Rolling Philosophy

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.

was thinking about this "non-philosophy" after lecturing on Descartes this morning. so I get what people mean when they talk about "non-mathematical reasoning", because math involves numbers & figures and so reasoning that doesn't involve those is plausibly non-mathematical. this rides on there being a straightforward enough characterization of the mathematical. (never mind the ~quality~ of that characterization.) so what's a straightforward characterization of philosophical reasoning? I'm perfectly happy merely gesturing at the tradition and saying "when we reason *that way*, we're reasoning philosophically"; indeed I'd favor such a characterization for mathematical reasoning also. but what's it to be the negation of a gesture? surely not just "everything outside that tradition"? or is this just a repudiation of the whole tradition of western philosophy, of the sort that only makes sense when you know the whole tradition of western philosophy (the way e.g. French students do)?

he does explicitly talk about "non Euclidean" geometry but I don't know how to trace that analogy further.

nothing so far strikes me as outside the philosophical tradition, but I'm not very far in.

he says there's three terms (suspiciously Peircean ones):

1- the Real or One ("indivisible identity")
2- "a term = X" which is "not immanent"
3- "Transcendental Identity"; a "clone of the One" which X "extracts" from the "Real"

why do the Real and the One seem to slip around so much? why have both terms and seemingly use them interchangeably if they mean the same thing? something important seems at stake in this...

does anyone care about this? worried about clogging up the thread.

yeah when someone says "transcendental" I immediate think he's talking Kantian, so that maybe the identity in question is unknowable by us, though we can argue that it exists.

yeah I think if you take him seriously (and I'm not even sure that being taken seriously can be a necessary claim of his thought) then you have to admit that whatever it is he is trying to do is under constant threat from philosophy--it's gonna risk being subsumed by its totalizing impulse. and I guess that's what motivates his talk of "democracy."

i've not read Laruelle but i am v. interested of reading people's experiences here. my first instinct from these posts is that he's claiming his own transcendental isn't transcendetal but maybe that's not fair. i'm smdh every time i read a quote that looks like moral realism tho

my yom kippur reading this year:
http://www.amazon.com/Judaism-Despite-Christianity-Correspondence-Rosenstock-Huessy/dp/0226728013/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/16/us-russia-kant-shooting-idUSBRE98F0DI20130916

I recently realised that I neither understand or want to understand Philosophy. While this means that I wasted my university career (well, no more than any other phil major, amirite?) it does perhaps mean that I can safely visit Russia.

http://i.imgur.com/BlUoCne.jpg

diogenes was the realest

DEFACE THE COINAGE

the sleeping in a big ceramic pot part sounds cozy

'plug'??

influence of Sasanian Zoroastrian thought on the Talmud:
http://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/an-interview-with-dr-shai-secunda-about-the-iranian-talmud/

pretty brilliant stuff

While these textual intersections are interesting, usually when the public learns about people like me working on the Bavli’s Iranian context, they want to hear about sexy, direct, and unassailable evidence of Zoroastrian influence on halakha or core theological concepts. The truth is rarely that simple, but awareness of the Iranian context does help us appreciate the protracted development of certain, sometimes central Jewish institutions. I discuss at length some talmudic beliefs about hell in the book. My friend Yishai Kiel has suggested, in a Festschrift in honor of Yaakov Elman, that the Bavli’s insistence on wearing a ‘tallit qatan’ even when one would not otherwise be obligated to do so may have been influenced by the similar Zoroastrian requirement to tie the kustig- a ritual belt. These are nice explanations that account for some of the Bavli’s novel beliefs and requirements, although the mechanics about how this sort of influence might have operated needs to be worked out.

i like that he starts w/ relatively firm loanwords and then extrapolates to more ambiguous influences. it seems like a good moment for this type of scholarship too since jewish-persian drama is still playing out.

look forward to reading that. Mordy have you ever read Harold Bloom's (i know, i know) "Omens of Millennium"?

i haven't -- should i?

oh i doubt it. been too long for me to remember much other than it covering similar ideas in a more speculative sense as bloom is wont to do.

i dunno why i'd want to publicise it cuz i find it all a bit embarrassing but anyway i came home today to find i'd been surprisingly 'published' in an audio-visual journal - http://www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk/deleuze-studies/journal/av-17/. guess which one is me. (clue: i'm not alphonso lingis.) (also, i don't know why it starts halfway through my paper. there was more philosophy in there, i promise.)

aw i was all set to watch that but it's kinda too hard to hear what you're saying!

i am legitimately interested in this though, and i hope you'll let us know when it's published in, like, print form.

i just got the proofs back from an article coming out next month--and i was almost too freaked out to look at the "corrections" lest the proofreader somehow implicitly signal their lack of faith in my intelligence. i swear im too fragile a soul for academics sometimes.

i can't believe alphonso lingis reads ilx!!