Rolling Philosophy

thanks j -- that's useful stuff, since i know like zero w. scholarship. (i do see noam zeilberger is fond of quoting w., so at least there's somewhat of a two way street there, in that modern ultrafinitists recognize a kindred spirit. but then nobody takes him seriously [except they all also take him very seriously]). also didn't realize that w. was early to reject "ex falso".

(speaking of which, here's an interesting question -- do philosophers take girard seriously?)

(btw euler would love to hang and pick yr brain on philo but i believe we are in relatively difft parts of the u.s.? next time you come thru ny for sure tho!)

i assume you mean mustard-watch jean-yves and not rené?

jean-yves girard (had to look him up) sounds fascinating but I doubt I have the background to really get far with him.

im not sure if adorno's attacks on heidegger are entirely fair but damn they are really fun to read.

What shows in this ontology is not so much mystical meditation as the distress of a thinking that seeks its otherness and cannot make a move without fearing to lose what it claims. Tendentially, philosophy becomes a ritualistic posture. Yet there is a truth stirring in that posture as well: the truth of philosophy falling silent.

girard is super weird and very fiesty.

if you want to get a taste of his most eclectic just browse appendix a of locus solum: http://iml.univ-mrs.fr/~girard/0.pdf (note: this is nearly half of the work and titled "a pure waste of paper").

his geometry of interaction stuff is potentially philosophically interesting i think, trying to find a notion of time _within_ the procedures of logical deduction directly (http://jb55.com/linear/pdf/Towards%20a%20geometry%20of%20interaction.pdf). [skip to section III for some meatier bits there]

I saw Girard give a talk in philly once where he was just practicing swearing in English

I'll be working in the south of frogland for the next year so I'll probably chill with him at some point. I've done some work that draws on stuff of his

thanks for those girard articles! i will give them a go. i think my patience and enthusiasm for loopy math and logic types far outstrips my ability to comprehend them but i do enjoy trying.

liked this passage from ND:

There is no peeping out. What would lie in the beyond makes its appearance only in the materials and categories within. This is where the truth and the untruth of Kantian philosophy divide. It is true in destroying the illusion of an immediate knowledge of the Absolute; it is untrue in describing this Absolute by a model that would correspond to an immediate consciousness, even if that consciousness were the intellectus archetypus. To demonstrate this untruth is the truth of post-Kantian idealism; yet this in turn is untrue in its equation of subjectively mediated truth with the subject-in-itself--as if the pure concept of the subject were the same as Being.

still really enjoying Negative Dialectics. and it's surprisingly readable--not saying I am understanding everything 100% but that's never the case with anything like this. i like the way it's written: short sections which tend to turn over the same few problems again and again. In the final 3rd of it and wondering a lot about Adorno's relation to figures like Derrida, Lacan (via Zizek). the earlier "dialectic of enlightenment" version of Adorno seems to come up a lot more often than this one does.

Derrida's Cinders on the way (a tiny little thing, apparently, but just published). also gonna give Spinoza Contra Phenomenology a go, since it came in mail (i had forgotten that I ordered it). might be a good way into Deleuze--something I've been trying and failing to start up for a while now.

I've thought for ages that the best way into Deleuze is through his second Spinoza book, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. It doesn't make Difference and Repetition less complicated or A Thousand Plateaus less crazy but I think it gives a good outline of the general spirit of his work and the problems it's dealing with.

oh thanks! I have his one on Leibniz but it's basically crazy-talk to me right now. strangely, I made it through "What is Philosophy?" without much of a problem but the capitalism and schizophrenia stuff seems to whoosh over my head.

the Leibniz book is pretty wild. Also suffers from a bad translation (I state authoritatively without having ever looked at the original French). What is Philosophy? is quite conceptually refined, yeah, its apparatus handily comes down to a few relatively simple axioms, and I think Anti-Oedipus can be thought of in a similar way, but then yer intellectual work as a reader is to track how those axioms mutate across the book. With A Thousand Plateaus, really there's no sensible way into it as a whole, so read a plateau here and there, a section (let's say 'Memories of a Spinozist' and 'How to Make Oneself a Body without Organs), a page, even a passage, see where it takes ya.

in the early 00s ATP was a bewildering slog to me, but somehow ten years and a phd made it fairly clear for what it is. basically, once you can appreciate that D+G are putting forward all kinds of solutions to traditional problems it's easier to feel like you can discern a pattern. it's practically systematic! or at least has an inner system kind of defined by the systematicity of all their interlocutors/the problems and questions they're engaged with (or at least the terms of those)

thanks guys. my being a philosophical dilettante is probably the ultimate source of my confusion (and explains why much of the deleuzian stuff in my discipline seems so sloppy). gonna grab D's Spinoza book then give AO a go (again).

i thought that eugene holland's book on AO seemed useful, when i looked at it; he kind of tries to be systematic, work the references to kant and hegel (??? iirc - been a while), the 'first synthesis' 'second synthesis' structure that's in the book, along with helpful context in psychoanalysis. i bet if you've read and understood more freud and marx than me, he would be a breath of fresh air.

yeah that book is good. I think one of the challenges of situating Deleuze-Guattari in a proper philosophical context is that Kant is so absent from their writings (v negative references in AO aside), so that angle is useful.

I say read the Kafka book as an introduction to ATP. Introduces the rhizome and the whole minor/major distinction. After that the first chapter and the large chunk on nomads should be clear sailing.

I taught a course on Spinoza last term & one chief aim was being able to understand Deleuze on Spinoza. it helped a lot! though I still sound like an idiot when trying to explain why I think "expression" is so important & thus am not even gonna try here

i have hardly read anything convincing about expression

this is a safe place!

i mean obvs. important but fuck if anyone can say a damn thing about it

xpost!

I am sure I am confused and mixing things up but I am convinced that Charles Taylor's writings on expression are super duper deep: that we can mean things by (re)presenting them, but also by expressing them; and these are not the same. & that in some practices, in particular mathematical practice, the latter plays an heretofore neglected role. for we don't refer to mathematicals because there aren't objects in mathematics, not in the usual sense; there's nothing to refer *to*. it's not like when we refer to a tree "over there". so how to think of language (& hence thought) in mathematics? I need all the help I can get! & so I've turned to these murkier waters to find something helpful.

oh & the confusion is thinking that Deleuze re. Spinoza is talking about expression like Taylor is; but if I'm not confused that would rule

I don't know about Taylor and I don't really know the mathematics but I think that gets to at least part of it - (re)presentation being the external categorisation of objects in Euclidean space (Kant) and expression being internally-defined movement in Riemannian space (Spinoza-Nietzsche-Bergson).

i've read some taylor, but i dunno, there's something about expression as a topic that seems not to really tolerate an overly schematic treatment. for all his efforts otherwise, the enormous bulk of taylor's projects kind of make everything he does seem schematic

I am such a Taylor fanboy though

(re)presentation being the external categorisation of objects in Euclidean space (Kant) and expression being internally-defined movement in Riemannian space (Spinoza-Nietzsche-Bergson).

this is very interesting and kinda/sorta puts me in mind of peircean stuff.

Spinoza Contra Phenomenology a nice read so far and I can already tell it's gonna significantly lengthen my "to read" list.

^^^now making me sad that there's no english translation of Cavailles. (or none I could find.)

I'm not aware of any, but another recent book that covers that kind of terrain is http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/post-rationalism-9781441186881/ (a cheaper paperback version is out in December)

interesting interview with its author - http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/lacan-and-french-post-rationalism/

very interesting! thanks for posting that. a little intimidated by that guy's career trajectory. geez.

though I can only be bemused by people who studied "structuralism, post-structuralism, critical theory, and Marxism" as an undergraduate! late bloomer that I am.

ah it just means you write lots of bullshit papers where you're all enthusiastic about deconstructing shit, so that later you look back and are like yeah, good call teach, that was some out-of-the-ass talk in THAT one, B+

I know him and he's also very nice, could at least have the class to be successful through sociopathic treachery and careerism rather than just being better than the rest of us, eh

excellent people are the worst

(Xp)j. otm. I was a certain school in New Haven during the heyday of deconstruction and steered clear of any classes like that after first term freshman year but certainly got a patronizing earful from the acolytes during and after school. Later read up a little bit about it from some of the British "popularizers" like David Lodge and Terry Eagleton. A few years later, a certain French-Greek director friend of mine memorably said "These are people who couldn't get jobs in France and they come over here and are superstars!" Perhaps a bit harsh but...

no i mean, those papers certainly showed me at my most callow, most often when i didn't put in the real effort to write a proper paper. but i did and still do think derrida would be worth studying, if you're able to do it properly and not get all bullshitified. but it seems to me a matter of opportunity costs; i think the time has passed in which that stuff could really put you in the middle of anything. maybe that means fresher eyes are possible now.

noted old tyme ilxor dr t did some very readable writing on derrida e.g.

Problem with that stuff is it verges on being so unsystematic that you need to be some kind of genius to pull it off, Derrida may be one, a random undergrad is not. Somebody once said of another famous sui generis Frenchman, "When Duchamp did it first, he did it last," might want to say the same about Derrida.

back when personal weblogs were first exploding there was this kid who kept one, popular, and he was in high school or had been in it when he was reading finnegans wake. not that that makes you a supergenius or anything, but i often think of that kid as an example of what an early proclivity for language play and exposure to the 'right' things might lead to.

i bought another graham harman book, but i haven't been reading any philosophy at all

almost done with "Spinoza Contra Phenomenology" and i'll be surprised if it's not one of the better and more satisfying new academic books I'll read this year.
nothing absolutely new or mind-blowing, but it's really clear and well written and peden just seems really confident with the material.

I was in a Barnes & Noble for the first time in a long time today. I was happily surprised to see a (very) small "philosophy" section. not so happy to see that it is about 1/3 books about atheism. also apparently christopher hitchens is a philosopher now.

that is the way it's been for years. occasionally some surprises, depending on the size of the store and the area.

philosophy is the worst

i remember finding an ayn rand biography in the lincoln square barnes and noble a while back

it's interesting in that it seems to break down into atheism, logical puzzles (a few books on paradoxes), "pop culture artifact X and philosophy," and a few figures from the tradition (here they had decent collections of Foucault, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard).

no Alain de Botton etc HOW PHILOSOPHY CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE self-help stuff?