Rolling Philosophy

it would be really amazing if her next album had references to being and event

http://www.versobooks.com/books/1175-philosophy-for-militants

Long interview with John Searle here that seems pretty interesting from what I've read of it so far: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/post/an-interview-with-john-searle

I think Bernard was as intelligent as any human being I’ve ever met. He had a kind of quickness which was stunning. Now one consequence of that is there’s a sense in which people who knew him well, or at least in my case, we always feel the published work is not up to the level of the Bernard we remember. Yes, it’s wonderful and admirable, the published work, but the particular fire and light that came from discussions with Bernard are lost on the printed page. Now whether that’s inevitable, or whether or not he had actually been more patient about sitting down and doing a hard slog necessary to write a great book, I don’t know. I know that in the last years of his life he suddenly became very productive. I think -- I mean now since we’re talking about somebody I admire -- that in some ways his career was a disappointment to his admirers because he never produced a work of the calibre of his highest ability.

Huh. I wonder how serious he's being here. Not just any philosopher could have written Shame & Necessity.

i think a lot of his readers probably underrate him because they have an expectation of a degree argumentative / persuasive force that they sense he is somehow approaching but feel he is falling short of. when really he's writing amazing shit for them and it's their own attachment to prejudices, reluctance to expose themselves and their practices to individual scrutiny, etc., that makes them feel that somehow, maybe, vaguely, he could be doing a better job at convincing them even though he's 'quite good'

Just google Derrida/Searle and came up with this: http://www.critical-theory.com/foucault-obscurantism-they-it/

Foucault and Derrida had a personal falling out (over an interpretation of Descartes!) so it makes sense F would want to badmouth D, but I've never bought into the rest of that story. Just doesn't seem to fit w/ Foucault's project and how he actually writes and how he relates to the other major figures of that period.

'i have french friends'

lol

https://twitter.com/everywordisgay/status/503790195180068864

worth clicking on i guarantee

u got it

my copy of that accelerationism book came in

read a bit on the futurists today and it brought accelerationism to mind (not that i know very much about either of those things).

the funny thing about the Foucault/Derrida thing is that while Derrida is often quite difficult, I think he's quite precise and "clear." Foucault is a cloudier thinker in my experience, even if the experience of reading him is easier. I think that's uniquely my experience though--since no one else seems to find him as frequently mystifying as I do.

i've never read him with much thoroughness, a bit of the famous stuff, and more recently some of the later lectures more carefully, and i get the impression that his kinda confident and unbothered pragmatism/materialism/historicism/whatever is in the service of a useful skepticism that he didn't see much value in articulating with greater clarity or definiteness. which seems kind of right, if you're in some sense an ethical thinker writing critically against like, the whole tradition of philosophically- and religiously-inflected moral and social and political thought.

yeah I think you've put your finger on it precisely.

my head is far too foggy at the moment to articulate anything, but without having seriously worked on the topic I've felt that Foucault's major insights from The Order of Things and The Thought of/from the Outside echo through the later work - not really as a foundation but more as an articulation of the historical moment that he's working within, namely being in the confusing midst of the perpetual transition between classicism and modernity. I have a note to myself from a while back where I suggest that in the later works he's trying to construct what in The Order of Things is termed a point of heresy, if anyone can discern what I was on aboot then that would be swell.

where's the passage that talks about that?

the point of heresy? I think the references to it are scattered around here and there, I know it through Balibar, e.g. http://www.booksandideas.net/Citizen-Balibar.html. I believe there'll be a long Balibar paper on it in an upcoming edition of Theory, Culture & Society (If yr really interested and willing to enter into a blood oath swearing not to distribute it I think I have a draft somewhere.)

very cool link, thanks!

funnily enough i was thinking about asking here if anyone reads the Balibar sections of Reading Capital or if they are safe to skip. i guess im interested now!

I refuse to read it coz he was ~23 when he wrote it, I already feel quite dumb enough thank u very much Etienne

oh damn fuck that then.

Whoa. I had no idea. http://www.aestheticsforbirds.com/2014/08/interview-with-oup-editor-indie-rock.html

I've become weirdly obsessed with Althusser for reasons I can't yet articulate. I haven't even read any Althusser directly! been reading warren montag's "Althusser and His Contemporaries" and it's pretty great--despite some poor writing at times and a weird amount of typos. there's an early chapter on structuralism though that is one of the best short texts I think I've ever read on that topic.

montag was my thesis adviser lol

one of THE nicest and most open profs ive ever met, and a super engaging and lucid explicator of texts and movements and history

it shows in the book. even the occasional poor writing is probably ultimately more althusser's fault than montag's.

just visited a favorite bookstore back home only to find a stultifying wall of atheist cheerleading and watered down Marxism. nary a copy of Reading Capital either.

Captivating read on Benjamin and Adorno on culture and critical theory: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/naysayers

In Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel, “The Corrections,”

bailed

thats a shame because you missed the end of the sentence

goes to the Strand Bookstore, in downtown Manhattan, to sell off his library of dialectical tomes.

The philosophers, sociologists, and critics in the Frankfurt School orbit, who are often gathered under the broader label of Critical Theory, are, indeed, having a modest resurgence. They are cited in brainy magazines like n+1, The Jacobin, and the latest iteration of The Baffler.

(Kunkel also mentions “The Corrections,” noting that Chip gets his salmon at a shop winkingly named the Nightmare of Consumption.)

i'm still not sure what The Baffler is but i'm always tempted to drop it in the Innocent Smoothies thread

the new yorker house style is so pedantic and shitty, 'iterations of The Baffler'

i just scrolled through and saw "steve jobs," so at least it kinda fits in with the theme of the day

Headlines have an authoritarian bark (“This Map of Planes in the Air Right Now Will Blow Your Mind”). “Most Read” lists at the top of Web sites imply that you should read the same stories everyone else is reading. Technology conspires with populism to create an ideologically vacant dictatorship of likes.

Am I stupid or is it possible that this title is referencing the Radiohead song? The actual proverb from which both titles are drawn is a little different. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/50336-everything-in-its-right-place-spinoza-and-life-by-the-light-of-nature/

Anyway, seems neat...I'm more likely to want to read something like this - personal and celebratory - than a scholarly contribution. I don't like how the reviewer breezily associates "letting instead the key come to you by way of understanding informally 'love of God (Nature)'" with "New Age".

just stuffy it seems. would have been a better review if it played this one against almog's book on descartes, which i haven't read really but seems odd but interesting. the references to the spinoza book do make it seem like maybe almog has switched gears since the descartes book (highly reconstructive, analytical)?

Yeah, that Descartes book looks like something I would be interested in. I don't think I've encountered Almog at all except for having photocopied a bunch of Themes from Kaplan, which iirc was either out-of-print at the time or, at any rate, famous for being much too expensive for any student to own.

http://urbanomic.com/pub_oop.php

primary deterrent against reading that: "430pp"

Is he still an "independent researcher"?

who ain't

:-/

What Voltaire said about god should be repeated about this book: if it didn't exist, we would have to invent it.
Slavoj Žižek

He says that like a book isn't an invention.

Is Leiter going to get ousted? His "shit department" remark was definitely an efficient encapsulation of what's ugly about the PGR mentality.

mid-oust now, apparently

not from his job tho right?

haven't seen any indication his job's in trouble, no. quite puzzling this has taken so long really, he's been a repugnant bully who hasn't even tried to conceal it since i've been aware of him.

shocked that a Nietzsche scholar would write intemperately