Rolling Philosophy

i've spoken to german people who prefer to read the critiques in english because they're so incomprehensible in german. maybe they're just dumb.

haven't read the book but I would assume nancy traces the lineage thru post-kantian aesthetic views of german romantics (a la The Literary Absolute, which I have read, and quite enjoyed)

philosophy/theory book blurbs are about 90% gibberish i find. i have books i know and love and have read multiple times and i couldnt even tell you what the back blurb was going on about.

a relevant passage from the translator's intro to said book:

What The Literary Absolute demonstrates is first of all that the concept of literature arises as a response to the problems posed by Kant's critical enterprise. While discussions of the conceptual genealogy of the Jena romantics often concentrate on Fichte's concept of the I and the beginnings of speculative dialectics, this study situates their texts more generally, and perhaps more pertinently, with respect to the "crisis" that arises in the aftermath of Kant. To condense the argument of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the problem of presentation that concerns us here, the presentation of philosophy and the subject of philosophy (of what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy refer to as the "system-subject"), is opened up by Kant. Kant bequeaths this crisis of presentation to his successors by effectively depriving the subject of its being-subject, i.e., of its adequate presentation of itself to itself, reducing the subject to little more than the logically necessary, purely regulatory idea of the unity of its representations. This crisis of presentation provides an initial context for the development of idealism and romanticism alike: "One must set out from this problematic of the subject unpresentable to itself and from this eradication of all substantialism in order to understand what romanticism will receive, not as a bequest but as its 'own' most difficult and perhaps insoluble question" ( 30 ). Idealism and Jena romanticism represent divergent yet intersecting responses to this crisis, responses that cannot be distinguished as simply philosophical on the one hand, and literary on the other. The imbrication of their responses is in fact already suggested by the two manners in which Kant third Critique had earlier begun to sketch out a potential resolution of the problems of the subject. The Critique of Judgment points toward a form of auto-presentation in reflective judgment, i.e., in the subject's synthetic function; at the same time, it suggests that a (simply regulatory) presentation of the subject occurs by means of the Beautiful in works of art, in the formative power of nature, and in history and culture, or the Bildung of humanity.

thanks snowy, that makes more sense

"A terrific writer" is about the last thing I'd think about Kant. "A terrific thinker", sure, but all the translations I've read are pretty awful.

My Kant teacher in grad school went out of his way to point out passages in the First Critique in which Kant was "vivid" with language, noting that "look, Kant isn't as dry or opaque as everyone says, he can use metaphors!" or some such. I found the attempt to liven Kant up endearing.

where do I start if I want to learn more about the concept about 'the other' or 'othering'

i suppose you start with hegel

levinas and lacan are probably your 20th century bros here, though their ideas of the other arent the same iirc

ugh lacan, avoid lacan

i suppose postcolonibros would be helpful here too

postbrolonial studies

^^ someone write this paper please

I kinda skipped over hegel in uni tbrr, supposed it's time to get into him again

lacan + maybe buber (who isn't as good, but easier read), levinas too. for postcolonbros i'd recommend achebe, said (def), um abjection theory should deal with this too

also feministbros

kristeva

sara ahmed has some really interesting (pretty contemporary) stuff about othering + particularly wrt hate and affect

*takes notes*

thanks postbrolonials

if u wanna take the feminist route which i am p much biased towards i would recommend a course of debeauvoir irigaray and wittig def. but then france+chicks is kindof how i roll w/ these things (recently found out irigaray is belgian tho!)

feministbros seems kindof the wrong way of phrasing that i think

irigaray's speculum of the other woman is my jam. it got her thrown out of lacan's school. hardcore.

lacan is such bullshit

not saying it's true here but 90% of the time someone tells me that lacan is bullshit it turns out they have almost no experience (or comprehension) of his work. they just think that because they don't understand it it is stupid

side note: did the band Aa get their name from lacan?

psychbronalysis

nah i just think that psychoanalysis is bs, fuck the subconscious

Lacan was a bro.

i'm a reasonable fan of lacan, but happy to label him bullshitter supreme. unlike yer derridas and yer deleuzes i think there's genuinely no reason for him to write in the dumb way he does.

After giving a talk at Berkeley once a guy accosted me at tea afterwards & would not shut up about Lacan, even though my talk was on logic. I'm pretty sure that what this guy was saying was bullshit, but I guess I'm not sure that he was getting Lacan right.

another music side note: have always wondered whether Smashing Pumpkins "Zero" was Lacan inspired.

i will say that lots of Lacan fans tend to be very passionate + outspoken in academia and generally aren't as smart as Lacan

(all this in my experience in academia, obv, ymmv, etc etc)

is that because when you challenge them they point to lacan and then it is hard to refute lacan

i mean more bc they talk about lacan-this and lacan-that and when pressed a lot of their ideas break down. (i've seen this at conferences where questions reduce the presenter to just repeating, 'you'll have to look in lacan to understand' in some form over and over)

i will say a lot of my lacan comes second hand via griselda pollock and other feminist art historians but it tends to be the point at which its difficult for me to take seriously what they're saying anymore. like theres this chapter in vision and difference where she does this lacanian analysis of rossetti's paintings and its just a bit like "oh ok thats the phallus is it? right ok" (she is otherwise awesome, i just wish ppl could use marx instead of lacan bc eg. spivak is a way more credible writer for me bc of this and only this)

some dude who picked me up hitchhiking once got into a mad argument w/ me about this and i resolved to read society and its discontents but i uh havent

civ + discontents. this is btw why i love Walter Benjamin (and Adorno) so much. Marx + some psychoanalysis. it's hot shit.

i like benjamin bc he is mystical

benjamin is my bro

mystical benjamin is the scholem connection

I like Benjamin but I find him TOO HARD a lot of the time because of his mystical shizz. Like, I can totally follow Agamben saying much the same thing but Benjamin makes my head hurt.

gershom brolem

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=2246786&boardid=77&threadid=81522

the brolitical unconscious is levels for a 'modern conception of literature'

Lacan isn't bullshit

re: the other: as somebody said, it starts with Levinas on the one hand and Kojeve's existential-marxist interpretation of the master-slave dialectic on the other (lol). and Kojeve begat Sartre and Lacan, who begat Fanon and a bunch of feminist theory, with probably some stuff I'm missing somewhere in there

what's the thread nakh linked? i'm still not on 77

reading lots of/about Heidegger these days

bro-ing-toward-death

the thread nakh linked to is about l0u1s jagg3r and the post he linked to is a gif of a book about gershom scholem