Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1991-1996

i saw this book on my teacher's desk, so i bought it. i must say, as much as i like to philosophize, a lot of this was way over my head. but, on some pages, i found certain paragraphs that hit the spot.

"The fragment has its ideal" -- R. Barthes. It's a little expensive for such a slim book, but it's so dense you wouldn't really want it any longer. FRAGMENTS is a very overdetermined word, too, it makes you wonder why, after Kierkegaard and Barthes and all the other writers who used the word so precisely, if Baudrillard sanctions its use or is it a "clever" device of the translator? He's constantly fascinating, and quite a conversationalist, not a dull sentence in the book. Did you know that in Japanese there is no word for "the subject," nor for 'the universal,' nor again for "communication" itself? It makes you realize with a start that if one's vocabulary is shaped with some words and not others, than one's conceptual limits will be quite different than someone else with a different language, where perhaps there are three hundred words for rice--or love. Ha, it's funny how Jean and Francois put down America for producing novels that last for manybe a thousand pages. This is hypertrophy they say, linking it to America's search for empire and planet glory. Well I have read some baggy monsters originated in France too. Then he (Jean) will turn around and praise something like Abbott's wonderful FLATLAND, and we see that nothing artificially determined sways his likes and dislikes, and that for Baudrillard, cities and cultures alike are controlled by language, borders, and the shock troops that keep us all from understanding one another. He follows Abbott in seeing God as an intuition, a vanishing point, very much as Antonioni found God in the American desert in Zabriskie Point. These European intellectuals with their quite touching view of the American West.