Not incredibly related to the reading, but perhaps somewhat . . . I just got off the phone with my best friend who graduated from Tufts last spring. Our standard meandering conversation took us a great deal of places, but one I wasn't expecting was to the topic of favorite professors who have made big impacts in our intellectual/identity formation . . . her most memorable prof is Lee Edelman of the Tufts English Department, a.k.a. Lee Edelman of this week's reading.

In reading the introductory part of "No Future," I kept thinking about a pop-culture representation of the need to 'Save the Children,' which Edelman lays at the foundation of politics and Western life: the 1964 Lyndon Johnson campaign ad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKs-bTL-pRg) in which the little girl counts (incorrectly, nonetheless, which probably was done so as to make her more endearing to viewers) as she picks off petals from a daisy, and then a nuclear bomb blows up.

I've been thinking about the interesting/shocking issue of the UNC mascot's organs tied up with sacrifice and secrecy. This may be highly tangential, but I thought of a couple of other examples in which bodies are "secretly" donated . . . and perhaps stripped of their zoe and what remains is the remnants of bios (??). Also, this may open up a space between the two deaths I was trying to talk about in class today . . .

I've been trying to think of some example of a homo sacer (I think having a referent really lets me grasp the concept at hand with more depth, at least most of the time), and the only thing that keeps coming up in my head is the idea of a pirate (yes, of the Caribbean!).

I really liked the illustrations of the states of nature and law in the state of exception on page 38. I feel seeing it drawn out as such--with the two separate entities (fig. 1) that then meld into one another (fig 2), and then finally become indistinguishable was really helpful.

On page 21, Agamben brings up some tricky issues that I'm hoping to get some more clarity on, please! He delineates two opposing modes: inclusive exclusion (which serves to include what is excluded) versus exclusive inclusion (which i think one could infer serves to exclude what is included . . . ?)

I don't quite know what to make of this. A Dutch teenager has stolen 4,000 euros worth of virtual furniture from the virtual social networking site, Habbo Hotel . . . and he's been arrested for it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7094764.stm

I keep thinking of Baudrillard's claim about how subversion in the simulacrum is more complicit than that in the real . . . where does this fall?

I was sitting in a coffee shop last week, and I swear I wasn't eavesdropping, but these two people were sitting right next to me talking loudly about short stories they had read. One of the stories they talked about seems to offer a good illustration of Lacan's idea of the repressed returning from the future . . .

I'm having a hard time accepting Zizek's statement (from p. 25) that "commodity fetishism occurs in capitalist societies, but it capitalism relations between men [and/or other gender identities] are definitely NOT 'festishized.'"

I have been thinking a lot about the idea of plateaus (From "Introduction: Rhizome"), and specifically about how we can grasp them in our minds that so very much latch onto structure (like you, Bumpkins, I feel need structure in my life in most things, and am quite lost without it, so the idea of plateaus is both tantalizing and infuriating at the same time). The way D&G write is in plateaus, as they claim, "each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau." (22) What a brilliant, non-linear way to write . . .