Recent readings

Bought a couple of new books while away from home:

Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno
One of philosophy's most beloved grumpy depressed old men. In this book, Adorno, in the form of aphorisms, writes what he calls a "dismal science" as a reversal of Nietzsche's gay science. Adorno was a depressed man who despised his surroundings, and was ashamed of having to live in them, and it shows. Although a lot of his theoretical starting points are Marxist, he does not have much of a revolutionary spirit. He has, at this point, become too jaded and cynical for it. To him, the world is so messed up, that the best we can do is to be conscious of this, so as to avoid being swallowed up by it completely. As an analyst of the modern world's ills, he is ahead of his time, and a lot of the prose is beautiful.
Much of his attitude can be summed up in this quote: "The only responsible course is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one's own existence, and for the rest to conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively and unpretentiously as is required, no longer by good upbringing, but by the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell."

The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
Bachelard is a French philosopher who started out in the philosophy of science but became increasingly interested in phenomenological explorations of poetry and art. Here, he explores art from the perspective of houses and homes - the way that our homes shape our spiritual life and creativity. He speaks of attics, basements, chests, cupboards and drawers, trying to boil down the spiritual essence of what it means to dwell and inhabit a place. He writes that before ever being "cast into the world", as Heidegger says, the human being is first "laid in the cradle of the house."
He's inspired a lot by Jung, so he also speaks of archetypical images, such as the hut or the castle, which he believes to be deeply imbedded in the human psyche, and drawing from Jung, sometimes speaks of our psyche itself as being a kind of building.
Reading this book consistently makes me think of my grandparents' home (or rather, daydream about it, which is what Bachelard wants us to do). It seems to possess a certain intimate quality that is lost in a lot of urban buildings.

The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
Although I've read much from Bataille, this is the first fictional work of his that I've read (and the most famous), and wow, it is honestly more messed up than I expected. It's a story in which nothing seems to matter except the various erotic configurations that Bataille wants to explore, in which he obsessively arranges and re-arranges the recurring images of the eye, the egg, the anus, and so on. What I find disturbing about it is not the mix of sex, violence, and gore that characterizes Bataille's obsessions, so much as how quickly the characters move on from one disturbing occurrence to the next. It is a prototypically French postmodern book, in that it can be read, on the one hand, psychoanalytically, as Bataille's attempt to convert traumatic childhood memories into eroticism, and on the other hand, structurally, as a play of metaphor and language. This edition includes an autobiographical essay from Bataille that really illuminates a lot of his motivations behind writing this, as well as an insightful essay from Barthes on Bataille's metaphor of the eye, and an essay on erotic literature by Susan Sontag.