Feminist reading group for the week of April 7

“Finally the critic asks for this minimal explanation, ‘Do you use these letter types [commercial stencils] because you like them or because that’s how the stencils come?’ – to which Johns replies, ‘But that’s what I like about them, that they come that way.’…
There could not be a better description of drive/sublimation: it so wills what occurs that the object it finds is indistinguishable from the one it chooses. Construction and discovery, thinking and being, as well as drive and object are soldered together. The drive’s creation, ex nihilo, of an object, a thing in the very place where unified jouissance, das Ding, is absent, is evoked in this description but without calling up along with it the Romantic image of the artist-creator.” (Joan Coapjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation)

Yes, yes! What made me fall in love with New York are all those little things I discovered about it – the 4/5 train on a weekday morning, my coffee cart, fresh flowers at the bodega, interventions from strangers, wine bistros in the Village – and I love those things precisely because they are New York.