Utsob Roy
Updated a reading goal:
Read 24 books in 2026
Progress so far: 6 / 24 25%
Consider one of your senses, not even the most important one— vision, but a minor one like smell, gone! Imagine a world of smell barred from you. Not reading Dostoevsky is just like that, not developing a sense.
And, his final novel, his magnum opus— The Brothers Karamazov, branches out new senses and intellectual capacities like an energetic sprout in your mind.
This book is deeply philosophical. But, like novels of the later period, like Remembrance of Things Past, the author is not living the philosophy (existentialism in this case), but explains it in detail in the author's voice. Let me enumerate the ideas being covered: Christianity and related concepts of sins, soul, free will, and kindness, psychology, law and jurisprudence, and life through his infinite lenses.
He is, in a sense, the sincerest novelist I have encountered. Ivan is one of the most powerful atheist characters I have ever read of, that too, in a novel about Christianity.
The first part is deeply about Christianity, or, to be specific, Dostoevsky's interpretation of Eastern Orthodoxy. In his mind, suffering and joy are intertwined, as if one joyfully suffers in a feast of suffering.
While The Grand Inquisitor remains the most intense of all chapters in the novel, the ultimate, and deeper question posed at the end of the book is the nature of crime.
The rest contains spoilers
Dimitri didn't kill his father. He merely wanted to kill him, for very real reasons, but never attempted it. Ivan wanted to get rid of his father, deep down, without making his hands dirty, of course, being an intelligent man. But all brothers, including Alyosha, never really liked their father, and if not killing him directly, would've found the world a better place without him.
If you accuse Ivan of his deadly despise, well… all the brothers are guilty of that. Yet, none was guilty enough, not because of the lack of action, not because of how they were brought up, leaving them less guilty, but because they never really wanted to profit from the murder. Yet, they bear guilt too, in their soul, for the flick of moments they despised their father.
But, Smerdyakov, the vile and the crook, and the veritable villain to the core of his heart, is really a complete villain. He has every reason to despise the old man, and probably more than the legitimate children. Cannot his bright future really be traded against the person who is not only the reason for his sufferings, but is also completely oblivious to that and bears no regrets and three thousand roubles?
Originally posted at hermitage.utsob.me.
Consider one of your senses, not even the most important one— vision, but a minor one like smell, gone! Imagine a world of smell barred from you. Not reading Dostoevsky is just like that, not developing a sense.
And, his final novel, his magnum opus— The Brothers Karamazov, branches out new senses and intellectual capacities like an energetic sprout in your mind.
This book is deeply philosophical. But, like novels of the later period, like Remembrance of Things Past, the author is not living the philosophy (existentialism in this case), but explains it in detail in the author's voice. Let me enumerate the ideas being covered: Christianity and related concepts of sins, soul, free will, and kindness, psychology, law and jurisprudence, and life through his infinite lenses.
He is, in a sense, the sincerest novelist I have encountered. Ivan is one of the most powerful atheist characters I have ever read of, that too, in a novel about Christianity.
The first part is deeply about Christianity, or, to be specific, Dostoevsky's interpretation of Eastern Orthodoxy. In his mind, suffering and joy are intertwined, as if one joyfully suffers in a feast of suffering.
While The Grand Inquisitor remains the most intense of all chapters in the novel, the ultimate, and deeper question posed at the end of the book is the nature of crime.
The rest contains spoilers
Dimitri didn't kill his father. He merely wanted to kill him, for very real reasons, but never attempted it. Ivan wanted to get rid of his father, deep down, without making his hands dirty, of course, being an intelligent man. But all brothers, including Alyosha, never really liked their father, and if not killing him directly, would've found the world a better place without him.
If you accuse Ivan of his deadly despise, well… all the brothers are guilty of that. Yet, none was guilty enough, not because of the lack of action, not because of how they were brought up, leaving them less guilty, but because they never really wanted to profit from the murder. Yet, they bear guilt too, in their soul, for the flick of moments they despised their father.
But, Smerdyakov, the vile and the crook, and the veritable villain to the core of his heart, is really a complete villain. He has every reason to despise the old man, and probably more than the legitimate children. Cannot his bright future really be traded against the person who is not only the reason for his sufferings, but is also completely oblivious to that and bears no regrets and three thousand roubles?
Originally posted at hermitage.utsob.me.
TL;DR: Derrida introduced Differance (notice the a instead of e) as a concept of creating differences over time. It is temporal.
While TL;DRs are good in the short term and nice to know, and will get us some nerd points in society, to understand the importance of this concept, one has to not only read this 24-page essay, but also a substantial part of the materials mentioned there.
So, on one hand, we have our plain, old difference. We use it all the time. This means two entities are not the same. But, this newly introduced differance is the process that works in our world over time and creates the differences, often of the same thing.
It is important to understand that differance doesn't exist, we can only see differences made by it. We cannot even bring it into existence because that will actually dissolve it.
Now, how am I to speak of the a of differance? It is clear that it cannot be exposed. We can expose only what, at a certain moment, can become present, manifest; what can be shown, presented as a present, a being-present in its truth, the truth of a present or the presence of a present. However, if differance is (I also cross out the “is”) what makes the presentation of being-present possible, it never presents itself as such. It is never given in the present or to anyone. Holding back and not exposing itself, it goes beyond the order of truth on this specific point and in this determined way, yet is not itself concealed, as if it were something, a mysterious being, in the occult zone of the nonknowing. Any exposition would expose it to disappearing as a disappearance. It would risk appearing, thus disappearing.
This also means that it is not how God has been defined in the negative theology.
Now, let's think about why this concept is important or interesting. First, let's consider this passage:
It was Saussure who first of all set forth the arbitrariness of signs and the differential character of signs as principles of general semiology and particularly of linguistics. And, as we know, these two themes—the arbitrary and the differential—are in his view inseparable. Arbitrariness can occur only because the system of signs is constituted by the differences between the terms, and not by their fullness. The elements of signification function not by virtue of the compact force of their cores but by the network of oppositions that distinguish them and relate them to one another. “Arbitrary and differential” says Saussure “are two correlative qualities.”
It means our knowledge about this world, all the categorisations we have in our head, so that we can distinguish this or that, is not based on our comprehensive knowledge of things. Instead, we know too little, but we know the differences between things. So, you can imagine that our reality is a big block of marble and we see it being chiselled away bit by bit, acknowledging differences, we get to know the ontological categories. These differences are the defining factors of the world.
Differance is that process of chiselling, over time.
What we note as differance will thus be the movement of play that “produces” (and not by something that is simply an activity) these differences, these effects of difference. This does not mean that the differance which produces differences is before them in a simple and in itself unmodified and indifferent present. Differance is the nonfull, nonsimple "origin"; it is the structured and differing origin of differences.
Differance is also the driving force for Dasein— a temporal phenomenon. It doesn't exist at a point in time, but over a stretch of time, ever changing, ever interacting. It is the tapestry of ever-accumulating traces created by differance, which often has the illusion of being only at present.
I shall only note that between differance as temporalizing-temporalization (which we can no longer conceive within the horizon of the present) and what Heidegger says about temporalization in Sein und Zeit (namely, that as the transcendental horizon of the question of being it must be freed from the traditional and metaphysical domination by the present or the now)—between these two there is a close, if not exhaustive and irreducibly necessary, interconnection.
Coming back to the signs, the signs we use in our languages are placeholders for things that are not present. This act of signification itself depends on differance because with this sign, we are deferring the entity we are signifying. Maybe we haven't stumbled upon languages and found a nice tool to use. Languages, perhaps, have a deeper ontological root, which makes it necessary for sentient beings, which brings us to the closing thought of this essay:
Being
speaks
through every language;
everywhere and always.
Originally posted at hermitage.utsob.me.
TL;DR: Derrida introduced Differance (notice the a instead of e) as a concept of creating differences over time. It is temporal.
While TL;DRs are good in the short term and nice to know, and will get us some nerd points in society, to understand the importance of this concept, one has to not only read this 24-page essay, but also a substantial part of the materials mentioned there.
So, on one hand, we have our plain, old difference. We use it all the time. This means two entities are not the same. But, this newly introduced differance is the process that works in our world over time and creates the differences, often of the same thing.
It is important to understand that differance doesn't exist, we can only see differences made by it. We cannot even bring it into existence because that will actually dissolve it.
Now, how am I to speak of the a of differance? It is clear that it cannot be exposed. We can expose only what, at a certain moment, can become present, manifest; what can be shown, presented as a present, a being-present in its truth, the truth of a present or the presence of a present. However, if differance is (I also cross out the “is”) what makes the presentation of being-present possible, it never presents itself as such. It is never given in the present or to anyone. Holding back and not exposing itself, it goes beyond the order of truth on this specific point and in this determined way, yet is not itself concealed, as if it were something, a mysterious being, in the occult zone of the nonknowing. Any exposition would expose it to disappearing as a disappearance. It would risk appearing, thus disappearing.
This also means that it is not how God has been defined in the negative theology.
Now, let's think about why this concept is important or interesting. First, let's consider this passage:
It was Saussure who first of all set forth the arbitrariness of signs and the differential character of signs as principles of general semiology and particularly of linguistics. And, as we know, these two themes—the arbitrary and the differential—are in his view inseparable. Arbitrariness can occur only because the system of signs is constituted by the differences between the terms, and not by their fullness. The elements of signification function not by virtue of the compact force of their cores but by the network of oppositions that distinguish them and relate them to one another. “Arbitrary and differential” says Saussure “are two correlative qualities.”
It means our knowledge about this world, all the categorisations we have in our head, so that we can distinguish this or that, is not based on our comprehensive knowledge of things. Instead, we know too little, but we know the differences between things. So, you can imagine that our reality is a big block of marble and we see it being chiselled away bit by bit, acknowledging differences, we get to know the ontological categories. These differences are the defining factors of the world.
Differance is that process of chiselling, over time.
What we note as differance will thus be the movement of play that “produces” (and not by something that is simply an activity) these differences, these effects of difference. This does not mean that the differance which produces differences is before them in a simple and in itself unmodified and indifferent present. Differance is the nonfull, nonsimple "origin"; it is the structured and differing origin of differences.
Differance is also the driving force for Dasein— a temporal phenomenon. It doesn't exist at a point in time, but over a stretch of time, ever changing, ever interacting. It is the tapestry of ever-accumulating traces created by differance, which often has the illusion of being only at present.
I shall only note that between differance as temporalizing-temporalization (which we can no longer conceive within the horizon of the present) and what Heidegger says about temporalization in Sein und Zeit (namely, that as the transcendental horizon of the question of being it must be freed from the traditional and metaphysical domination by the present or the now)—between these two there is a close, if not exhaustive and irreducibly necessary, interconnection.
Coming back to the signs, the signs we use in our languages are placeholders for things that are not present. This act of signification itself depends on differance because with this sign, we are deferring the entity we are signifying. Maybe we haven't stumbled upon languages and found a nice tool to use. Languages, perhaps, have a deeper ontological root, which makes it necessary for sentient beings, which brings us to the closing thought of this essay:
Being
speaks
through every language;
everywhere and always.
Originally posted at hermitage.utsob.me.
Who are we? The answer to this question is not only one of the tasks, but the task of science.
As stated by Erwin Schrödinger in Science and Humanism. This sets the tone of this book. This is an evolutionary journey of self-searching guided by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan.
What I like about this pair of authors, and why I keep coming back to them, is their sense of balance. Between rational and real, poetic and scientific, between not being egoistic and also not being humiliated due to what we are. This balance makes their book accessible without compromising on seriousness. Even if you are a seasoned reader of their work and of pop-science in general, you will still find thought-provoking moments.
I really like how gently and kindly, almost like a doctor, they try to remove deep-seated notions of superiority based on self-deception (a disease in my opinion).
Originally posted at hermitage.utsob.me.
Who are we? The answer to this question is not only one of the tasks, but the task of science.
As stated by Erwin Schrödinger in Science and Humanism. This sets the tone of this book. This is an evolutionary journey of self-searching guided by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan.
What I like about this pair of authors, and why I keep coming back to them, is their sense of balance. Between rational and real, poetic and scientific, between not being egoistic and also not being humiliated due to what we are. This balance makes their book accessible without compromising on seriousness. Even if you are a seasoned reader of their work and of pop-science in general, you will still find thought-provoking moments.
I really like how gently and kindly, almost like a doctor, they try to remove deep-seated notions of superiority based on self-deception (a disease in my opinion).
Originally posted at hermitage.utsob.me.
This book is very concentrated in its form. Myriad ideas got traversed simultaneously— some from historical incidents, some are pure stories, and some are stories about stories— all intertwined to craft a truly musical offering.
So, what is this book about? Art, literature, music, war, destruction, wastage of human life… But, above all, this is a book about hope, about hope and goodness that doesn't wither. It is a book about love that perseveres amidst the toughest of times.
More hunger will come, and more cold and more death. But there are red flowers. This is food for the eyes. Knowing this, every morning will be a child from now on. And every night a womb. With such knowledge, no one can lose a war.
This is also a book of life— how circular it is, yet how many variances it accommodates— like music— through repetition and variation, how it blooms— often awkwardly, through individual lives to something greater than the sum.
Originally posted at hermitage.utsob.me.
This book is very concentrated in its form. Myriad ideas got traversed simultaneously— some from historical incidents, some are pure stories, and some are stories about stories— all intertwined to craft a truly musical offering.
So, what is this book about? Art, literature, music, war, destruction, wastage of human life… But, above all, this is a book about hope, about hope and goodness that doesn't wither. It is a book about love that perseveres amidst the toughest of times.
More hunger will come, and more cold and more death. But there are red flowers. This is food for the eyes. Knowing this, every morning will be a child from now on. And every night a womb. With such knowledge, no one can lose a war.
This is also a book of life— how circular it is, yet how many variances it accommodates— like music— through repetition and variation, how it blooms— often awkwardly, through individual lives to something greater than the sum.
Originally posted at hermitage.utsob.me.
This year (2024) I have collected as many literary and cultural references I can find in this note.
To me, this is Alan Moor's greatest work. He is so clear, and so in command of the ideas he wanted to expose, I couldn't find a place where they got watered down which is so much common in comics.
Most of the characters in V for Vendetta are complex. Seldom there is a major character like Bishop Lilliman who is typical. So well-crafted the characters are, their inner struggles, and conflicts with the world out that they felt real, yet full of surprise. Moore has shown a mastery in psychology which I consider a hallmark of great fiction writers.
However, the characters are only backdrops here. Alan Moore used these characters to effectively convey some very elaborate ideas— freedom, anarchy, justice, integrity, etc.
So, when V started his vendetta, it was not only against some people. It is against the system, even against the lack of aesthetics that the system enforces (hence the theatrical nature of V).
This year (2024) I have collected as many literary and cultural references I can find in this note.
To me, this is Alan Moor's greatest work. He is so clear, and so in command of the ideas he wanted to expose, I couldn't find a place where they got watered down which is so much common in comics.
Most of the characters in V for Vendetta are complex. Seldom there is a major character like Bishop Lilliman who is typical. So well-crafted the characters are, their inner struggles, and conflicts with the world out that they felt real, yet full of surprise. Moore has shown a mastery in psychology which I consider a hallmark of great fiction writers.
However, the characters are only backdrops here. Alan Moore used these characters to effectively convey some very elaborate ideas— freedom, anarchy, justice, integrity, etc.
So, when V started his vendetta, it was not only against some people. It is against the system, even against the lack of aesthetics that the system enforces (hence the theatrical nature of V).
This year (2024) I have collected as many literary and cultural references I can find in this note.
To me, this is Alan Moor's greatest work. He is so clear, and so in command of the ideas he wanted to expose, I couldn't find a place where they got watered down which is so much common in comics.
Most of the characters in V for Vendetta are complex. Seldom there is a major character like Bishop Lilliman who is typical. So well-crafted the characters are, their inner struggles, and conflicts with the world out that they felt real, yet full of surprise. Moore has shown a mastery in psychology which I consider a hallmark of great fiction writers.
However, the characters are only backdrops here. Alan Moore used these characters to effectively convey some very elaborate ideas— freedom, anarchy, justice, integrity, etc.
So, when V started his vendetta, it was not only against some people. It is against the system, even against the lack of aesthetics that the system enforces (hence the theatrical nature of V).
This year (2024) I have collected as many literary and cultural references I can find in this note.
To me, this is Alan Moor's greatest work. He is so clear, and so in command of the ideas he wanted to expose, I couldn't find a place where they got watered down which is so much common in comics.
Most of the characters in V for Vendetta are complex. Seldom there is a major character like Bishop Lilliman who is typical. So well-crafted the characters are, their inner struggles, and conflicts with the world out that they felt real, yet full of surprise. Moore has shown a mastery in psychology which I consider a hallmark of great fiction writers.
However, the characters are only backdrops here. Alan Moore used these characters to effectively convey some very elaborate ideas— freedom, anarchy, justice, integrity, etc.
So, when V started his vendetta, it was not only against some people. It is against the system, even against the lack of aesthetics that the system enforces (hence the theatrical nature of V).
This year (2024) I have collected as many literary and cultural references I can find in this note.
To me, this is Alan Moor's greatest work. He is so clear, and so in command of the ideas he wanted to expose, I couldn't find a place where they got watered down which is so much common in comics.
Most of the characters in V for Vendetta are complex. Seldom there is a major character like Bishop Lilliman who is typical. So well-crafted the characters are, their inner struggles, and conflicts with the world out that they felt real, yet full of surprise. Moore has shown a mastery in psychology which I consider a hallmark of great fiction writers.
However, the characters are only backdrops here. Alan Moore used these characters to effectively convey some very elaborate ideas— freedom, anarchy, justice, integrity, etc.
So, when V started his vendetta, it was not only against some people. It is against the system, even against the lack of aesthetics that the system enforces (hence the theatrical nature of V).
This year (2024) I have collected as many literary and cultural references I can find in this note.
To me, this is Alan Moor's greatest work. He is so clear, and so in command of the ideas he wanted to expose, I couldn't find a place where they got watered down which is so much common in comics.
Most of the characters in V for Vendetta are complex. Seldom there is a major character like Bishop Lilliman who is typical. So well-crafted the characters are, their inner struggles, and conflicts with the world out that they felt real, yet full of surprise. Moore has shown a mastery in psychology which I consider a hallmark of great fiction writers.
However, the characters are only backdrops here. Alan Moore used these characters to effectively convey some very elaborate ideas— freedom, anarchy, justice, integrity, etc.
So, when V started his vendetta, it was not only against some people. It is against the system, even against the lack of aesthetics that the system enforces (hence the theatrical nature of V).