Reading difficult things:
I just realized I might literally not be smart enough to understand Hegel, Althusser, Lacan, Baudrillard, Jameson, and the more philosophical aspects of Marx, especially in relation to form, writing, ideology, literature, hermeneutics, marxist literary criticism and so forth.
I keep reading explanations of their work, and their work itself, and I have to keep re-reading pages over and over again and sometimes it still doesn't make any sense.
Or I'll understand a few paragraphs in a row and then they'l do something like "Therefore X" and I have no idea why that means X is true.
Is it possible to just not be smart enough to 'get them'. And I should give up entirely, or is it better to just understand as much as I can?
>>7780248
Outside Hegel all of the authors you have are complete trash written intentionally to be obscure as they really didn't have anything of value to say.
Is there any proof that anyone ever acutally understood Hegel? I'm geniunely curious
>>7780257
Not just Hegel, but all Post-Modernists.
>>7780248
Write. Take notes. Write brief interpretive summaries of the various perspectives. If you aren't a long time lit person you're probably not used to reading dense material.
Also it's said everywhere, but really, reading the short, early Socratic dialogues is a low intensity way to get your mind ready for philosophy/lit jargon.
>>7780263
Postmodernists are basically sophists. If you want some good philosophy start with the Greeks.
>>7780260
So Hegel is pomo eh? Is your mom pomo too?
>>7780260
fuck off
>>7781254
ur dum
ur rong!
>>7781254
I doubt I said they were impossible to understand. I thought I had written that I personally found that I didn't think I was literally smart enough to understand them, and was generally thinking about a thread where what we read we can't actually understand it, we're just not smart enough.
I wondered if it was possible for fairly regular people to not be able to understand books after a certain point of complication and level of theory.
Of course, I understand some of the listed authors' ideas, but not parts of their ideas to say the least
A lot of this stuff just requires building a certain tolerance to it and acclimating yourself. Once you get enough of a matrix of "oh, I actually kind of know what the fuck he's talking about here" nodes, you can sustain more weird readings.
Some of these will be basic contextual things, actual information (like "what the fuck IS structuralism?????"), but a lot of it will be more vague, personalised familiarities and heuristics (like having sufficient redundant information about Althusser's intellectual context that it actually gels for you personally into something that "feels" like it makes sense), and even some very wonky, very non-glamorous things (like having heard enough smart people call Baudrillard a pretentious fucking hack that you're relatively comfortable entertaining the notion that he is one).
Hegel is always dense. Especially if you want to read his stuff off the beaten path. Extra secret special protip: Most super smart people are familiar with Reader's Digest versions of Hegel and very few people have read him in serious depth.
Google Alan Macfarlane's Youtube lecture on Marx to give yourself a little bit of slack that he actually is an obfuscated inconsistent fuckface whose philosophy is barely coherent.
Althusser just requires acclimation.
Don't worry about Lacan. Lacan is the most extreme possible example of no one actually reading him seriously, even his supposed adherents. Read around Lacan if for some bizarre reason you actually want to "know Lacan."
Baudrillard is very much a product of "look how clever and allusive I am!!!!" gimmicky Parisian writing, at the worst possible phase of pomo. Read "around" Baudrillard first, then read Baudrillard, and try not to become nauseous at his shallow trendy stylizing.
Not sure on Jameson though.
When in doubt, use the Stanford Encylopaedia. And seriously, remember that 90% of people who claim to be familiar with major intellectuals, including professors and other academics, are at least full of shit. Reader's Digest knowledge and face-saving dominates academia, especially among the vast majority of scholars who are mediocrities.
>>7781362
sometimes i do think that i should actively avoid all the primary sources, and only read the explanations on standford, or purdue OWL. the primary sources seem to make things worse.
>I just realized I might literally not be smart enough to understand Hegel, Althusser, Lacan, Baudrillard, Jameson, and the more philosophical aspects of Marx, especially in relation to form, writing, ideology, literature, hermeneutics, marxist literary criticism and so forth.
You're not smart enough to notice that reading these guys is nothing but a meme. You have failed prior to even starting.
>>7781362
>Baudrillard is very much a product of "look how clever and allusive I am!!!!" gimmicky Parisian writing, at the worst possible phase of pomo. Read "around" Baudrillard first, then read Baudrillard, and try not to become nauseous at his shallow trendy stylizing
You're so wrong with this. I could understand you saying this for someone who is presenting some wacky far out ideas but Baudrillard isn't
>>7781429
Well, the process with this shit is usually that people effortlessly immersed in the original intellectual context of the thing are the first generation to interpret it, and then to make it canonical by mediating it to their students. So you already have
>Generation 1: People who have infinitely more subtle contexts and continuities with which to understand the text, because they themselves are primary sources
>Generation 2: People who have as their teachers natural exegetes with direct access to the primary sources
>Generation 3: People who read secondary works which themselves become canonical and authoritative, written by generation 2
Past that, almost everyone who "reads" fancy stuff is first encountering it by having it explained to them in simplified terms. There is a certain amount of bullshit in telling someone that all the books are out, there waiting for them in the libraries - that they can read Marx any time they like. I didn't understand Marx when I took MARX 101 in first year, and I only half understood Marx when I had him explained to me in very unofficial, un-library-esque terms by a professor who was treating me like a confused child, and I only meaningfully understood Marx in fourth year when something finally clicked, and I had enough background of failed attempts to grab onto it that time. That's one of the real benefits of university.
But there is also a lot of merit to seriously attacking the primary sources too. I recently read de Saussure after years of assuming he was going to be some precociously postmodern hypercomplex LINGUISTICS WIZARD, and it turns out de Saussure is simple as fuck. Same thing happened to me with Durkheim and Mauss, I think. I just assumed they were going to be big impenetrable monsters, because I had only ever asked professors about them or been taught about them.
>>7781434
I like Baudrillard's ideas but holy fuck I hate this actual prose style.
Francois Dosse is another one with the "look how allusive I am!" style. It feels shallowly gimmicky.
>>7781469
Ah yeah I get what you mean
Foucault does that to an extent as well
>>7781459
Durkheim is okay, I studied sociology, and my profs wrote him off as a conservative quickly, as he isn't a radical, but Fredric Jameson chooses these two quotes before the preface in The Political Unconscious (a book that is tough for me)
To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.
—Wittgenstein
Since the world expressed by the total system of concepts is the world as society represents it to itself, only society can furnish the generalized notions according to which such a
world must be represented.. . . Since the universe exists only insofar as it is thought, and since it can be thought totally only by society itself, it takes its place within society,
becomes an element of its inner life, and society may thus be seen as that total genus beyond which nothing else exists. The very concept of totality is but the abstract form of the
concept of society: that whole which includes all things, that supreme class under which all other classes must be subsumed.
—DURKHEIM
