Welcome back to what will probably be the final episode of the reading group arch. We started off with Badiou and we’ve been all around the houses, but it feels about time to we jump into something new. From here on out we’ll be reading Benjamin Bratton’s new book The Return of the Real. Get your copies in soon if you want to read it along with us, probably starting in two or three weeks.
In the meantime, we read Gilles Deleuze’s essay “Bartleby, or, the Formula”, which we were meant to read last week but instead just chatted about general stuff. We dug a bit deeper into the essay this week, but still bounced around its central concepts. Reading this sent me into a poetry rabbit hole personally, and so Bec and I ended up chatting for quite awhile about Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, in a way that I hope sheds some light on the literary associations and interests embedded with Deleuze’s own philosophy.
The book mentioned about poetry was Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry, published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions, and the Ted Hughes documentary was Stronger Than Death, available on YouTube here. Part of my thoughts on that already made it into a blog post posted yesterday, if you want the more polished and less rambling version.