Man is a Desiring Machine.

I am sitting here on hold with the state of California and I am going over some of my notes from last week’s Critical Theories of Literature class. The notes themselves are not terribly interesting unless you’re super into Psychoanalytic Criticism. However the bits scrawled in the margins are kind of fun (not all of the lecture is actually useful for studying later, but I like to keep ahold of the tangential bits that are interesting):

- A German saying I learned:

“Love is home-sickness”

- Something that Edgar Allan Poe apparently said:

“Man is a desiring machine.”

- Something my professor said:

“If I had had that experience than I would have an even stranger sense of myself that I do now …”

- You would not believe how much Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism deals with the notion of castration (male children are afraid their fathers with castrate them, female children believe they have already been castrated, fear of castration is sublimated into the unconscious, “The Uncanny” is just the return in disguise of the repressed “Castration Complex”, etc. etc. etc.) and so in the margin of my notes I apparently wrote: Do I really need shorthand for Castration?! And below that are a few attempts at inventing shorthand symbols.

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