Desire under the Elms

JKSCHW at aol.com JKSCHW at aol.com
Fri Jan 28 21:39:15 PST 2000


In a message dated 00-01-28 17:50:01 EST, you write:

<< Who possesses the Phallus? Oh, baby, it's too hard for me,

> don't stop.

> Forget lawyering, get into the phone sex business, certainly more

lucrative.

I doubt it. You have no ide the obscene amounts of money I could make, but probably won't.

> "I don't write about sex because... its boring"

--Foucault int./w/ Rabinow and Dreyfus 1981.

It depends, doesn't it? Read Shelley's To Constanzia, for example, and tell me writing about sex is boring. If Foucoult wrote about sex it would probably be boring, because he's an institutional historian. Institutional; sex would be boring.

> Although their prose often has an austere purity I admire, the NCErs don't

> havea feel for the raw energy of the greed they celebrate--for that you have

> to go to Balzac or Faulkner, maybe--there's not that much fiction that

> appreciates this driving Desire of western civilization, though Marx,

> actually, has a psychological feel for it and the literary talent to express

> it, even if from the outside rather than the inside.

How about our old friend Schopenhauer, who captured the energy and drive

behind greed, elevating it to the most seminal and elemental force in

civilization.: " Thus the subject of willing is constantly lying on the

revolving wheel of Ixion, is always drawing water in the sieve of the

Danaids, and is the eternally thirsting Tantalus." WWR I 196.

Nah, this won't do. This is nth rate Westernized Buddhism, and quite abstract. It isn't about _greed_, the desire for more hard cash.

>

> If, however, we want to discuss the concept of Desire, rather than lust or

> greed, . . . we should look to the analytical literature on the belief-desire

> thesis.

> Elster? Some of Elster's best work is on the paradoxes of rationality

Yeah, Elster is hard to figure. His best stuff is on jsut that, but then he just devers to belief-desire rational choice theory. He's schizophrenic.

--jks



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