Monday Night -- 03.19.01 -- Where to Love -- Reading Group at 16 Beaver

Where to Love?

CONTENTS:
1. About This Monday (text selected by Paige, Ayreen, Rene)
2. About the Author
3. General info About the Book
4. About efax Reader (attached file: this week's reading)

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1. About This Monday

From readings exploring contestation in the
production and maintenance of public space
:::::::::::::::::::::::::(Deutsch)
to readings exploriong architecture and notions
of Publicity.Privacy
:::::::::::::::::::::::::(Loos, Colomina)
to readings calling for utopia as a category of
force too soon abandoned
:::::::::::::::::::::::::(Harvey)
to readings exploring utopia as a category
(Barthes on Fourier)
:::::::::::::::::::::::::(Klossowski on Fourier and Sade)
to a small leap towards an exploration of Love....
:::::::::::::::::::::::::(Barthes...Lover's Discourse)
to a different perspective and entry into Love,
love as action, as source of an ethics
:::::::::::::::::::::::::(bell hooks)
to shattered love, love in its shatterring, in its
profusion and desolution
:::::::::::::::::::::::::(Nancy)

This week we tie together ongoing questions around privacy and publicity with our
recent readings exploring love as a category of analysis, an ethics, a force, a question
.......from Renata Salecl's (PER)versions of Love & Hate

For the Love of the Nation: Ceausescu's Disneyland

"Passionate attachments not only affect people's private lives, they can also
torment a whole nation. There are always grounds for concern when politicians
declare their love for their country, since this love can be extremely destructive."
- Salecl

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2. About the Author

Renata Salecl is a former researcher at the Institute of Criminology,
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and is currently Visiting Professor
at the New School for Social Research, New York. Her previous books
include The Spoils of Freedom.

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3. General info About the Book

Why, when we are desperately in love, do we endlessly block union with
our love object? Why do we often destroy what we love most? Why do
we search out the impossible object? Is it that we desire things because
they are unavailable, and therefore, to keep desire alive, we need to prevent
its fulfilment? Love and hate go hand in hand, since the subject is both
attracted and repelled by the uncontrollable jouissance of the other. In
contemporary society, intersubjective relations have changed with the decline
of social prohibitions; but this change has not simply brought liberation, it
has also triggered various forms of violence, including self-mutilation. In seeking
out new forms of prohibition, don't young people who pierce their bodies
have something in common with African immigrants who embrace clitoridectomy,
or with women who act on their dates according to the instructions set out
in the Rules?

In (Per)Versions of Love and Hate, Renata Salecl explores the disturbing and
complex relationships between love and hate, violence and admiration, libidinal
and destructive drives, through investigation of phenomena as diverse as the
novels The Age of Innocence and The Remains of the Day, classic Hollywood
melodramas, the Sirens' song, Ceausescu's Romania, and the Russian
performance artist Oleg Kulik, who acts like a dog and bites his audience. For
Salecl - who questions the legitimacy of the calls for 'tolerance and respect' by
multiculturalists - practices such as body multilation are symptoms of the
radical change that has affected subjectivity in contemporary society.

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4. 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