{"product_id":"subject-matter-isbn-9780262546362","title":"Subject Matter","description":"\u003cb\u003eA theorization of habit that emphasizes its excessive and unsettling qualities rather than its mediating, adaptive, and stabilizing functions.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eSubject Matter \u003c\/i\u003eoffers a bold counterpoint to prevalent conceptions of habit characterized by bodily fluidity and ease, as the stabilizing foundation of an emerging subjectivity, or, more negatively, as a numbing and deadening force. Instead of facilitating the coordination of action with goal and self with environment, habit appears here as a disruptively recursive operation with extreme ontological implications that are often more quotidian than exceptional. Vinegar theorizes habit’s more perturbing aspects, from repetition compulsion to kenosis to breakdown, through an encounter between Hegel’s philosophy (of habit), psychoanalytic dimensions of repetition, Tom McCarthy’s novel \u003ci\u003eRemainder\u003c\/i\u003e, and Omer Fast’s feature-length film interpretation of the novel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVinegar starts with the premise that habit is an “unhappy mediator,” a disturbance of the very medium and milieu that is constitutive of the subject. \u003ci\u003eSubject Matter\u003c\/i\u003e pays close attention to those aspects of habit that are usually considered deviations from, or potential threats to, habit proper and that generate a logic of breakdown: automaticity, mechanization, thingness, inertia, and fixity. By plotting a topology of habit’s unbearability through detailed accounts of its manifestation in writing, art, aesthetics, and visuality—and through an attentiveness to the unbalanced nonrelations between mediation and immediacy, being and having, fixity and fluidity, vanishing and overflowing, abbreviation and excess, beginning and ending—Vinegar exposes habit’s failure to mediate and inhabit. In doing so, he offers new and counterintuitive insights into how habit generates the unruly grounds it is supposed to settle, thus allowing us to ask how we might break down differently.Series Foreword vii\u003cbr\u003e  INTRODUCTION: HABIT— THE UNHAPPY MEDIATOR 1\u003cbr\u003e Habit without the Fly- Wheel 1\u003cbr\u003e Fixity, Fluidity, and Superfluity 6\u003cbr\u003e A Crack in the Mirror, a Rent in the Veil 9\u003cbr\u003e The Anaesthetics of Habit 11\u003cbr\u003e No Footlights— On Staging the Set- Up Error 13\u003cbr\u003e Habit, Hegel, and Remainder 14\u003cbr\u003e A Logic of Breakdown 19\u003cbr\u003e Subject Matter and Habit 20\u003cbr\u003e Kenosis and the Stained Soul of Habit 22\u003cbr\u003e (Chapter) Breakdown 24\u003cbr\u003e 1 FALLING STUFF 29\u003cbr\u003e Falling Stuff and the Destitution of Subjectivity 29\u003cbr\u003e Repetition, Habit, and the Speculative Sentence 33\u003cbr\u003e Satz at the Heart of Setzen and the Failure to Ingrain 38\u003cbr\u003e The Fixed Subject 40\u003cbr\u003e “Unhappy Tristram!” 45\u003cbr\u003e Habit, Anxiety, and the Overproximity of Being and Having 47\u003cbr\u003e Habit’s Death Drive and Dead Time 49\u003cbr\u003e “Kerr- thunkk!”\/“thump! kadump!” 52\u003cbr\u003e 2 PER- SEVERING HABIT AND THE DESEASE OF\u003cbr\u003e THE FLUID BODY 57\u003cbr\u003e Rattling Off— On Chains and Streams 58\u003cbr\u003e Fixity and Fluidity 60\u003cbr\u003e “This being- at- home- with- oneself we call habit” 61\u003cbr\u003e Bruised, Bloodied, and Stained 65\u003cbr\u003e Expunging the Beautiful Soul (Porifera) 68\u003cbr\u003e Compulsive Machinic Exteriority 75\u003cbr\u003e Being- That- Is- Deposited 76\u003cbr\u003e Understanding and the Aesthetic Ideology of Habit Change 80\u003cbr\u003e Verstand and Vernunft in Habit 85\u003cbr\u003e Death- Dealing Matter and Forensic Analysis 89\u003cbr\u003e The Magic and Cunning of Habit 93\u003cbr\u003e A Short- Circuiting Anaesthetics of the Infinite Judgment 96\u003cbr\u003e 3 BUFFETING AND BEING SECOND- HAND 103\u003cbr\u003e Michelangelo’s Artichoke 103\u003cbr\u003e The Static Logic of Habit 109\u003cbr\u003e Buffeting and Being Set Adrift 112\u003cbr\u003e Tingling and the Tinnitus of the Body 116\u003cbr\u003e Fulgurating Lightning Rods 118\u003cbr\u003e The Recoil of Vergreifen in Begreifen 121\u003cbr\u003e The Ego- Function of an Organ is Impaired 123\u003cbr\u003e “Not a Member is Sober” 129\u003cbr\u003e Grasping at the Principle of Carrot and Stick 130\u003cbr\u003e Joan of Arc’s Gaucherie and the Stained Soul of Habit 137\u003cbr\u003e 4 PIECES OF (FIGURE) EIGHT AND THE CRUX OF\u003cbr\u003e THE MATTER 141\u003cbr\u003e Habit and “Un- Matter” 141\u003cbr\u003e A Kenotic Anaesthetics of Habit 144\u003cbr\u003e Vanishing, Vaporizing, and Overflowing 145\u003cbr\u003e Pieces of (Figure) Eight 147\u003cbr\u003e The Disinhabiting Ring of Habit 150\u003cbr\u003e Autopilot, the Not Yet, and Remainder’s Nonending 152\u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments 155\u003cbr\u003e List of Abbreviations 157\u003cbr\u003e Notes 159\u003cbr\u003e Index 199“Rigorously argued and lucidly written, \u003ci\u003eSubject Matter\u003c\/i\u003e engages Hegelian speculative thought and Lacanian psychoanalysis to transform habit from a force of mediation and reconciliation to one of disturbance, disruption, and compulsive repetition. Vinegar offers us a nuanced and surprising meditation on the formations and deformations of the subject.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Alex Dubilet, Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University; author \u003ci\u003eof The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eAron Vinegar is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Oslo. He writes and teaches at the intersection of art, architecture, visual studies, aesthetics, and philosophy.","brand":"The MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303206834405,"sku":"NP9780262546362","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780262546362.jpg?v=1767737474","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/subject-matter-isbn-9780262546362","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}