°It walks
… or, ambulatory materialism. Apropos the brief encounter with the uncanny, Samuel Weber writes of the uncanny as that which defies identity, wherein “the narcissistic categories of identity and presence are riven by a difference they can no longer subdue or command”. Susan Bernstein follows Weber - in “It Walks: The Ambulatory Uncanny” - in emphasising that:
The discourse of the uncanny destroys the illusion of a stable subject position, of a final meaning, of a sense separable from language and the body. It points to the finitude and temporality of thinking, as Weber makes clear in “Uncanny Thinking,” and “marks the spot where what is (there) and what is not, presence and absence, coming and going, can no longer be clearly distinguished.”
And, while I put some thoughts together on the relation between abstraction, spectrality, the human subject and Capital for a post for another day, go read Jon over at Posthegemony on the strangeness of reading. And, related, Jodi wonders whether going nowhere is harder than getting somewhere.
