speaking of Story of the Eye

It’s been, wow, 19 years since I last read Story of the Eye, and it’s a fine piece of work. A couple of my more rascally undergraduate friends discovered it, and then at Penn State we had a “base materialism study group” going for a year, and this was the first thing we read.

But it’s one of the most quotable books of continental philosophy, even when self-censoring on a semi-public blog like this one. For instance, following the wild teenaged orgy scene, we read this:

“My own parents had not turned up that evening with the pack. Nevertheless, I judged it prudent to decamp and elude the wrath of an awful father, the epitome of a senile Catholic general.”

Those senile Catholic generals…