<p>i would think the essays you write in ap lang and comp are very similar to the literary analysis for tasp. </p>
<p>you guys started/finished essays already?</p>
<p>heh. i'm going to end up starting/finishing all on the day it's due. x_x</p>
<p>Okay, because I am awesome, here are SUPER helpful links for that blasted critnal (yes, that's how I'll refer to the critical analysis from now on). ^_^</p>
<ol>
<li><a href="http://kcweb.nhmccd.edu/employee/jsamuels/critanal.htm%5B/url%5D">http://kcweb.nhmccd.edu/employee/jsamuels/critanal.htm</a></li>
<li><a href="http://learning.mgccc.cc.ms.us/writing/fiction.html%5B/url%5D">http://learning.mgccc.cc.ms.us/writing/fiction.html</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/criticalreading.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/criticalreading.html</a></li>
</ol>
<p>Hi. Do you actually have to be HS junior to apply to TASP?</p>
<p>EDIT: never mind. TASP emailed me back. I guess I'm never going to get to go. :(</p>
<p>this is slighttly unsettling. i've just started my TASP app.</p>
<p>Uh, why Kilini? Are you a senior?</p>
<p>Musechick, do you know how high a PSAT score you need to recieve an application in the mail for TASP?</p>
<p>i got a 240 and i received it in the mail.</p>
<p>how high of a PSAT score you need depends on a lot of things, including where you live and your ethnicity. Generally, if you get a 230+ you'll almost certainly get one, but otherwise you never know. I got a 225 and did not recieve an app in the mail. I feel like I'm a broken record for the amount of times i've used this phrase on this thread, but it really doesn't matter. printed apps are as good as mailed apps. end of story :)</p>
<p>Really it depends on your ethnicity?</p>
<p>i emailed tasp about just sending in junior grades and got 2 different answers</p>
<p>one said it is fine</p>
<p>and the other said i need a full transcript.</p>
<p>?
im just scared because my gpa is only like a 3.4. But im getting straight A's this year.</p>
<p>I keep seeing "does GPA matter? like, omg, gpa lolzz."</p>
<p>I am unable to say that GPA doesn't matter, but mine was <3.11/4 (that's my GPA now) when I applied. But then again, I have some weird circumstances (this is my eighth year in high school - started in 5th grade).</p>
<p>Nevertheless, I still have an outstanding D, several F's that I had to fix, and a prodigious amount of C's and B's. Relatively few A's.</p>
<p>I still got in. I don't know if this information is useful or not; just wanting to qualm your curiosities/anxieties.</p>
<p>^^uh...i have no idea what you are talking about...how can you start high school in fifth grade?</p>
<p>AIDA! You are on CC! Haha</p>
<p>GPA, unless it sucks (which, fyi, a 3.4 does not) DOESN'T MATTER.
don't stress.</p>
<p>Hey guys, quick question concerning the essays...</p>
<p>I've heard that there is a maximum page limit of 2 pages for ALL essays, even for the ones that do not explicitly say that there is a page limit (seminar rankings, educational plans/objectives). Is this true?</p>
<p>Send in the full transcript JUST in case, then.
haha, I feel dumb now! My PSAT scores were 211 or so. XD
Yes, it depends on your location because in a place/state/country where, on average, everyone gets a 130, let's say, if you get 200, it really means something.</p>
<p>Kids, lmao, your GPAs ARE FINE!!</p>
<p>haha, yes I am! Who are you Dragonfly? These names confuse me. XD</p>
<p>UM, I don't know if the essay thing is true BUT if you have a REALLY good essay or are being quite interesting, you don't have to be so strict on yourself. Page limits are often there because people write boring drivel.</p>
<p>in my opinion, i think it's best to keep everything to two pages or less. that's quite a bit of space for writing, considering how many apps they have to read. i'd respect it. it'll make the tasp admissions people happy. for everyone who's seen my essays (and there are several of you...i can't even remember who i've sent them to at this point), you'll note that my "issue" essay has rather stretched out margins, but it fits on two pages. so you can always do that. lol.</p>
<p>No, they don't care. I unapologetically submitted a 4-page paper for a related thing...Deep Springs. I don't care about it anymore; I think it's a s hit, so here you go. It's not like you can steal this. You have to interview, you know. Hope you get the idea...don't write about Huck Finn or Great Gatsby. They're s hitty books anyway. Or even Wuthering Heights and Ulysses. I would go for the riskiest...most "out there" topic you can find that not only separates you from the rest but challenges the very beliefs and thoughts of the reader. Be relentless. Telluride wants people who will change the world. If you want to change the world, start with changing one person first--your reader.</p>
<p>The Trace of the Other in the Wake of the Solar Anus</p>
<pre><code> The concept of the “Other” in phenomenology, understood for so long as something merely separate from the I, invariably results in a xenophobic egoism. While Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology pioneered a new - and arguably superior - way of approaching the problem of the subject-object dichotomy, it failed to sufficiently account for our ethical intuitions.
Superficially, Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenology can be understood in a rather cloyingly altruistic sense: the I is a being that finds its ethical calling in the presence of the Other. Closer analysis reveals that in this “cloyingness” may lie an invaluable escape from the amorality of Heideggerian phenomenology.
By restating the tautological me ipse as “A is anxious for A,” or the hedonistic “A enjoying A,” Levinas takes it as his thesis that knowledge of ourselves and others is to be understood not in epistemic postures, but ethical ones, as manifested in the “outside of me’s” solicitation of the ipse when in need.
The proposition “me ipse” - an egoistic one, as Levinas notes - can also be seen as something of a circularity of thought in an “effort at total identification,” and the result of a failed attempt to visibly connect everything in the ontology at a single glance by tracing thought “into its own labyrinth:” an ideal that is irritating in its impossibility, according to the French thinker, Georges Bataille.
The chief concern of this paper will be to engage both Levinas’ phenomenological theory and Bataille’s pre-established objection to it, and in effect understand how the two can harmonize in regards to a unification of the subject-object dichotomy (here understood as the I-Other dichotomy), and, in particular, to find out if an ethically harmonious unification can be achieved with a synthesis of the two theories.
Levinas’ conception of the Other as alien, had it ended there, would have transgressed no phenomenological inquiries attempted previously, and his theories would likely have been nothing more than a footnote as a result; fortunately, this is not the case.
The Other, as Levinas shows it to be, is a stranger from an alien sphere that reveals itself to the I through the denuding of its face. This subsequently places the I’s own concept of “I” into question. Out of this strange and absolute concept of “denuding,” nudity first comes to the face, and then from that to the world. But it is this nudity of the face, a “destitution without any cultural ornamentation - a detaching in the midst of its very production,” that is the means of the Other’s “putting into question” the consciousness, the egoism, and indeed, the very I of the I. The nudity of the face, it’s wretchedness, provokes an immediate ethical response in the I that cannot be ignored. In the process of seeing the face denuded and outside of its alien sphere, it is the ethical response that puts the Other before the I, as the I exists only in virtue of its responsibility to the Other. It is thus in responsibility to the Other that the I finds its own existence validated. Georges Bataille, a contemporary of Breton and Dali as well as a surrealist in his own right, took a different route.
In one of his earliest and most brilliant works, “The Solar Anus,” Plato’s ancient concept of “the Good” finds itself utterly transformed from the ideal of justice, order, and wisdom to violent, noble creativity.
The “solar anus” is that object of Platonic descent - Bataille’s conception of the sphere of the I - and in particular its blinding excrement:
</code></pre>
<p>The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but it finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray. </p>
<pre><code> Bataille sees himself not as the Sun, but as a parody of it. For Bataille, the world is “purely parodic,” or existing in a state where each and every thing is each and every other thing, though in a deceptive, or parodic form. Prima facie, at least, this is Levinas’ Other on its head; rather than a destitute, alien stranger from Beyond, the Other becomes all that is experienced by the I, and at the same time a parody of the I. Rather than free the I from the bonds of isolation, the parodic nature of the Other in fact reinforces them, such as in the case of the man who becomes irritated in the presence of Others because he is not one of them.
As Bataille notes, the copula of terms is no less “irritating” - i.e., unstable - than the copulation of bodies, since the verb “to be” is identified as the vehicle of “amorous frenzy.” Thus, the unstable copula in “I AM THE SUN” results in an “integral erection,” which in turn necessitates equally unstable copulation between the I and the Other through morbid and perverse sexuality. The classic “chicken or egg” question is then posed:
</code></pre>
<p>The two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive’s wheels and pistons.<br>
These two motions are reciprocally transformed, the one into the other.<br>
Thus one notes that the earth, by turning, makes animals and men have coitus, and (because the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it) that animals and men make the earth turn by having coitus. </p>
<pre><code> Since the copula of terms and by association the copulation of bodies are unstable and parodic, phenomenological causation cannot be identified. In Levinasian terms, as soon as the Other enters the realm of the I from its place in the Beyond, it is no more than a parody of the I from the point of view of said perceiver; i.e., the I itself in a deceptive form. The moment the Other puts the I’s concept of itself into question - an inquiry obviously not unfamiliar to Bataille - a circularity arises, and one wonders if the I is the one putting its own concept in question - the ultimate egoism, proposed as “A deceives A.” It seems that for Levinas to rid himself of this circularity, he must invoke the “trace.”
Levinas’ concept of the “trace” is a signifying of the Other without its appearance. The trace avoids the vaguely Parmenidean pitfalls of being, in which “the bipolar play of immanence and transcendence proper” results in the perpetual victory for immanence. The trace obliges the I to move “beyond being,” or into the third person, which cannot be defined by the I, who exists as an ipseity. In the context of the third person, the trace is shown to be an eternal thing; that is, its signifyingness is “not foreign to the past,” and its time is irreversible.
Though Levinas eschews ontological treatment of the Other and its trace, he does tacitly make the appearance of an Other a necessary condition for the trace throughout. In fact, his definition of being, that is, being qua trace, is “to pass, to depart, to absolve oneself.” For the purpose of bypassing Bataille’s circularity problem, it seems necessary - albeit drastic - to understand the trace in an “end-in-itself” sense, without an Other or face as cause.
Understood as Levinas intended, the trace is a means for the Other to maintain its hold (though that may be harsher a term than he would have liked) on the I after it has “absolved itself;” taken as an “end-in-itself,” however, the trace becomes a content of the I’s consciousness only (the false “I,” that is). As a content of consciousness, it then becomes questionable as to whether or not its ability to put the “I’s” sense of self into question is still valid, and if it is, what the trace is in fact a trace of after the dissolution of the concept of the Other is equally questionable.
Firstly, in assuming Bataille’s parodic ontology as our system, the I is effectively dealt a lethal blow. In this sense, whether or not the trace puts one’s “self” into question is inconsequential; what does matter is whether or not the trace is able to bring about an ethical response in a given instantiation of the whole - i.e., what we used to call the “I.” And to be able to bring about such a response, the trace must be of something of significant power.
For Bataille, the role of the Other is cast entirely by traces; more specifically, traces of love:
</code></pre>
<p>An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality.
An umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the smell of rotten eggs, the hollow eyes of judges are the roots that nourish love.
A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a sobbing accountant, a jar of mustard, represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love. </p>
<pre><code> These seemingly random similes are in fact valid and salient traces of Bataille’s “Other,” being love, or, more specifically, love in the face of alienation. Despite the inevitable frustration that comes with such actions, the instantiations of the whole, in their “infantile rage” (love) may try to find each other, but will run into nothing but parodic images and fall asleep “as empty as mirrors.” Yet despite of all this, Bataille maintains that love and life only appear to be separate because everything on earth is “broken apart” by vibrations of varying amplitudes and durations, while all vibrations are in some way circular, and analogous to metamorphosis - or reincarnation, as Bataille reverses the cynic’s maxim to “beings only die to be born.” Thus, love and life are torn apart in perception by the vibration of change.
Love necessitates an Other (for self-love can no longer be seen as anything other than a pathological ignorance, or at the very least an awkward concept), whereas life requires only an instantiation of the whole to manifest itself. The Other - the trace - ideally triggers an ethical reaction via love, yet change prevents the two - love and life - from being perceived as the single entity that they are. Thus, we have the umbrella itself (the root that nourishes love) that shelters and protects, and would forever do so were it an entity belonging to Levinas’ eternal beyond; but it ages, changes, and eventually rots and becomes unable to do anything to keep out the elements. One imagines the once-valiant “knight in shining armor,” now become a feeble old man who, unable to help his crippled wife out of the bathtub in which she is drowning, limps to the phone to dial 911 right as her heart stops. When the root dies, so does the tree.
Yet when the root is understood as the trace, the old man, who tries his best to save his wife of 50 years, still retains the trace of protectiveness that had been the motivator of his actions then and throughout his relationship with his wife.
The trace, then, is the eternal idea of an instantiation of love once it has passed, while it is present, and in the future. In order for it to bridge the gap between two instantiations of the same whole, it must transcend change. But then, it seems, love between two instantiations of the same whole leads us to a contradiction: self-love.
In light of this problem, it appears that another object must be the object of love, while still maintaining the same ethical implications of the old couple and the trace; in other words, the object of love must be a “bridge between parodies” rather than a parody itself while still provoking an ethical response. In “The Solar Anus,” this bridge is coitus - coitus between two different kinds of the whole: heterogeneous and homogeneous matter.
Heterogeneous matter, being a “filthy parody” of the homogeneity of the Sun, is represented by both the Jesuve (the volcano) and the anus. The Jesuve is the anus of the earth, constantly ejaculating its molten entrails over towns and villages, yet consuming nothing - it is a force of pointless, arbitrary destruction. Likewise, the anus itself is meant for nothing but disposal, an act that, by its very definition, adds nothing to the world save for waste, which is only more heterogeneous matter.
The homogeneous Sun is an assimilated ideal that still contains a sort of noble violence in its uniformity that can be contrasted with the chaotic morbidity of heterogeneous terrestrial violence. Thus, the Sun can be likened to the god from the Old Testament: it praiseworthy and holy, yet the means in which it interacts with humanity is often violent. And this is how the heterogeneous parody of the Sun - the instantiation of the whole, the false “I” - comes to build a bridge to one of his parodies; the parodic being aspires to be like the Sun, taking it as his parody, even though the Sun blinds him:
</code></pre>
<p>Love, then, screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.
I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night. </p>
<pre><code> As mentioned earlier, the Sun, which exclusively loves the Night, is forever incapable of reaching its lover. Therefore, like the Sun that it aspires to be, the false “I” is ethically provoked not by an Other, but by the anticipation of an Other, the hope for an Other, which is the trace. The trace then becomes realized in the bridge of coitus, where the solar violence of the false “I” “violates” his lover while being violated himself by love, still screaming from his own throat as it is being slashed open. In this coitus, the two parodies unite in recognizance of their common bond as heterogeneous substance; their very existence antagonizes the heavens, and in their inability to love one another, they must learn to love the bridge - that is, coitus.
In coitus one finds the ethical posture sought by Levinas: as the copula between the false “I” and its corresponding false “Other,” it allows for the investigation of the false “Other” and thus access to the solar annulus - the intact anus of the false “Other,” and the heterogeneous equivalent of the Sun. “Nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared [to the anus] except the sun, even though the anus is the night,” writes Bataille. In the anus - the image of human heterogeneity, destruction, and change - lies the denudation of the false “Other” as a parody. It is in this moment that the false “I” is made to question its “I-ness,” not by some alien “Other,” but by the blinding absence of an Other in the image of the Solar Anus.
In sum, the Solar Anus is that Levinasian concept which, in its violent destructive power, indicates the wretchedness of the false “Other” and by association the false “I.” With self-love being a contradiction (and love of the false “Other” being impossible), the pleasures of the copula between the two instantiations - coitus - become the object of love. Indeed, it becomes the ultimate ethical posture, as well, for the two false “I’s,” returning to their mutual heterogeneous ground from their vain aspirations to be the Sun, find themselves in coitus.
</code></pre>
<p>i just noticed that i have a grammar error. "it's" instead of "its".</p>
<p>F UCK. I already submitted this.</p>