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January 2025

	the phenomenology of spirit (hegel) ★★★★ it took me 7 months to read. I understood at most maybe 35% of it but I think that's fair for a first read … for the first third I relied heavily on gregory b sadler but I eventually got used to hegel's writing on my own + he speaks more concretely as the book goes on. after the reason section I got bored and didn't read a page for 2 months, but I turned out to be this picture -- the following spirit section was very rewarding. and now I can not only better understand marx and lacan but most importantly, dutch modern artist piet mondrian.
	the psychoses (lacan) ★★★★ lacan is known for writing obscurely but his earlier seminars are very clear. I like how he elaborates on certainty in psychotics and I feel like that was missing from the associated paper in ecrits. he makes his infamous statement here about how he makes himself deliberately difficult to understand, but I think he has a little bit of a point if you think about how confident people can be in their complete misunderstandings of freud …
	memoirs of my nervous illness (schreber) ★★★ read schreber's memoir so I could read freud's case on schreber so I could read lacan's third seminar so I can read deleuze and guattari's anti-oedipus …
	postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism (jameson) ★★★★ denser than I expected. I like that jameson is clear about using "late capitalism" to refer to a purer, multinational capitalism because otherwise I only hear the term being thrown around redundantly. and the word "postmodern" actually means something to me now outside of the mouths of jordan-peterson-alan-sokal types. I will reread this when I'm more familiar with the literary criticism jameson is responding to.