Shannon Li

Samuel Sorensen

GAMES 101

Oct. 27, 2024

Enjoy Being Punished by Games

Game is an extremely violent mediation: it punishes you, it disciplines you. People can sit in front of a pile of matter, or a glowing panel, or immerse themselves in their own enjoyment without even having anything to do with it. It’s poetic in a way, but it’s also extremely creepy. For the player, in that emptiness, what remains is not cogito in the sense of René Descartes, because that assumes that ego congito is the only remaining behavior. But this is clearly not the case: in that immensely dark, yet endless void, the subject is self-absorbed: an ego without a body dances in a void without matter! In that suffocating void, subject can enjoy nothing, yet enjoying everything. Gaming is dynamic that allows the subject to enjoy the action of punishment. Gaming is dynamic that allows the subject to enjoy the action of punishment.

Aeschylus. The Persians. Prentice Hall, 1970.

Gruen, Erich S. “Rethinking the Other in Antiquity.” Princeton University Press eBooks, 2010, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400836550.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Penguin UK, 2016.

I would like to combine this week’s reading and the important psychoanalytic theory of the Other with the basic position I stated last week. Sans the tedious theoretical elaboration of the Mirror Stage, the conclusion is simple: one subject can only see himself from the Others’ eyes.

Irigaray, Luce. Sexes and Genealogies. 1993. pg9-21.

Very interesting article. The very act of the author questioning the legality of phallus is an act of patricide. The topic of contraception and abortion was a highly controversial subject in the United States of America in the 1980’s and to this day. In China, however, abortion has not been a taboo since ancient times. The Han Book, written in 105 A.D., records the use of medication for abortion by the ancient Chinese.

Shannon Li

Avital Ronell

GERM-UA 244

Nov. 23rd, 2023

Standing Over the Glass Bridge Above the World’s Rift

For psychopharmaceuticals, positivist psychology categorizes them: anxiolytics, empathogens, stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens. and these drugs, which are always chemically and electronically interfering with the brain’s natural way of functioning. The user of a drug usually expects a specific drug to work. Users of drugs usually expect that a particular drug will bring about a particular effect that will change the mental dilemma they are currently experiencing. This paper will combine psychotropic drugs and postmodernist writing to explore whether the world of hallucinations Walter Benjamin refers to is actually a gift from mother Nature.

Plato. Plato: Complete Works. Hackett Publishing, 1997. Phaedrus.

On my first day of seventh grade (freshman year of junior high school), I had a very childish argument with a kid wearing glasses about a stupid question. The main form of this argument was as follows: You’re stupid. Bounce back! Bounce is not valid! The rebound is valid, period! My IQ is twice yours, comma! My IQ is your absolute value! Of course, we could go on and on with this rhetorical question. However, when I first heard the concept of “absolute value,” I realized I couldn’t continue the argument. The reason was that I didn’t know what “absolute value” was, i.e., I had no signified in my head, and my whole language system went down for a few seconds. Perhaps in retrospect, we could have stacked that argument with concepts like “squaring,” but that would have implied some kind of rhetorical rift.