No.1730
>What is your favorite book?
Fatal Strategies by Baudrillard, or almost anything else by Baudrillard, because he starts from the premise that everything is utterly fucked yet also finds ironic reversals in that. Doomers would be cured if they just read some Baudrillard (avoid Simulacra and Simulation though, that one is very mediocre compared to the rest).
>What book influenced you the most?
Hard to single out one book, but starting to read philosophy and sociology in particular was the biggest shift in not only thinking but just in the general attitude to everything.
>What do you like about books?
- reading is slow, long, painful, and submissive. Exactly what we need in the age of hyperactive and narcissistic hedonism.
- you get way more out of it compared to other forms, at least when it comes to theory books. Theory can't be done in any other way than in language, any other form is at best a showcase of theory, not theory itself.
- language is inherently poetic and seductive because it plays with both the writer and the reader, it's simply evil
>what are you planning to read?
Mary Douglas - Purity and Danger. I don't expect much from it, it's just because of the book I'm reading currently. Then I plan on (re)reading some anthropology classics like Malinowski, Mauss, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss.
>What are you reading now?
Jean Cezaneuve - "Sociology of rituals: taboo, magic, holy". Kinda dry and repeats itself too much, but it tries to rationally explain something deemed irrational. It's similar to Freud in this sense, only applied to social relations instead of an individual's psyche. And like Freud sometimes it reduces its object to banality, at other times it elevates the theory to the strangeness of its object (like "death drive" in Freud).
<What is the last books you read?
An amazing book by Robert Pfaller that attacks postmodernity, political correctness, idpol, libtardation, puritanism, narcissism, etc. It's an apologia of everything deemed by the current system as evil, inauthentic, irrational, extreme, superficial, etc. Pfaller is influenced by Zizek but radicalizes Zizek's theory way further, IMO. At times neuters himself by relying too much on psychoanalytic tropes though.
The book I've read is not translated into English, but the existing English translations are really worth checking out because he repeats himself a lot across his books.