Fido the Yak

A list of books I may get around to reading next year, in no particular order:

• Material Phenomenology, by Michel Henry (trans. Scott Davidson, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). This one didn't actually escape from Powell's but came in the mail while I was at Powell's. Page 123, sentences 4, 5 and 6: "In representation, the ipseity of the I is inscribed in the following way: I represent myself. That is to say, I present something as myself, as my ego or yours. But why is what is put before me a me or you?"




• Difference and Subjectivity: Dialogue and Personal Identity, by Francis Jacques (trans. Andrew Rothwell, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). "As we can see, the terms of the interlocution–the agencies, or positions, of utterance–are determined in the first place by speech, for their determination forms part of the meaning of the proffered messages. It therefore follows, rather than precedes, the establishment of the dialogue. Once the principle of the primum relationis–or primacy of the relation–is defined in this way, we must resist the temptation to ask: relation between what and what?"




• Loneliness as a Way of Life, by Thomas Dumm (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). "I had a gnawing fear of her. She seemed to pay attention to me only when I caused trouble, so I guess I caused as much trouble as I could. When I threw tantrums, she would lock me away in a cubbyhole closet under the staircase in the dining room."




• Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, by Adriana Cavarero (trans. William McCuaig, New York: Columbia University Press). "In choosing him as the instrument of horrorist destruction, Verloc basically counts on this very factor. It is worth emphasizing that the paradigmatic innocence of Stevie has both an ethical and an intellectual valence. An eternal child, he is not only excluded by definition from the realm of responsibility and guilt; he does not know what he is doing because his mental retardation–and not casual, or arranged, innocence–prevents him from understanding it."




• The Ethics of Memory, by Avishai Margalit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). "Although it takes (at least) two for sexual relations, the defeated partner can declare, like Baudelaire: 'I am the wound and the dagger.' Baudelaire did not necessarily believe that he is the Alpha and Omega in bringing about the wound. But he had an important part in bringing it on himself."




• Human Posture: The Nature of Inquiry, by John A. Schumacher (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989). "Let us now consider the same experiment in a quantam mechanical context: [a figure is shown]. We suppose that the microscope is an electron microscope, and that the deflected particle is an electron. What must we say in quantum mechanical terms?"




• Metamorphosis and Identity, by Caroline Walker Bynum (New York: Zone Books, 2001). "The response is not imitatio or even love but admiratio, a reaction that to Bernard conjures up distance and strangeness, the word for what we feel when we cannot approach or be like. These themes are also reflected in the fourth sermon for Christmas Eve, where Bernard, again referring to Christ as physician, connects the miraculous mixture of the virgin mother, fertile yet uncontaminated, breached yet intact, with the fertility of the world and the hope of resurrection. Thus for Bernard, the mixture–whether hybrid or marvel–is double, twofold, a joining of contrarieties."

I'm still in the midst of Casey, Levinas and Kuzminski and have a few books kicking around from the library.

Labels: reading lists

posted by Fido the Yak at 7:09 PM.