🪐☁️ Harrowday
still have to get the cat litter, pick up plates, do some dishes.
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have to be up between 14:00 and 15:00 to be ready to go shopping with Boyfriend
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27 January 2024 Thesis Notes
[28:00]
Feast of the Harrow
Preliminary
I’m going to attempt a new structuring/framing/outlining strategy i’ve been thinking about for a couple days.
Freewrite
Interview Questions:
Thank you for being with us. Could you introduce yourself?
I see. And tell us a bit about how it is you came to this work?
Where are you writing from?
my bathroom, at the moment. i’ve got the sink faucet on full blast cause i need white noise to write by and have my laptop balanced precariously on a storage tub in the bathtub and i’m leaning over the rim of the tub my back to the door and my foot to base of the toilet, with my power cord strung out from the wall to the toilet to the laptop cause if its unplugged for even 30 seconds the laptop will die.
what is your thesis about
Are you the first person to posit/conceive of the self harm-writing parallel
no, in psyche on the skin Sara compares self harm to poetry and dance and the language of the history of medicine. I am definitely inspired by what little of and about Derida’s gramatology and expansive ideas of what a text can be, there’s a whole complex and often misoginistic tradition of interpreting self harm as communication, as manipulation. the stigmata, tattoos, scars, i think the body as text and changes to the body as text is a diffuse idea, though especially when it comes to self harm there’s a lot we censor, a lot we un-see, un-read, disociate ourselves from, chose not to think about. and that’s a problem for self harmers, its a problem for people who want to think about human behavior and communication and self formation, i also think its a problem for philosophy and political philosophy in particular because self harm isn’t just language, language is also implicated and changed and how we think about it is changed if we make this link.
How does Carl Schmitt relate to self harm?
.Carl Schmitt brings up self laceration in The Concept of the Political several times as an important antithesis to his tightly linked concept chain of politics, identity and war.
What is the relationship between politics and self harm today.
one thing i see a lot get discussed, and which i think mahmood is a great counterresponse to, is the idea of people acting against their interests, the old kind of discredited at least in my critical theory, post frankfurt school Marxist line about false consciousness, that people are just routinely duped about their interests, that people are hurting themselves by voting for the wrong candidate or whatever. and then very related to it is my work on what i call the cult of the lesser evil, which demands you inflict some harm or will avow support some harm to yourself or others in order to avert a different, theoretically greater harm, so you see this in parties seeking votes to stop another candidate from winning, but at a more everyday level we are constantly incentivized to work too much and in dangerous and unequitible conditions because the constant threat of homelessness and starvation under capitalism. so there’s the creation or interpretation of self interest and the use of self interested infliction of pain and some of it is so pedestrian we learn not to think of it that way and other inflictions are taboo and subject to a mystifaction, like self laceration, because of its particular history and context.
Do you see a connection between the medical authority and Schmitt’s sovereign
yes, on several levels. defining someone as mad, unreasonable, is sort of a microcosm of the sovereign’s state of exception powers, in both cases there’s this need to recognize as observe and recognize as decide that an exception exists, and from there unravel all of the norms which otherwise would script the relationship. And this state of exception leaks, it unravels. In the Being Sane in Unsane Places, we see this, once you go into this place, your body is overwritten from someone who can make sense, reason, give reasons, make meaning, to this black box, a crazy-making machine
crazy-making?
there’s that ae article about nurses being scared of mental illness being a contagion, interacting with self cutters, it weirds people out and on of the ways that manifests is fear you might become or discover a desire to hurt yourself. its an intoxicating thought, i suppose. also, crazy-making, i don’t know, i think of the way trump produces nationalistic delirium, the way capitalism puts these contradictory demands on you, when you rob someone of the way to make sense, to act irrationally, the only options they have left are to speak in the grammar of the irrational.
what other theorists talk about self harm, politics, mental illness.
John Stuart Mill, Holmes, and Friedman make very explicit references to mental illness as they attempt to work out persuasive contours and boundaries for their respective flavors of liberalism, white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism…
((That was really scary but it went really well!))