When I started this blog, I knew I’d never keep up with it. My whole life I’ve been terrible at forming consistent, disciplined habits. This weakness has made my goal of becoming a professional academic—a job that requires a huge amount of discipline to structure otherwise unstructured and even mystical requirements—a bit silly. Well, I’ll give it another shot.

Blog posts I planned in my head and never sat down to write include topics on:

• Descartes’ obsession with dissection of the heart and the brain, searching for the materiality of essence
• Cavendish and Spinoza: the Crossover, in which I argue that his Ethics and her Observations, written contemporaneously, and shit on Descartes with equal verve, dialogue in important ways
• A post simply vibing with some of the best passages from Marx’s Grundrisse, thinking about Marx as a natural philosopher in continuity with Spinoza and earlier materialists, as a change from the usual post-Hegelian reading impulse (which is important, of course, but has been done!)
• Losing my mind reading Althusser on representation and ideology because it made me understand the thing I never understood and always found frustratingly concealed: how we got from Marx to Foucault. And I refuse a psychoanalytic genealogy! I logged my time in the Freud mines in undergrad! Though this blog post could never have been written because it’s missing Stuart Hall, whom I need to spend more careful time reading before I overascribe impact to Alt.
• The one I got closest to writing: extreme vibing with Deleuze & Guattari, whose work I found 1) not difficult at all to read this time around and 2) ethical, energetic, and friendly to a trans studies framework.
• After reading Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus in the same week, I decided to put a cherry on top and reread the first chapter of Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter, which blew my mind. I’ve read that chapter many times and never once thought of “bodies” through the term’s lineage in materialist philosophy (body as opposed to substance as opposed to existence; see Aquinas). Descartes’ obsession with the anatomical body haunts us!

So, um, I hope to write some of these some day. I have my notes in a paper notebook, so it’s not all lost. Anyway, List 1 was really fun.

I’m now a couple weeks into List 2, which is a deep dive into the history of the field of early modern gender/sexuality studies (and specifically not trans studies, which comprises my third list). Rereading Foucault’s first volume of History of Sexuality was an important exercise that reminded me of where so much of our language around topics of gender come from (and, perhaps, helps trace where they’ve migrated or even been misread). I then read the fascinating textual and citational scholarly debates between David Halperin and Eve Sedgwick (Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, followed by Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, followed by Halperin’s How to do the History of Homosexuality). I’m now onto Valerie Traub, Gregory Bredbeck, John Dollimore, and Bruce Smith. Much more to come.

Anyway, I have a blogpost in mind to write tomorrow—about none of these topics. But if you see a topic you want to hear more about…let me know, I guess!