recommended reading on various subjects:
- letter to J. Bloch against economism and fatalism, the parallelograms of forces, the individual, the unconscious
- letter to Borgius the individual in its relation to the social, accident to necessity
- On the Concept of History Benjamin, opportunism and ideology with respect to the conception of history, searching the wreckage
- Reification fetishism, reification, of social relations. particularly relevant for trans people re: gender and biology
- Eros and Thanatos the drives in late Freud, an assertion of one into two (analysis as primary over synthesis, etc)
art
- The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Benjamin, what has changed, what is new, and what new stakes are opened up by this stage introduced in art production?
- Marx and Engels On Literature and Art a basic introduction
- Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art defining what is art
- Leaving the Movie Theater Barthes, something of a response to "Mechanical Reproduction", film
- Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism alt link Jameson, extremely insightful analysis and example of method. If nothing else, read the introduction
- The Death Of The Author alt link Barthes, useful for understanding Jameson's use of "text" (and the "disappearance of the individual subject"), again something of a response to "Mechanical Reproduction"
logic & epistemology
- On Practice the stages of cognition in an individual
- On Contradiction movement and development of a thing
- Dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete
in Marx’s Capital Ilyenkov, a brilliant longform analysis of two of the most important categories of logic and epistemology (on practice and on contradiction are both very helpful for this)
- Contradiction and Overdetermination the interpenetration of aspects, re: economism (as described in Engels letters, Benjamin, see above), re: on contradiction, re: Ilyenkov