Foucault and Luhmann

Speculative Realism, New Materialism, and Deleuze Posted by larvalsubjects

I hasten to add, that I share Harman’s critique of “undermining“, but believe this is already the new materialist positions... I have a number of projects in the works. One on Foucault as a forerunner to assemblage theory and the new materialists. Another on Luhmann, who I see as an under-appreciated thinker in the Anglo-American world of Continental theory.

Interdisciplinarity: Conceptual Geographies Posted by larvalsubjects

Here it’s necessary to note that Luhmann uses the term “environment” equivocally. 

Great Moments in the Classroom from Larval Subjects by larvalsubjects

Students shuffling out of the classroom after a discussion of Platonic realism and the possibility of transcendent, objective values independent of culture, history, and individual determination.

STUDENT: “This class is impossible.”
ME (Alarmed): “Why?”
STUDENT: “We come in here thinking we understand the world and now we discover that everything we think might be mistaken.”

...

Husserl begins with an obvious thesis – “look at the things themselves!” – yet in executing this project he unsettles our assumptions about what it is to experience the world and objects, opening a vast domain that continues to challenge central assumptions in cognitive science, psychology, the social sciences, etc.

The cuisine of India is a bit like Hegel where philosophy is concerned: incredibly sophisticated, nuanced, and unfolding simultaneously on a variety of different levels. You could spend a lifetime studying it and still never exhaust or master it. What’s for Dinner? from Larval Subjects by larvalsubjects

Matthew David Segall on October 30, 2015 at 9:12 am said: 

human beings are still entirely mythical and magical in general outlook. Nietzsche’s announcement of God’s death is hardly relevant to those for whom no such monotheistic notion of value existed in the first place. 

Worlds Without End https://t.co/LzlAIbFcs3 - Friday, September 4, 2015 — Beatrice Marovich

In his introduction to the recently published Science & Religion: One Planet, Many Possibilities (Routledge 2014), Whitney Bauman—while acknowledging that the religion and science dialogue is slowly becoming less western, and less Christian—argues that there are still a number of critical “lacunae” in the field.

Larval Subjects .

Lacan - Today I found myself rereading Lacan’s 8th seminar (transference) after 15 years. I try to put myself in the shoes of his audience. He had such a remarkabl...

His readings never carry the air of scholarly or academic pedantry, but rather show why these texts continue to speak to us across time: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas, Descartes, Russell, Quine, Wittgenstein, Kant, Sade, Shakespeare, etc. All of it becomes something else in his hands, and somehow something quite different than what it’s been.

But it’s also psychoanalysis that becomes something different in his hands. Let’s be honest, Freud and much of the psychoanalytic literature prior to Lacan is just plain crass. We get something that appears like a reductive hydraulics of psych. With Lacan entirely new terms are introduced that go to our existential, extimate core: love, desire, jouissance, the Other, the Law, ethics, etc. These are not really terms that Freud used; at least not in the sublime sense deployed by Lacan. Somehow Lacan introduces something entirely new into Freud, while also finding something that was everywhere there. Lacan is a model of what a reading can be, of a productive reading, of a reading that bears fidelity to the living being of texts rather than placing them in the museum of scholarship. Lacan provides a model of reading that is thought rather than mastery.

The Indian Philosophy Blog

Expanding the canon part n - We have discussed several times (see also here and here) about the problem of how Indian philosophers should be part of normal classes on Medieval philosop...

Foucault and Luhmann

Page updated on March 17, 2016