Rolling Philosophy

i was just thinking of reading that. been pondering NEGATION, figured it was time.

epictetus, ench. c. 2:

do not be joyful about any superiority that is not your own. if the horse were to say joyfully, "i am beautiful," one could put up with it. but certainly you, when you say joyfully, "i have a beautiful horse," are joyful about the good of the horse. what, then, is your own? your way of dealing with appearances. so whenever you are in accord with nature in your way of dealing with appearances, then be joyful, since then you are joyful about a good of your own.

i think i'm gonna jump into after finitude again soon. i've been in there before. i might've even finished it at least once? don't have a good memory. but i got the kindle version a little while back and i'm thinking of starting it up.

at some point i should probably read harman's meillassoux book too. esp. for the interview. wonder if they're ever gonna publish the divine inexistence in english.

my goddamn laruelle hasn't even shipped yet. currently reading Martin Jay's "Marxism and Totality" in its stead.

let us know how the laruelle goes.

i should probably see if there's been any good secondary literature on him that's out yet too. although the way in might just be something primary, even if it's in translation and harder going than having it explained clearly to you. if you take the secondary lit first approach it may color -- probably will inevitably color -- your own interpretation, which might not be the way to start out.

there's a lot to read.

might fuck w/ a lil seneca soon too -- "on the shortness of life"

https://twitter.com/AcademeSeinfeld

btw marks, there's a Rocco Gangle introduction to Philosophies of Difference that I understand is quite good. Anthony Paul Smith also did a series of video lectures which I think should still be available somewhere, can't locate them just now but I'll try to find em and get back to you.

maybe not online anywhere actually, can't find anything after this announcement http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/laruelle-e-seminar/ but you could email Anthony about them.

i was thinking i'd get the "Dictionary of Non-Philosophy" as well (which sounds tremendously interesting in and of itself, as a kind of philosophical project) but i've bought way too many books this month. maybe once i've gotten some way into Principles.

xpost thank you! i was in a reading group that was supposed to go through gangle's translation of philosophies of difference, but we gave up on it quickly, like after one meeting or whatever quickly, and i can't remember how much of it i read, but i don't think it was very much. i think gangle teaches at a college pretty close to my house, incidentally.

i think i have that blog in my rss reader, along with some others.

gangle has a really interesting article on peirce, deleuze, and self-organization a la stuart kauffman. i've always been looking for more stuff from him since that sorta thing is exactly what I'm interested in--turns out he's been working on Laruelle!

there's some analytic stuff i'd like to read eventually, like patricia churchland's new one and some jesse prinz

xpost kauffman's been on my radar before. maybe via ray brassier?

that would make sense, i think. i ran into him via luhmann.

one reason peirce is so interesting to me is that you could argue he's a central figure in or originator of three (maybe 4) very different traditions:

1) american semiotics a la thomas sebeok
2) contintental philosophy of both derridean and deleuzean stripes.
3) 20th century analytic philosophy
4) systems theory (originating from cybernetics)

of course when you devote your life to writing volume upon volume of impenetrable and brilliant stuff there's gonna be a lot of strands for people to take hold of and develop (or not).

wait, you think derrida comes out of peirce?

well there's been a lot written on that--but derrida himself says (in a note to Of Grammatology) that Peirce "goes very far in the direction of a deconstruction of the signifier." or something like that.

ah sorry messed up my terms. it's "Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified..."

basically pages 48-50 in Of Grammatology are about Peirce.

ah cool! i don't know much about him

speaking of derrida, have you read the peters bio ryan?

i have not! looks good though.

yeah i'd like to get a copy at some point.

ditto paul churchland's "plato's camera" and a bunch of other stuff (adrian johnston, patricia churchland, brassier, less than nothing)

been working through both Ecrits (an essay a day!) and Reinhart Koselleck's Critique and Crisis (which seems really interesting, though i can imagine some may take issue with it). Principles of Non-Philosophy is on the way and I hope to make slow and steady progress with it when it arrives. I noted a local bookstore has Laruelle's "Dictionary" so maybe I'll pick that up as a companion piece.

i was really interested in Nihil Unbound until i read an interview that Brassier sorta disowned it? hard to work up the commitment to engage with a new thinker when he's already moved on!

also Luhmann's Theory of Society, Volume 2 is on my shelf staring back at me.

alright, got a churchland book in my room now:

http://i.imgur.com/86GW6dp.jpg

i plan on starting it tonight so i might be back eventually w/ followup

actually, maybe i'll wait until tomorrow or another day

i read the translators preface to "Principles of Non-Philosophy" today. They remarked that Derrida famously called Laruelle a "terrorist within philosophy." Finding that pretty striking considering who said it, I did some googling and found this debate between Derrida and Laruelle, which I haven't had a chance to read closely yet:

http://pervegalit.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/laruelle-derrida.pdf

Worth pointing out as well that this debate precedes the publication of "Principles" by about ten years (I think).

I hope the formatting works out here:

Am I practicing terror? There are two readings of my text, obviously. There is a philosophical reading, one in which I do practice terror. And there is a non-philosophical reading, which is obviously my reading. And from the latter point of view, I am reluctant to concede that I am practicing terror. I would like to suggest to you why not. I was very careful to say that terror is bound up with overturning. I only used the word "terror" in contexts that related it to overturning.

So, are the relations I have described between science and philosophy relations of overturning?

Absolutely not. The whole problem for me, having studied your work along with that of other contemporary philosophers, lies in defining a point of view that would not be acquired philosophically; which is to say, a point of view that would not be acquired via philosophical operations, be they those of doubt, controversy, or overturning as principal philosophical operation, and even displacement insofar as it is of a piece with overturning. From science to philosophy, because I return to this point – and it is this direction that governs everything I write – there is no overturning. There is merely a elimitation but one that does not take the form of an overturning. However, maybe it should be made more explicit, there is a limitation of philosophy by science, that is all.

But above all I do not overturn philosophy; were I claiming to overthrow it, then that would be pointless gesture, a zero-sum game. The entire enterprise would then be contradictory.

Jacques Derrida:

When you say that you are calling into question the sufficiency of philosophy, in what way is this gesture different from a host of others, mine among them? Why erase the latter gesture and consign it to the realm of sufficiency?

François Laruelle:

You often say that I conjoing ontology and deconstruction. Obviously I only conjoin them under certain conditions, I do not put conflate them in general terms, and I have sufficiently emphasized in other works how seriously I take the difference between certain forms of metaphysics and your work on and in metaphysics. But if I allow myself to conjoin them, it is in the name of the struggle against the Principle of sufficient philosophy, and in that regard alone. What is more, I do call any philosophy into question, since I posit the equivalence of all philosophical decisions.

What is probably wounding for philosophers is the fact that, from the point of view I have adopted, I am obliged to posit that there is no principle of choice between a classical type of ontology and the deconstruction of that ontology. There is no reason to choose one rather than the other. This is a problem that I have discussed at great length in my work (Les philosophies de la dif érence), whether there can be a principle of choice between philosophies. Ultimately, it is the problem of the philosophical decision. And I sought a point of view – one can query the manner in which I arrived at it, or constituted it – which implies the equivalence of all philosophical decisions, or in other words, what I call democracy and peace.

this is good but i can't include all of Laruelle's reponse:

Jacques Derrida:

I don't understand what is meant by "transcendental" outside of philosophy. But whenyou tell us: my response, it is the thing itself, then, I want to put two questions to you: isn't this a philosophical move here: the appeal to the thing itself? What, which, what is the thing itself?

François Laruelle:

The One is the thing itself.

Jacques Derrida:

You think that the relation to the One as the thing itself is an experience that is nonphilosophical?

François Laruelle:

Yes, precisely because it is not a relation. This is the crux of the misunderstanding, which is to say that you persist in wanting to make a philosophical reading through the prism or the optic of the philosophical decision, albeit a decision which has been worked upon, you persist in wanting to read what I do through the medium of philosophy.

fass.kingston.ac.uk/activities/item.php?updatenum=2459 i'm speaking at this conference next week. who wants to write my paper for me?

little known truth-functional operation, conjoingtion

this Laruelle ish reads like an obfuscated version of Quine's "Epistemology Naturalized"; which is also ish, but at least I know what the view is, in contrast to e.g. "the equivalence of all philosophical decisions, or in other words, what I call democracy and peace"

or is the latter just another take on "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen"?

or relativism?

democracy and peace, man

tentative and reductive hypothesis: L seems to think philosophy makes a distinction between immanence and transcendence--which works itself out in various ways. non-philosophy is perhaps grounded in a refusal to make that distinction, or to refuse to see it as meaningful in some way,* and then see what happens when you do that. ("democracy and peace"?)

*perhaps in the manner of Cusa: situating itself between them, infinity on two sides.

that's how I read this for now, anyway:

It seems to me that philosophy cannot help but deploy itself in a hybrid structure that combines transcendence and immanence. Whatever their modes, however varied these two coordinates, philosophical space is a space with two coordinates, transcendence and immanence. It may be that metaphysical transcendence has a kind of tain or lining of alterity; that may well be possible, in which case there would no longer be just two dimensions, but three or four, one could try to discover them. But it seems to be a defining characteristic of philosophy to combine something like a position with something like a decision, and hence to deploy unity, but to always deploy unity along with its opposite.

how are "transcendence" and "immanence" to be understood there?

im not sure but so far i think those terms are being kept intentionally vague. maybe he intends for them to map onto "inside/outside," "phenomenal/noumenal," "beings/Being," etc...

when he says "deploy unity along with its opposite" im inclined to translate that into a distinction between unity and identity. the "unity" in question then being the unity of a structuring difference. of course this begs the question, what is the structuring difference of non-philosophy. you can see the "unity" he's deploying in the very name of the discourse!

also inclined to think that maybe part of what he thinks he is doing is creating a space outside philosophy, a place to point to the contingency of philosophy as philosophy, from which to re-orient our relationship to it. but then this is why I am perhaps misguidedly thinking this all has something to do with pragmatism. some followers say he subordinates philosophy to the "human"--isn't that the quintessential (and questionable) pragmatic move?

hey i may be finished this paper before to the day of presenting it, that would be a first.

what's it about?

erm, to. guess i'm getting back to the stage i was at yesterday when i wrote 'specifical' and 'phenomenonologically'.

xp effectively doxxing myself hard here, but it's on music/sound and structure via John Cage, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze.

sounds very cool!

there's a funny kind of gesture in laruelle in his constant invocation of the (rather offputting) seemingly very philosophical terms of the "One" or the "Real." it's almost as if since philosophy qua philosophy no longer authorizes talk of such things, we have to authorize it through some appeal to a new discourse called "non-philosophy." also not really buying his distancing himself from the mystical tradition--a move that when claimed invariably reduces the mystical tradition to something it most surely exceeds.