Marie tells us that the “lai is name/ Guildeluec and Gualadun” because “it happened to the women” (21-25). Do you think the rest of the lai and the ending in particular correlates with this? How do you think agency is distributed between the three main characters or do they even have agency?
Serres’ critic of Descartes is that he “desires to build a closed system, to think or to build without error or interruption,” but this is impossible because to be in the world is “to be dependent, to be an intermediary, a go-between, to be one thing among many, inhabiting a system in cascade” (49-50). How does this relate to Yates’ description of the prison escape of 1597? How is the escape and Peyton’s investigation of it “a system in cascade”?
Yates presents a range of perspectives on the 1597 event he’s re-considering and re-telling. What is the orange’s perspective? Does agentive drift seem to have much in common with Bennett’s approach, or do you see meaningful differences between the two?
Bennet references Nietzsche and his idea of edible objects (in this example, beer) “as a contributing source” but also “as part of a diet consisting also of German “newspapers, politics, … and Wagnerian music” to the cultural state of Bismarck controlled Germany at the time. Do you agree with this intermixing of edible and non-edible objects? Can all objects a human is subject to be considered edible as they’re ‘digested’ to form these types of societal diets?
Does edible matter seem to have more agency or affect than nonedible or other inanimate matter? Why? How do the foods we eat, the potions we drink, the medicine we inject, the drugs we habituate all work as affecting assemblages?