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February 2025

the experience of meaning (zwicky) ★★ ½ I was supposed to read it for a book club but I got impatient and read it on my own. after reading anti-oedipus and losing faith in structures and wholes it was hard to be persuaded by Zwicky's gestalts. I felt like I could vaguely agree with gestalt thinking when she used the examples of the little graphs or of poetry and music, but it was all lost on me whenever she elaborated on her reasoning (though maybe that vagueness proves her point). I would begin to nod along when the opposition of calculative and gestalt thinking appeared like the opposition of lacan's symbolic and imaginary, and this was nearly explicitly addressed when Zwicky assigned the calculative to Freud's second topography (ego) and gestalt thinking to the first (unconscious). but this only became an example of her failure to keep the opposition as strict as she suggests it is, because a couple of pages earlier she says the individual is a gestalt. and the lacan in me couldn't shake the conviction that ineffability is immanent to language... I would actually feel like she was making the same argument on the topic of poetry, but then she'd insist that poetry is outside of language. I was also suspicious of her insistence that the west went wrong when it began questioning gestalts, for being "puzzled" while the rest of the world "took them for granted"; I don't think critical thinking is exclusive to the west nor that we should reject it. I'm not sure how we would challenge the technocracy she is so vehemently against if we just took everything as they immediately are to us… I was surprised Zwicky never discusses cleanth brooks considering her interest in literature, because I noticed their wholes run into the same problems: science that isn't science but is science, and a liberal disregard for material conditions.

anti-oedipus (deleuze & guattari) ★★★★★ my original review for this is embarrassing; anti-oedipus changed entirely how I think and it's hard to express here. I think I read it at the perfect point in my study of psychoanalysis, not to say that this book is no more than a reevaluation of psychoanalysis. The scope is so impressive that only at the level of its implications was I fully convinced by atheism for the first time. and I think its reputation of being hard to read is such a disservice because the writing style is so enjoyable to me that I would even call it poetic (though d&g would hate that).