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.

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.

More Leiter

I should have figured this might have happened, but I recently received an email responding to my recent post by the man himself, Dr. Brian Leiter. Here it is:

Dear Mr. Burns,

A disadvantage of having a large blog readership is that readers often send me links “of interest,” including your long posting of June 2.

Ordinarily, one doesn’t publish e-mail correspondence without permission, but be that as it may, it is clear you took offense at our correspondence, which I regret, though I am disappointed by the way you chose to handle this.

I did not post your subsequent comment on the blog precisely because I did not want to cause a graduate student embarrassment on the Internet.    It would behoove you to realize that your perception of things from Dundee is not everyone else’s informed perception, and you would have done yourself harm, rather than good, by having your views on this particular subject recorded on my blog.

It is unfortunate that in your anger you also chose to insult Michael Rosen.  Rosen took his DPhil in philosophy at Oxford with Charles Taylor, wrote a book on Hegel early in his career, but is best-known for important work on the Frankfurt School.  If in fact his work, and its importance, is not known at Dundee, that would surprise me.   He was hired to cover 19^th- and 20^th-century Continental social and political theory at Harvard, the position held previously by Seyla Benhabib.

I am sorry for having caused offense.

Best wishes,

Brian Leiter

So my favorite part is clearly when I’m told that he didn’t post my comment on his blog to protect me from embarrassment. What does that even mean? I clearly had no problem posting what I had tried to say on my own blog, and have no idea why saying that a few online journals are in fact quite reputable would lead to embarrassment on my behalf. And how would I be harming myself by simply saying that to those of us working in contemporary continental philosophy, these journals are in fact useful and important? It also seems as if he is implying that my institution of study is somehow sub-standard due to my personal opinions on these matters.

I do, however, recognize my comments in regards to Michael Rosen may seem a bit rude, and I will admit that I am not familiar with his work, at all. He is likely very good at what he does, but I stand by my claim that he is by no means an important figure in recent European philosophy, and that he is surely not more notable than many of the figures Leiter previously disregarded.

Besides any regret I have for painting Rosen in an unfair light, I completely stand by my original claims. In an attempt to confront me and ‘apologize’ he managed to insult me a bit more. I have been lucky to come in contact with many well known and notable philosophers who have treated myself, and other students, with an un-necessary amount of respect and kindness, and thus, see no reason to excuse this blatant condescension and disregard on the account of Leiter having a popular blog. I’ve seen philosophers ten times his stature treat students in a kind and charitable fashion, this is just ridiculous.

Also, he had the time to email Graham as well, you can see their interaction here. The Limbaugh of analytic philosophy indeed…

A Leiter Report

In the past 24 hours I’ve somehow managed to enter into a bit of online disagreement with the (in)famous Brian Leiter, who is famous for, um, having a blog. Occasionally I check this blog to see what’s happening on the other side of the divide, and occasionally there is some interesting material. Yesterday there was a post asking why there was not more open access journals in philosophy.  The original post can be seen here. For those who don’t want to visit that site for moral reasons, here is the post:

I’d love to see philosophers discuss open access philosophy journals.  

Some observations:  (1) In many sciences, some of the most prestigious journals are now open access. 

 (2) In philosophy, only one open access journal (Philosophers’ Imprint) has a good enough reputation to be ranked among the 20 best philosophy journals (as per the ranking recently published in Leiter Reports); the top philosophy journals remain the usual ones.  

 (3) Some commercial publishers, such as Bentham, are now trying to establish for profit, open access philosophy journals, but their quality is questionable.

High quality, open access philosophy journals seem to be both desirable and feasible – witness Philosophers’ Imprint, not to mention the many prestigious open access journals in other fields.  Why aren’t there more prestigious open access philosophy journals?  Why haven’t open access journals been able to threaten the dominance of the old philosophy journals in the way they have done in other fields?

I found this an interesting issue, and since there are some very interesting online open access journals in recent European (or, continental) philosophy, decided to post a response, which read:

Not sure if this crowd will be a fan, but, there are a good number of quality open access journals dealing with recent European/continental philosophy. Some examples would be Cosmos and History, Parrhesia, and Phaenex [...] I can only speak for those working in contemporary European philosophy, but much of the work being produced in journals such as these (and, the new french/english online journal Nessiea:http://nessie-philo.com/) are putting out much more exciting research than many of the more ‘established’ print journals in contemporary European philosophy [...]

to which Dr. Leiter responded:

I do not have the impression that, even among those working in recent Continental philosophy, that these journals are especially well-regarded.

I then attempted to post a polite defense of my original post that said:

Brian,
I’m not sure if that’s true, I’m a graduate student [at a continental department] and some of the figures who’ve had work published in these journals: Alain Badiou, Daniel Smith, Adrian Johnston, James Williams, Alberto Toscano, Bruno Bosteels, Miguel de Beistegui, Alexander García Düttmann,Christian Kerslake; are some of the most well regarded people working in the field [...] And I can absolutely guarantee that these journals are all well read by graduate students who work in recent European philosophy.

This is where Dr. Leiter started to get mad at me. He refused to approve this comment, and sent me this email response:

Without a full name attached to these comments, no one can evaluate them.  But I also think it not advisable to pursue this.  The people you list, Badiou excepted, are minor figures, and the editorial boards of some of the journals you mention are extremely weak.  I don’t think you need to go out on a limb on this.

I was a bit surprised, as I said nothing aggressive or combative, and was surely not ‘going out on a limb’. If anything, I was just trying to share what was happening on the continental side of things in regards to open access journals. So I wrote him this response:

Sorry for the lack of full name [...] While those people may be minor figures to some, they are some of the most notable figures working contemporary European philosophy, and to any student/scholar working on people like Bergson, Deleuze, Sartre, Laruelle, or Badiou, they are household names. Sorry for bringing up a conversation on your blog you’d rather not have, but at the same time, for those of us working on continental philosophy in the UK, many of the people I listed are in fact notable figures. sorry for making it seem as if I was going out on a limb, just trying to share some open access journals that myself and colleagues have found useful.

At this point, I was still trying to be as polite as possible to someone who was treating me like an idiot. But of course, Dr. Leiter had to get his last word in:

Having recently finished editing with Michael Rosen The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, which included quite a bit on contemporary European philosophy, I do not share your assessment, and I’m sure Michael Rosen doesn’t share it either.   I think it would be highly misleading to students and young philosophers to suggest that these on-line journals would be good places to publish.

So, because Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen (prof. of government at Harvard), two figures I’ve never heard anyone working in recent European philosophy reference, edited a book that no one I know actually working in continental philosophy has read or taken seriously (in all fairness, a few really good people have chapters, but the book is clearly written for an analytic crowd, as the notre dame review evidences) he knows whats happening in continental philosophy and who the important figures are? Absolute bullshit. The guy has pretty much no idea what he’s talking about, and somehow gains some satisfaction from being a complete asshole to well intentioned graduate students on the damn internet.  Him telling me that a government professor wouldn’t agree with my assessment on interesting journals in recent European philosophy is equally idiotic, as being a graduate student in a well regarded continental department who actively participates in the British continental philosophy community, I think I can humbly say I’d be a better judge than him, or Leiter for that fact.

People like Leiter seem like they just take out the fact they were bullied in high school out on anyone who disagrees with them. His general attitude (as well as his ranking system) represents the sort of thing which is ruining the beauty of the discipline of philosophy. The guy is, to be blunt, a pretentious dick, and thus I see no problem in publicly proclaiming that here. But then again, what else would one expect from a guy who waits until someone (Derrida) dies and then mocks a well intentioned obituary. The worst thing about the internet is the way it’s created space for complete cowards, and bullies, to sit behind the safety of their computer screen mocking the world around them.

The report is out, Leiter is an ass.

Conference in London later this month

(lots of dundee people. hopefully we make our department look good!)

IMMANENCE AND MATERIALISM CONFERENCE

QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

23 June 2009

Registration for this event is now open: please contact Simon Choat
(s.j.choat@qmul.ac.uk) to register. Registration and attendance are
free.

Programme details below. All papers will take place in Room 3.28,
Francis Bancroft Building, Mile End Campus, Mile End Road, London.

PROGRAMME

9:00am  Registration

9:30am  Panel 1: Immanence, Transcendence, Ontology (Chair: Simon Choat)

Michael O’Neill Burns (University of Dundee): ‘The Life of
Materialism: Politics between Concept and Affect’

Brian Smith (University of Dundee): ‘Extending Badiou’s
Mathematical Materialism to Account for Real Change: Beyond the
Transcendence/Immanence Dichotomy’

Paul Rekret (Queen Mary, London): ‘Derrida, Foucault, Immanence,
Transcendence’

11:10am Tea Break

11:30am Panel 2: Marx, Materialism, Immanence (Chair: Alberto Toscano)

Nicole Pepperell (RMIT University, Melbourne): ‘What’s the Matter
with Marx? Notes on Marx’s Immanent Critique of Materialism’

Vidar Thorsteinsson (Reykjavik Academy): ‘Materialism’s Cognitive Edge’

Francesca Manning (CUNY): ‘Capital as Axiomatic within Spinoza’s
Communist Ontology’

1:10pm  Lunch Break

2:15pm  Panel 3: Philosophy, Politics, Praxis (Chair: James Williams)

Matteo Mandarini (Queen Mary, London): ‘The Fate of Politics’

Duncan Law: ‘Two Ontologies of Materialism: from Non-Philosophy to
Non Philosophy’

Michael Goddard (University of Salford): ‘Misrecognising
Immanence: Towards a Critique of the Anti-Deleuzian Strategies of
Badiou, Zizek and Hallward’

3.55pm  Tea Break

4:15pm  Keynote Address (Chair: Caroline Williams)

James Williams (University of Dundee)

Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, London): ‘Immanence Unframed:
Secularization, Enlightenment, Fanaticism’

a necessary distinction.

Just a thought. I think a distinction should be made between two sorts of people who are all over academia:

The Procrastinator, and the Lazy ass.

Whereas these two are often conflated, I think the distinction is crucial. One who procrastinates does (or, can) still work very hard and produce a very high quality of work. The main problem being that they usually have near panic attacks every time deadlines approach, but are willing to go nights without sleeping or cancel days worth of social activities to produce work they are proud of. I usually tend to fall into this.

Lazy people on the other hand, do not work hard. They do the absolute least amount of work to get by, and more often then not end up producing sub-standard work, and getting by on the merits of being good talkers, or sometimes (as Graham has pointed out on his blog recently) simply by being hyper-critical of the work of others.  Lazy people can sometimes be fun people to talk to, or decent friends, but intellectually they will always fail to produce good work.

Lazy people really piss me off, especially when they get in the way of people who actually work hard, even if much of this hard work takes place in an intense and last minute period of time.

Apologies for the rant, but it was needed.

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?

Ernst Bloch-Atheism in Christianity

Peter Thompson left this comment today on an older post, and I think it deserves to be seen by all:

Dear All
one of the figures who has been largely forgotten or ignored in the whole debate about liberation theology is Ernst Bloch, who, as a Marxist, took as his starting point the attempt to define the message of exodus in the old and new testaments as a self-misunderstood rational for the uprising of the subaltern. Verso are just re-publishing this work in English translation and I think it could answer some of the debates going on on this (excellent) blog. He anticipates much of the stuff which Badiou, Zizek, Meillasoux etc. have argued and posits the possibility of transcendence without the transcendental. The book can be found at http://www.versobooks.com/books/ab/b-titles/bloch_ernst_atheism_and_christianity.shtml
or http://www.amazon.co.uk/Atheism-Christianity-Ernst-Bloch/dp/1844673944and has an interesting and very good new introduction (hey, if I don’t say it no-one else will!)

I have heard about Bloch before but have yet to read him, but I’m glad Peter has brought this work (which was has written the introduction for) to light. As soon as it’s available for order I will definitely be checking this out. Of specific interest seems to be Bloch’s work on transcendence.  If anyone here is familiar with Bloch’s work I’d love to hear more…

new Kierkegaard texts

As many whom either know me personally, or know this blog digitally, have ascertained, one of my primary areas of interests is the work of Soren Kierkegaard, and specifically in developing a reading of his work which places him in proximity with the political and ontological concerns of the recent materialists (and/or ‘post-phenomenological’) traditions of European, and specifically French Philosophy. That said, there are two recent works which seem to share a similar concern, which is both exciting and encouraging.

The first, written by Latin American (but US based) Theologian Eliseo Pérez-Álvarez, is entitled A Vexing Gadfly: The Late Kierkegaard on Economic Matters.This one is not only interesting as its the first study (at least that I’m aware of) which takes Kierkegaard seriously on economic matters, and its about time. Even more interesting is that the preface to this book was written by liberation philosopher Enrique Dussel, on whom I wrote much of my MA (on liberation philosophy and theology). It’s always exciting when two seemingly disparate research areas converge. Regardless, I’m waiting for this to be available on amazon.co.uk, and I will likely post thoughts as soon as its in my hands.

The other book, written by Alison Assiter of University of West England, is titled Kierkegaard, Metaphyics, and Political Theory. Sadly, this is being published in the Continuum series which constantly publishes interesting sounding text in paperback only editions cost over £50, far out of the economic reach of this books prime audience, PhD students. That said, I’m hoping to get an inter-library-loan copy of this book to read, and I’m really looking forward to it. Taking Kierkegaard seriously in regards to metaphysics and politics is one of the issues which helps get me up in the morning, so its exciting to someone else with a similar concern. I must admit, however, that when I first heard of this book I was afraid that it would render my project un-original, but luckily, what I’ve seen of this work so far seems to be far from what I’m working on.

Regardless, both would be interesting for anyone wanting to reckon with Kierkegaard as a political (and inherently non-postmodern) thinker should give these a read. I’ll try my best to post some notes once I acquire these.

brilliant advice…

from Graham:

Anything that helps you be productive should be treated as holy. What that may be differs for each of us. For me, it’s long multi-volume history books, as well as certain public sites that have been “lucky” places for me for thinking and working– the now-closed Café Trevi on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago, a specific cybercafe near Russell Square in London that still exists, etc. I do recommend treating these sorts of lucky rituals and places with a near-religious awe, because humans are all constantly within inches of turning into sulky, embittered procrastinators and aggressive resenters of the productive and the fulfilled. But you have to find your own holy places and holy relics. (OOP)

This is both brilliant advice, as well as utterly painful for me to read. While living in Nottingham for my MA I did most of my ‘good’ work at one of the many mellow pubs or cafes in the city. On moving to Dundee to start my PhD I figured I’d be able to do the same and find a few places possessing that certain ‘energy’ allowing me to work. Sadly, there is not even a shred of ‘cafe culture’ in this city, and the pubs are not the type of pubs that are used to people coming in mid-day with a stack of books under their arm. (A stack of alcoholism, maybe…)

Thus, I’ve been doing most of my outlining/writing in the small library cafe, and taking advantage of St. Andrews, which is right across the river, and being filled with mostly American and English students it has great cafes where you can buy one cup of coffee and sit for a couple hours comfortably working away. Although at times pretentious, at least St. Andrews ‘feels’ academic, and it’s not hard to walk into a pub and find an awkard looking academic with a pint of ale and a book.

Regardless, great advice.