Sam Kriss Syllabus

by brunella @brunellaism

the essential sam kriss

  1. On the new New York literary avant-garde Alt Lit
  2. A manifesto https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over
  3. On the internet https://damagemag.com/2022/04/21/the-internet-is-made-of-demons/
  4. On the literature of mass shootings https://thepointmag.com/criticism/when-reason-fails/
  5. On the October 7th attacks https://samkriss.substack.com/p/but-not-like-this
  6. On the war in Gaza https://samkriss.substack.com/p/bread-figs-phosphorus
  7. Fiction, on Christmas https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-black-mountain
  8. On Hegel, rotors, and vibes https://samkriss.substack.com/p/a-universal-absolute-and-infinite
  9. On the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal and the oral epic https://samkriss.substack.com/p/before-i-reach-my-enemy-bring-me
  10. On Girard https://harpers.org/archive/2023/11/overwhelming-and-collective-murder-rene-girard/

my personal favorites

  1. Fiction, on Dimes Square https://samkriss.substack.com/p/downtown-23?s=r&curius=1848
  2. Fiction, a retelling of the 5th chapter of the Book of Mark https://samkriss.substack.com/p/legion?s=r&curius=1848
  3. On Nietzsche https://samkriss.substack.com/p/nobody-understands-nietzsche-except
  4. A postmortem of the 2024 election https://samkriss.substack.com/p/i-told-you-so
  5. On fame, popular culture, and Taylor Swift https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-25/forgetting-taylor-swift
  6. Fiction, but also nonfiction, about Taylor Swift https://samkriss.substack.com/p/taylor-swift-does-not-exist
  7. Against lists of books https://samkriss.substack.com/p/against-lists-of-books
  8. On Andy Warhol and nerd culture https://samkriss.substack.com/p/all-the-nerds-are-dead
  9. Manifesto of the Armed Front of Love https://samkriss.substack.com/p/manifesto-of-the-armed-front-of-love
  10. The 2010s in review https://samkriss.com/2020/01/05/teenage-bloodbath-the-2010s-in-review/
  11. On Girls by Lena Dunham https://samkriss.substack.com/p/eternity

i read sam kriss and i love him, who else should i read

  1. Andrea Long Chu. love her + like kriss she is a bona fide hater
  1. A Little Life sucks https://www.vulture.com/article/hanya-yanagihara-review.html
  2. Ottessa Moshfegh sucks https://www.vulture.com/article/ottessa-moshfegh-lapvona-review.html
  3. Rachel Cusk is a TERF https://www.vulture.com/article/rachel-cusk-parade-book-review.html
  4. A measured response to Amia Srinivasan https://thepointmag.com/dialogue/wanting-bad-things-andrea-long-chu-responds-amia-srinivasan/
  1. Justin Ruiu-Smith, charming boomer
  1. On Proust https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/prousts-panmnemonicon
  2. On Trump https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-trump-restoration
  3. On art and moralism https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/hr-managers-of-the-human-soul
  1. Scott Alexander. extremely prolific but here are my favorites from his old blog:
  1. Meditations on Moloch https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
  2. The Toxoplasma of Rage https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/

& stuff sam kriss has cited (across substack/Idiot Joy Showland/magazine articles)

(incomplete list) assembled ad hoc:

  1. Epic of Gilgamesh, Anon.
  2. Odyssey, Homer
  3. Classic of History (Shujing), Anon.
  4. Fragments, Anaximander
  5. Fragments, Heraclitus
  6. Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus
  7. Georgics, Virgil
  8. The Bible, Anon.
  9. Talmud (Sanhedrin), Anon.
  10. Confessions, Augustine
  11. City of God, Augustine
  12. Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius
  13. History of the Franks, Gregory of Tours
  14. Qur'an.
  15. Alphabet of Ben-Sira, Anon.
  16. Babylonian Incantation Bowls, Anon.
  17. Bhaddekaratta Sutta, Anon.
  18. Tibetan Book of the Dead, Anon.
  19. Arabian Nights, Anon.
  20. Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali
  21. Ars Magna, Ramon Llull
  22. Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas
  23. Divine Comedy, Dante
  24. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong
  25. Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio
  26. Mabinogion, Anon.
  27. Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
  28. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Anon.
  29. Steganographia, Johannes Trithemius
  30. Essays, Michel de Montaigne
  31. The Lusiads, Camões
  32. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
  33. Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, Anon.
  34. Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton
  35. Religio Medici, Thomas Browne
  36. Urn Burial, Thomas Browne
  37. Theodicy, Leibniz
  38. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
  39. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
  40. Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
  41. Selected Essays, William Hazlitt
  42. Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb
  43. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas de Quincey
  44. On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, Thomas de Quincey
  45. Suspiria de Profundis, Thomas de Quincey
  46. The Nose, Nikolai Gogol
  47. Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel
  48. Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard
  49. Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard
  50. The Concept of Anxiety, Søren Kierkegaard
  51. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Søren Kierkegaard
  52. White Nights, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  53. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
  54. Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
  55. Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  56. Capital, Karl Marx
  57. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
  58. The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche
  59. À Rebours, Joris-Karl Huysmans
  60. The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', Joseph Conrad
  61. Begriffsschrift, Gottlob Frege
  62. De Divinatione, Cicero
  63. "Normal Motor Automatism" / "Special Motor Automatism", Gertrude Stein
  64. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud
  65. Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure
  66. Ideas I, Edmund Husserl
  67. "The Geographical Pivot of History", Halford Mackinder
  68. "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man", Walter Benjamin
  69. The Epistle to the Romans, Karl Barth
  70. Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud
  71. "Manifesto of Surrealism", André Breton
  72. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
  73. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud
  74. Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell & Alfred North Whitehead
  75. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein
  76. The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
  77. Ulysses, James Joyce
  78. "The Task of the Translator", Walter Benjamin
  79. The Ego and the Id, Sigmund Freud
  80. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin
  81. Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
  82. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  83. Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
  84. Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud
  85. Man's Fate, André Malraux
  86. The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz
  87. Poems, Bertolt Brecht
  88. "The Storyteller", Walter Benjamin
  89. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, E.E. Evans-Pritchard
  90. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, Bruno Schulz
  91. The Comet, Bruno Schulz
  92. The Practice of Joy before Death, Georges Bataille
  93. "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Walter Benjamin
  94. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem
  95. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer
  96. Theory of Religion, Georges Bataille
  97. Selected Writings, Antonin Artaud
  98. Memories of the Future, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
  99. Molloy, Samuel Beckett
  100. Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett
  101. Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno
  102. The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett
  103. Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss
  104. Confessions of a Mask, Yukio Mishima
  105. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
  106. Castle to Castle, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
  107. Eroticism, Georges Bataille
  108. On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, Gershom Scholem
  109. A House for Mr Biswas, V.S. Naipaul
  110. How to Do Things with Words, J.L. Austin
  111. Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
  112. Critique of Instrumental Reason, Max Horkheimer
  113. Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida
  114. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
  115. The Hebrew Goddess, Raphael Patai
  116. Illuminations, Walter Benjamin
  117. The Green Man, Kingsley Amis
  118. The Atrocity Exhibition, J.G. Ballard
  119. Essays, Lu Xun
  120. "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", J.G. Ballard
  121. Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Lévinas
  122. Violence and the Sacred, René Girard
  123. Deceit, Desire and the Novel, René Girard
  124. Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari
  125. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze
  126. Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
  127. V., Thomas Pynchon
  128. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
  129. Crash, J.G. Ballard
  130. The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz
  131. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari
  132. A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari
  133. Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke
  134. Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva
  135. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger
  136. Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit
  137. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe
  138. "The Deaths of Roland Barthes", Jacques Derrida
  139. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, Judith Butler
  140. The Enormous Space, J.G. Ballard
  141. The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek
  142. "Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority", Jacques Derrida
  143. The Western Canon, Harold Bloom
  144. Whatever, Michel Houellebecq
  145. Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida
  146. "E Unibus Pluram", David Foster Wallace
  147. "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", W.V.O. Quine
  148. Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
  149. The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
  150. Super-Cannes, J.G. Ballard
  151. "The Conspiracy of Art", Jean Baudrillard
  152. Straw Dogs, John Gray
  153. Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher
  154. Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber
  155. Embassytown, China Miéville
  156. The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher
  157. Civilizations, Laurent Binet
  158. The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber & David Wengrow
  159. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, Justin E.H. Smith
  160. Records of the Grand Historian, Sima Qian
  161. Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam
  162. Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus
  163. The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
  164. The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
  165. "What Is Metaphysics?", Martin Heidegger
  166. Écrits, Jacques Lacan
  167. The Question of a Weltanschauung, Sigmund Freud
  168. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Laura Mulvey
  169. Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer
  170. VALIS, Philip K. Dick
  171. Illuminatus!, Robert Anton Wilson
  172. Antigone, Sophocles
  173. "Critique of Violence", Walter Benjamin
  174. "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", Thomas Nagel
  175. "Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor", Franz Kafka
  176. Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben