A Visual History of Trump Magazine Covers

Masha Gessen, "Donald Trump’s Very Soviet Fixation on Applause," New Yorker, Feb. 6, 2018

Fear and Loathing in Trump's America

President Trump said on Monday that he has the power to pardon himself. June 4, 2018

To Be or Not To Be — "Heil Myself"

Wait. WHO wants to hate? What is up with the ellipsis?

"That to me is the thing with this man: He wants to hate. When Trump feels what he believes is a righteous indignation, his default position is hatred."  June 2018

"Why can’t we hate men?" Suzanna Danuta Walters, a professor of sociology and director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University, is the editor of the gender studies journal Signs. June 8, 2018

feinstein-didnt-really-know-mistreatment-undocumented-immigrants-obama-years/

Portia Boulger, Featured in Viral Video Viewed by Millions, Explains her Anger at DNC 2016

Network - Mad as Hell Scene 1976

Counsellor At Law (1933)

Can uncivil, hardnosed, motivational speech be more effective than civil motivational cheerleading?

Is this poster better or worse than . . .

this poster?

FIX IT UP!

DON'T FUCK IT UP!

"U Matter" to whom? Who is saying this? "We care." Who cares? Who does the care-giving?

Why You Must Never Major in Journalism (skim if you must, but don't read; roll your eyes; move on): Woke 101: If Starbucks struggled to teach about race, can universities on’ diversity curriculums do better?

Martin Heidegger on the "They" and "idle chatter" (Rede) in Being and Time.

If you need to relax . . . . (go directly to time stamp 1:54)

But Wait. Wait a minute. What if "hate speech"not only has to be tolerated not only becasue "hate speech" is Constitutionally protected speech but because there is no such thing as safe speech or even targeted speech or an index of prohibited because "offensive," uncivil words that only racist (and other "ists") white people use? And what if hate speech is to be unbound, imagined, invented, and well-expressed, well-written? What if you just take the L?

Here is an example of praise for a "wor(l)d-disturbing" hater:

The economy of [Karl Kraus's] errors and weaknesses –more a fantastic edifice than the totality of his gifts—is so delicately and precisely organized that all outward confirmation only disrupts it.  Well it may, if this man is to be certified as the “pattern of a harmoniously and perfectly formed human type,” if he is to appear—in a term as absurd stylistically as semantically—as a philanthropist, so that anyone listening to his “hardness” with “the ears of a soul” would find the reason for it in compassion. No! This incorruptible, piercing, resolute assurance does not spring from the noble poetic or humane disposition that his followers are so fond of attributing to him.  How utterly banal, and at the same time how fundamentally wrong, is their derivation of his hatred from love, when it is obvious how much more elemental are the forces here at work: a humanity that is only an alternation of sophistry and malice, a nature that is the highest school of aversion to mankind and a pity that is alive only when interlaced with vengeance, “Oh, had I only been left the choice / to carve the dog or the butcher, / I should have chosen.”  Nothing is more perverse than to try to fashion him after the image of what he loves.  Rightly, Kraus the “timeless world-disturber” has been confronted with the “eternal world-improver,” on whom benign glances not infrequently fall.

Walter Benjamin, “Karl Krauss” in Selected Writings, Vol 2, Part 2 1931-1934 ed. Michael Jennings, Harvard UP, pp. 442-43.

"The time is out of joint." Literature as Anachronism. Forget "now."

Yes, everything is political. So what?

Aesthetic Choices Are Inescapable! Down to a single word and even a single letter.

For example:

"Man frage nicht" by Karl Kraus published in October 1933.

Kraus's last word "erwachte" pointedly echoes a popular Nazi slogan, "Germany Awake," introduced circa 1923, seen on the 1932 Nazi banner below:

So much for being "WOK."

Dialectical Thinking:

Again. Aesthetic Choices Are Inescapable! An everyday example:

Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" in the opening title sequence of David Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tatoo (2011) and in Thor Ragnarok's (2017) prologue.

Background Music we can listen to while we scroll down the page.

Tycho - A Walk (Live on KEXP)

 Netflix's Dark (2017)

"Stupid Shit: (In)security in the Age of Twilightenment" (2008)

If you need to relax . . . . (go directly to time stamp 1:54)

RICHARD TRENHOLM, 'The Cleaners' dishes dirt on social media JANUARY 29, 2018

Pre-School Politics

From "I Get That" to "I Don't Get That."

Penderecki: Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima

#hashtag/civility

If you need to relax . . . . (go directly to time stamp 1:54)

If you really tried to talk about racism in academia, you couldn't. Because it would be unthinkable. Because you would have to know something, learn something beyond you. Talking about something deeply disturbing doesn't necessarily mean you feel better afterwards.

Stream of Consciousness Raising:

William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)

Film adaptation of Intruder in the Dust (1949)

vs.

Suburbicon Official Trailer #1 (2017) 

Racism and White Trash Abuse in William Faulkner, "Barn Burning"

Patti Smith, "Rock 'N' Roll N-word"

 Joseph P. Williams, "Segregation's Legacy Fifty years after the Fair Housing Act was signed, America is nearly as segregated as when President Lyndon Johnson signed the law." April 20, 2018

I Am Not Your Negro James Baldwin and Race in America

More literary "hate speech":

The n-word used 108 times in Paul Beatty's prize-winning 308 page long satirical novel

The Sellout.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Dan Baum, Harper's, April 2016 issue "Legalize It All" 

Dive into the heart of the Roland-Garros atmosphere! Chapter 4: joy.

If you need to relax . . . . (go directly to time stamp 1:54)

Why do the Elite Hate Democracy?

What if identity politics is a way of NOT talking about race, class, gender, or sexuality, the promotion of vacuous, inconsequential, content-free, market-tested slogans rather than concrete public policies and legislation (aka an agenda)?

After Gaza Massacre, Has Israel Lost Liberal American Jews? 

So much for free speech and "hate speech":

43 Senators Want to Make It a Federal Crime to Boycott Israeli Settlements

The New Israel Anti-Boycott Act Is Still Unconstitutional

Landmark bill restricting criticism of Israel sneaks through South Carolina Senate

"The legislation codifies a definition of anti-Semitism that significantly changes the meaning of the word, and it requires the state’s colleges to use this new definition when determining whether an action is “discriminatory” and therefore prohibited. This new definition declares statements that are critical of Israel—even when factual—“anti-Semitic” and therefore impermissible."

South Carolina’s New Hate Speech Law Outlaws Criticism of the Israeli Occupation 

In bill author Clemmons’ view, discussing the military occupation of the West Bank, a reality recognized even by Israel’s Supreme Court, would be considered anti-Semitic under the new South Carolina law.

Candace Owens on Her Journey From Left to Right  Sep 28, 2017

Jacques Derrida excoriating Giorgio Agamben in The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. 1, pp. 92-95 on "the first great thinker," adding "one no longer knows who was the first to define what." 2003

Jonathan Goldberg, What's with "Firsts" in (Good) Women Studies 1997

Do it yourself Slavoj Žižek:

Why Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale is a profoundly sexist, sis-gender utopia.

From the art of hilarious despair

to the song of the Loser:

Doris Duke (Usa, 1969) "I'm a Loser"

Walter Benn Michaels, "Who gets ownership of pain and victimhood?"

From The New Yorker

In this cogent jeremiad, which is certain to be controversial, Michaels diagnoses America's love of diversity as one of our greatest problems. Not only does it reinforce ideas of racial essentialism that it claims to repudiate; it obscures the crevasse between rich and poor. Michaels, a scholar of American literature, suggests that the growth of economic inequality over the past few decades is the result of a deeply ingrained and unchallenged class structure. Scrutinizing current events and religion, he argues that our fixation with the "phantasm" of race promotes identity over ideology, and he rejects the idea that meritocracy prevails in America's elite universities. A believer in the power of progressive politics, he calls for a debate in which class, rather than identity, would be at the fore. "You can be black and upper middle class, you can be gay and upper class, you can be transsexual and upper class, you can be a woman and be upper middle class, you can be an immigrant and upper class, but you can't be working class and upper middle class.  The University is (or was) an upper middle class institution and its culture and habitus (if you will) cannot tolerate working class culture: working class culture is what the University keeps out and what upwardly mobile students want to shed.  As Walter Michaels says, they want to stop being working class.  They don't want to do dangerous jobs, be poorly paid, have bad taste. . . . " 

--Sharon O'Dair

Walter Benjamin,"The Path to Success, in Thirteen Theses," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 1 1927–1930 ed. Michael Jennings, Harvard UP, 2005, pp

A Rare Collection: Lessons Learned from Dick Macksey

Stewart Lee: my life on the shelf

Stewart Lee on UKIP

Masha Gessen, "Donald Trump’s Very Soviet Fixation on Applause," New Yorker, Feb. 6, 2018

Moral Treatment

William Tuke

Occupational therapy

Frantz Fanon (universal emancipation)

As Black as Resistance

THE TROUBLE WITH DIVERSITY
AN ARGUMENT BETWEEN WALTER BENN MICHAELS AND KATHA POLLITT

November 18, 2006

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

On the Image of "X" Fetish and "Iconoclash"

Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Science and Cultural Theory)\

"This seems, finally, to be Bird’s rather pointed agenda: to put his readers on notice that, in these fraught times of national struggle over slavery, and in the face of intractable political dilemmas, he could give no affordance for moralistic complacency of any sort." Christopher Looby, "Introduction," Sheppard Lee Written by Himself

Robert Montgomery Bird, "My Friends in the Madhouse," Peter Pilgrim; Or, A Rambler's Recollections

James Kirke Paulding, Westward Ho!: A Tale

Christopher Looby, "Introduction," Sheppard Lee, Written By Himself

Seneca, "On the Shortness of Life"

Dorothea Lynde Dix, Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States

Stewart Lee: my life on the shelf

Stewart Lee on UKIP

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

On the Image Fetish and "Iconoclash"

Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Science and Cultural Theory)

"Neoliberal Arts" Harper's Magazine 2015

Dickens, Charles. 1852. "A Ragged School," Harper's Magazine

Arthur Schopenhauer, "On University Philosophy" in Parerga and Paralipomena:Short Philosophical Essays Vol. 1 Ed. Christopher Janaway. (1851 / Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Arthur Schopenhauer, "The Art of Being Right" or, "The Art of Controversy"

Friedrich Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer as Educator" (1874)

"Historical, in fact philological, consider- ations have slowly but surely taken the place of profound explorations of eternal problems. The question becomes: What did this or that phi- losopher think or not think? And is this or that text rightly ascribed to him or not? And even: Is this variant of a classical text preferable to that other? Students in university seminars today are encouraged to occupy themselves with such emasculated inquiries. As a result, of course, philosophy itself is banished from the university altogether."

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1872 anti-education Harper's Magazine

Friedrich Nietzsche,1872. ANTI-EDUCATION introduction and annotation by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, translated from the German by Damion Searls

Heidegger, Martin, 1933. "The Self-Assertion of the German University and The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts," Review of Metaphysics 38 (March 1985): 467-502. 

Auerbach, Eric. 1943. Epilogue to Mimesis: The Represenation of Reality in Western Literature

Curtius, E. R. 1947. Die auslandiche wissenschaftliche Literatur der Kriegs- und Nachkriegsjahre ist mir bis auf verschwindende Ausnahmen nicht zuganglich gewesen. Auch die Bonner Universitatebibliothek ist seit 1944 in folge eines Bombenangriffs teils unbenuntzbar, teils verbrannt. Ich habe daher manches Zitat nicht meher vergleichen, manche Quelle nicht mehr einsehen konnen. Aber wenn die literature 'das fragment der Fragmente" ist (Goethe), muss ein Versuch wie der vorleigende erst recht den Charackter des Fragmentarishcen tragen.

During the war and postwar years, I lost sight of foreign literary criticism after it vanished and was thus inaccessible to me. Also, as a consequence of an air raid in 1944, parts of the Bonn University Library were unusable or burnt. I could no longer check various citations or consult many sources. But if literature is "the fragment of fragments" (Goethe), an attempt like this one in particular must exhibit a fragmentary character.] — "Vorwort," in Europaisches Literatur und Lateinische Mittelater, (my translation; not translated in the English edition of 195

Curtius, E. R. 1953. I have tried to show that humanistic tradition is from time to time attacked by philosophy. It may suffer a serious setback from these aggressions. Many signs seem to point to the fact that we are faced once more with an incursion of philosophers, existentialists... "Appendix: The Medieval Bases of Western Thought," European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, 592

De Man, Paul. 1983. As a control discipline . . . philology represents a store of established knowledge; to seek to supersede it . . . is without merit. "Heidegger's Exegeses of Hölderlin," Blindness and Insight, , 263-4.

Readings, BiIl. 1997. The University in Ruins. Harvard University Press. 

Derrida, Jacques. 2001. "The University Without Condition," originally delivered as a Presidential Lecture at Stanford University in 1998. Its title was "The Future of the Profession or the University Without Condition (Thanks to the 'Humanities,' What Could Take Place Tomorrow)." This version can be found in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), 24-57. A slightly altered version, recast as an essay, appeared as "The University Without Condition" in Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), 202-37. The French original is L'université sans condition (Paris: Galilée, 2001).

Derrida, Jacques. 2002 Who's Afraid of Philosophy: Right to Philosophy 1 trans. Jan Plug. Stanford Univ. Press, 

Derrida,Jacques. 2004 Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 trans. Jan Plug. Stanford Univ. Press,

Avital Ronell, "Introduction" in Complaint: Grievance among Friends (2018)

Recommended Viewing and Reading:

Avital Ronell. Complaints Department. 2015

Avital Ronell, "The Uninterrogated Question of Stupidity." differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.
8.2 (Summer 1996)

Walter Benjamin, "Privileged Thinking"

Executive Order: Images of 1970s Corporate America

Habeas Corpus / The End of Habeas Corpus

Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

Jack Black,‎ You Can't Win

Joe Coleman (Illustrator),‎ William S. Burroughs (Foreword)

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/spinoza-philosophy-freedom/

"Er lasst sich nicht lesen" THE MAN OF THE CROWD by Edgar Allan Poe (1850)

Messiness & Creativity: How a Messy Desk and Creative Work Go Hand in Hand

Finding Your Way into a Literary work: Reading as Invention (Inventio) and as Discovery (Why those two words?) Criticism is Creative (Writing).

"Wildered" Percy Shelley, Alastor, l.140

Etymology / Online Etymology Dictionary

Reading the Table of Contents

Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation 

PDF is here. 

Table of Contents pdf of Introduction Here.

Martin Heidegger, selections from Being and Time and The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics; and "The Essence of Ground," in Pathmarks

Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Noise," in Studies in Pessimism

Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death 

Maurice Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death," in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell and Lydia Davis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 300-43.

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Coaches" Essays, Book Three, Chapter Six.

Jacques Derrida, Death Penalty Seminar, Vol. 1, Session Eleven, pp. 270-83.

Michel de Montaigne, "To His Father: On the Death of La Boétie," in Complete Works of Montaigne, Trans. Donald Frame, 1276-88.

Seneca, "On the Shortness of Life"

Maurice Blanchot, "The Last Word" in Friendship (1971; trans 1997)

Maurice Blanchot, "The Very Last Word" in Friendship (1971; trans 1997) 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, "Second Promenade"

Maurice Blanchot, "Idle Speech," from Friendship.

Jacques Derrida, "Fichus" and selected letters written by Walter Benjamin that Derrida discusses in "Fichus."

Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law"

Walter Benjamin, "Critique of Violence"

Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Auch Einer: Eine Reisebekanntschaft (in English); Heimito von Doderer, "Eight Attacks of Rage" and "The Torture of the
Little Leather Pouches," in A Person Made of Porcelain and Other
Stories; Seneca, "On Anger"

Friedrich Theodor Vischer, "A Rabid Philosopher"

Jörg Kreienbrock, Malicious Objects, Anger Management, and the
Question of Modern Literature

What is an ideologue? What is an intellectual? What is fake news? How do you decide if a source is reliable? Glenn greenwald at the Intercept versus Jimmy Dore show versus Max Keiser Report versus Alex Jones at infowars

Have a group of students lead for each week on the film--cover itin depth for two classes--and be experts on the film research, divide it up--in the film, listen to the commentary, compile a bibliography. Be experts on the film., ocys on formal aspects that define these films and their relation to violence, sexuality, sexism, misogyny, misanthropy, and nationalism.

Turn in your notes to me a week in advance. Be prepared to bring in the information you've learned as it is relevant to discussion.

Get the DVD yourselves.

Build to a reasearch paper using your notes and biblio to discuss one film you have led on, if you wish,and one filmyou havenot.

August

SENIORS FOR STUDENTS / THE RE-ABLED BODY

Jack London, "To Build a Fire"--

sabotage

CIA Manual for Purposeful Stupidity

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"
William Empson, "Obscurity and Annotation"

Thomas Bernhard, Extinction
Thomas Bernhard, Correction
Franz Kafka, The Verdict

Edgar Allen Poe, William Wilson

Stefan Zweig, Amok

MAX OPHULS, LETTER FROMAN UNKNOWN WOMAN

EDGAR G. ULMER, DETOUR

Hart Crane, selected poems
Sigmund Freud, A Child Is Being Beaten
Paul Roazen, Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk

Samuel Beckett, From an Abandoned Work

James Joyce, "The Dead"

Shepard Tone

Masha Gessen, "Donald Trump’s Very Soviet Fixation on Applause," New Yorker, Feb. 6, 2018

"Call Out Culture"

Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies, Josie Appleton's Officious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VObVj_Rlec?

They miss the virtual economy of "likes" and the vacuous categories Twitter gives you, like "impressions."   Ditto for citations on academia.edu

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Genealogy of Morals,Third Treatise

Cyrano de Bergerac / J-P Rappeneau (Gerard Depardieu)

Zero Squared #136: Lindsay Shepherd and Free Speech

Debunking the Bernie Bro Myth: Briahna Joy Gray Interview with Katie Halper

Two women debating the merits or flaws of HRC's policies before the 2016 election. One is a socialist woman of color. She got $15 minimum wage passed in Seattle with no help from the Democratic Party (they are against the 15 minimum). The other woman is white, a Democrat, a writer for neoliberal publications, and a self-avowed feminist.

Published on Nov 2, 2016
Michael Moore tweeted, "No women ever invented an atomic bomb, built a
smoke stack, initiated a Holocaust, melted the polar ice caps or
organized a school shooting," and was immediately and powerfully
corrected by screenwriter Jessica Ellis.

The Birth Control Handbook: The Underground Student Publication That Let Women Take Control of Their Bodies (1968)

Dive into the heart of the Roland-Garros atmosphere! Chapter 3: motivation.

Dive into the heart of the Roland-Garros atmosphere! Chapter 4: joy.

25 Labor Events and Organizers Who We Should Teach About During Women’s History Month

Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) with Gerard Depardieu "Tirade du nez"

Neoliberalese ("very scientific!") and the privatized, corporate university

Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, Katha Pollitt

Fre