note taking posted elsewhere

From the blurb for Grosz' "Chaos, Territory, Art" linked above

Instead of treating art as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate, Elizabeth Grosz argues that art-especially architecture, music, and painting-is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and in doing so, finds that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires, not just its intention and aesthetic.

Find and Replace

Instead of treating scholarship as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate, Elizabeth Grosz argues that intellectual activity-especially theory, philosophy, and the humanities as such-is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches the humanities as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and in doing so, finds that the meaning of works comes from the intensities and sensations they inspire, not just their intention.

I got two responses to that on the page, neither of which responded to the fact that the substitutions work. You can't remove politics from language. A note to Jack Balkin from 2003. Balkin, and Taruskin. I should probably refer to the two of them more often. I don't, mostly because I can't think of any time in my intellectual life when their supposedly surprising arguments were anything but a given. And I'm talking about listening in on dinner table conversations as a 10 year old.