The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre Book

The appeal of the ever-elusive realization of bataille's theories is met only by its ineffability

if anyone has any good feminist readings of bataille, lmk

it's easy to read bataille as an edgelord but i think a lot of it holds:

my existence, first and foremost, should probably be considered as a (glorious) excess, an outflow of energy, a burn-off

this includes the moment of birth but also writing this article here, and yeah all art

i think Stoekl makes you think hard about actions which are by definiton 'productive' and those that are not,

since one always wants to blur the lines between them. I.e. as @fucktheory said, art is a measure of a society's health, not . . . something-something about effecting that state of health

Anyways, there's always this motivation to 'think beyond' the problem we find ourselves in, and my inclination after reading this profound book is that uhm maybe no, we all just need to reduce our caloric intake (the pursuit of bodily aesthetics, yet again, are a form of excessive burn-off) and overall expenditures

I imagine this book being interesting for urban planners because uh there's a chapter on the city

at the very least it got me thinking in a religious or spiritual way about energy, the kind of stoner philosophy you feel on acid but probably don't speak about casually in public less your sanity be questioned

so it's nice that we can have that kind of imagination in (academic) writing

I'll probably return to this book