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Nice condition. I immediately dove into this book. Loved the movie, looking forward to finishing the book.
Well i was completely blown away by the book, and the movie. I somehow managed to make it all the way until last fall without seeing the movie fight club. This thanksgiving we went around the table saying what we are thankful for. I work at a video store and everyone said i have to see it. So i figured i should read the book before i saw the movie since i didnt know anything about the plot i just heard something about soap and obviously fighting. I said im thankful i read fight club before i saw the movie or knew the plot. If you are in the same boat as i was please dont read any more reveiws just go out and read the book then watch the movie.
Like many, I saw the movie first without knowing there was a book. Everything that needs to be said about Fight Club has already been said. This is an awesome, easy to read book that will have you entertained through out the entire story. After reading the book, I can tell you that it is way better than the movie. Fight Club is an awesome novel with great characters and a twisted, entertaining story line.
Their common project is dehistoricization. The fights are not based on personal acrimony but on the exercise of power; it is the fight that is pure; it is through the fight that one's human implications and virility are drawn out. Tragedy is not death, the liberation from all forms of the political; it is, rather, the impossibility of dying.* * * * *A few words on the form of FIGHT CLUB.This could have been an excellent novel.Any strong writer knows that a dead page - a dead paragraph, a dead sentence, a dead word - is unacceptable. When the narrator attempts to demolish the fascist version of his self, his phantom double remerges.
FIGHT CLUB posits nothing other than the impossibility of a way out. Dying in offices where their lives are never challenged (and therefore lacking anything with which to contrast with life), they are the mere shadows of the proletariat, deprived of access not merely to the fortunes of the capitalist world, but also to consciousness of their own oppression: they are "[g]enerations [that] have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need" [49].Eventually, fight club transcends and operates independently of the individuals who produced it (following Tyler's anti-individualist creed) and becomes wholly acephalic: "The new rule is that nobody should be the center of fight club" [142]. Only what he imagines to be a direct experience of death grants him a real and intense sense of life, and, as the novel proceeds, violence will come to be his salvation.[Let me remark parenthetically: the word "violence," etymologically, means "life."]And yet Western culture manufactures not merely inclinations and proclivities, but also aversions and forms of disgust: particularly relevant to a discussion of Palahniuk's novel is the aversion toward violence and mortality that the narrator attempts to unlearn.The narrator's desires are prefabricated. Here we encounter two analogous versions of a single self: whenever the narrator (who subserves capitalist society) falls asleep, Tyler Durden (who represents the "authentic" self) inhabits his body.Tyler and the narrator form a masculine unit that exists apart from the feminized support groups, which are populated by man-women such as Bob, an estrogen-saturated former weight-lifter who sprouts what appear to be mammary glands, as well as Marla Singer (associated, at one point, with the narrator's mother), who appropriates the narrator's support groups and eventually unsettles the homoerotic / homosocial bond between the two men.With the narrator, Tyler founds "fight club," an underground boxing organization and a perverse version of the support group attended by the narrator. What fight club did for selfhood and individuality (the formation of a new identity apart from the one mandated by capitalist society), Project Mayhem would do for capitalist society itself. The split between the bourgeois and authentic selves is replicated in the difference between one's work existence and fight club: "Who guys are in fight club is not who they are in the real world" [49].
are members of the Lumpenproletariat, those who labor without a productive or positive relation to work, who are estranged from their own slavery, and who are excluded from every social totality. Capitalist culture homogenizes all of its inhabitants until individuality is lost---its alternative, communism, would lead, theoretically, to the redistribution of wealth and the elimination of rank. Fight club thus opens up a separate space, one that is divorced from the dependency and servility of the world of exchange; it posits a self-sufficient universe in which control and mastery, sovereignty and force are achieved, paradoxically, through self-destruction. Like countless others in a consumerist society, his selfhood is defined by the merchandise that he purchases: his "perfect life" is constituted by "his" Swedish furniture, "his" quilt cover set, "his" Hemlig hatboxes, and the IKEA catalogues that serve as the foundation of his identity. Since Rousseau and Hegel, it has been assumed that the bourgeois self is divided into civil and private dimensions: the citizen and the "true" individual. FIGHT CLUB moves in the exact opposite direction: its prose is soul-deadening, life-negating, dull. Fight club thus transmutes into Project Mayhem, a revolutionary group that begins with acts of vandalism and food contamination and eventually expands into full-blown guerilla terrorism. Western culture represses the sacrifices that were its origins through a process of cleansing: soap here would indicate a return to those repressed sources.
Before discussing the form of Chuck Palahniuk's FIGHT CLUB (1996), I would like to reconstruct its political content.* * * * *The thirty-year-old narrator of FIGHT CLUB feels alive only when surrounded by decrepitude and death. Aggressive, virile, and charming, Durden represents alternative possibilities that the narrator could adopt. In the same manner that fight club destroys capitalist identity, Project Mayhem is to destroy Western civilization to "make something better of the world" [125]---a world in which manhood would intensify through a non-moral relation to violence.Here we are in territory already elaborated---much more richly---by J.G. Violence must be re-vived in order to reclaim the self, now unclean.The dream of capitalism complements the dream of fascism: "We wanted to blast the world free of history" [124]. By attempting to destroy history, Project Mayhem pretends to break with the capitalist world but ends up mirroring it.
The meaning of soap is not, in this context, propriety (as Freud would have it), nor, unfortunately, the ebullitions of language (Francis Ponge), nor, following Roland Barthes, the luxury of foaminess. Project Mayhem wants to blow the capitalist world to smithereens to give birth to a new form of humanity. Norms learned from television (that mass accumulation is life's goal, that success is equatable with financial success, that violence must be shunned)---all of these values are reversed in fight club, the sole objective of which is the reclamation of one's manhood, which has been diminished in the feminizing world of capitalism (hence the phallic imagery that crystallizes throughout the novel).The constituents of fight club (copy-center clerks, box boys, etc). He is the member of a generation of men who identify themselves solely in relation to the world of commodities ("Everything, the lamp, the chairs, the rugs were me" [111]), commodities that, according to the Marx of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, serve as extensions of one's personality in the capitalist world.Enter Tyler Durden (a man who is, apparently, the same age as the narrator). Soap is indissociable from sacrifice.If Western culture, as Freud claims in UNBEHAGEN IN DER KULTUR, is a culture of soap (sanitizing one from the awareness of death), the accustomed meaning of the saponification is here transformed to its opposite. One of the infinite number of go-betweens in this culture (his job is to determine the expenses of recalling lethally defective automobiles), the narrator yearns to die in an airplane crash in order to free himself from the superficiality of a capitalist world that trivializes death and immortalizes the unliving commodity (a "necrophilous" culture, as Erich Fromm would say).
Neither is accepted by FIGHT CLUB. Even those on the higher levels of the bourgeoisie, it seems, conform to the same model: their strength is vitiated, they, too, function as the refuse of a society that will not acknowledge them. It is a prose that neither confronts nor challenges.Chuck Palahniuk does not have a way with our rich language. This is evident in the text.
He attends testicular cancer support groups in order to enhance his vitality: by distinguishing himself as much as possible from the sick, he attempts to wrest himself away from a consumerist culture that suppresses death; by exposing himself to the mortality of others (which grants him the knowledge that he also is going to die), every moment in his life becomes more valuable. Nor, for that matter, are the utopian primitivism and fascistic terrorism represented by Project Mayhem. The refusal of the capitalist / communist / fascist alternatives does not imply nihilism, either. Soap, which Freud named "the yardstick of civilization," is here emblematic of a reduction to primal manhood. Joseph Suglia
And John Zerzan, a Portland anarchist.Washing oneself clean, returning to one's hidden origin, primitivism, regressionism, cleansing, and sacrifice. Tyler is radically opposed to the progressive "improvement" of the self that has been so valorized by capitalist societies; he claims that the drive toward "perfection" has led to the loss of manhood and has transformed men into a limitless army of purchasers and consumers who slave away in life-draining jobs.By randomly destroying property (with which members of consumerist society identify), Tyler intends to explode the foundations of capitalist identity. Every page, every paragraph, every sentence, every word should be electric, vibrant, vivacious. Its aim to regression: to reduce all of history to ground zero. Ballard.
Neither capitalism nor its double is overcome. The language of this book is metallic, anti-poetic, and illiterate.The writer claims to write in the way that "people talk."This would be good advice if we lived in an age in which people knew how to talk.Dr.
His writing style is accessible, his views on the world refreshing.In Fight Club, a nameless narrator chronicles some of the very unusual that he experiences after having met a man named Tyler Durden. Fight Club is my third favorite book of all time. Chuck Palahniuk is a tremendous author. The narrator's house explodes, he ends up living with Tyler, fighting at bars, threatening to cut off the testicles of congressmen, and so on. It's just a brilliant, brilliant way of saying "open your eyes."
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