Samuel Baudinette

Another cool little free library find from earlier today: this book on Human Diversity by the evolutionary biologist, and committed Marxist, Richard C. Lewontin.

I guess these aren’t exactly uncommon occurrences on social media. But they haven’t particularly characterized my experience of social media until fairly recently. Not sure if it’s a bad thing. I do know I don’t really like it.

One thing that is a qualitative change that I’ve definitely noticed with the growth in engagement: more non sequitur responses and actively hostile misinterpretations of what I try to say.

I’m still over on the other side since I have an intellectual community there and still enjoy the conversations we have. But recently my posts have been gaining more attention and my follower account has begun to blow up and I have no real idea why that’s happening. I don’t post any differently!

We live in a political and libidinal economy, the psychoanalyst might say, that is tyrannized by the the fantasy of a nourishing and all-satisfying breast that we can never regain but which we constantly strive to rediscover (and whose very removal has even become a threat to our going-on-being).

—become objects of intense, often obsessional, libidinal investment and whose loss is often explicitly theorized as a kind of wound the world inflicts upon the desiring subject (who is all too often also a consuming subject).

I’ve also been thinking about this, by the way, in relation to the current cultural obsession with so-called lost media. Where the most dimly remembered things—old toys, television adverts, early builds of video games, director’s cuts that never existed

This isn’t about anything in particular. Nor am I directly responding to any discourse. But I’ve been thinking about this problem for a while now as I observe communism transformed into an aesthetic posture that one adopts on social media rather than a project to be politically realized.

But that requires we also grant one of the key arguments of Benjamin’s theses on history: that the past is a record of barbarism that places moral and political demands upon the present. Not a grand narrative about the progressive unfolding of freedom toward a predetermined end!

Although, in Benjaminian fashion, I do also think there is a necessary place within revolutionary theory and praxis for an historical reckoning with the failures and betrayals in the past that we ought to strive to readdress in the present. We must attend to all prior utopian currents.

A fascist attitude, in my opinion, that orients socialist politics toward a desire to “return” instead of a revolutionary politics that strives to realize the possible, for the future, while carefully considering and working through the contradictions of our present moment.

I imagine it must be comforting to believe that there ever was (or is) actually existing socialism. It means that socialism ceases to be something we need to struggle to realize (in theory and in praxis) in a way that sanctions a nostalgia for what has been “lost” or “stolen.”

If you’re interested in the late-antique and medieval historical imagination, the practice of biblical exegesis, and the relationship between canonical and apocryphal Gospel narratives, then you might find this book on Maurice of Kirkham and Herbert of Bosham a fascinating read!

I’ve never thought too hard about it before but I wonder whether the interest in libidinal economy and the politics of the family that led me to psychoanalysis may have been sparked by the work I did as a medievalist tracing the history of theological debates about the family of Jesus.

These two books were also quite helpful. But by the time they were published I felt like I had enough of a formal grasp of the critical study of medievalism (as opposed to the critical study of the Middle Ages) that reading them didn’t feel as revelatory.

Thinking this morning (for no particular reason I’m able to discern) about four books I found to be formative during my graduate training as a medievalist and which helped me understand and appreciate the history and politics of my academic field.

Thinking this morning (for no particular reason I’m able to discern) about four books I found to be formative during my graduate training as a medievalist and which helped me understand and appreciate the history and politics of my academic field.

If you know someone in high school who might like to take an intensive college-level class on the critical study of religion and secularism at the University of Chicago this summer consider telling them about my three-week course “The Politics of Religion and Unbelief.”

“A new language is what responds to reality where a moral, epistemological jolt has occurred.”

— Ingeborg Bachmann

(from the first Frankfurt lecture)

You can find out more (including how to apply) here:

summer.uchicago.edu/courses/reli...

If you know someone in high school who might like to take an intensive college-level class on the critical study of religion and secularism at the University of Chicago this summer consider telling them about my three-week course “The Politics of Religion and Unbelief.”

The video also ends on a final note that connects the thoughtless reproduction and consumption of the aesthetic status quo to AI slop as symptomatic of the political unconscious of the late capitalist (or postmodern) culture industry.

In light of the aesthetics of our present moment I like how Olson points out the way that video game aesthetics and jingoism progressively replace and displace in each sequel the anti-war aesthetics of the original film (which evoke Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket).

This Is How You Get JARHEAD Sequels YouTube video by Folding Ideas

For those who enjoy video essays that are actually thoughtful I enjoyed this recent piece by Dan Olson at Folding Ideas which analyzes the film Jarhead and its (terrible) sequels to show how a critique of the ideology of soldiering is repurposed for propaganda.

youtu.be/i5m-RHS1fU0?...

I had my final collage class at the Hyde Park Art Center today. Its been a blast and ive learned a lot!

Here’s the piece I made this afternoon. I used some magazines from Germany and Austria from the 1910s-1940s that I had recently picked up from the library (who were throwing them away).

I just found the January edition of Le Monde diplomatique in a little free library. The first article I saw when I grabbed it out to take a look was a piece about whether psychoanalysis Is bourgeois! 😭😭😭

There are also has extracts from Lordon and Lucbert’s new book on the concept of the drives.

Not quite sure what to make of Brian Eno’s endorsement lol

It’s a fitting end for a class that has largely constituted a dogmatic intro to Solms’s reading of Freud rather than a class that approaches neuropsychoanalysis as a project that raises questions & posits hypotheses about the philosophy of mind or the nature of therapeutic action

We’re reading portions of Mark Solms’s new book The Only Cure for our final class on neuropsychoanalysis this week. Curious to see how it compares to the other works by Solms I’ve already read that primarily address a popular and non-scientific audience, like The Hidden Spring!

Bruno got up on top of the Loebs again this afternoon!