Customer Reviews

The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida)

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I am already on page 179 and being reminded that the first sentence of a French work:

Translated into
English, you remember,
this gave:
"I am not very
strong on stupidity."

German and English have different words for stupidity than the usual form of French used to excuse oneself for a mental blunder. The big problem is:

that properly human animality
supposedly free, responsible,
and not reactive or reactional,
capable of telling the difference
between good and evil, capable of
doing evil for evil's sake, etc. (p. 179).

Among the obscure points near the end of the book, two meanings are discussed for the Greek word autopsia. (p. 294). I would prefer the rare meaning to be interpreted as:

Among those who dwell with the gods are spearchuckers in the war on the dead.

Americans tend to join the money mudslide just to provide themselves with ways to pay for their own home entertainment. As a fan of popular music, character is fate for me when it is like bad poetry:

Having grown used to
Bob Dylan's you stew

is like jumping into Derrida questions like:

The threshold: to ask oneself,
"What is the threshold?"
is to ask oneself "How to begin?"
"How to begin?" we are asking
ourselves very close to the
provisional end of our first meridian,
our first circle or return of the line.
How to begin again? (p. 312).

Back on page 296, "curiosity" is proposed for "a certain analogical passage between the modern and postrevolutionary zoological garden and psychiatric institutions, insane asylums." History would like progress to produce "an ecosystem that was not without a certain improvement in the living conditions of both animals and the mentally ill." (p. 297). Then treatment is linked with "the two other words we have brought back to themselves, autopsy and curiosity." (p. 299).