Every book, paper, idea, experiment, conference, and conversation becomes an entry. The intellectual engine of this archive.
A reading of Homer's thymos / noos / psyche trichotomy as a productive multiplicity rather than a precursor to the unitary self. Connects to the flagship essay.
Open question: How does this reading change when applied to the Odyssey?
Reading Shostakovich's late string quartets as a study in what music remembers. The Testimony memoir anchors the biographical reading.
Open question: Does trauma compose differently than joy?
A close reading of A Thousand Plateaus, plateau 6. The BwO as a limit, not a destination.
Open question: Is the BwO a concept or an experience?
George Herbert Mead's “I” and “Me” applied to comparative cognition in domestic cats. The conclusion: selfhood in cats is plausible but not the same self.
Open question: What would settle the question empirically?
Working through Hebb's original 1949 paper and modern restatements. The current computational project is grounded here.
Open question: How does spike-timing-dependent plasticity fit?
A first pass through Damasio's distinction between emotion and feeling. The feeling is what the self is for.
Open question: How does the somatic marker hypothesis survive criticism?
Reading the Iliad not as a story but as a phenomenological study of how selfhood registers — affective, perceptual, reflective — at different moments.
Open question: Which register does the opening of Book I invoke?
A reading of Interview with the Vampire as a meditation on what is preserved when the body is not. Memoir as the form of immortality.
Open question: Why does this novel still work after fifty years?
Troilus and Cressida as a study in a self that knows what it wants and refuses to want it. The Importance of Being Earnest as the parody.
Open question: Is the willing self possible?
A first reading of Cobain's lyrics as documents of a body in pain. The Kurt-derived question: what does popular music know that the philosophical tradition does not?
Open question: What does the popular song remember?
Carmen as a study in what cannot be willed. The opera form as a way of holding desire at a distance.
Open question: Is opera a method?
A reflection on whether keeping an intellectual archive changes what is being archived. Probably yes.
Open question: Will this still be true in twenty years?