The Big Other is the symbolic order, the anonymous "they" whose gaze shapes how we present ourselves even in private. An internalized audience, a set of expectations that we perform for without even being able to name who's watching. Even when I write in private, in secret, in my journal, I am still not fully myself. Even this note is again just a performance of my awareness of the gaze to the gaze.
Acts of Worship ★★☆☆☆ Yukio Mishima
Anna Karenina ★★★☆☆ Leo Tolstoy
Anti-Oedipus Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari
The Brothers Karamazov ★★★★☆ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Capitalist Realism ★★★☆☆ Mark Fisher
Confessions of a Mask ★★★★☆ Yukio Mishima
Crime and Punishment ★★★★★ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Demian ★★★★☆ Hermann Hesse
Demons ★★★☆☆ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Letters to a Young Poet ★★★★★ Rainer Maria Rilke
Man's Search for Meaning ★★★☆☆ Viktor Frankl
No Longer Human ★★★☆☆ Osamu Dazai
Siddhartha ★★★★☆ Hermann Hesse
Slowness ★★★★☆ Milan Kundera
Steppenwolf ★★★★★ Hermann Hesse
The Alchemist ★★★★☆ Paulo Coelho
The Bell Jar ★★★★☆ Sylvia Plath
The Fountainhead ★★★★☆ Ayn Rand
The Ohlone Way ★★☆☆☆ Malcolm Margolin
The Stranger ★★★☆☆ Albert Camus
The Trial ★★★★☆ Franz Kafka
The Unbearable Lightness of Being ★★★☆☆ Milan Kundera
The Wretched of the Earth ★★★☆☆ Frantz Fanon