Rolling Philosophy

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!!

i'm reading funkenstein. pretty good stuff.

which one?

theology + the scientific imagination

i really wanted to read his stuff on medieval jewish history but i think that's primarily in the perceptions collection?

oh dang that's right up my alley.

theology and the scientific imagination, that is.

that book is dope

thinking of teaching a seminar on Spinoza next term, don't know the work well, kinda psyched!

has anyone read the new latour?

i've decided im going to, but that doesn't count. gotta get through the laruelle first, on which I've stalled.

the anthony paul smith translation?

yep that's the one.

i better start reading

do you think that book is a useful entry point to laurelle or is there a better one?

you'd have to ask someone who's read more of him, but it certainly seems intended as a foundational text for him. he's pretty explicitly laying down the axioms of "non-philosophy." it's not an easy read, but not as hard as like lacan or whatever. he's not a great writer, though.

haha i've experienced a tiny bit. but that sounds somewhat promising

i posted a link to a "debate" between him and derrida upthread that actually strikes me as a good starting place.