I #amreading EMBRACING ALIENATION by #ToddMcGowan. Only a few pages in, and he's blowing my mind in some of the best ways possible. 🤯🤯🤯
#alienation
#identity
#LifeHacks
#philosophy
#existentialism
#psychoanalysis
#Hegel
#DeathDrive
#reading
#books
#bookstodon
#subversive
#resist
After a long hiatus due to #Covid #brainfog, I am back to #EmbracingAlienation by #ToddMcGowan.
I'll share more thoughts as I go along. But for now, I'm all about this in the back of the book:
" #RepeaterBooks is dedicated to the creation of a new reality. The landscape of twenty-first-century arts and letters is faded and inert, riven by fashionable cynicism, egotistical self-reference and a nostalgia for the recent past. Repeater intends to add its voice to those movements that...
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...wish to enter history and assert control over its currents, gathering together scattered and isolated voices with those who have already called for an escape from Capitalist Realism. Our desire is to publish in every sphere and genre, combining vigorous dissent and a pragmatic willingness to succeed where messianic abstraction & quiescent co-option have stalled: abstention is not an option: we are alive and we don't agree."
😳😳😳
❗❗❗
😍😍😍
I cannot adequately express how hard this hits me.
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From #EmbracingAlienation by #ToddMcGowan:
"The struggle against racism requires the translation of symbolic identities back into the acts of alienated subjects. Where race appears, we must see the racist act that creates this racial difference. Racism offers subjects a way of avoiding the confrontation with alienation. To challenge racism is to thrust oneself directly into the position of the alienated subject.
"...Racism only works so long as at least one group of people...
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...does not qualify as subjects of modernity, in which case their oppressors can also view themselves through the lens of self-identity.
"The exclusion of some from participation in modern existence not only consigns this group to an antimodern form of life, but it also equally allows those who consider themselves modern to indulge in the barbaric treatment of this racial other. Racism licenses anti-modernity on both sides of the divide. A modernity without this anti-modern supplement...
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...would be a radicalized modernity. It would be an emancipated modernity."
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"The concept of the *working mother* reveals the extent of the identification of women with the home. Even when she works outside the home, this external employment remains an adjective affixed to a woman's identity and not an essential part of that identity. The man who stays home to take care of the children, in contrast, becomes *Mr Mom*, suggesting that he is not at home in the home but rather becomes feminine when taking up this position."
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Reading McGowan makes me feel like there is a massive amount of hope for us while simultaneously making me feel that we are far more massively fucked up than we've ever realized.
To opposing things can be true at the same time, right?
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"The lure of a stable identity seduces some, but oppression occasions resistance because alienation is not w/out its own appeal. Existing as an alienated subject gives one autonomy from external determinations. ...The fight against oppression is a fight to assert once alienation against the oppressive enforcement of an identity. To strive to embrace one's alienated subjectivity is to be engaged in the fight against oppression of all stripes."
If only our political leaders engaged w/ this.
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"(T)he community provides protection from the unanswerable questions that subjectivity poses for itself. Subjectivity's nagging question receives a comforting answer in the form of a symbolic identity undergirded by the community. But one must look closely and see how every community ultimately fails to deliver the goods. The more I invest myself in a community the more I sense that I don't belong. This alienation is what we must pay attention to."
#ToddMcGowan
in #EmbracingAlienation
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My own experience: go all in as a Christian missionary and find out you REALLY don't belong. You can't even fit in.
#Christianity
#Christendom
#ChristianMissionary
#expat
#TCK
#exvangelical
#ChurchOfChrist
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"...To receive the support that the community offers, I must submit to the implicit demands that hold it together. Members of any community, without exception, must obey its implicit demands.... Sometimes the implicit demands tell members how to relate to the explicit rules--which ones to obey completely, which ones to disregard.... The community's implicit demands create a bond through a shared secret that divides those in on it from those on the outside."
-- #ToddMcGowan
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"...The slightest chink in the armor of the united front... (represents) a mortal danger to the community and (has) to be dealt with severely.
"...Communities must be exclusive, and only secret implicit demands can create exclusivity. ...(E)ven the most open community makes an implicit demand on its members that none can forgo while remaining members. The community provides the security of a symbolic identity...
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...while forcing the subject to pay for the security with strict obedience. No community offers identity for free."
#ToddMcGowan
in #EmbracingAlienation: Why We Shouldn't Try to Find Ourselves
What do we have and/or want: #community, #commons, or #communion?
(In which I define "communion" a lá #PeterRollins: gathering around shared Lack/alienation. Ftr, that's what I want.)
#fedizens
#Americans
#Democrat
#Republican
#liberal
#conservative
#progressive
#totalitarian
#socialist
#anarchist
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This is it, y'all.
We have arrived at my favorite line in the whole book.
Are you ready for it?
Here we go.
"The great virtue of failure is that everyone can do it...."
-- #ToddMcGowan,
#EmbracingAlienation
He's serious. And so am I. That's my favorite. Boom.
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Court Cantrell does not comply
Guitarsophist