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Nathan Keller's avatar

Struck with the feeling This was why the 50s in movies in the U.S. are devitalized and unfunny. 40 years later in Crybaby and Roadracers that ten years still looks like prop comedy. A giant steel slide, gas guzzlers, daterape, artless vandalism...Norman Brown's Life Against Death articulates that the death instinct behaves less like a force than the pleasure principle which he says motivates the games in the conscious system. One can follow his argument, it is a good read. 1959. My takeaway was the word 'subset', the other super egos and other systems are partial subsets to the pleasure prncpl, that the child accepts deathlike states as the ticket to waking up 'grown up'? I cannot remember, Brown paints a persuasive pict ure.

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Bloomd's avatar

perhaps I don’t have enough of a grasp on these ideas, but I don’t really get how play would be the antithesis to negative infinity. How exactly would this work. Please elaborate a bit more.

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Shane Devine's avatar

The next piece in this series is going develop the notion of "Play," so stay tuned.

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