[steve.jpg]
(Photo courtesy of Davide Grassi)

STEVEN SHAVIRO

"Shaviro explains to us in his airy way the mistakes of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Saussure, Chomsky, even Lacan (though Foucault is, like Shaviro, pretty much infallible) while citing as authorities various comic books and science fiction authors - as well, of course, as Burroughs and his cinematic interpreter, David Cronenberg."

--James Bowman, The Public Interest, Summer 1996

DeRoy Professor of English
Wayne State University
Department of English
Suite 9408
5057 Woodward Ave.
Detroit, MI 48202
Phone: (313) 577-5475
Fax: (313) 887-6437
E-Mail: shaviro@shaviro.com

My writings

Other stuff

The aliens are gray, hairless, about four feet tall, with leathery skin and vaguely humanoid features. Their eyes are deep, black, and unblinking, and have hypnotic power. If you look directly into them, your will crumbles and you are paralyzed... Perhaps the aliens are trying to breed a hybrid species, mixing their genes with ours. Or maybe they can't even reproduce on their own, but need help from our bodies and DNA. We service them as bees do flowers. In any case, the aliens seem clinically detached during these procedures. Sex is evidently not joyous or fulfilling for them. "They don't know what a porn movie is," one victim remarks. "[They don't] understand the concept of voyeurism or anything like that." Their interest in us is not prurient, nor do they bear us malice. It's just that they don't realize how much it all hurts. As Budd Hopkins puts it, "they simply appear unable for the most part to understand us, our feelings, our terror, our love for one another." They fail to grasp even the simplest things about us, like how we dress or how we do our hair. Human emotions are "like candy" or "like a drug" to them, one abductee explains, a dangerous luxury in which they dare not indulge. No wonder our close encounters end in mutual misunderstanding.

--from Stranded in the Jungle

Other Stuff:

I have a modest, perpetually unfinished Jerry Lewis page.

And for the morbidly curious, there is a photo of Maurice Blanchot.

Some Favorite Quotations:

"It's all insinuation." (Infamous Menagerie)

"The visions became flesh, uncontrollable flesh." (Dr. Brian O'Blivion)

"You have come for knowledge. There will be pleasure. Because knowledge is sexy. There will also be pain. Because knowledge is torture." (Jeff Noon)

"I dreamed of scented rooms and endless permutations of identity; boys becoming girls, girls becoming boys who do boys like they're girls." (Grant Morrison)

"Electricity, and finance, and sexuality, and happiness, and evolution, they all come about because of the amourous inclinations of matter." (Philip Pullman)

"She was suffering as much as she had ever suffered before, because she was going to do what she wanted to do. But it would not make her happy. She did not have the courage to stop from doing what she wanted to do. She knew that it would not make her happy, because only the dreams of crazy people come true. She thought that she was only interested in duplicating a dream, but in doing so she necessarily became the complete victim of a nightmare." (Jane Bowles)

"Who knows what binds a lover to another, other than excesses of fantasy and disappointment..." (Camille Roy)

"The shape of power, snaking irregularly through the matrix of sociocultural life, doesn't just yield to your touch; it asks for recompense always." (Martha Baer)

"Morals are just these sensory coagulations, these tensions knotted and bunched across the skin of your beliefs. Dr. Octagon inverts the Trad hierarchy of head/stomach so that your head tastes ill and your intestines think. Your brain throbs, in peristaltic waves. Dr. Octagon keeps everything unreal, its voice in perpetual motion, from glutinous to gloating to dastardly to bedside to malicious. Instead of grounding you it uproots you, pulling you across into its world, moulding then massaging you across a series of thresholds you never knew existed." (Kodwo Eshun)

"Anemones and madrepore formations constitute a loaded and baroque panorama, a place where emotions take the shape of a petrified nature that somehow keeps shifting form, a constant metaphor of itself. Kitsch is this ability to surpass essential belongings and rest in more superficial ones, to create an imaginary landscape through accumulation and camouflage, and to crystallize the continuous movement of life in the permeable disguise of fantasy." (Celeste Olalquiaga)

"What you want is always out of reach when you can't sleep. You can only have what you don't want, or what you thought you wanted, lurching toward you, unspeakable horror.... Oh there's nothing empty about insomnia; it's full to bursting! Chains of thought, some miniscule, tinnily chime in your pricked ear; some, immense, wind Laoco\F6n-like around your twitching limbs. You think you're waiting but you're not; you're awaited, though not by sleep. Insomnia is the wish to be immortal, granted by an ass." (Kathryn Davis)

"There's a difference between a thug and a rebel." (Chuck D)

"Honestly, at this point, all I really care about is novelty and making sure I have ringside seats for whatever awful spectacle is about to unfold."(Alan Cabal)

"And the whole Bush family, from Texas, should be boiled in poison oil."(Dr. Hunter S. Thompson)

"In the marketplace, at least, rape is the natural order of things. And remarkably popular, too, on both sides of the exchange. People hand over their money, their lives, to DynaZauber or any other corporation, they know what they're getting. They want to get connected; the customers are always bottoms looking to get topped, the harder and bloodier, the better." (K. W. Jeter)

"If we make Napster-like free file sharing illegal, we'll have to rid ourselves of either computers or democracy. You can't have both."(Jaron Lanier)

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."(H. P. Lovecraft)

"I cut my finger. That's tragedy. A man walks into an open sewer and dies. That's comedy."(Mel Brooks)

"Psychopath's not a narrow term anymore...I've heard it applied to whole cultures on occasion. It's even been applied to me once or twice. Reality is so flexible these days, it's hard to tell who's disconnected from it and who isn't. You might even say it's a pointless distinction."(Richard K. Morgan)

"Artists are interesting people with dull ideas, while scientists are dull people with interesting ideas."(Bruce Sterling)

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