Michael Kinnucan

On the Jerk

moments of intense humiliation - what color the walls were - my hand shot up - what a little turd! - the iron law of egos - when the event burst through the door - certain vicissitudes or derivations - Louis CK and Jerking Off - half the studio audience would be openly sobbing - Baudelaire, That Jerk - a prose poem from Paris Spleen entitled « Beat the Poor »

Adventures in Friendship

what people find most disquieting about male homosexuality - « inventer de A à Z une relation encore sans forme » - I thought Foucault was crazy - the miserable abjection of the « friend zone » - ways there aren’t any songs about yet - the frisson twenty-somethings feel on hearing that one of their friends is getting married - a hobbyist of lost causes

Afterthought on “Love Potions”

What Politics Can Steal From Ethics

a job is one’s place in the world - wait until we find the right particularity - Christ’s demand - not so much the quantity of love - the general class « mankind » - fate must be transformed into freedom - that all or most people be employed in a single task for most of the waking hours of their adult lives - the depression of activists

Tiny Trojan Horses: On Lovers’ Gifts

the suitor - susceptible, willing, reckless - start touching the woman immediately - « the secret of my reputation » - his furniture, the rug he walks on - who would agree to be loved? - « made of truth » - he's not young, and she'll never be true

Wine and Spirits: Baudelaire’s Orgy and Attention

the thing a student learns - whether it’s time to move on -  the comical fallibility of human prudence - his money’s worth - a doorway to eternity - the freedom to give oneself up -  « Il est l’heure de s’enivrez! » - to be entirely and serious sad - what does it take to  « marry the crowd » ? - some things you can’t talk about sober

Forgiveness

« why not me? » - disaster movies - police and cowardice - a market for forgiveness - an older logic - the same choice every day - partners in crime - vile housekeeping - an innocent victim - drink His blood

The Short End of the Stick: Gender Pleasure

This is a joke about penis envy. - the only sexual organ devoted exclusively to pleasure - enthusiastic politicization - Zeus and Hera - thought grasps pleasure most deeply in longing - Daniel Paul Schreber - « the plot whereby my soul was to be murdered and my body used like a strumpet. »

Disagreement and Dialectic

the need for philosophy - obscurely motivated producers of contradiction - the dream of metaphysics - what is merely « ours » - watches and waits - the unhappy lover of truth - knowledges must challenge themselves - like a waste of time, like an unaccountable stupidity

Afterthought on “Untimely Translations”

The Empty Subject and the Art of Ethics

a body and a name - doubt taken as far as doubt will go - pressing entanglements - the religion in which he has happened to be raised - it can inhere in a soul - it cannot inhere in a subject - « I did not ask for this gift! » - we start smooth and grow wrinkled

Solomon and Equity

« for who is able to judge this thy so great a people? » - what he refrained from asking - impartiality - Anatole France’s famous joke - premature, crude, and approximate - the king’s word - to each what is proper - reasonable readers

A Back Way Into Eden: Elaboration on Kleist

« trying too hard » - conformity with a rule - « His soul is in fact located (and it’s a frightful thing to see) in his elbow. » - physical grace and spiritual grace - Narcissus does not recognize himself - the tree of knowledge - kung fu movies

The Beginning of No

the care which the good person takes - a being for whom the world is a teat - what does he have in mind? His non-mother? - the rigorous negation of finitude - « I should like to spit it out » - in the half-light of their own internal logic

The Uncanny and the Rest of the World

« that which ought to remain secret but has come to light » - a tremor in the world - adult reasonableness - parents who are just like hers except that they seem to love her more - something goes wrong with a mirror - an ambiguity between the living and the dead - « The Sandman » - (bleeding eyeballs strewn on the floor) - « Oh, inanimate, accursed automaton! » - he is obsessed with giving her this fear - Grand Unified Theory of the Uncanny

Early Retirement: An Essay on Lear

« I will not die with you » - the « open night » whose tyranny... - what success might mean to the dying - a Fool's take on eschatology - Faced with the horror of betrayal, Edgar refuses to be tragic. Or at any rate he tries. - a duty with no touch of the sublime

Looking and Wanting to Touch: Irony and Its Enemies

the weeks after 9/11 - Roger Rosenblatt’s distasteful editorial - Real Things like death and freedom - the ironist as omnipotent, dissolving cultural force - the fantasmatic hipster - distanced, inauthentic consumption - what the poser was to the punk - the activity of Socrates in its simplest form - sarcasm - the consciousness of ambiguity - the black hole behind his irony - one choice among others

Self-Destruction as Spiritual Practice

what a history of ethics must seek out - her corpse; fingers, feet, elbows and eyelashes were shipped - « or by heavy rain, when the Lord waters » - antinomies of the Counter-Reformation - despite the nothingness of the world

Beckett and Failure

« total object, complete with missing parts » - why is it obligatory to express? - language as palliative care - the restless ghost in our machine - a formerly wandering hobo, now confined to bed awaiting death - to write is an impertinence - his success is a failure, even a disaster - the contingency of the body’s weakness - to live out his days as a watcher of bees

Incest, Cannibalism, and the Gods: The Rise of the House of Atreus

the House of Atreus - Tantalus had served them human flesh - the end of social exchange between gods and mortals - « nothing that is great comes to the life of mortals without atë » - enough bones to build a temple to Ares - a bowl filled with human hands and feet - Thyestes and Aegisthus ought to die - an utterly trivial and laughably hubristic act - a new form of art, the tragedy - the apotheosis of the city

The Rape of Gaia: “Avatar” and the Politics of Nature

insatiable greed and mere bloodlust - the damaged boy meets a girl - guilty before nature - the gifts so freely given - « we as a society » - the constitutive sin of left-liberal politics - nature should tame man - we enjoy feeling knowingly guilty - practice and physicality

The Innocent Criminal

a criminal beyond sin and beyond guilt - « the dust that Pancho bit down south ended up in Lefty's mouth » - they might have been kinder to shoot him - the law isn't the criterion of innocence - we know nothing worth dying for

A Peculiar Institution: The Afterlife of Marriage

The last first kiss - it has become possible to live alone - « sex and utilities included in the rent » - guaranteeing adulthood at the cost of childhood - folie à deux - a solid decade of serial monogamy - the opportunity to do better