There is a clear break from the use of rationality and the use of the chain of command seen in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. To set off the plot of the story, General Ripper orders an unauthorized direct attack on Russia’s nuclear war plants. He does this crazy thing based on his irrational fear of Communism. After this, every single person follows protocol and executes precisely as it is written. The rational moves made by everyone after is spot on, however all this rationality was brought about by and irrational act. This reminded me of when we talked about the Flowers from Evil and how there is beauty that comes from disgust. It parallels exactly, the good wouldn’t exist without the bad just as the rational actions would not have been taken if the initial irrational attack weren’t called in. What’s also interesting is that you see the very beginning of the process is missing. Everything that occurs under General Ripper’s command is supposed to start with the President’s orders, however it does not making everything being done wrong. It’s another weird circle like the ones we have been dealing with all semester. I personally loved the movie very much and am glad you decided to show it. Great pick!

Simon Critchley was a very interesting read. The excerpt Surfaciality from his ABC of Impossibility gave me two explicit feels. In the beginning he spoke about poetry explicitly the poet. He described the poet as someone who redefines things, ideas, concepts for us. He is an interpreter of what is already known, but covered up. As Critchley said, “we already understand but have not made explicit.” The poet de-familiarizes what we think we know or understand and uses a simplistic approach to reexamine it. While reading this part the first thing I could think of was Percy Shelly’s statement that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the wold.” It sounds as if Critchley would agree with Shelly in this sense and embraces the role of poets across the world. The second feel I got from this piece was a looking away from science and reasoning. Looking at the world in a simple way, just at the surface if you will, allows for unlearning which he then says leads to learning. He wants to look at the real appearance and nothing more. He then goes on to describe the nastiness of reason and says why it hinders rather than helps in the way of looking at the world. We overlook the obvious and by doing so miss what is right under our noses. When looking at Clarice Lispector’s Daydreams of a Drunk Woman through this simplistic I thought of it two ways, through the drunken eye and through someone observing the drunk person. Because the drunken vision and way of thinking is obstructed, it would get a blurred view of reality and most likely couldn’t think deeper about much if it tried, however being the observer of a drunk woman could definitely work into what Critchley talks about. By just observing, not knowing someone is drunk or thinking deeper about it, we may be able to review some thinks that we though to be understood and look through it in a new lens.

Samuel Beckett left me speechless and yet full of questions. In Endgame he writes without plot and the entire play/storyline consists of only dialogue. The sentences are short and choppy, the tone is very depressing, and the setting seems very dull. Beckett’s use of language is very peculiar. He adds long pauses, hesitant sniffles, and yawns within his paragraphs and in some cases in the middle of his words. The pauses are used to add emphasis or change a subject, like used in ordinary works seen before. But the other things seen, the chuckles, the sniffs, and yawns are weirdly placed allowing for further examination. The instance we spoke about in class was where Beckett used a [yawn] to break apart the word “absolute.” He is literately shattering what was though of before, the old ideas such as what people thought of as being absolute, and trying to get us the think and maybe even redefine it. This can also be read into as part of Beckett’s nihilism. There is a nihilistic tone seen throughout the play and I believe it begins here. He is rejecting “God” and religious principles which were thought of to be absolute. In the play there is a tone of meaninglessness present. The characters are handicapped, violence is seen, and Hamm asks Clov to kill him more than once. The setting also adds to this. It is inside at all times, not explicitly mentioned, but seems dim and not very well lit. The only sense of an outside world we get are two little windows that are out of reach because Clov needs a ladder to see through them. This tone poses a problem because it creates dullness and an uneasy sense in the reader, but that is the exact way that Beckett gets us to shake our perception of normal and maybe start redefining what has been given all the times before.

Responsibility. One seemingly simple concept, but when beginning to dissect it, its not so simple at all. It is defined as the fact of being accountable or to blame for something, and with this definition there can already be flaws seen. It’s too general. There are a vast number of different steps and procedures to everything now-a-days that there is no one to blame and no one is responsible as Jacques Ellul brilliantly portrayed. His example with the bursting dam shows how responsibility is slipping away from us when we can’t even assign responsibility to something so small as the building of a dam. He associates this collapse to technology, which it does play a huge role, however technology isn’t solely to blame. As seen in The Visit, the people in Gullen were being very irresponsible and technology was nowhere to be seen. They condemned Alfred Ill to dead based on a simple bribe, then the attempt at rationalization and justification of it began. They tried to shift the thinking from a moral responsibility to a responsibility to the town’s well being. Like Professor Rickenbach stated in class, they had they’re end goal in mind and just had to add twists and turns in their logic to get there. A good comparison is seen between the two when they talk about losing individuality. Ellul makes a direct remark about this when he talks about the illusion of freedom from technology. It looks like we are more free however we end up huddling up turning into a “coherent mass.” His examples of the millions of people getting into their cars going to the Mediterranean and the image shown of the bunch of people in the airport display this point very vividly. This loss of individuality is also seen in The Visit, but less explicitly. One way that its shown is through everyone getting the same yellow shoes conforming toward the bribe. It is also seen when Alfred is trying to get on the train and the huddled mass of people is in front of him stopping him. If Alfred would had ran through the crowd, and someone would have killed him there who would have been to blame? No one would have know because the responsibility would have been lost in the mass, along with individuality.

Like you said in your email, both videos were very weird. They both heavily displayed a bunch of unconventional images in an irrational order. This emphasized the movement from the structured thought and way of thinking to the rise of a new creative way of thinking, maybe even by using the subconscious or unconscious mind. What really popped out at me in both videos and what I focused on was the use of the face. In the Un Chien Andalou video the eyes were used quite gruesomely. The first time was near the beginning when the man used a blade to cut open the woman’s eye. I immediately thought of this as an attack on the current was people were looking at the world and a calling for a change. The second was when another man was dragging the two pianos with the dead deer on them. The deer had their eyes hollowed out which I again interpreted as a need to stop looking at things in a traditional sense. The other video also had this. The woman’s eyes were often seen closed or closing, and when they were open she wasn’t looking straight, always in a new direction. Also, the randomness in the videos lead me to thought that they were trying to break or at least shake the structure of things. In Andalou’s video the characters were in different sceneries at random times, first the house, then the woods, to the ocean. The random images show in the second video weren’t hard to miss and they seemed to say not to look to the past, take a different approach toward looking at the future.

The second paragraph of Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” immediately caught my attention. In it he is describing how “aimless and arbitrary” human intellect is. Off coarse he is talking about it in the context of nature, but one question I had raised from this was if he would go further than that with it. Nietzsche goes on to talk about how nothing was impacted when it hadn’t existed and that nothing will happen when it ceases to exist. This “intellect” we hold so dear only relates to human life, and more so only humans give it this such importance that makes it seem that it governs the laws of the entire world. Nietzsche gives an excellent example when he says, “But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world.” The way we see things only relates to us humans and in the end, when we are no more, it will be as aimless as it could get.

In the second last paragraph Nietzsche mentions concepts saying, “That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect.” Again he is pointing out how arbitrary intellect is and how we use it to support and defend ourselves and our actions, however these laws and rules we make up are only relative to humans and only impact human life. Going back to the end of his second paragraph, Nietzsche has a good example of this when he talks about the philosopher as a porter who needs and admirer. Nietzsche says, “… the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees on the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts.” He shows that humans use this intellect to feel better and think they have knowledge, but then he raises the question of how much we even know about themselves. He displays how in the end nature is keeping things from humans using the example of how the intestines and bloodstream work. This solidifies his point because in his time you couldn’t find out this information unless you examined a dead corpse, but then the dead person will never know so, like he said, it is truly arbitrary.

Make up assignment: Nietzsche’s take on “death of God.”

When Nietzsche mentions “death of God” he is referring to how the Enlightenment took away some of God’s “credibility.” Before people had faith and believed in the name of a God, however with the Enlightenment and people being able to scientifically prove and explain things this idea and reliance on God decreases and diminishes causing a “death of God.”

The Anansi Stories highlight the importance of rational thought. The Anansi tales heavily enforce the saying “brains over brown.” Anansi faced opponents and problems that were totally bigger, for example snakes and leopards, and still prevailed because of higher thinking. When you think of a spider against a leopard, no one expects the spider to win, no one even expects a good show, but Anansi does it not through superior strenght, but through quick thinking and examination. Anansi didn’t defeat his enemies, he let them defeat themselves.

When I first heard this, my mind went back to  Enlightenment thinkers. Of coarse not in the way they are seen or taught about, but the rational thinking and logic associated with them. However, emotion also plays a role in some stories, but they often don’t end well. For example in the video clip, Anansi gets angry at the end, exiles humans, but then starves. Rational thought was not used, but instead the Romantic expression of strong emotion which lead to his downfall. Even though Enlightenment thinkers weren’t connected to Anansi Stories, the logical process is clearly seen.

Baudelaire is portraying the world as a sinful dishonest place full of death and suffering. In his poem “To the Reader” he blames the devil for everything that is wrong with the world, but he seems to believe humans are no better. We come to temptation and do the devil’s evil bidding so there is no chance that our world can be a wholesome or peaceful place. Baudelaire says, “Gangs of demons are boozing in our brains.” Looking at this it’s almost as if we have no free will, that the devil is controlling us to do all these things. This fits best into that idea of the know vs. the unknown. Why do we do what we do? Are we truly choosing for ourselves? Who controls if anyone? Baudelaire really gets at this idea in “To the Reader” and makes us question what we know, and what we think we know.

I chose to write about The Rights of Woman by Olympe de Gouges.

The argument here is they the rights of women are the same as those of men. Equality is the issue being discussed. Gouges starts in her preamble and uses listed rights to get her point across. Each bullet has a reason embedded in it which is how she rationalizes them. With the new revolutionary ideas going through thinkers’ and philosophers’ heads, Gouges starts to think like them. She sees men fighting for their freedom and equality so she decides to fight for women’s too.

These thinkers aren’t trying to make us look at the world, they are trying to get us to think about the world. What they talk about is opening our minds and thinking about the things that go on instead of blindly following rules and norms. They want people to think about God, authority, politics, and everything else that governs everyday life. They promote knowledge and use of the mind.

I agree with a lot that was said. This period of new thinking and ideas brought much change to history and these texts show much of why. Enlightenment thinkers wanted people to think with perspective instead of thinking one sided which gave way to innovation and depth in people’s work. Although they weren’t perfect, I don’t believe anything was left out. These people were very thorough and insightful which is what brought about such an intellectual revolution.