ENG 3011
Section 5051
A Splice of Life: Biopolitics and Biomedics
Spring 2011
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This class meets T 2-3, R 3 in
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Please email me only to send me class assignments. Otherwise, please talk to me in person after (not before) class or during office hours. Office: 4314 Turlington Hall Office Phone 352 392-6650 Office Hours: after class, and by appointment
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This is Your Brain on drugs.....any questions?
Only a professional can deliver the (greatest) hit(s) of reading (speaking strictly metaphorically: "STAY IN SCHOOL!!!!!").
And the most passionate investigation of hashish intoxication will not teach us half so much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic) as the profane illumination of thinking will teach us about hashish intoxication.
--Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism" (1929),
"And no one"--that means: for none among these men prevailing everywhere who merely intoxicate themselves with isolated fragments and passages and then blindly stumble about in its language, instead of getting underway on its way to thinking, and thus becoming first of all questionable to themselves.
--Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? (50)
"But Nietzsche had to scream. For him there was no other way to do it than by writing."
--Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? (49)Apprehended as a blend and an impurity, the pharmakon also acts like an aggressor or a housebreaker, threatening some internal purity and security. The restoration if internal purity must thus reconstitute, recite . . . that to which which the pharmakon should not have had to be [added and attached] like a literal parasite : a letter installing itself inside a living organism to rob it of its nourishment and to distort [like static, = bruit paratiste ] the pure audibility of a voice. Such are the relations between the writing supplement and the logos-zoon. In order to cure the latter of the pharmakon and get rid of the parasite, it is thus necessary to put the outside back in its place. To keep the outside out. This is the inaugural gesture of logic itself, of 'good sense' insofar as it accords with the self-identity of that which is: being what it its, the outside is outside and the inside inside. Writing must thus returns being what should have ceased to be: an accessory, an accident, an excess. (128); The cure by logos, exorcism and catharsis will thus eliminate the excess. But this elimination, being therapeutic in nature, must call upon the very thing it is expelling, the very surplus it is putting out. The pharmaceutical operation must therefore exclude itself from itself . (128); Writing . . . the phantom, the phantasm, the simulacrum, of living is course is not inanimate; it is not insignificant; it simply signifies little, and always the same thing. This signifier of little, this discourse that doesn't amount to much, is like all ghosts: errant. It rolls this way and that like someone who has lost his way, who doesn't know where he is going, having strayed from the correct path, the right direction, the rule of rectitude, the norm; but also like someone who has lost his rights, an outlaw, a pervert, a bad seed, a vagrant, an adventurer, a bum. Wandering in the streets, he doesn't even know who he is, what his identity--if he has one--might be what his name is, what his father's name is. He repeats the same thing every time he is questioned in the street corner, but he can no longer repeat his origin, Not to know where one comes from or where one is going, for a discourse with no guarantor, is not to know how to speak at all, to be in a sate of infancy. Uprooted, anonymous, unattached to any house or country, this almost insignificant signifier is at everyone's disposal, can be picked up by both t eh competent and the incompetent, by those who understand and know what to do with it . . ., and by those who are completely unconcerned with it, and who, knowing nothing about it, can inflict all manner of impertinence upon it. At the disposal of each and of all, available on the sidewalks, isn't writing thus essentially democratic . . . Excess, anarchy; the democratic man, with no concern for hierarchy. . . . This errant democrat, wandering like a desire or a like a signifier freed form logos, this individual who is not even perverse in a regular way, who is ready to do anything, to lend himself to anyone . who gives himself equally to all pleasures, t all activities . . . he has no essence, no truth, no patronym, no constitution of his own. Moreover, democracy is no more a true constitution that the democrat ahs a character of his own. . . Democracy is orgy, debauchery, flea market, fair, (145)
--Jacques Derrida, The Pharmakon," in Dissemination
--Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One.
Jacques Derrida in Ghost Dance
Avital Ronell on the examined life
Caravaggio's paintings of Abraham about to sacrifice Issac.html
Friedrich Schlegel, "On Incomprehensibility"
Screenplays in Progress:
Good Grief
(Comedy)
"They turned grieving into a grievance that couldn't be grieved."
About a family of Mafia attorneys (consigliari) just dying to sue each other over their Mafioso father and Mafiosa mother's "pre-bump" agreement / living dead will (who gets what depends on which parent gets bumped off first) and still keep it all in the family.
It's Your Funeral, aka Death Coach (Comedy)
About an ageing, single former self-help guru who hosts a TV show called "We Died Laughing" broadcast to retirement homes preparing retirees to get ready to die.
"Now that you've retired, what's next?"
When the Dead Won't Die (Horror)
Don't know what it's about yet.
Father Dad (Comedy)
Just as an unmarried male virgin is about to become a priest, he discovers that he fathered twin daughters who can't wait to meet him now that they have now become porn stars. The Bishop is not amused.
For the Rest of Your Death (Horror, with some comedy)
About graduate students who never get their Ph.D.s or (keep their) jobs.
