notebookeleven

The following announcement arrived today and I encourage anyone interested in philosophy, thinking and life to Collapse.

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We are delighted to announce that Collapse Volume IV will be published May 2008 and is now available for advance purchase online.

Contributors to this volume include: Kristen Alvanson, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Michel Houellebecq, Oleg Kulik, Thomas Ligotti, Quentin Meillassoux, China Miéville, Reza Negarestani, Benjamin Noys, Rafani, Steven Shearer, George Sieg, Eugene Thacker, Keith Tilford, Todosch, James Trafford.

Collapse IV features a series of investigations by philosophers, writers and artists into Concept Horror. Contributors address the existential, aesthetic, theological and political dimensions of horror, interrogate its peculiar affinity with philosophical thought, and uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable. This unique volume continues Collapse’s pursuit of indisciplinary miscegenation, the wide-ranging contributions interacting to produce common themes and suggestive connections. In the process a rich and compelling case emerges for the intimate bond between horror and philosophical thought.

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To call life itself just or unjust, to conceive life as samsara or suffering, is to judge life and to do so from outside life, from some position which is the ground of a judgement. To encounter life, respond to it, is inevitable and not all responses are equal, this much is inevitable. Too often, however, this encounter and response is thought of as a judgement. To not judge does not mean to not respond or that any response is as good as any other. There are different responses in life, different lives if you like – or different types of life. Life produces its own end, life drives itself to death but in the encounter with death there is another space of response, this time one that shows us the two fundamental ways of response, affirmation and negation, more life or never ending death.

How am I to think of life? The philosopher must ask this question. They must, moreover, continue to ask this question and to encounter the force of this question with responses – the philosopher must not simply ask an idle question but encounter the problem of the question, the problem the question arises from, responding with thought, with emotion, with passion, with action. Encounter and response constitute the activity of thought and living, though too often this dynamic to-and-fro is congealed, by the social, into regulated habits, pre-formed responses such as the response of the subject, ‘I think…’. Living is a poor name for the habits and habitats of the human. We are all, inevitably, products of the social, products of the inhuman and yet we are not inevitably condemned to remain nothing but product, commodity, object. It is not a matter of striving to become a subject since the subject is that which is subservient, the subject of the monarch. Rather it is a matter of striving for monarchy itself, becoming a crown within life but not a ruler, judge or controller. Crowned anarchy, this is the watchword, a monarch of creation, a singular moment that adds to the abundance of singular moments. In more traditional terms, this is the assumption of an imperative to autonomy, the self (auto) lawmaking (nomos) reality.

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For my 3rd year students in NMEP.  (This is just a brief and partial account of the discussion today and students are welcome to continue the discussion here on on the WebCT bulletin board if they want a little more privacy, this is a public site after all.)

Today we discussed the way in which we think the subject by exploring the problems involved in the idea of ‘loving a robot/loving a simulation/loving a simulacrum’ and how these might be teased apart.  A large part of our understanding of both Klossowski and Deleuze’s works on Nietzsche involve us in thinking about the way in which there is a problem for them, what exactly it is that motivates them, as it were, to write and think in the way they do, particularly when the initial impression when confronted by these two works (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle:NVC and Nietzsche and Philosophy:NP) is one of disorientation.  As we approach an exam we need to supplement the detailed exegetical work done in the essays and the reading seminars with a ’step back’ that enables us to get a broad sense of dynamics and lines of thought.  To that end it is important to remember, I suggested, that Nietzsche is one of the ‘masters of suspicion’ (along with Marx and Freud – the phrase itself originates form Paul Ricoeur) and that both Klossowski and Deleuze begin form a position congruent with such suspicion in that they begin thinking by distrusting the way we think and speak.  We use words and as we use them assume we know what they mean, until we are asked what they mean when we find confusion and disagreement.  The words we use are capable of possessing us with the feeling that we know something, they possess a sense (or affect, feeling) of sense that we need to be suspicious of in order to begin to think critically.  This doers not mean we simply throw out our intuitive relation to meanings and the sense of things, since such a rejection would also imply that we somehow knew what it was we were meaning and now reject it.  Uncritical rejection is no better than uncritical possession.  Thus the task is to ask, how might we think about the concepts of subject when the language and sense of the concept already exists, how might we think, as it were, in spite of the possession of sense.  To do this, I suggested, both Klossowski and Deleuze attempt something we can think of as a reframing of the questions, a redrawing of the lines of debate.  This idea of a reframing of the problem is perhaps simplifying things but for now, as a kind of working device or ‘rule of thumb’ to enable us to develop understanding (what is called a ‘heuristic‘), it will suffice.

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This is an old Real audio radio programme I made.  I’ve been thinking of doing some more work with sound and so dug this out and had a listen and I still find it interesting, so it has an audience of 1 at least ;-)

Blu19 real audio file (right click to save-as)

If anyone can convert it to an MP3 then that would be cool (I don’t have an app on my machine and am not about to buy one just for this one task) – you can upload files to the anonymous FTP server at razorsmile.org if you do happen to convert it…

(Notes primarily for the use of my 3rd year undergrad students on the Nietzsche and Modern European Philosophy course, terms 2 and 3, in which we’re studying Klossowski’s ‘Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle’ and Deleuze’s ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ and exploring the problematic of post-structuralism.  Page references to the Continuum impacts edition of NVC).

The intention here is to follow a ‘reading strategy’ in which we acknowledge that the style of thinking that occurs within NVC (and perhaps more widely within post-structuralist thinkers) is that of a weave or tapestry, in which words and concepts are introduced without explicit definition and these words are then employed (used) within a line of thought.  The meaning of the terms within the text is to be produced through the work of the text, such that the book will constitute its own context within which key terms can be thought through rather than simply argued about.  This is not to say that argument is irrelevant, not at all, but rather to emphasise something like a principle of ‘meaning is use’ that underlies much of NVC.  Structuralism itself made use of ‘binaries’ in order to begin its analysis with structures and not elements (employed/employer: man/woman: expert/amateur etc), for the simple methodological fact that a single term would be an element and if we are to begin with structures then this must mean, in terms of language and conceptualisation, beginning from relations between words or concepts (what for ease I will simply refer to as ‘terms’).  Post-structuralism, then, will continue its emphasis on structures, and as such will continue to find much of interest in the technique of using binaries or pairings of terms although it will not want to presuppose a final and definite order that can be produced from such an analysis.  Our reading strategy, then, works on the basis of trying to identify interesting ‘key-words’ that we then try to understand conceptually by examining their oppositional terms.  Concretely this begins from finding something that we can identify as a claim and then working backwards and forwards within the immediate context in which the claim is made to try and clarify the relations at work in a particular space of the text.  These ‘partial analyses’ will then enable us to begin to reconstruct something like a ‘line of thought or argument’ that is made by the text (or perhaps, better, one of many lines of argument that will be made by the text).

Beginning at the bottom of page 8 and going onto page 9, we find some of the central questions within the first chapter, ‘The combat against culture’, sitting at the head of a short (3 paragraphs) line of argument.  Here, as part of that partial analysis just mentioned, I want to pick out four ‘key-words’: reciprocity, idiosyncracy, culture and objectivation. 

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The Ranting Gryphon – America