whats going on

So, after a pretty good stretch of consistent blogging I’ve taken a two week+ break. But I have good excuses! I spent a little over a week travelling around going to conferences with little to no internet access.

The first conference was the Immanence and Materialism event at Queen Mary, University of London. By clicking the above link you can access some of the papers, and hopefully I’ll have mine up soon. While I’m not the type to recount conferences play by play, I will say that I found this to be an excellent event, and almost every paper was highly interesting and there was some great debate during the discussion times. One interesting aspect was the contrast between the panels. For example, myself and a colleague were the only two papers on the first panel, and we both gave presentations that dealt with issues of freedom, subjectivity, choice, will, and the like. The next panel then featured papers of a highly determinist/monist bent, and one presenter even said, during her paper, “I’m glad that there have already been some papers dealing with will and freedom, because I am TOTALLY against that.” It was bold, but I appreciated the honesty, and it led to a fun debate over dinner where the two of us from Dundee attempted to convince this individual of the necessity of an ontological account of freedom. I don’t think we were convincing enough…

Wonderful conference though, and I look forward to future events at Queen Mary.

The next conference I attended was the ‘Towards a Philosophy of Life’ event at Liverpool Hope University. This event was the launching point for the new Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion. Although my panel was absolute shit, due to the fact that no chair showed up to moderate, and the first person decided to take 35 minutes to give their 20 minute presentation, the conference itself was a very good event. I got to meet lots of interesting people, and catch up with some old friends, and overall I was left feeling quite positive about the future of Continental Philosophy of Religion in the UK. The only horrible parts were the keynotes by John Caputo and Don Cuppit, who are collectively the most boring philosophers of religion still living, maybe when they die this obsession with ‘postmodernism’ will die too. Cuppit was one of the most bold apologist for globalization and the religion of capital I’ve ever seen, but maybe he can blame it on age or something.

Overall, I had a great time at both, and it was a wonderful excuse to get out of scum-dee Scotland for a week.

That’s all for now, but will attempt to get back to ‘real’ posting soon enough.

spinoza research network

One of my jobs at the university is getting to be the assistant to Dr. Beth Lord on the Spinoza Research Network project. Part of my role is maintaining and updating the website. Not sure how many of you came across the previous one, but we just put a new version of the site up, now based on the more user friendly wordpress model.

You can visit the website here.

For all of those interested in Spinoza, be sure to check out the information on the ‘Spinoza and Bodies’ conference which will take place in Dundee this fall, as well as the podcast which are available from last month’s ‘Thinking with Spinoza’ conference at Birkbeck College.

Conference Announcement

Well, seeing as his new book is being published as we speak, I figured it was as good a time as any to make a ‘Harman related’ announcement I’ve been holding back for a while.

Although we’re still a ways off, I’d like to give everyone a heads up on a conference we’ll be holding at the University of Dundee next March called:

‘Real Objects, or, Material Subjects? A Conference on Continental Metaphysics’

Which will feature keynote presentations from Graham Harman and Adrian Johnston. I am still working on arranging one more (very good) keynote speaker, but it’s still too uncertain to announce anything. The conference will take place over two days and we’ll soon be putting out a call for papers. It’d be great to have some of those involved in recent ‘interweb’ debates on these matters show up in person and contribute to what will hopefully be a lively and important weekend of philosophical debate. Also, there are early talks on having selected papers from the conference published in a wonderful journal (which will for the time being go un-named).

So, mark your calenders for 27-28 March 2010. It will be great to see Harman and Johnston go ‘head to head’ on these issues, especially as Graham has already come up with the title “I Am Also of the Opinion That Materialism Must Be Destroyed” for his presentation. Should be fun.

Lynch on the Latin American Turn

Good friend and blogger Thomas Lynch just posted his notes from the conference held at Birkbeck last week called “The Latin American Turn: On the Unfinished Project of Decolonisation”. I was incredibly disappointed to be unable to attend the event, especially as one of my living philosophical heroes, Enrique Dussel, was presenting.

You can read all about it here.

One brief side note: it’s interesting that when Birkbeck holds large events featuring prominent European/American speakers, they charge for attendance. But when they feature an event with an equally established group of Latin American scholars, it’s free. Interesting.

good response…

…to some of the recent ‘happenings’ from i.t.

An excerpt:

I’m sure that people in much more serious physical trouble – heavy addiction, sickness exacerbated by poverty, those who have suffered bodily abuse – are unlikely to celebrate their oh-so-exciting degradation and would probably prefer access to free, high-quality healthcare. There is something horrible, truly horrible, about people who have access to clean water, enough food and adequate shelter celebrating ‘the rot of the flesh’ and ‘contamination’ as if it were sexy. Go and lick open wounds and tube seats if you think it constitutes an interesting philosophical position.

read the rest here

what just happened?

So, in the past 30 hours or so, everyone has collectively decided that they hate Badiou. What a burst of originality.

I’m glad at least some people are getting the ridiculous and sad irony in all of this. I’m not going to bother linking to all the ‘lets kill the father’ posts out there, I’m sure you’ve seen them or can find them, but almost all of them share one troubling thing, an odd absence of any philosophical or textual engagement with his work. And, if I can make a guess, at least a few seem to be written by people critiquing a book (LoW) which they have not read, or, understood.

As I said in a comment on one of the previously mentioned blogs, this reminds me of being 14 years old and turning violently against one of my favorite punk bands when they would sign with a major label or put a video on mtv.

Dark and obscure doesn’t always equal rigorous or interesting.

more on logics of worlds

I came across something just now that I think helps better articulate what I was trying to get at in my last post. On page 144 of Logics of Worlds Badiou states:

The triple of the non-whole, which we advocate, is as follows: indifferent multiplicities, or ontological unbinding; worlds of appearing, or the logical link; truth-procedures, or subjective eternity.

The important thing here, in relation to what I was trying to get at in my last post, is the notion of ontological unbinding. I am in complete agreement that before one can enter a world and begin the process of becoming-subject, they must first be unbound. My concern though, is whether or not a notion of the ‘human animal’ is adequate for this unbinding. I know many will advocate for an accelerationist theory of capitalism, by which pushing capitalism to its limits we end up with nothing but un-bound ‘post-human’ elements, but I don’t buy this argument. As capital currently stands, it functions exactly like a transcendental (in Badiou’s terms). It functions to order intensities of appearance in a world, and those in this world must bind themselves to the psuedo-event of capital to have appearance.

I would thus want to explore the possibility of lifeserving as the counter foundational event of universal unbinding, and a sort of primary event which allows the individual self to exists unbound from the one way relationality of capital, and instead exist in a primary state of self relation through this primary relation to life. This would subsequently produce un-bound self relational individual selves capable of entering new worlds through a decisive entering into a subjective body.

I’ll end with a quote from an article by William Large that gets at the critique of capital I’m relying on here:

What is outside capital is not social in the sense, but what resists it within society, which is life itself […] the only answer to capital is life.

affectivity and the human animal in Logics of Worlds

In Logics of Worlds Badiou identifies four affects which signal the incorporation of a human animal into a subjective truth-process. These affects are terror, anxiety, courage, and justice.

The first, terror, “testifies to the desire for a great point” [86]. This point serves as the decisive discontinuity which brings about the new in an instantaneous fashion, and completes the subject in the process. The initial point is the break in a previous situation, or world, which inaugurates the opening of the path into the new one.

The second, anxiety, “testifies to the fear of points” [ibid], in which the human animal fears the choice between two hypotheses which comes with no guarantee. Thus, anxiety, in the Kierkegaardian-Sartrean sense, comes about when the individual (or, human animal) is confronted with the realization of free and contingent choice.

The third, courage, “affirms the acceptance of the plurality of points” [ibid]. Thus, one has the courage to navigate the consequences of an event in the form of points. To once again use Kierkegaard/Sartre as the example, courage is the affect which grips the individual who has overcome the anxiety of contingency and freely willed a decision.

The final affect is justice, which “affirms the equivalence of what is continuous and negotiated, one the one hand, and of what is discontinuous and violent, on the other.” [ibid] To justice, all categories of action are thus subordinated to the absolute contingency of worlds. Justice is thus the affective sign of the egalitarian maxim.

On page 87 of LW he goes on to note that “all affects are necessary in order for the incorporation of a human animal to unfold in a subjective process, so that the grace of being immortal may be accorded to this animal.” Thus, the human animal must go through each affect to enter into the process of ‘becoming-subject’.

While I am excited and intrigued to see Badiou relying so much on language of affect (which was a major lack of Being and Event, see Gillespie, The Mathematics of Novelty, for the best critique of BEin regards to affectivity) in Logics, I am also left wondering what is actually feeling these affects? And along these same lines, how does a/the subject ‘feel’ an affect? Because the subject is non-individual and non-human (as theorized by Badiou), what is it that feels itself feelingthese affects? Is it only a collective subject-body whom is able to feel enthusiasm in regards to an emanciptory political movement? Or can the individual be equally affected by novelty in this respect?

It seems as if theorizing the pre-subjective individual as the ‘human animal’ is problematic in these regards, and it would be more constructive to theorize the existence of the non/pre-subjective ‘human animal’ as the ‘individual self’. By providing a more detailed theorization of this individual self, we can have a self whom is self relational and capable of ‘feeling itself feeling’ theseaffects which subsequently lead it into the subjective process. As anthropocentric as Badiou’s philosphy of the subject is (no matter how much he argues otherwise), it seems as if it’d be more constructive for his whole project if he would just concede to the existence of this originary individual self, which theorized properly is situated in such as a way as to be cable of feeling affects and subsequently enter the process of becoming-subject.

I’m still working my way through (the english edition of) Logics of Worlds, so more thoughts on this to come for sure. Would be interested in hearing what others are making of this language of affect in LW…

InC Website

InC, which is the continental philosophy research group at Goldsmiths, has a great website up. Of special interests is the podcast section, which features recent lectures from Lorenzo Chisea, Alberto Toscano, Howard Caygill, Jean Luc Nancy, and Catherine Malabou. I recently listened to Malabou’s lecture, entitled ‘Auto Hetero Affection’, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in the relationship of philosophy, affectivity, neuroscience, and subjectivity.

On a similar note, I’m really looking forward to Malabou and Adrian Johnston’s forthcoming work on this topic.

the lawsuit?

Just when it looks like the ‘leiter wars’ are starting to wind down, he goes and threatens Graham with a lawsuit.

I’m sure the courts in egypt will tremble when they see that the legendary and all powerful Brian Leiter is faxing over a lawsuit from his chicago office. As funny as this all is, it’s terribly sad that someone like this can climb the academic ranks and end up with a chair at one of the more prestigious universities in the United States. I guess enough well placed kisses on enough of the right asses can do wonders in academia.

I must say, however, that if Leiter’s lawsuit forces Graham out of house and home, he’ll have a place to stay in Scotland, as I guess it’d be ‘my fault’.

If anyone has an endless supply of money, we should take turns sending books/journals of a recent continental vein to Leiter’s office. Or maybe someone in chicago can leave a flaming bag of crap outside his door?