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From the archive:
In an effort to add information for previous
events. Prior to the re-design, we are adding
short descriptions that were sent out as emails
and posted on the web.
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Monday.1/22 - Reading Group at 16 Beaver
Sade My Neighbor (by Klossowski)
CONTENTS:
1. About Monday and the Reading
2. About efax Reader
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1. About This Monday
This week's meeting begins at 8:00pm.
For this upcoming Monday Reading Group, we will be reading a short selection from the Klossowski text, Sade My Neighbor. Klossowski is an enigmatic and critically engaged writer, novelist, actor (in Bresson films), artist (his brother = Balthus) , ... who was quite influential to a whole group of French thinkers including Derrida. Unlike Blanchot and others who occupy a similar space, Klossowski has not had a very large reception in the US. Partly because of the difficulty in finding his texts, partly because he his harder to categorize. This text is linked with the Barthes text from last week, in that it carries through a reading of Sade and even discusses Sade's " utopia of 'evil' " ... . For those who do not receive the second part of the reading which contains this footnote. I have transcribed a section of it.
"This passage, as well as the following one, gives evidence of the tendentious deviation of the author's reasoning at the time he compose this study. What the "utopia of evil" leaves out of account is not ennui but the functional, or utilitarian, charcter that the institutions of a given social milieu give to the exercise of impulsive forces. If there is here a question of a utopia of "evil"," it is because Sade, using the language of institutions, sketches out the idea of a human grouping that would declare itself to be in "permanent insurrection" because of the "state of perpetual motion" of its members, one that would have become conscious of being founded on nothing else but the exercise of impulses freed from every ideological legitimation. As a result, the behavior of individuals as well as the nature of their actions would be changed; this is what makes Sade's project utopian. For if disgust and ennui follow "crime committed solely for the sake of committing a crime," it is only in the existing institutional world that there arises the dea of such a crime, followed by ennui or a fall in intensity..."
If you have ideas for future readings, presentations, discussions, activities, ?.... feel free to write to sixteenbeaver@aol.com. As always, all are welcome to attend and please invite a friend.
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2. A NOTE ON THE EFAX MESSENGER:
For Mondays we often like to distribute work, notes, readings to accompany presentations. In these cases we use this messenger as a simple and cost efficient way of distributing the materials. The download is short (it is a small program) and quite simple to use. It allows you to read digital faxes (and of course to print them). When you follow the link below, please make sure to download the correct viewer. There is one for Windows and one for Mac. The one for Mac will take a bit longer to download. Here is the link,
http://www.efax.com/need/index.html
