What are you reading?

[galia]

I completely agree with MM regarding Walser, I never read Michaux so I can't comment on him. Yes, you can start stoning me now. I feel deep shame.

The unheimlichkeit I was talking about in the movie is because of the quay brother's obsession with extreme idiosyncracy, pushed as an artform to the point of virtual irrelevance. That's why they work well with Walser's writing I think. And in any case, that's why I like them

[trentk]

This is more of a "what I wish I was reading", b/c I have alot of reading to do before I can approach this text.

Is anyone very familiar with speculative realism? (the philosophies of Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux)

[BSR]

Is anyone very familiar with speculative realism? (the philosophies of Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux)

everything that is around badiou should be burnt, it's to philosophy what ed hardy is to fashion

[trentk]

bsr - badiou should be burnt, or only the stuff around him like Meillassoux's work? if badiou is to philosophy what ed hardy is to fashion.... what exactly do you consider "real" philosophy?

[BSR]

bsr - badiou should be burnt, or only the stuff around him like Meillassoux's work? if badiou is to philosophy what ed hardy is to fashion.... what exactly do you consider "real" philosophy?

haha don't tempt me i'm for a whole 'autodafé' of French Theory / continental phil. books which are 99% intellectual imposture and wanking. well, maybe 98% only. but the metaphysics + hyperlitterature + complete lack of scientific culture mix = a cocktail too hard to swallow for BSR

'real' philosophy is to be found in the analytic tradition

[trentk]

haha don't tempt me i'm for a whole 'autodafé' of French Theory / continental phil. books which are 99% intellectual imposture and wanking. well, maybe 98% only. but the metaphysics + hyperlitterature + complete lack of scientific culture mix = a cocktail too hard to swallow for BSR

'real' philosophy is to be found in the analytic tradition

where's the bulging eyes smiley when I need it. I take too much issue with, for starters, the principle of noncontradiction to take analytical philosophy seriously. Although, I'm only a freshman who happens to read alot of post-structuralist philosophy outside of class... so this is just a provisional opinion, and I'm in no way knowledgable enough to even say anything definitive about my own preferences.

[BSR]

where's the bulging eyes smiley when I need it. I take too much issue with, for starters, the principle of noncontradiction to take analytical philosophy seriously. Although, I'm only a freshman who happens to read alot of post-structuralist philosophy outside of class... so this is just a provisional opinion, and I'm in no way knowledgable enough to even say anything definitive about my own preferences.

what's your concern with noncontradiction principle?

[docus]

julia kristeva on the melancholic imaginary

My girlfriend tells some funny stories about Julia Kristeva - JK was her analyst when she lived in Paris - apparently JK used to take personal calls in the middle of sessions, start and end sessions arbitrarily, and make interpretations that were as impenetrable as her writing.

(I haven't read the paper you linked to yet, but will take a look )

Anyway, I'm just starting on this:



Only a few pages in, but a rollicking read so far.

[docus]

haha don't tempt me i'm for a whole 'autodafé' of French Theory / continental phil. books which are 99% intellectual imposture and wanking. well, maybe 98% only. but the metaphysics + hyperlitterature + complete lack of scientific culture mix = a cocktail too hard to swallow for BSR

'real' philosophy is to be found in the analytic tradition

I never thought I'd read these words from a Frenchman!

[docus]

what's your concern with noncontradiction principle?

The problem with the non-contradiction principle is that it stops people from omnipotently arguing whatever the hell they please, logic be damned!

[trentk]

what's your concern with noncontradiction principle?

I don't see how we can reduce reality to binary oppositions without truncating part of the matter. Truth is always in excess of simplified either/or depictions. For example, how do we reconcile the principle of non-contradiction with light's wave-particle duality? Can we say that something is either matter or energy, instead of both matter and energy?

I think it makes more sense to conceive of the relationship between "opposites" not as a binary opposition, but as a "chiasmic unity" (much like derrida's undecidable) where the oposites are simultaneously bound together and kept apart. That is, they're together in such a way that doesn't amount to a fusion. If that doesn't make sense, here's a geometric rendition: chiasmic unity is like the relationship between "two points" on "opposing sides" of a moebius strip.

edit: have you actually looked into speculative realism, or did you just notice badiou's name and heap it into the "French Theory / continental philosophy" category? B/c its not continental philosophy, its something that claims to breach the continental/analytical divide, and a number of analytical philosopers (crispin sartwell being one example off the top of my head, if the name means anything to you) have expressed approval for the movement. Of course, I wouldn't cite a blog in a formal philosophical argument.... but, b/c our discussion is informal, here's one person's attempt to situate speculative realism in the analytical tradition: http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/02/s...ok-series.html

[todestrieb]

LOL @ the Badiou - Ed Hardy comment. Must've had Badiou confused with that hack Baudrillard. *shrugs*

You won't find a more classically inclined philosopher's philosopher today than Alain Badiou. His philosophic sensibility is as kindredly old-school as a Plato, Aristotle right up to Kant and Heidegger. And yet, at the same time, brings with it new vigour and more importantly, new questions/challenges to the proverbial table, or the eternal conversation that is the history of Philosophy.

There's much to admire about his work. For one, he's an immensely hardcore and staunch metaphysician (and not by any stretch of the naive Pre-Kantian kind if you know what I mean) unlike any philosopher working today, in a climate still mugged and bound by various proclamations of "the end of metaphysics" (be it of the Wittgensteinian/Carnapian or Heideggerian/Derridean varieties). Not to mention a highly systematic ontologist with an imperious sense of architectonic meticulousness and rigour not seen since the days of, say, Hegel and Leibniz (though you could always make the case for Deleuze (chiefly his more philosophical/scholastic works like Difference and Repetition), Lardreau or David Lewis in that regard). Which if anything goes radically against the grain of the present suffocating hegemony of philosophers still pussying-about and intoxicated by (mostly) epistemology and language - deconstruction, hermeneutics, philosophy of language/mind, and what have you - on both sides of the so-called analytic and continental divide.

Go read his two engaging tomes, Being and Event (L'Être et l'Événement), and Logics of Worlds (Logiques des mondes), or the earlier and smaller, Theory of the Subject (Théorie du sujet) and The Concept of the Model (Le concept de modèle), and then come back to me. Number and Numbers (Le nombre et les nombres) is brilliant as well if you don't mind the formal nature of the work.

Badiou's only failing, while admirable especially in our time of incessant specialisation, might just be his polymathic ambition to cover a wide variety of fields that some times has this negative effect of being judged on specific works and commentaries, rather than on the broader mechanisms of his foundational work. Additionally, his observations on specific fields (like the stuff on cinema and Beckett) can often be found rather wanting, but admittedly more than hold up on their own, better than whatevers out there - I'd sooner read his take on Beckett than most existing scholarship.

Is anyone very familiar with speculative realism? (the philosophies of Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux)

They're all fine philosophers in their own right and you'd do well to tackle the literature with open-ended blinkers. Grant's book on Schelling is something of a masterpiece. Harman's books on Heidegger and Latour are more than brilliant contributions to, and extend on, existing scholarship. Brassier's Nihil Unbound is quite the treasure especially the chapter on François Laruelle which is incredibly illuminating of a difficult philospher (Laruelle) still obscure to many. Would be interesting to see what Brassier does with Brandom and Sellars in forthcoming writings if his recent interviews are anything to go by.

The Meillassoux is an exceptional read and think. Written in a very classically argumentative style reminiscent of Hume, Locke and the like. I'm sure you'd heard of how un-Continental the writing style is. Very clear, compact, lucid and yet highly complex and thorough in drawing out and arguing for its conclusions. The chapter on Hume is especially good, particularly the stuff on displacing necessity from stability, and whatever conceptual baggage that has hitherto been associated with it.

I take too much issue with, for starters, the principle of noncontradiction to take analytical philosophy seriously.

So would paraconsistent logicians. And they would have you believe differently.

[BSR]

@trentk: i don't think we talk about the same thing then, actually i don't understand what you're talking about. The principle of noncontradiction, in my book, is only a logical rule which forbids you to assert the proposition p and its negation non-p at the same time.

@todes: it looks like we have opened a pandora's box here. for many reasons (number 1, lack of time) i won't deal with all the difficulties i see in your post on badiou (and his followers), but let's just say that i'm not a complete ignorant on these matters and the joke on ed hardy was just a joke. actually french philosophers love crafted words exactly like Audigier loves shiny details, whence the comparison...

[trentk]

So would paraconsistent logicians. And they would have you believe differently.

Well then... I'll have to look into paraconsistent logic, and mention it to my professor who takes issue with binary oppositions.

[Faust]

This last headache-inducing page makes me want to repeat Rorty's assertion that all philosophy worth reading is in literature.