I think it has to be something generational. Bong Joon Ho said Don’t look up is one of his favorite movies ever which like…. Brother how?
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Yea, I didn’t mean it as a knock on the book, more about my ability to hold all those issues together in some kind of coherence — I think its kind of unavoidable when covering such a broad topic, but I think the framework of the “the mirror world” did a great job of stringing everything together. The concept has definitely stuck with me.
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I started my next book today. It’s Mort by Terry Pratchett.
I actually ordered very pretty cloth bound editions of Guards, Guards!, Pyramids, and Mort years ago when a friend showed me that they had been released. I’ve been interested in reading Pratchett for a long time because everybody I’ve ever known that read these books is a hardcore fan and owns all of the discworld books, displayed in an impressive giant bookshelf in their apartment.
But I’ve actually never touched these books. I was kind of afraid I wouldn’t like them after all and that kind of kept me from starting to avoid ending up in that failed state. Better forever stay a potential liker instead of becoming a definitive hater, I thought.
After the first couple of pages I had taken so many pictures of paragraphs to share with friends that I had to stop because at that rate I could just send them a photocopy of the whole book.
That guy is funny and clever and I’m sure that some of the subtler jokes are going right over my head because I’m not a native speaker but reading the beginning has been a blast so far. I’m looking forward to reading more later.
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Fantastic start to the Discworld books you picked there and one of my favourites. The entire Death Collection is amazing and if you only read them you wouldn’t be disappointed either!
Never met anyone who is a definitive hater, and so glad you’re not a potential liker anymore.
And those are beautiful editions you have to.
Enjoy more!
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I’ve heard similar criticisms levied at Badiou and especially Zizek. Between that, this old exposé on the company culture, and this even older and bizarre analysis of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, I suspect this is a problem with Verso in general.
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hm i’m not sure i see the connection you’re making, especially as verso is only the english publisher of one of han’s books as far as i can tell. i have no doubt the company culture there is indistinguishable from the rest of the publishing scene, but there is such a wide range of contemporary and historical thinkers in their catalogue it’s hard to attribute anything to a house style.
as for han, i ended up reading another book of his i had on the shelf, the burnout society, and poked around a bit more online. i see the “half-baked” criticism leveled at him a lot, but i am not buying it. i find his books to be dense and swift, not shallow or scattered. they draw and build upon the work of others, but i also think he has a unique critique of neoliberalism and interior life that could only come from deep thinking and contemplation. i like him!
All of my current Discworld books are from this release too! In fact Mort was my most recent pickup, but I have most of the Death books, a couple City Watch…they’re truly lovely and made me picky about which editions of books I pick up physically.
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Yeah definitely! With the ongoing TikTok-ification of reading I recently noticed an increase in pretty editions of books, especially classics. Though some of those editions definitely look like they would be a pain to actually hold and read. I find the Mort special edition to be both pretty to look at and comfortable to read. Definitely makes me want to pick up more of this release!
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Admittedly, a lot of it is rooted in both Zizek’s privileging of pop media analysis in his treatment of capitalism, and in the importance he held to Verso at the 2000s: his books were the best selling ones in their catalog, enough to keep them afloat where they might otherwise go under. So given that and the other points I mentioned, it’s easy - or at least tempting - to come away thinking they leaned into that kind of pop media analysis in their other published works, whether to capture that lightning a second time or because this analysis would only become more entrenched over the course of the 2010s (the Gaston article from 2019).
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i don’t really have an opinion on zizek one way or the other, but it’s worth noting that his books published by verso seem to be of a much different substance than pop culture critique he’s known for. flipping through the one book of his from verso i have on the shelf (in defense of lost causes), it appears to be pretty rigorous. i’m sure he was a cash cow for a time, but i’m hesitant to agree he solely kept them afloat. like i mentioned, their catalogue is huge and includes lots of perennials like angela davis, fedric jameson, the frankfurt school etc. on that note, it makes sense to me to do a beauty and the beast reading alongside adorno. that doesn’t mean i want to read it, but seems like a good choice for a goofy little blog article or whatever.
apologies in advance if it seems like i’m arguing about this 
. i have no allegiance to verso books outside liking a few books they published and disliking a few others.
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I agree, Verso is kind of a crap shoot (and maybe this is like any other publisher), they have some great stuff, some ok stuff, and some “did anyone edit anything at all in this?” stuff
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Zizek is similar in the sense that there is a lack of resolution or follow-through in his points, he is very much just throwing ideas at the wall… but he then gets lost in the reasoning of them, there is a joy and wit and quirkiness in his argumentation that I enjoy. he says something provocative and then grounds it in reality, Byung-Chul Han says something true that sounds good but isn’t particularly surprising, and then the book is over.
what did you find not surprising?
all of it. from the last page of The Burnout Society
The capitalist economy absolutizes survival. It is not concerned with the good life. It is sustained by the illusion that more capital produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living. The rigid, rigorous separation between life and death casts a spell of ghostly stiffness over life itself. Concern about living the good life yields to the hysteria of surviving. The reduction of life to biological, vital processes makes life itself bare and strips it of all narrativity.
idk, my reaction to this is ‘‘aha, yes, and?’’
see to me that’s a well written paragraph. surprising, maybe not, but i’m also not sure surprise or novelty are strong qualifiers for me. the language itself is illuminating. the term “hysteria of surviving” or the sentence “the rigid, rigorous separation between life and death casts a spell of ghostly stiffness over life itself” have a saliency and force that drives han’s larger critique, and i’d argue they also demonstrate the poetry in han’s writing that gives it resonance and fertility. those same ideas are explored further by both han and others elsewhere, but i’m not really quite sure what is missing there outside of what could be considered missing in any piece of writing.
i’d agree that his books sacrifice scholarship and textual depth for that poetry, but to me they are justified and worth reading.
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for me it reads a little clunky and just isn’t that interesting of a conclusion for a whole book to come to :P
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I think there’s a feeling of gilding the lily when it comes to further taxonomies of neoliberal degradation. Dont know if thats really the fault of these books or their publishers/markets though, thats sort of a social context issue
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we are drowning in information, this is true
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While reading metamorphoses for the hundredth time I realized that I’m probably constantly returning to its a book of short stories
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damn dude i was just reading an elias canetti book tonight where he talks about metamorphoses at length. great book. canetti’s argument was that all literature/poetry is in essence about metamorphosis and ovid’s book is one of the first we have and one of the ones we always return to.
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