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clompch's review
5.0
“To write down what one thinks one knows is to destroy possibilities for joy” Kathy Acker’s non-fiction is so hugely under-rated and this book is the perfect example of how a fiction writer can bring colour to journalism. The piece she writes on ‘The Language of the Body’ (bodybuilding) is sublime and my new favourite piece of writing. One of the best books of essays I’ve ever read.
meganmilks's review
5.0
just as i was losing faith in the ability of critical writing to do anything but oversimplify, in comes this book to refuel my critical imagination.
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To write is to do other than announce oneself as an enclosed individual. Even the most narcissist of texts, say Nabokov's Lolita, reaches out to, in Lolita's case grabs at, its reader. To write is to write to another. Not _for another_, as if one could take away that other's otherness, but _to another). To write, as Gertrude Stein and Maurice Blanchot both have said, is to write to a stranger, to a friend. As we go forward, say on the Net, perhaps we are also going back, and I am not a great believer in linear models of time, to times when literature and economics met each other in the region of friendship. "The ancients," comments Arendt, "thought friends indispensable to human life, indeed that a life without friends was not really worth living."
Friendship is always a political act, for it unites citizens into a polis, a (political) community. And it is this friendship that the existence of copyright (as it is now defined) has obfuscated.
The loss of friendship, the giving over of friendship to business based on individualism, has caused loss of energy in the literary world. Think, for a moment, with how much more energy one does something for a lover or for a close friend than when one acts only in the service of oneself.
In his remarkable essay about the writings of his friend Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot opposes two kinds of relationships, that of friendship and that of totalitarianism. Both Blanchot and Bataille lived through Nazism and Stalinism. A totalitarian relationship, Blanchot states, is one in which the subject denies the otherness, therefore the very existence of the other person, the person to whom he or she is talking. Thus, the totalitarian relationship is built upon individualism as closure. Individualism as the closing down of energy, of meaning. Whereas, when I talk to my friend, when I write to her, I am writing to someone whose otherness I accept. It is the difference between me and my friend that allows meaning; meaning begins in this difference. And it is meaning, the meaningfulness of the world, that is consciousness. You see, I am finally talking about my writing.
:
To write is to do other than announce oneself as an enclosed individual. Even the most narcissist of texts, say Nabokov's Lolita, reaches out to, in Lolita's case grabs at, its reader. To write is to write to another. Not _for another_, as if one could take away that other's otherness, but _to another). To write, as Gertrude Stein and Maurice Blanchot both have said, is to write to a stranger, to a friend. As we go forward, say on the Net, perhaps we are also going back, and I am not a great believer in linear models of time, to times when literature and economics met each other in the region of friendship. "The ancients," comments Arendt, "thought friends indispensable to human life, indeed that a life without friends was not really worth living."
Friendship is always a political act, for it unites citizens into a polis, a (political) community. And it is this friendship that the existence of copyright (as it is now defined) has obfuscated.
The loss of friendship, the giving over of friendship to business based on individualism, has caused loss of energy in the literary world. Think, for a moment, with how much more energy one does something for a lover or for a close friend than when one acts only in the service of oneself.
In his remarkable essay about the writings of his friend Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot opposes two kinds of relationships, that of friendship and that of totalitarianism. Both Blanchot and Bataille lived through Nazism and Stalinism. A totalitarian relationship, Blanchot states, is one in which the subject denies the otherness, therefore the very existence of the other person, the person to whom he or she is talking. Thus, the totalitarian relationship is built upon individualism as closure. Individualism as the closing down of energy, of meaning. Whereas, when I talk to my friend, when I write to her, I am writing to someone whose otherness I accept. It is the difference between me and my friend that allows meaning; meaning begins in this difference. And it is meaning, the meaningfulness of the world, that is consciousness. You see, I am finally talking about my writing.
jacob_wren's review
5.0
"One must be where one is. The body does not lie. Language, if it is not propaganda, or media blab, is the body; with such language lies are not possible. If lies were possible, there would be no reason to write fiction."
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