Limited, Inc.

So let me get this straight. The Taliban set up a computer program encouraging vigilantes to report on women using their rights, and will award these vigilantes cash? The wickedness of the Taliban knows no limit! Thank God , in the U.S., you have institutions, like the Supreme Court, to protect the rights of women!

  “He painfully wrote   Jeune Parque , pulling it out little by little from a world of erasures, and then the following poems with a large enough facility.” – Thibaudet On beach 72, between Carnon and La Grande-Motte, I stood on the beach and let the ripples die between my toes and looked out at the Mediterranean and I thought of you, Paul  Valéry. Valéry is, to me, the least sympathetic of the “great poets”. In Thibaudet’s book on Valéry, he distinguishes between those poets “who know how to make verses because they are poets … and those who are poets because they know how to make verses.” The first are guided by some inner vocation – some inner fun, I think – and the latter are guided by their sense of forms – some exterior fun, or at least business. Valéry he puts in the latter camp. Myself, I think these two types struggle within the soul of every poet, but it is true that Valéry did everything to make himself seem like the coldblooded trap-maker of poetry. His great lines of v

  Was ist „obstinat“? — Der kürzeste Weg ist nicht der möglichst gerade, sondern der, bei welchem die günstigsten Winde unsere Segel schwellen: so sagt die Lehre der Schifffahrer. Ihr nicht zu folgen heisst obstinat sein: die Festigkeit des Charakters ist da durch Dummheit verunreinigt.     First, the title: Character under Capitalism: some notes The first section: character The second: homo oeconomicus The third: Marx’s buried notion of circulation Eliminate: The fourth: Simmel’s sociology – the encircling institutions of modernity The fifth: the clerks of literature The sixth: simultaneity – the new and the end of the future The seventh: the non-totality of totality, or the exchange matrix   Chapter 5   [In the clerks, I want to explore the aesthetic dimension, or effect, of the circulation sphere – how it shaped a certain style of alienation, of writing, and of living. The clerks are, as it were, at the very nerve ends of a social turn towards uti