immanence-materialism papers

I know a few of these were up a while ago, but almost all of the papers (including mine) from June’s Immanence and Materialism conference at Queen Mary are now up on the conference website.

If anyone has thoughts on my paper, feel free to comment. It contains a lot of ideas I’m exploring and playing around with, and I’m already convinced some of the arguments in this don’t pan out, but either way, would love to chat about it more, especially as some of what I try to outline here relates (i think) to the recent Hallward discussion.

hard books

Right now I’m engaged with a colleague in a slow and intense study of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Embarrassingly enough, I’ve never really spent that much time on Hegel, and have been content with the crude (and incorrect) ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ version of his system that has been handed down through generations of laziness. The only real Hegel study I’ve done before this has been selections from the Phenomenology, read alongside Kojeve’s lectures.  I’m now starting to get why someone like Badiou holds such contempt for the influence of Kojeve’s reading of the Phenomenology on the French reception of Hegel, and while the Science of Logic is a much more difficult work, it is infinitely more rewarding as an attempt to think through systematic metaphysics. The intensity of this work seems to be obvious when looking for secondary work on the Science of Logic, as thus far I’ve seen only two book length studies which seem decent, and this is compared to the countless studies of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Well, as I’m sure none of this is news to anyone else, feel free to share what the hardest book you’ve ever come across is, I’m always into stories of intellectual self harm of this extent. Or, if anyone has any recommendations for any secondary sources that deal with the Logic, that’d be nice too.

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.

summer activities

Following the lead of others I’ve decided to add a post regarding my summer ‘to do’ list. Hopefully publicly posting this will help provide some sort of motivation…

Writing

• Chapters on ‘Kierkegaard and Badiou’ and ‘Kierkegaard and Sartre’ for the collection Kierkegaard’s Influence on Social-Political Thought.
• Essay on Meillassoux and philosophy of religion for the volume Anthony Paul Smith/Daniel Whistler are editing.
• A paper (or, papers) on the concept of life in Badiou and Henry. One version with a more political bent for a conference on immanence/materialism in London, the other with a more ‘continental philosophy of religion’ approach for a conference in Liverpool.
• Editing half of my first chapter to submit for publication

Reading

• Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol. 1 and 2
• Hegel’s Science of Logic
• The more ‘category theory’ oriented sections of Logics of Worlds, as well as some secondary literature on category theory.
• Random secondary texts on Sartre/Hegel/Marxism

Teaching

• Still haven’t found out what I’m teaching in the fall (it’ll be either the first or second year philosophy tutoring) but when I do, I’ll hopefully spend a bit of time familiarizing myself the material.

that’s all.  hopefully I’ll be able to provide updates when I actually do these things, and luckily, there are deadlines attached to most of these tasks which will hopefully keep me from straying too bad. although I wonder…how pissed do editors get if you get your chapter in a week or two late?

an introduction, and more…

I would like to introduce the new blog of a good friend, named Dan. His blog is called Vacuous Savor, and he already has some interesting post up that seem to be coming out of a recent period of Zizek reading. Surely worth checking out for those interested in the relationship between philosophy-theology-politics.

Right now I’m working on a paper, to be presented later this week, on the place of the subject in philosophies of life and concept in the recent french tradition. I’m framing the debate between the work of Badiou and Henry, and trying to ‘get at’ a concept of the subject that is founded through a relationship to the absolute life of Henry, while retaining the political axiomatics of Badiou. To bring things to the ground, I’m attempting to evaluate these accounts of the subject in relation to their efficacy in providing sites of novelty under capitalism. At this point I’m still wrestling with how to read the role of both life and capitalin Badiou’s work, and specifically in Logics of Worlds.  I’m also finding his quick dismissal of Negri/Deleuze to be problematic in regards to questions of Life; I say this as being someone who agrees with Badiou over these figures 9 out of 10 times, but still can’t help but finding Badiou’s attempt to bring the world life back to the centre of philosophical thinking a bit silly/pretentious.

But I’ll digress…at this point my mind is still a bit cluttered. I’m going through some (hopefully) final edits of the paper before leaving for the states on wednesday, so will potentially post it here before then, but if not, I will surely post the paper after the conference. Which, just now, I noticed is going to be attended by an entire class from Canada as a sort of philosophical field trip. This should be, if nothing else, interesting.

the writing process

I have attempted to spend a majority of my time writing over the past few days. While the whole ‘writing’ thing has not panned out very well, I have managed to spend a good amount of time drinking tea, sleeping, watching tv, cooking delicious mexican meals, reading, and cleaning my flat. At this point I have a few hours this evening and all day tomorrow to finish the paper I am presenting on Tuesday. I am a bit stressed, but have learned that these things always, although sometimes painfully, work themselves out.

The thing I’ve realized through all of this is that while I’ve recently developed a good set of habits in regards to reading, I have yet to develop a habitual system for writing. The only writing habit I have at this point is always hand writing my first draft, but that’s more of a technique than a habit.

So out of curiosity, does anyone have a certain system they find helpful for writing?  I’d be willing to take any and all advice on this topic, as my current system makes it possible to rush through 4,000 or so words, but will be nothing short of hellish if I attempt to use this system to produce over 15,000 words this summer. Also, while I’m fishing for advice, does anyone have anything different they do when preparing a paper for presentation as opposed to an assignment or publication? and does anyone have any ‘tricks’ for presenting? I find myself getting very tense during my presentations and usually have small panic attacks during the question and answer period…