I often wonder what sort of book I would write were I not bound up with the academy

Different Types of Books • ~ by larvalsubjects on April 19, 2007

It seems to me that there are different types of works of philosophy that do very different types of things. Some works, like those of Epicurus, Epictetus, Lucretius, or Spinoza are almost like user manuals. They were written to produce a transformation in oneself, in ones values, how one feels, how one sees, and how one lives, as well as a transformation in one’s readers. Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, for instance, is a poem written to his friend Memmius. You pick up Epictetus or Spinoza to figure out how to weather this world and perhaps even prosper in life. When you come out the other side you have a different set of values. You might end up doing little more than tending to your garden and taking pleasure in the study of the stars or flowers or the creatures that swim about in tidal pools.

Other books are like weapons or bombs. They target the social space or a configuration of common thought, a sensus communis, and shatter a set of conceptions. These are books like Hume’s Enquiry, Voltaire’s Candide, de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays, Civilization and Its Discontents, Nietzsche’s Geneaology of Morals, Marx’s Das Kapital, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, etc. These books do something. They explode conceptions. They change configurations of human bodies, generating new collectives and groups. They reverberate.

Yet other books are like moves in a game of chess in long discussions that span thousands of years. These are the academic books, addressed to other scholars, like Brandom’s Making it Explicit, or Searle’s Construction of Social Reality, or Gadamer’s Truth and Method. I tend to feel these books are cancerous, even though I’ve written such a book and such books often contribute something. Nonetheless, I can’t help but have suspicions about the whole publishing industry attached to universities and what it produces.

This is not an exhaustive catalogue, just a stab. I often wonder what sort of book I would write were I not bound up with the academy and if I had no intention of ever publishing. Is there a book that I would like to rewrite, to repeat, today? What would such a book be for? What would it seek to do (to me, not to any readers)? What would it mean to write in a way that forgets all scholarly debates and options and simply attempts to distill the essence of something (which is very different from suggesting something outside history)? Is it possible to write such a book today? What would it be to write a book that wasn’t a move in the game of chess, that like Spinoza, refrained from any such engagement in the world of letters, and strove simply to transform oneself in and through the act of writing? What would it be like to spend ten, twenty, thirty years writing, without the intention of ever releasing such a work, of ever being recognized for such a work, and without worrying over such debates? What book would you repeat or rewrite?

Spinoza Quote of the Day BOOK III, PROP. III. The activities of the mind arise solely from adequate ideas; the passive states of the mind depend solely on inadequate ideas.

Note.–Thus we see, that passive states are not attributed to the mind, except in so far as it contains something involving negation, or in so far as it is regarded as a part of nature, which cannot be clearly and distinctly perceived through itself without other parts: I could thus show, that passive states are attributed to individual things in the same way that they are attributed to the mind, and that they cannot otherwise be perceived, but my purpose is solely to treat of the human mind.

Relationship between international politics and international repression, and Western “decadence”

We’re All Mad Here 17 Apr 07 by Joseph Kugelmass WRITE ME...josephkugelmass at gmail dot com [reposted from The Kugelmass Episodes ]

Among the small (frankly, the dwindling) number of purely academic blogs that haunt the blogroll on the right, one of the hardiest survivors, along with Spurious in his infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering melancholy, is the Lacanian blog Larval Subjects.
Jacques Lacan is a difficult writer, and a specialist who appeals to specialists, and the very comprehensiveness of the Lacanian expansion of Freud tends to alienate people who are not already within his orbit. He has had a tremendous impact on the academy, and recently, English-speaking theorists have benefited from the translations and critical studies done by Bruce Fink. Nonetheless, I think Lacan will suffer from the coming backlash against postmodernism, maybe fatally so. (A backlash fueled partly by the fact that the key figures in postmodernism are very old or already dead, and new scholars will replace them and want to oust them.)
Even were that to happen, the archives at Larval Subjects would still be worth reading, and a recent post entitled “I Think You’re All Lunatics” is a good example why.
LarvalSubjects writes:
In his forward to Anti-Oedipus, Foucault points out that fighting fascism does not simply consist in fighting fascist social organizations, but rather it above all consists in fighting the fascism within: Our own fascist desires. In this vein, I’ve begun to notice that I think all of you are lunatics. That’s right, I think you’re all absolutely crazy, off the wall, and completely nuts. I’m not proud of this, and it certainly doesn’t make me a very good Lacanian. After all, as Lacan says at the end of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, the desire of the analyst is not a pure desire, but is rather a desire for absolute difference. The thought that makes me shudder, the thought that makes my stomach burn with acid, is the thought that I don’t desire difference….
And, of course, if I think all of you are mad in your desires, your fixations, your obsessions, your persistant fears, themes, and anxieties, then this must mean that I believe myself to be sane. That’s right, I must believe myself to be normal and healthy. Yet in reflecting on my day to day life, with the way I obsess, the things that I fixate on, the dark fantasies that sometimes inhabit me, the way I don’t allow myself to sleep or enjoy, the varied forms of abuse I heap on my body, and so on, I can hardly say that I am a model of health. No, I don’t have a particularly nice sinthome….
Is it truly possible, I wonder, to ever desire the difference of the Other, or is this simply impressive sounding talk? Perhaps there are others that truly desire Otherness and I’m simply a fascist pig. Lacan liked to poke fun at philosophy, calling it a paranoid discourse striving to establish a regime of the same and identical: The hegemony of the imaginary, striving for the whole, completeness, and an eradication of difference. Perhaps my sickness has been produced by philosophy, or perhaps my sickness, my inability to desire difference, is what has drawn me to philosophy. I would like to stop thinking everyone is insane.
First of all, that’s hilarious. Second, isn’t it interesting how inoffensively it reads? I responded:
The fact that you may be mad certainly does not mean you are wrong about the rest of us. While I think you ought to interrogate yourself on the question of whether you really desire difference (in the ethical sense of the ought), recognizing that you are mad might mean that, in your desire for absolute difference, you deplore the multiple manifestations of a symptom you and lots of others share. This is often how I understand my own projects of cultural critique — I hope for a common project of sanity emerging from a common recognition of one’s own madness. A madness that lacks even the distinction of being individual, being one’s own possession.
Both LarvalSubjects and N. Pepperell (of Rough Theory) asked me to elaborate, and I might as well do that here.
The problem of difference, and the desire for difference, and a feeling of guilt over not desiring difference enough, is not just a Lacanian problem. It is really the major source of guilt and anxiety fueling the majority of postmodern writing, which, taken together, constitutes a canon that has practically no other subject besides self-incriminating, self-ironizing anxiety.
First of all, I think the discussion cannot go anywhere (besides towards a useless anguish) until we recognize that we live according to an extraordinary tolerance of individual difference, and the blogosphere proves it. No matter how close I might feel to the writers on my blogroll, anyone who clicks there and leaves this space immediately feels the difference. They are ushered into spaces that look dramatically different. They potentially leave my world, of the academic blogger writing under his own name, and enter the world of an anonymous blogger writing about her own life, with only the most occasional nods to intellectual work (many of my friends blog to other ends). The length of the entries differs. The governing notions of propriety change. The sense of humor changes, disappears, or emerges in some different and doubly funny form.
So, LarvalSubjects’s feeling that the rest of the world is mad, which probably represents a real horror on his part (one that he immediately curbs, guiltily), is pleasantly balanced by his links to other writers and his willingness to engage with them, a willingness that suggests a similar kind of openness in his real affairs.
What, then, forces LarvalSubjects to look beyond these initial signs of tolerance, towards some kind of fascistic intolerance of which he is guilty? One of two things must be at stake.
First of all, it is possible to feel guilty about positions that appear to be deeply subjectively grounded, even though they have implications for all of us. Thus, for example, it is possible to be guilty about defending secularism, since so many people derive such obvious and felt benefit from their religious beliefs and practices.
Difference transcends itself as content but not as form. It is a mistake to overlay a desire for difference onto disagreement in the public sphere. Evangelical believers have an interest in me as a subject; part of their difference from me involves their belief that I should become identified with them, at which point I myself would no longer desire difference. I come up short against the limit of difference, just as I do in the classroom, where as a teacher or as a seminar participant I encounter readings that are unjustifiable, and that don’t have recourse to difference.
So far, so good. But what about the more personal issues at stake here, which LarvalSubjects links to his obsessiveness, his problems with sleep and enjoyment, his abuse of his body, and his dark fantasies?
I imagine that, outside of public matters of disagreement that preclude difference, LarvalSubjects is thinking about self-defeating phenomena. All of the work I’ve done writing for this blog, and all of my own experiences with the bitter alienation he is describing, persuade me that the essential symptom/syndrome of this moment in Western life is undecidability and indeterminacy. That means, with respect to individual neuroses and psychoses, that all of them are acquired secondhand, and dropped or revised with startling ease.
Is there a single way of abusing one’s body that has not been chronicled in films, television shows, medical handbooks, websites, and so on? Is there a single pathology of sleep that is not known, catalogued, campaigned against, satirized, and vindicated? If, right now, eighteen people are singing simultaneous versions of “Folsom Prison Blues,” is it really possible to talk about a dark fantasy of murder in a shocking manner?
Certainly, for a given individual, all of their pathologies describe a complex of some kind, but even those complexes are so liable to changes and substitutions that most people who want to be famous (e.g. as artists of some kind) would give their right arms to have a complex as rich and internally consistent as Schreber’s. My troubles with sleep now aren’t the same as they were ten years ago, nor my taboos, and if all these were the same in 2017 as they are now, I’d in all honesty have to count that as an accident, and possibly a worrying sign of stasis.
I am glad that the most egregious and strange obsessions, prohibitions, and fantasies are out there on the table, picked up and passed around like costumes. We can talk about them, thanks to our strange and theatrical time, rather than having to live them out under a false banner of destiny. Filed under: Philosophy, pop culture, Blogroll, Meta, Religion, Personal 6 Responses to “We’re All Mad Here”

1 parodycenter on Apr 18th, 2007 said:
persuade me that the essential symptom/syndrome of this moment in Western life is undecidability and indeterminacy.
Awww Kugelmas you just made me weep from the bottom of my ass. How alarming, Western undecidability! Especially in comparison to Eastern poverty, famine, war and disease. Call the United Nations, the Red Cross and BAD AID. We must jump to the rescue of your decadent Western asses - IMMEDIATELY!
2 Joseph Kugelmass on Apr 18th, 2007 said:
parodycenter,
If you are actually curious where I stand on the relationship between international politics and international repression, and Western “decadence,” then you should look at the “Betrayers” talk I recently gave here at Irvine.
You might also read through my two new posts at the Valve (Part 1 and Part 2), on Amanda Claybaugh, politics, and literature.
Who knows — maybe that’s not enough for you, especially given that your symptom is weeping from the bottom of your ass. If you misspell things like the name of the poster, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.
Oh, and your blog link doesn’t work, so I guess we don’t get the benefit of your parodic prowess. Or maybe you just chose to de-center.
3 parodycenter on Apr 18th, 2007 said:
Thanks Kugelmass, all three of them are really nice articles, but I’m not grasping what your message is on thesubject of international politics and repression, even as I understand much better your position on art in this context.
The parody center’s address is http://www.parodycentrum.wordpress.com./
4 N Pepperell on Apr 18th, 2007 said:
Joe - Just letting you know that I’ve written a combined response to some of your post, and to some of Sinthome’s reflections, over at Larval Subjects. If you don’t mind my responding in two places… ;-P I wanted to pick up over here with something that didn’t fit in (or, in my current tired state, I couldn’t figure out how to fit in) to the other discussion:
Difference transcends itself as content but not as form. It is a mistake to overlay a desire for difference onto disagreement in the public sphere. Evangelical believers have an interest in me as a subject; part of their difference from me involves their belief that I should become identified with them, at which point I myself would no longer desire difference. I come up short against the limit of difference, just as I do in the classroom, where as a teacher or as a seminar participant I encounter readings that are unjustifiable, and that don’t have recourse to difference.
I like this point a great deal - it seems related to what I would usually call someone’s “critical standpoint” - or the set of normative ideals deployed in the critique. But I wanted to double check whether I’m hearing you as you intended, rather than pushing your words into my framework. Are you suggesting here that the category of “difference”, taken by itself, might be normatively underdetermined? That there may be a better way to express what we are actually trying to achieve - one that might make it clearer why there are certain kinds of “different” social movements, political goals, etc., that are precisely not adequate to the potentials of our time?
I ask because the issue of normative underdetermination has been a long-term interest of mine, particularly in relation to understanding the unintended consequences of social movements. There’s a quote from William Morris that has always drawn me for this reason:
I pondered all these things… how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name…
I’ll post a pointer to this discussion at Rough Theory when I have a bit of time…
1 An Episode of the Kugelmass Show « Larval Subjects

2 Roughtheory.org » The Matter of Madness

Nietzsche and Heidegger, both apposite allies of the Grece’s philosophical project

Like Nietzsche, Heidegger believes that whenever Dasein “runs ahead toward the past,” the “not yet actual” opens to the inexhaustible possibilities of what “has been” and what “can be.” He also follows Nietzsche in viewing the regenerative impulses of mythic time as inherent to history. In thus emphasizing man’s inherent temporality, both Heidegger and Nietzsche reject the abstract universalism of the mechanical and teleological conceptions of becoming (suitable for measuring matter in motion or the Spirit’s progression toward the Absolute), just as they both dismiss decontextualized concepts of being (whether in the form of the Christian soul, Descartes’ ego cogito, Marx’s species man, or Rawls’ disembodied individual).

Heidegger, however, differs from Nietzsche in making being, not will, the key to temporality. Nietzsche, he claims, neither fully rejected the metaphysical tradition he opposed nor saw beyond beings to being.(n103) While denying modernity’s faith in progress and perpetual overcoming (the Aufhebung which implies not only transcendence, but a leaving behind), Nietzsche’s “will to power” allegedly perpetuates modernity’s transcendental impulse by positing a subjectivity that is not “enowned” by being. As a possible corrective to this assumed failing, Heidegger privileges notions of Andenken (the recollection that recovers and renews tradition) and Verwendung (which is a going beyond that, unlike Aufhebung, is also an acceptance and a deepening) — notions implying not simply the inseparability of being and becoming, but becoming’s role in the unfolding, rather than the transcendence of being.(n104)

Despite these differences, the anti-metaphysical, anti-modernist aims Nietzsche and Heidegger share makes them both apposite allies of the GRECE’s philosophical project. This is especially evident in the importance they attribute to becoming and to origins. Heidegger, for example, argues that whenever being is separated from becoming and deprived of temporality, as it is in the Christian/modern logos, then being (in this case, abstract being, rather than being-in-the-world) becomes identified with the present, a now-point, subject to the determinisms governing the inorganic objects of Newtonian physics.(n105) This implicit denial of ecstatical temporality allegedly causes the prevailing philosophical tradition to “forget” that being exists in time, as well as space, and is not an essence posited by God or the laws of nature.(n106) By rethinking being in terms of human temporality and restoring it to becoming, Heidegger, like Nietzsche, makes time the horizon of all existence, thereby freeing the existential from the inorganic properties of space and matter.

Moreover, since it is inseparable from becoming, and since becoming occurs in a world-with-others, being is necessarily situated in a “context of significance” saturated with history and tradition. As man pursues his project in terms of present worldly concerns, the various existential modes of these concerns, as well as the “world” itself, are informed by interpretations stemming from a history of interpretation. Just as “every age must write its own history afresh” (R. G. Collingwood), every man is compelled to engage his existence in light of what has been handed down to him — in light, in other words, of the totality of meaning and purpose defining his world.(n107) His future-directed project is indeed only conceivable in terms of the world into which he is thrown. Man therefore makes his history, but does so as a “bearer of meaning,” whose convictions, beliefs, and representations have been bestowed by the past.(n108) This meaning-laden matrix constitutes the “t/here” [da] in Dasein, without which being (qua being-in-the-world) is inconceivable.(n109) And because there can be no Sein without a da, no existence without a specific framework of meaning and purpose, man, in his ownmost nature qua being, is inseparable from this matrix that “makes possible what has been projected.”(n110) Being is indeed inherent only in “the enowning of the grounding of the t/here.”(n111) The Philosophical Foundations of the French New Right by Michael Torigian 3:09 PM

Hegel's owl of Minerva

Hegel's owl of Minerva, what was it?
The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
¶ 7:47 AM 0 comments Monday, April 16, 2007

Ellopos hosts a discussion of Heidegger's use of aletheia.
¶ 1:34 PM 0 comments Thursday, April 12, 2007 enowning

Kant, Maimon, Bergson, and Simondon

Difference and Givenness, The Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence Levi Bryant

From one end of his philosophical work to the other, Gilles Deleuze consistently described his position as a transcendental empiricism. But just what is transcendental about Deleuze's transcendental empiricism? And how does his position fit with the traditional empiricism articulated by Hume? In Difference and Givenness, Levi Bryant addresses these long-neglected questions so critical to an understanding of Deleuze's thinking. Through a close examination of Deleuze's independent work--focusing especially on Difference and Repetition--as well as his engagement with thinkers such as Kant, Maimon, Bergson, and Simondon, Bryant sets out to unearth Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and to show how it differs from transcendental idealism, absolute idealism, and traditional empiricism.

What emerges from these efforts is a metaphysics that strives to articulate the conditions for real existence, capable of accounting for the individual itself without falling into conceptual or essentialist abstraction. In Bryant's analysis, Deleuze's metaphysics articulates an account of being as process or creative individuation based on difference, as well as a challenging critique--and explanation--of essentialist substance ontologies. A clear and powerful discussion of how Deleuze's project relates to two of the most influential strains in the history of philosophy, this book will prove essential to anyone seeking to understand Deleuze's thought and its specific contribution to metaphysics and epistemology.

Intellectually rarified dialog

The two truths of Nagarjuna by Edward Berge- An example of the intellectually rarified dialog that members of the Integral Community are engaged in at the Open Integral Forum with Alan Kazlev, Andy Smith, Jim Chamberlain, Chris Dierkes, Tusar N. Mohapatra, Marko Rinck and Ray Harris. (One of the few comments that I could actually comprehend- ef)

"They are not saying that Spirit does not exist, but simply that any finite statement about the infinite will categorically not work- not in the same way that statements about relative or conventional truth will work. Spirit can be known, but not said; seen, but not spoken; pointed out, but not described; realized, but not reiterated. Conventional truths are known by science; absolute truth is known by satori. They simply are not the same thing." BACK to PLAYING GURU BACK to ADVAITIC EXPERIENCE BACK to MAYA-GAIA SITEMAP email> smalltownsATusaDOTcom

Peirce's Hegelianism

Charles Sanders Peirce was born on September 10, 1839 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he died on April 19, 1914 in Milford, Pennsylvania. His writings extend from about 1857 until near his death, a period of approximately 57 years...

Peirce's Hegelianism, which he increasingly professed as he approached his most mature philosophy, is more difficult to understand than his Kantianism, partly because it is everywhere intimately tied to his entire late theory of signs (semeiotic) and sign use (semeiosis), as well as to his evolutionism and to his rather puzzling doctrine of mind. There are at least four major components to his idealism.

• First, for Peirce the world of appearances, which he calls "the phaneron," is a world consisting entirely of signs. Signs are qualities, relations, features, items, events, states, regularities, habits, laws, and so on that have meanings, significances, or interpretations.
• Second, a sign is one term in a threesome of terms that are indissolubly connected with each other by a crucial triadic relation that Peirce calls "the sign relation." The sign itself (also called the representamen) is the term in the sign relation that is ordinarily said to represent or mean something. The other two terms in this relation are called the object and the interpretant. The object is what would ordinarily would be said to be the "thing" meant or signified or represented by the sign, what the sign is a sign of. The interpretant of a sign is said by Peirce to be that to which the sign represents the object. What exactly Peirce means by the interpretant is difficult to pin down. It is something like a mind, a mental act, a mental state, or a feature or quality of mind; at all events the interpretant is something ineliminably mental.
• Third, the interpretant of a sign, by virtue of the very definition Peirce gives of the sign-relation, must itself be a sign, and a sign moreover of the very same object that is (or: was) represented by the (original) sign. In effect, then, the interpretant is a second signifier of the object, only one that now has an overtly mental status. But, merely in being a sign of the original object, this second sign must itself have (Peirce uses the word "determine") an interpretant, which then in turn is a new, third sign of the object, and again is one with an overtly mental status. And so on.

Thus, if there is any sign at all of any object, then there is an infinite sequence of signs of that same object. So, everything in the phaneron, because it is a sign, begins an infinite sequence of mental interpretants of an object. plato.stanford.edu

I continue to stress my own more Habermasian roots

Chris Dierkes Indistinct Union

Deconstructionism has the ability to spot the gaps in language. That is not the same as "questioning assumptions" and to me is much more than a species of opinion. Nor is that so vague as to meaning nothing. What deconstructionism can not do is anything more than spot such gaps. This is why it leads to literary terrorism. It can blow texts up and nothing else. [An example of me practicing deconstruction in a moment in order to ground this claim].

This is why, as much as it may seem otherwise, I agree with Matthew that deconstructionism per se/en toto leads to bad art, degraded culture, and nihilism. What I don't say is that therefore the entire thing is irrelevant. It's worth following the deconstruction train, feeling its rhythms, seeing the terrain. Ideally, I think it makes us more humble as thinkers--I can't speak for artists though I would assume the same.

Derrida and anyone who takes his work as primary make the same mistake in reverse as those he properly criticizes. They absolutize absence, grammar, mourning, the Other which is only the same disease in reverse: the disease recall was only identifying with the Same, logos, present, truth, living, etc.

So following Nagarjuna I state that there is relative and absolute truth. The relative world exists on the principle of polarity. The poles dependently co-arise: i.e. they depend for one another on their existence. For there to be flowers there must be weeds and vice versa as Matthew's garden image points out. Derrida rightly stressed I feel that the Western philosophical tradition did not give proper time, attention, and respect to one side of the pole: the absent, dead, maimed, feminine, irrational, emotional, aboriginal, structural, etc. [Others before Derrida like the Romantics made similar cries no doubt].

That the Western tradition did so philosophically is related to the pain and violence inflicted on such groups. The outer and inner themselves dependently co-arise, with a deep resonance about them. That does not mean I am saying people shouldn't study that great Western tradition/canon, but they should never been unaware of the historical consequences of that tradition either. Some of it good, plenty evil. In other words, deconstructing Matthew's analogy, he can not destroy all the weeds because the weeds are the very thing that make flowers possible in the first place. If he kills the weeds, the flowers will no longer be flowers and may become in the minds of many themselves a weed.

The prostitute is always the secret best friend of the preacher, because the preacher would be out of job without her. While that may seem a silly play on words, I assure the reader it is quite serious when you take weeds and flowers and apply that to human beings. The idea that weeds should be fought at all times is quite dangerous when say applied to a civilian population housing an insurgency (think Vietnam carpet-bombing). [For the record, I am not accusing Matt or anybody else of promoting genocide. I am simply stating that ideas always have political ramifications. Ideas for me are not reducible to their political consequences but they are never separate from them either. That is a Marxian position, which is very modernist btw.]I follow, as best as possible, the words of Christ: the weeds and the wheat must grow together until the final harvest...

But what Matthew has not I believe shown is that in this Double-Deconstruction---that leads into Emptiness/Godhead not Nihilism--deconstruction, little d, has no value whatsoever.The problem, as I see it, is Matthew reading every instance of postmodern as inherently meaning better than modern. While that is certainly the case I would say for many who are self-described postmodernists, that is not my position. And anyone who reads through this blog will have a damn hard time finding me saying something as simplistic as that.Though Matthew doesn't come out and say it specifically, seems to me he is often insinuating I'm in the same camp as the stereotypical Lyotardian, American left-wingnut boomer humanities professor. I am not--for God's sakes I've linked to David Horowitz on occasion. Not to mention I quoted a "premodern" text (Gita) as more important and wiser than a postmodern one.

This is why in my rebuttals I continue to stress my own more Habermasian roots. I promote modernity generally (hence my support for Barnett, not exactly a postmodernist he) but I believe some forms of postmodernism made proper criticisms of the way in which modernity was sourced during the 18-mid20th century. Like Habermas I think to talk about progress (which to my mind is a modern notion last time I checked, not postmodern) in a dialectical fashion. And that reason must be grounded philosophically in the intersubjective, which for me leads to perspectives. As many as possible and then working from the ones that are already in existence, seeking to find creative solutions that engage but are not limited to such already in existence perspectives.

That is not postmodernism but it includes a postmodern (what I take to be postmodern anway) element. [But I'm not married to the idea that has to be a postmodern insight]. Namely that truth is contextual and that contexts are endless. Hence in our own differing ways, both Matthew and I are advocating the unending conversation...posted by CJ Smith @ 3:41 PM

Program to muzzle others, to ridicule and demonize their perceptual "gaze"

dilys said... Thinking about your question, what is positive in postmodernism, reminds me that it was said that Derrida converted or returned to Christianity. A lecture by him is not without sense, either. Some of the postmodern ways of thinking and delving into texts are, as auxiliary tools, indispensable.

However, motive is everything. If the enterprise is driven with the narcissistic demand to demonstrate that nothing is true or beautiful, and that no work of art has any more integrity than the fleeting moi, then something else has become the tool. I believe Gagdad said elsewhere that sincerity is the key, sincerity in light of communicative integrity and acknowledgement of objective truth.

Refusal to stake a claim and develop a territory in positive terms violates basic human agency. To risk a pragmatic and testable outcome is missing in "postmodernism" as she shows up in the ivory-colored hard-steel academic office blocks. It reduces to a barely-camouflaged program to muzzle others, to ridicule and demonize their perceptual "gaze," and to have one's own indeterminate feelings "heard."

The leftist motivation is, not to inherit and improve, but to take over structures someone else created [Gramsci's long march through the institutions]. I seem to remember there are crabs and snails that hijack others' shells. However, in nature they mostly postpone seizure until the shell is vacant. Squatters, not thieves. The cuckoo also springs to mind. 4/11/2007 08:14:00 AM

It is not the Idea of Opinion he is concerned with, it is the very essence (or lack thereof) of All the Great Ideas themselves

Tuesday, April 10, 2007 Is postmodernism a weed? CJ and Matthew have been talking about postmodernism (specifically, postmodernism and conservativism) . Matthew also comments here in a post titled "Battling Postmodernism Down." My reply is here (slightly edited version below):

MD, On the weed metaphor that you use... I use it to describe my HIV (weeds) in a garden of flowers. See my guided visualization here:

http://until.joe-perez.com/2007/03/thousand-flowers-guided-visualization.html

I'm mostly content to just lurk and see how CJ or others reply to this post, but a quick word or two on your metaphor... I wanted to say that as I see it the term "postmodernism" must have a meaning, otherwise it would not incite the sort of deep disdain you and I share for weeds. So it will not surprise you that I feel CJ made his case in the dialogue by providing an ample reference of philosophical learning to clarify his use of the term postmodernism. As a term which refers to a broad current or movement with both an intellectual component (i.e., scholars write books about it!) and a pop cultural component (e.g., contemporary camp humor), it's obviously a very inclusive term (much like the terms classical and modern, terms which I've noticed you continue to use). Or, if I may add, the word Humanities. It's a shallow (umbrella) term, not a deep (precise) one.

• The postmodern current, as I see it, isn't so much like a weed with roots more than 10 feet deep. It's too new, and it has taken hold mostly in an academic enclave among intellectuals. Culturally, it is in evidence only in styles and trends shared by a minority of the population of America and other highly developed nations (for example, "post-PC humor").
• Postmodernism is more like a style of gardening in which shrubbery is not pruned, trees are left to "go wild", weeds are considered acceptable and desirable. It's a fondness for jungle-like gardens. In contrast, your classical perspective is more like a traditional approach to gardening.

I hesitate to say anything more because I don't want to put words into your mouth, but generally classical approaches to anything tend to have greater respect for order and carefully pruned thoughts and the elimination of weeds, and perhaps these phrases characterize your view of the postmodern current.

I don't agree with your view of pomo as, within the context of a Great Books approach, "a pathological riff under the heading of Opinion," but I'm afraid it would involve a more significant exchange to come to anything resembling understanding/agreement. I'll stick to the gardening/weeding metaphor, even as I insinuate without argument that the pomo current in relationship to the Great Ideas is like the attitude of a collector of Great Books who reads them carefully but scattershot, in no particular order, and in a continual dialogue with himself and the books, decides that they do not form a coherent Order. Therefore the collector decides to cut up the books and use the pages for different purposes. Some pages he frames and places high on an altar. Other pages he uses to line a bird cage. Others he sails into paper airplanes, others he gives to friends who he thinks will find the pages useful. On other pages, he scribbles notes and eventually publishes a collection of random notes from his journal (not unlike Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations). He's a postmodern collector of the Great Books. His attitude may or may not be pathological, but it is not the Idea of Opinion he is concerned with, it is the very essence (or lack thereof) of All the Great Ideas themselves. Perhaps postmodernism's concern is what you call the Humanities.

I'm actually very appreciative of your reference to poetry. It does appear that the formal properties of language as reflected in poetry are important and noteworthy. Study of them further, esp. in poetry, may be an effective way of moving beyond postmodernism. There are other ways out of postmodernity and I highly recommend to you the neo-Thomist, neo-Aristotelian philospher Alasdair MacIntyre to you, esp. After Virtue or Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (the latter book is referenced in your encyclopedia article link). MacIntyre begins a very compelling critique of postmodernity from a neo-Aristotelian view. For example, he argues with Thomas that modernity and postmodernity alike are guilty of the sin of pride, and that their distorted worldviews are symptoms of this spiritual malaise.

But if like MacIntyre or Ewa Thompson you are battling postmodernism, then you must first recognize that something which may be called postmodernism exists, right? That seemed to me the issue where you got backed into a corner in your exchange with CJ. It was hard to tell whether you were debating that postmodernism is too vague to exist or if postmodernism needs to be shot down because it's a pathology of Opinion. I shared CJ's confusion and would invite you to be more clear. You sound a bit like a prosecuting attorney who says, "There may or may not have been a homocide, but if there was a homocide, then the defendant must be the guilty party." bestwishes, joe Subscribe to this feed • Add to del.icio.us • Digg This! posted by Joe Perez at 4/10/2007 0 comments links to this post

How absurd it is for one word to mean so many different things

At 3:48 PM, MD said... It seems you really haven't come to grips with

a) how entrenched this word appears to be in your thinking (in other words, how attached you are to it), and

b) how much you want it to mean something, when regular word do the trick just fine, sans the "postmodern" tag.

1) technologically, where postmodernism is simply "what the web offers"

2) sociologically, where postmodernism simply means "people hanging out in (possibly) different ways"

3) politically, where postmodernism, simply means "people read what they agree with"

4) linguistically, where postmodernism simply means "we acknowledge bias"

5) journalistically, where postmodernism simply means "journalists acknowledge the needs of their audience"

The point in all this is how absurd it is for one word to mean so many different things, which already have regular words to describe their phenomena. The logical fallacy is one of coming to a conclusion, then finding facts to support that conclusion. In the process, you imply that smart journalists, smart news organizations, and smart people in general haven't always known that success in the social sphere's contest of ideas means mastering the media and responding to audience's needs. People who think this is a "postmodern insight" demonstrate immaturity.

I think this is a bogus, naive, unearned, and even patronizing tact to take, but one you are compelled to if you believe that "postmodernism" means anything. For it is is the notion of "progress", that whatever is "postmodern" has evolved beyond what came before it. How that happens is never explained, but rather just assumed for the purposes of epistemological taxonomy. The only kind of progress that anyone can point to with any kind of certainty (and not mere conjecture) is technological evolution. Which, for the purposes of this discussion, means you must talk about how media works. Which I don't think you are in any way that, for example, incorporates a "media studies" perspective, such as McLuhan. Until that sort of argument comes from you, I'll say this: Adding bells and whistles does not evolution make. md

At 9:57 AM, MD said...And I'll raise you not only the 103 Great Ideas, researched comprehensively by Mortimer Adler (my favorite philosopher). Also, no mention of postmodernism. But also this article, with the apt quote:

"Postmodernism is the irrational response of today's intellectuals to the failure of socialism both in theory and in practice. It is through the doctrine of postmodernism that these thinkers and politicians can continue their beliefs in many of the ideas that underpinned the failed worldview of socialism."

Or in a word, postmodernism is "whining", that socialism is losing, or in many senses, has lost. md

At 10:16 PM, MD said... America is the land of liberty. The dream of Western Europe, because Western Europe could never truly be a land of liberty, given its history. This is the land of liberty of thought, of living the state of mind that is the condition of liberty. America is not the place, or shouldn't be, for tired taxonomies of continental philosophy...

Postmodernism, and its larger taxonomy, is a blur on being and knowledge. My proposal for remedy is to discard the entire taxonomy, and simply adopt a philosophical life that uses as objects of meditation the ideas and perceptions that regularly pop up in great works of the integrated Humanities. General knowledge, across the disciplines, finding problems, questioning assumptions, returning to the great works time and time again, living a contemporary life. md 6:46 AM

My theoretical push most often follows the logic of Slavoj Zizek and his critique of modernity

NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO Friday, March 17, 2006

The Spear can only be Broken by the Wound that Caused It

Ever since my manner, my writing and my work has become super theoretical one issue has persistently dogged me wherever I go. It pops up during my hysterical internal monologues over sections of my thesis ("oh crap, did I just accidentally reify the split I was trying to pass through?"), questions from Chamorros and others in response to my zany blog posts ("what the hell does "patriotic blowback" mean?") and from people who find my notion of being an "indigenous Lacanian" disturbing. What exactly is this issue, this question that haunts me?

Where does my critique emerge from in relation to modernity?

Okay, so maybe in that form it doesn't sound like something alot of people would ask on an everyday basis, but nonetheless it is this kernal that is always confronting me in my work, and by work I mean academically or what I produce explicitly for academics as well as intellectual work I do for anyone else anywhere.

The phrase "relation to modernity" is the key here, because basically when I critique the United States, when I articulate what decolonization means to me, and what it should be for others, from where am I positioning myself in relation to the thing that I am decolonizing or the framework I am critiquing? Do I place myself outside of modernity, do I root my articulation in something outside of it, or before it? Or do I position myself inside of modernity, making a critique and seeking to dissolve it from within?I am an indigenous subject/non-subject, I am put into that position and I occupy it and chose to continue to occupy it. Yet, given the obvious friendliness of my work with "non-indigenous" theories and scholarship (Zizek, Lacan, Weezer, Evangelion, Pikachu) doesn't this affinity provide an easy autocritique of what I do? To put it another way, am I just reproducing, through my critiques of the ways Chamorros are representing themselves and their culture, the very thing I am attempting to critique, namely the impossibility of the Chamorro?

Depending upon what day of the week it is, my critical relationship to modernity changes, and regularly shows up in the different ways I relate to “indigeneity.” How I articulate it, how I occupy it, and how I resist it (my paper earlier this year on Whale Rider a perfect example). Some days I refuse to give European modernity that much credit, and I insist on the existence of something else, whether in the forms of alternative modernities or alternate epistemologies. Only through attempts to embody and inhabit these forms will real critiques of modernity take place. I work hard to articulate a Chamorro in defiance of the anthropological monopoly on it, which continues to colonize through the very concepts and tendencies that have yet to be decolonized and dealt with in very real ways. (for example, the dilemmia of indigenous peoples is that we are stuck with and stuck in culture, and the predicament of culture is that it is supposed to be stuck, static, and therefore indigenous peoples when entering modernity and modern representation are basically trapped within frameworks of oppressive and colonizing authenticity. In order to be visible to be audible we have to work to retain that cultural position, but speech, representation, like the vision of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park are all predicated on movement, a change, that which culture as it is dominantly articulated, not supposed to do). Some very vibrant recent examples that I've found of this strategy are coming from indigenous epsitemologies in Latin America, the Carribean and the Pacific.

Lately however, my days have not tend to be of the above type. While the hope for something different, outside of modernity remains with me and always makes cameo appearances, my theoretical push most often follows the logic of Slavoj Zizek and his critique of modernity, which provides an interesting way of giving it too much credit to it and giving it not enough credit at the same time. For him the logic of critiquing modernity lies in a line from Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, “Die Wunde schilesst der Speer nur, der si schlug,” “The wound can only be healed by the spear which made it." Or to echo the sentiments of Indian philosopher J.L. Mehta, when confronted with European modernity, “there is not other way open” save to pass through it." This meaning that modernity in its very production, in differing ways, provides the very means for its dissolution. To seek something outside of modernity, or more importantly for issues of indigeneity, something before it, is the most obvious way of ensnaring yourself in it.

Interestingly enough, in my paper Everything you Wanted to Know About Guam, but were Afraid to Ask Zizek: Part 1, I provided a different reading of his "spear" and "wound" spiel.

"The wound can only be healed by the spear that caused it," is therefore like the advice of a doctor, who’s advice is that what the patient needs is a good doctor’s advice, this wound comes with its own logic and its own trap. Colonizing impulses dictate that once wounded, it is the colonizer that Chamorros are to turn to, and to insist bitterly or wait patiently to be given access to that which has hurt them. To me, this is the response that leaves the wound misrecognized, unattended, festering in mythology, eventually becoming something akin to the grotesque thing from Franz Kafka’s story, “A Country Doctor." It becomes a sore so huge and gaping it begins to take a life on a life of its own, precisely because of the lack of understanding as to its purpose or source...posted by Sahuma Minagahet at 1:22 AM

Lacan warned against the desire to do good

The Beyond of Fantasy In a post responding to my remarks on fantasy earlier today, Anon writes: Levi, I know flattering leftist homologies have been made by Zizek and others between Lacan’s subject of drive and Badiou’s subject of the truth procedure,...8:32 AM

I think Anon here makes a very good observation pertaining to the difference between the practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the clinic and Zizek’s political project. Ideally (both Freud and Lacan talked about the impossibility of analysis as a profession), the analyst has no particular stance on the outcome of analysis. Traversing the fantasy in analysis does not entail that someone is going to become a revolutionary subject, that they’ll become leftist, or that they’ll accomplish anything in particular. An analyst is an advocate of the analysand’s desire, not of a preconceived agenda or conception of the good. Indeed, Lacan warned against the desire to do good as this desire inevitably smuggles in the analyst’s own imaginary and desires. Or as Lacan put it much earlier in the Rome Discourse, the analyst agrees to play dead. At most, traversing the fantasy entails that the analysand encounters the non-existence of the big Other and discovers the impossibility of complete or total jouissance which, in turn, opens the possibility of enjoying those bits and remainders of jouissance that are available.

I don’t know that I would describe this in the sort of pragmatic, bourgeois, and utilitarian terms Anon describes it in terms of (the Bourgeois strike me as very concerned with what the Other thinks, as can be discerned in Kierkegaard’s astute psychological descriptions in The Sickness unto Death), but he does have a point. Take Zizek’s description of drive as a sort of parallex shift in how we view desire. The subject experiences desire teleologically as aiming at some state of completeness that somehow we perpetually fail to acheive. I never get the right girl. I never write the right book. I never get the right job. Etc. However, if we anamorphically shift our perspective on desire, we discern drive, where the whole point of the activity is precisely its repetition without ever reaching the goal. The jouissance lies not in the goal, but in the repetition of the failure or the activity itself. Now if the outcome of analysis is a shift from being a subject of desire to a subject of drive, we can very well imagine post-analyzed subjects who draw their enjoyment precisely from some idiotic activity like Kinsey collecting his gall wasps or Husserl producing ever refined phenomenological descriptions of minutiae, without entertaining a belief that these activities are undertaken for the sake of some grand goal that might someday complete itself. The telos of such activity and its jouissance lies in the activity itself, and the subject feels no need to call on the approval of the Other to engage in this enjoyment, nor does he see this enjoyment as an act of transgression attempting to steal jouissance back from the Other.

Along these lines, Dermot Moran, in his Introduction to Phenomenology, relates an anecdote of a very young Husserl being given a pocket-knife one year as a gift. Believing the knife to be too dull, little Edmund sharpened and sharpened the blade until it disappeared entirely. Later in life he came to see his phenomenological descriptions in these terms, wehre the descriptions became ever more precise, drawing all sorts of nuanced scholastic distinctions, until the phenomenon itself often became lost. Now Husserl did entertain world-historical pretensions for the value of phenomenology, but in reading him– especially his lectures or works like Ideas –one gets the sense that the jouissance lies in the activity of drawing distinctions and describing itself, without these descriptions having any particular use or value. Indeed, Husserl sometimes spoke of something like an “epistemic drive” in his discussions of “Ideas” as a telos of knowledge. There’s hardly anything revolutionary in all of this, though Husserl’s jouissance was certainly revolutionary in birthing a thriving philosophical movement with entirely new questions.

By contrast, when Zizek speaks of traversing the social fantasy, something very different is at stake. That is, Zizek envisions a particular outcome of this traversal of the fantasy that produces a particular type of subjectivity. But to what degree can this be said within a Lacanian framework, which strives to suspend any normative criteria in approaching the analysands desire? I’m prepared to say that there are some things that are impossible to continue after traversing the fantasy: I find it very difficult to conceive of a Lacanian that believes in a standard “folk psychological” conception of God, for reasons that I set out in an earlier post on desire and fantasy. This does not entail that other relations to the divine might not be possible within a Lacanian framework. As Bobo once pointed out to me, Lacan, somewhere in seminar 20, names femine jouissance as opening on to the divine. This is a theme that deserves rich and careful exploration. Likewise, I find it difficult to imagine a post-analyzed subject that continues to be racist or sexist. Insofar as racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., are imaginary stances towards the Other designed to account for the absence of jouissance through the theft of jouissance, it does not seem possible for a subject who has traversed the fantasy and encountered the non-existence of the Other and the impossibility of jouissance to continue in the belief that another group has stolen their jouissance. But it seems very difficult to say just why traversing the fantasy would necessarily have to produce a revolutionary subject. It’s suspicious that Zizek was only in analysis for a few weeks and is often downright hostile to Lacan’s clinical orientation. Could we be dealing here with Zizek’s desire writ large? Do others have thoughts on this?

CAUTIONARY NOTE (Since they seem necessary today when interacting with the disciples or true believers where questions are generally unwelcome and experimental larvae are generally disliked, i.e., those who must defend against the void as articulated by Badiou in BE 8): Raising these questions is not a dismissal of Zizek, but a challenge to be addressed, posing the question of just why psychoanalytic categories should produce a certain outcome or subjective position vis a vis the political. It’s well known that Lacan was fairly “conservative” in his own outlook, and, like Freud, suspicious of utopian, emancipatory movements due to his understanding of psychic structures. Is this cynicism unfounded? Why? Posing a question is a first step. ~ by larvalsubjects on November 16, 2006. 2 Responses to “The Beyond of Fantasy”

I’ve had a strangely parallel set of discussions this year over the role of university teaching - where I’ve maintained that it’s inappropriate (and, particularly in the long run, also likely to be counter-productive) to communicate to students that they must embrace specific political views, but where I also think that equipping students with the skills they require to determine their own views in a reasoned way has its own transformative dimension - perhaps not transformative in a specific political direction, but meaningful and important in enabling individuals to direct their own lives (and perhaps ultimately also politically significant in weighing against certain kinds of irrationalism in political life…) (If this posts successfully, it will confirm my firewall theory… ;-P) N. Pepperell http://www.roughtheory.org said this on November 16th, 2006 at 10:24 am

Levi, the way I see it, the subject having traversed the fantasy recognizes that there is no a final destination to their desire - what if, then, performing acts that mark their own intrinsic failure like Kinsey’s idiotic collecting the incollectable is all there is to the subject of drive? But then, what about pottering or dedicating one’s life to studying NFL statistics? Drive or desire? Stavrakakis envisages the traversing of the fantasy in terms of identifying with objet a - something akin to proclaiming “we are all Jews!” in the Hitlerian Germany. What he does not address is why the subject having traversed their fantasy should have any intrinsic motivation to perform any such feats. Why not stick to collecting wasp galls instead? Anonymous said this on November 16th, 2006 at 12:36 pm

As an American whose training was in Continental philosophy and who is a Lacanian

The Theory Wars Continue Once again the theory wars have erupted throughout the blogosphere (here and here and here) and once again I find myself both disturbed and confused as to what these wars are about. On the one hand, if I find myself disturbed by these discussions then this is because vaguely I experience myself as falling within the scope of these critiques, and I see all of this as somehow being bound up with questions of institutional power.Somehow critiques of “Theory” with a capital “t” seem to paint things with too broad a brush. To adopt a somewhat worn out critical term, these critiques seem to reify the object of their discussion.

Suddenly a nebulous entity is conjured into existence, Theory, that functions as a master-signifier (S1), and then a number of other signifiers (S2’s) are attached to this master-signifier: “Deleuze and Guattari”, “Irigaray”, “Freud”, “Lacan”, “Zizek”, “Derrida”, “Levi-Strauss”, “Foucault”, “Butler”, “Spivak”, “Negri and Hardt”, “Adorno”, and so on. Once this move is accomplished, the nature of the critique becomes obvious. Since one as against “Theory”, any of the S2’s attached to this master-signifier can be rejected a priori simply because they fall under this signifier. The proponent of theory is thus left scratching her head, wondering why she was so summarily rejected and denounced, and is thoroughly baffled as to why none of her specific claims were discussed or entertained.

As an American whose training was in Continental philosophy and who is a Lacanian, it comes as no surprise that such a gesture is thoroughly chilling and frightening. Spectres of Quine and the sixteen others signing the letter denouncing Derrida’s honorary doctorate at University of Cambridge immediately come to mind. What was it that motivated Quine to sign such a thing? Similarly, while Adam Kotsko and Anthony Paul Smith are quite right to point out that the analytic/continental divide is artificial– a number of prominent French theorists, for instance, have been deeply influenced by analytic philosophy such as Derrida (who translated Goedel’s incompleteness proof) or Lacan (who often refers to Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and even Quine) –this distinction has nonetheless had real institutional effects on hiring. It has only been in recent years that papers influenced by Continental thinkers have been presented at the American Philosophical Association.

But the real question here is why it is legitimate to group thinkers in this way. That is, what seems required here is a separation of S1 from S2. Drawing a lesson from Plato’s dialogues, it could be argued that Plato’s style itself makes a substantial ethical and philosophical point: Namely, that philosophy occurs as an aleatory encounter between two individuals concerning some pressing matter that is to be hashed out in the here and now. The problem with the master-signifier “Theory” is that it tends to undermine this interaction. If the contention is with some specific claim that a thinker makes, then why isn’t it specifically that claim that is being disputed? If one questions a particular explanatory name about the nature of the world– for instance, Luhmann’s claim that the social consists of systems that are composed of communications, not individuals or persons –then why isn’t it this specific claim that is being addressed. If the issue is with the Lacanian conception of desire or a specific application of this concept, then why isn’t this the object of critique?

Often I hear the suggestion that claims made by the so-called advocates of theory are ungrounded or undemonstrated. Yet is the person making these claims given the opportunity to defend them by the would-be critic? The assumption seems to be that the so-called defenders of Theory cannot support their claims and simply haphazardly apply castles in the cloud to whatever issue they’re attending to. However, wouldn’t the more charitible reading be that perhaps critics are working within a theoretical paradigm much like Kuhn describes, and they take certain claims to be established within that paradigm.

However, as a more pressing matter, what I can’t figure out is what alternative there might be to Theory. If the critics of Theory wish to convince me that they occupy a superior position they’re going to have to offer me something in return, some sort of option or some sort of alternative. All of my analytic training– and by this I mean Anglo-American philosophy –teaches me that there is no such thing as a non-theory laden perspective. This is the lesson to be drawn from the likes of Sellars. What, then, is this non-theory laden perspective of which these critics seem to be speaking? ~ by larvalsubjects on February 6, 2007

I had a powerful and upsetting experience yesterday

Friday, April 06, 2007 Pragmatic Philosophy for Easter: Anyone who has made any effort to read and digest philosophy, whether it is the Holy Scriptures, Theology, or any other kind of philosophical thought will agree that philosophy is usually challenging. I have also heard many people (friends, family, fellow students, strangers) argue that philosophy is impractical. They often argue that philosophy and theology are simply academic exercises where scholars gather and argue of things that have no bearing upon daily life. Some even argue that philosophers and theologians should devote their lives to something of greater substance that affects the daily lives of people in need. I want to try, as best as I can in a brief blog entry, to respond to claims such as these...

The Constitution of the United States declared that slaves were 3/5 human and 2/5 non-human. A philosopher by the name of Benjamin Franklin objected. He voted against the Constitution and refused to be considered as a candidate for President. He spent the rest of his life fighting for the abolition of slavery on the grounds that Africans were human and deserved the same basic human rights as non-African humans.

I hope that this history is not unfamiliar to people, particularly North and South Americans. However, I mention it here because I think it is an important demonstration of the practical use of philosophy. Philosophy and Theology are primarily concerned with questions like “What is a human person?” or “Why is one living thing called ‘human’ and another thing ‘non-human’?” Also, “Why do we hold some people to be more valuable than others? Should this be so? Why don’t we change this?”

Elizabeth, Ali, and I had a powerful and upsetting experience yesterday. We arrived in Pondicherry at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. I will leave her to blog about that experience, but my blog is, in large part, a reaction to those experiences. Basically, Aurobindo was an Oxford-educated philosopher of the 20th Century who argued that each and every individual person is as valuable as any group of persons. To him, institutions, governments, and even religious groups often overlook that each person is unique and that diversity is every bit a part of our unity as our similarities. While we should always strive to work together to make the world a better place, where all people can experience the fullness of life free from as much suffering as possible, we must never forsake the fact that we have been Created by God as individual persons who are unique and valuable.

For Aurobindo, it is not because we are the same that we should listen to one another and work together, it is because we are unique and special. There is a Western Philosopher, Wittgenstein, that made a similar statement. He said, “I am not less important than you. I am not more important than you. I am not equally as important as you. I am a unique and special person, and so are you.” Sri Aurobindo said that “our Unity is fulfilled in our diversity.”

Please forgive me for the length of this blog. I have tried to make my argument as brief as possible. As a philosopher and as a theologian, though, I deeply believe that philosophy and theology are very pragmatic/practical endeavors. In my humble opinion, we simply must ask “why do I value this person this way and that person another way? Why do I live my life the way that I do? Why does this person live her/his life the way that they do?” Ultimately, all of these questions are part and parcel of the ultimate philosophical/theological question: “Why am I here? What am I called to do? How should I live my life today, tomorrow, and everyday?”

These are unanswerable questions, but this does not mean that we should not live every single day with these questions in mind. If our lives and our choices – our exercise of free-will – are not guided by our best attempts to answer these questions, then what is our life guided by? My philosophy and my theology leads me to the belief that everyday I must humbly bow before God and pray that I might discern my purpose. Every single day, I believe that God answers these questions. Many days, I am too wrapped up in the trivial comings-and-goings of life to recognize God’s answer – but even on those days, I believe that God has provided the answers. The reason I believe this because on those other days – the days that I am open and receptive to God’s discerning call, I am able to receive those answers. It is my belief that God provides these answers every day, regardless of whether or not we ask those questions. But when we prayerfully ask, we are more open and receptive to receive the answers.

Returning to my opening statement, philosophy and theology are challenging. Sometimes, they are challenging because we do not understand the questions. Other times, though, they are challenging because we do know the answers. In light of Easter Sunday, I invite you all to read Mark’s account of the empty tomb in Mark 16:1-8. We are told that Mary, Mary, and Salome “went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” As theologians, we all must ask, why were they afraid? Were they afraid because they did not understand? OR, were they afraid because they did understand? They had been told to go to Galilee. (Mark 16:7) Perhaps they were afraid because they knew that it was their turn (and our turn) to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and sacrifice for the sake of those who could not experience the fullness of life free from as much suffering as possible. Perhaps they remembered what Jesus said in Mark 8:34 “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” posted by Brad at 4:14 PM

How is it possible for an analyst to be a philosopher?

If no one is interested in the symptom of another, then this is because the sinthome is nonsensical, a silent jouissance, a jouissance that has been subtracted from the field of meaning and the Other. Sinthome is symptom that has become drive. I find it impossible to be interested in Joyce, for even when I’m interested in Joyce, I am interested in myself. The jouissance of the letter embodied in Joyce’s text functions as a rorschach for my own symptom, which is why interpretations of Joyce are always the pet projects of their authors. One might say something similar of Lacan’s reading of Freud or any reading of Lacan. The beauty of any reading of Lacan is that one is singularly responsible for what Lacan will have been. In this regard, Lacan’s writing performatively enacts his theory of “oracular interpretation”– interpretations that can be taken in a variety of different ways –making the reader, like the analysand, responsible for what they find in the text...

All of this, I think, poses, in very vague form, a philosophical question I’ve been revolving about: How is it possible for an analyst to be a philosopher? Lacan, of course, is legendary for his critiques of philosophy. For Lacan philosophy is a discourse of the imaginary, an attempt to totalize the world, a discipline that disavows the constitutive split of the subject. Yet when Lars evokes “specific voices”– so many of which we find here: Spurious, Blah-feme, Jodi Dean, Yusef, Glen, the Yak, N.Pepperell, K-Punk, $, IT, and so on –there is already a challenge to thought, for a specific voice is precisely that which evades the determination of the conceptual.

A few months ago I wrote a post asking whether or not Badiou could be called a materialist. There the argument was that something is added to a mathematical space when it is materially instantiated, and this seems lost in Badiou’s onto-logy. The issue is the same with philosophy in general. In the analytic setting you are concerned with the specific voice of the analysand, sans conceptuality… With it’s pure materiality, it’s saying, and its having been said. Lacanian concepts do not appear in the analytic setting, unless the analysand evokes them. Indeed, it’s not unusual to undergo an entire analysis without being told whether you’re obsessional, hysteric, psychotic, perverse, phobic, etc. All of this is irrelevant to the analysand’s act of saying and to what the analysand says. Yet philosophy, it seems, institutes the regime of the exchangable and the equivalent through its formation of the concept. It effaces the singularity of the event of saying so as to institute that which might be comparable in the said. It seems to me that this is one reason that philosophy must always be at odds with literature, for literature sings the psalm of the remainder, of the materiality of the voice and the event, or of that which cannot be exchanged under the umbrella of a concept. A literary event can only be a spur for thought. What is always lost in philosophy is the event. Is it possible for philosophy to preserve the event? ~ by larvalsubjects on November 19, 2006. 11 Responses to “Lars Watch”

Lars is a really wonderful writer. I actually was thinking of some bits of his I had read before coming over here. In a review I’m writing I try to make the argument that, and this means no disrespect to you, Continental philosophy’s new home will be in the UK. By this I mean that, for some reason, the passion for thinking in the distinctive style that is Continental (always with the historical, political, literary, etc) is very much alive in the UK. I think Lars is part of this. Anthony Paul Smith said this on November 20th, 2006 at 1:43 am

Anthony, no offense taken. I think there are institutional reasons for this. As I see it, continental philosophy departments are not very ammenable to doing philosophy in the United States. Our students are trained to do close reading and to be intellectual historians, but not to argue, contest various positions, and develop concepts. This entails that the only way one can practice philosophy in the United States is by engaging with other thinkers and making them say what you would like to say. This problem is exacerbated by continental professional conferences, where the only papers accepted are those dealing with various masters of the tradition, rather than accepting work done by newly emerging independent thinkers. I don’t know if such work is promoted in England or not, as I see a lot of commentary going on there as well. Suppose that Badiou, Ranciere, or Deleuze had been born in the United States and did their graduate work at Penn State. Would Being and Event, Disagreement, or Difference and Repetition have been written? Would it be possible for them to be written in England? There’s an odd way in which this kind of work seems to be prohibited here in the States in continental journals and departments, though that might just be a fantasy on my part. The alternative seems to be “do commentary and ignore philosophy” or “do analytic philosophy and be facile”. A third possibility: blog and forget the entire stinking system. Sinthome said this on November 20th, 2006 at 1:52 am

tThanks as always Sinthome. This is a tangent, so my apologies to the host of this comment thread: Anthony, thanks, and I like the idea that the new home of Continental Philosophy being in the UK, and I hope this is, or becomes the case. I should say, without false modesty, that I’m not part of it at all! Clearly what is going on in and around Middlesex is very exciting, and there are other places, too - Dundee, for one, that are worth watching. And of course isolated individuals all over the place (too isolated …).
I suppose what I think is vital is that there exist unusual fora in which the work of interesting and emerging voices is supported. For a time, there was a yearly seminar at Marjons in Plymouth where only 3 speakers were invited over 2 full days. Each speaker could invite 5 guests (’ideal interlocutors’), all of whom were fully supported in terms of travel and accommodation. Papers were circulated in advance, and the atmosphere was far removed from that of the usual conferences. Speakers were often barely published, and selected entirely on the basis of their work.
Secondly, it is vital to review at length those books which are attempts to do philosophy. Not simply to support your friends - although this, too, is important - but to foreground interesting work in the field. Of course often the field stretches far beyond philosophy. When this is the case, it is important to alert those trained as philosophers to that work.
Thirdly, genuine collaboration is very important. Not one’s own work but that work that is produced between you - or even that is occasioned by a conference or a symposium on a *theme* rather than a philosopher. This is not, of course to say that it isn’t it important to hold conferences on themes. I particularly admire those who continue collaborations across disciplinary fields not for one off events but over a series of years.
Fourthly, for me, the use of the internet is all. I cannot understand why journals are not available free of access, via the net. Fortunately, interesting work is being done in its own right on the net - right here at this blog, for example.
I totally agree with your comments, Sinthome. I strongly agree that independent thinkers (of which I am certainly not one) are not supported by conferences and so on whether in the UK or in the US. For the most part, publishers will not touch work in the field which is not on a recognisable name. Thankfully, there are a few who slip by, but then there is the net, which remains pitifully underused. Why aren’t electronic copies of books being exchanged here? But apologies again for drawing the discussion away on a tangent. Lars spurious said this on November 20th, 2006 at 8:34 am

Just to pick up very briefly on something that I’d probably need to write on at greater length to have some chance of making sense - your comment: “For Lacan philosophy is a discourse of the imaginary, an attempt to totalize the world, a discipline that disavows the constitutive split of the subject.” I understand the worry that informs this kind of critique - but I want to combine it, I think, with a worry from a different direction: that, if we happen to be participating in the creation of a world that, among all its various particularities, also involves something like “real abstractions”, then we can disempower ourselves if we are too severe in disavowing conceptual abstraction. The task, I suspect, would be keeping abstractions in their place - using them, not as general principles and still less as normative ideals for thought, but as pragmatic tools that may be required to grasp something quite distinct - something whose specific contingency might be very difficult to capture without them… But this is probably too compressed…N. Pepperell roughtheory said this on November 20th, 2006 at 8:39 am

Sinthome, I feel the effects of being trained to read a text closely and it can be paralyzing. However, I wonder if you don’t make too sharp a distinction between working through figures and “doing philosophy”. I think there is a subtle difference between Difference and Repetition and Being and Event, both of which go about constructing their philosophy by engagement with figures and texts, and the commentary industry. This is why I included Lars in this, though he’s always far too modest about himself. In so far as Blanchot does belong to the tradition we call philosophy who can say that his two books are merely commentaries? They are engagement and they show a real mind at work behind the writing. I worry that ontology is getting too much pride of place in the attempt to revitalize Continental philosophy, and I hope we don’t leave out this kind of literary philosophy as well. I mean, isn’t Lars a kind of virtual Kierkegaard (Apologies for speaking as if you weren’t here)? Maybe I define philosophy too broadly, I’ve been accused of this before and I’m not sure they were wrong. Anthony Paul Smith said this on November 20th, 2006 at 9:00 am

N.P., I think that’s a very good point. We don’t want to go in the opposite direction of being paralyzed or incapable of making any affirmative statement by virtue of the thesis that it is only a statement within one contingent world. It seems to me that a good deal of deconstruction and some variants of postmodern theory have gone this route. Sinthome said this on November 20th, 2006 at 6:43 pm

Anthony, I don’t disagree. I recognize that all philosophical texts are produced within a dialogical network. I’ve occasionally described philosophical texts as very slow conversations on this blog. I also recognize works such as Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena, Dissemination, Of Grammatology, Heidegger’s lectures on Kant, Plato, Leibniz, Aristotle, etc., and the works of Blanchot as philosophical texts.

On the one hand, I’m arguing that continental philosophy in the States is subject to certain institutional constraints that actually inhibit philosophical work and promote commentary alone. In my view, just about the only genuine philosophy being done in the States (and perhaps England as well) is Anglo-American. Even Ed Casey, who does original phenomenological work, must filter those phenomenological analyses through commentaries on other phenomenologists. About the closest thing we have to philosophers in the United States are figures such as Judith Butler, and various feminist and queer theorists, who enjoy a greater degree of conceptual freedom due to the relative newness of their field. In short, I think the issue here is one of the signature. If you are a continentalist in the States than your signature is largely under erasure. None of this is to denigrate commentary or hermeneutics.

On the other hand, I think much of this has to do with how philosophy is taught in continental programs. One of the things that I’ve found in my experience is that everything comes to be driven by textual hermeneutics, and that there’s something scandalous in arguing against one of the great masters or contesting a claim made by the master. Again and again these sorts of arguments are responded to with the claim that the disputant is “misinterpreting” the work, that they need to go back and look more carefully, etc. That is, engagement with another thinker is reduced to questions of *interpretation* rather than questions of the legitimacy of claims. We’re taught to *understand* texts, not to question whether they’re true or false, sound or unsound. This generates blank stares when someone does, in fact, dispute a text. Indeed, it seems to me that if you’re not practicing Anglo-American philosophy, the only thinkers entitled to make truth claims and argue against other thinkers are the French and Germans. French and German philosophers make truth claims and the rest get busy interpreting these claims, writing commentaries on these claims, applying these claims in a variety of ways, etc. Once again, this is not to dispute the importance of good interpretation, just to point to a rather bizarre phenomenon. Sinthome said this on November 20th, 2006 at 6:56 pm

I wouldn’t have thought to generalise from my experiences, but what you’re saying certainly matches them: I was told quite explicitly that, given my interests, I had to become an intellectual historian and, in practice, could only ever get projects approved that were commentary-based. I was constantly having to fend off questions whose premise seemed to be, essentially, that one would be an acolyte of a particular tradition: “whose” was I? I had thought this was an idiosyncracy of my US university - it’s a bit depressing to hear that it might be more general (although it does make sense of certain aspects of what seems to be published…).
I have more freedom in Australia - at the cost of an intellectual community (I’m not making generalisations about Australian scholarship as a whole here - this may be a function of the institution where I’m currently working, which I value because it trusts me enough to leave me alone to do my work, but which has a very strong policy and practice orientation).
An orientation to truth claims is still very unfashionable everywhere - this, though, it seems to me is more of an historical issue, and has, I think, been in the process of breaking for the past several years now: you can feel in the work of graduate students coming up through the ranks, for example, a much greater comfort level with these kinds of questions - perhaps not enough to make this a dominant orientation, but enough to make it much easier to find other people here and there with whom you can speak… I think this is also visible in some more practically-oriented social movements… Perhaps a byproduct of increasing familiarity with recent transformations, which no longer seem so reality-shattering in their implications… Not sure…N. Pepperell roughtheory said this on November 20th, 2006 at 9:11 pm

Levi, I was going to pick up on your dichotomy of philosophy as focusing on the general (or conceptual) and literature as pursuing the singular. Could you elaborate what exactly you mean by that? I was going to say some Rortian stupidity that Nietzsche is as much of a poet as Mallarme but this is too trivial. Over the time, I’ve come to see the literature-philosophy split in purely formal terms, per Kripe, as a result of a “primal baptism”. That is, I suspect that once upon a time in the ancient Greece, something went horribly wrong and someone had a good ideological or whichever other reason to believe that that the kind of things Plato is writing is really different from poetry. Poetry was of course always part of the official political machine due to being institutionalized in ancient Greece much sooner, rhapsodic excesses being the necessary obscene complement of the official culture. Every social formation needs a poet to justify its existence. But which nation needs a philosopher? What then interests me is this moment in time when philosophy splits off from the official literature. It’s like Freud’s seeking the primal crime of killing the father of the primordial horde. You know there never was one, empirically, but you still sense that the cultural norms, along with the much celebrated philosophy-literature distinction, are somehow arbitrary, they’ve got to be based on some primal act of foundation. Anonymous said this on November 23rd, 2006 at 8:29 am

Anon, I’m not sure that I have a sophisticated theoretical account of the distinction between literature and philosophy. My point was just that when I deal with the narrative of an analysand, what is important is the events that have populated their life and the style of their language, rather than the way in which they exemplify a set of concepts or can be treated as equivalent to others. There’s a reason psychoanalysts write case studies: every analysis is singular. By contrast, I take it that the concept institutes the regime of exchangability, where two things can be seen as equivalent to one another in terms of the intension of the conception. Historically philosophy has sought to ignore the individual differences of things, treating them as irrelevant to the conceptual comprehension of a *type* of thing. This has begun to change somewhat, but not much. By contrast, it seems to me that literature is focused on precisely these individual differences or differences that escape conceptual comprehension. I wasn’t trying to defend a Platonic perspective on this difference, though I might have inadvertantly ended up doing so. Plato used this distinction as a way of dismissing the poetic, whereas I was doing precisely the opposite. Sinthome said this on November 23rd, 2006 at 5:06 pm

Or take the Lacanian practice of not revealing diagnoses over the course of analysis. This is one way in which analysis is radically different from therapy. In therapy you go to your therapist, often take a test or answer a series of questions, and the therapist comes back and tells you that you’re suffering from depression, are borderline psychotic, are schizoid, etc. Of course, all of this is for the sake of insurance companies. Therapy unfolds under a medical model, and aims at subsuming the patient under a general concept such as “depression”, that then renders the patient equivalent as an instant of a concept.

In analysis you’ll never hear any of this. Indeed, analysts don’t have patients at all, nor are they dealing with illnesses, but rather have “analysands” and deal with *solutions*. For an analyst a symptom isn’t a sickness, but a solution. You will never hear your analyst give you a diagnosis because the diagnostic categories are irrelevant to the process of analysis (and are even counter-productive as they position the analyst as master that *names* the analysand, whereas the aim is for the analysand to name himself). Nor will you hear your analyst say “this is objet a”, “this is repression”, “this is identification”, etc. All the analyst says is “talk”, and the rule is that the analyst can only intervene in and through what the *analysand* has introduced into discourse. In this regard, analysis is radically anti-conceptual and attends only to the fabric of the analysand’s discourse, the singular events that populate the analysand’s life, and the style that the analysand’s speech embodies and enacts. This is the opposite of philosophy, where individual events and narratives tend to disappear altogether in favor of the pristine concept. One need only read Hegel’s Science of Logic side by side with Freud’s case study on Dora to discern this difference. Sinthome said this on November 23rd, 2006 at 5:15 pm