Raffles madness

Oh the irony. All those post-colonial literature folk forced to drink their tea and coffee in a cafeteria named after the great imperialist Sir Stamford Raffles.

I was sitting there reading Nietzsche when I had a strange encounter with M and a new postgraduate student. I was telling M how much I was enjoying The Gay Science when this dude - an Irigarayan - started asking if we were 'gay scientists'. Over and over again.
M asked him if he was one and he replied while walking away: "I don't take a whip when I go to meet women." We furrowed our brows, and M duly noted that we were talking about Nietzsche, not Sade.

That was quite enough madness for one day.

Day of rest

What an odd weekend I have had. My housemates and I were feeling in something of a bataillean mood, so we decided to freeze an egg, hoping to chip the shell off and reveal a frosty egg-shaped marvel. It didn't quite work out as planned, since the 'white' didn't remain clear as we expected, but became opaque.
M asked whether, in truly excessive fashion, we urinated on the egg or pulled someone's eye out. No I replied, we didn't. We did pass the slimy defrosting object to each other, but this activity was of a non-sexual nature.

Later I forced my housemates to watch Derrida Does Dallas. Afterwards, we thought for a short while about the question posed to 'Jacqui': which philosopher would you like to have been your mother?
Except we decided to interpret the question in what might be called a more literal sense (watch the film and you will understand what I mean).
I settled on David Hume. A great thinker with a reasonably pragmatic general outlook. I don't know much about his life, but I do know, from his texts, that was a relaxed sort of chap, and that he believed there is a time and a place for sceptical doubts. For example, I think he would agree to set them aside whilst engaging in certain sorts of parental activities with me.
It would have been a whole lot easier to suggest a 20th Century philosopher for the role, such as Foucault, or a woman, such as Beauvoir, but we thought this would be cheating (let's not consider the political implications of privileging women thinkers for the role).
As for my housemates - Axel muttered a few things, but I don't remember exactly who he decided on, and Lila shouted 'Freud!' from the top of the stairs in an obscure act of defiance.

Consciousness, you say?

The obscure delights of Coventry

They never cease to amaze me. When I arrived here, I assumed that the most loathsome part of my journey to and from campus each day would be verbal, physical and psychic assaults from 'the locals'. How wrong I was: the supposedly yobbish youngsters loitering in the street provide such pleasure that I now look forward to being accosted.
Last night, for example, when walking past a group of robust-looking teenage girls, one of them broke into a Ministry of Silly Walks silly walk. What an unexpected joy. And there was nary a cuss to be heard, nor a dilated pupil to be seen.

And this was not the first time. A few months ago, a boy sidled up to me on his BMX while I was cycling home. In his best cheeky chappie voice he said: "Nice bike - wanna swop?" Now I must insist that my - racing - bike is utterly unsuited to any sort of BMX scallywaggery; he spoke in a sincere but silly tone, as though he thought that I might turn down his offer(!) Yet his remark can only be made sense of as deeply, deeply ironic: what on earth would he do with a bicycle like mine?

Last year, while walking home, I passed a family (an obese mother surrounded by raucous children of various ages) moving ('walking' is not the right word to describe this amorphous chaotic mass) in the same direction as me. As I overtook them, one of the kids asked of me: "Dude, are you the Matrix?"
Oh how I laughed - where do they come up with this stuff? And why do they make the students at my university seem so boring?

"If it be knowledge or wisdom one is seeking, then one had better go direct to the source. And the source is not the scholar or philosopher, not the master, saint, or teacher, but life itself - direct experience of life. The same is true for art."

Henry Miller, The Books in My Life.

Philosophical labours

I am feeling the aftershocks of my first work-through-the-night of this year. Sitting at my desk, at four this morning, puzzling over the nature of aesthetic judgements, I remembered how right Adorno was when he described proper thinking as "the strenuous toil of conceptual reflection." (Quoting Hegel's Phenomenology)

BONUS: Pictorial representation of the calamitous mental misadventures of 'conceptual reflection,' courtesy of Arthur Schopenhauer.

The petty politics of academia: What Would Nietzsche Do?

Today, I had a rather strange lecture with Professor Elusive-Hyphen. He was talking about Schopenhauer's ethics, and how the ethical life involves a denial of the will-to-life: instead we tend towards a kind of death, as the culmination of pure asceticism. He added in a quiet voice, and much to my surprise, that he didn't mean "living-death, in the way that we might say some members of the department are dead."
In fact, this startled me so much that I am tempted to doubt whether he said it at all. But he did say it. Ah, such enmity - it brings tears to my eyes.

We owe it to ourselves to speculate libellously about what exactly this cryptic statement could mean. Is he alluding to the vacant looks that he gets when attempting to talk to his colleagues about anything other than neuroscience? Or perhaps he means the zombie-like fashion in which creativity is relentlessly stifled in our accursed fackulty?

"Forgive them father, for they know not what they do..."

Step into my office...

Nietzsche and dogmat: together at last

Tomorrow morning, I shall begin my long-awaited engagement with the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. I'll first tackle Beyond Good and Evil for a reading group that Brn has organised.
My true character will be revealed in the way that I am affected by Nietzsche; I expect to learn as much about myself as about the man and his thought.

The birds were out this morning. They were sitting atop television aerials, and on the chimneys. They were in a state of extreme agitation. They departed as suddenly as they arrived. Their appearance and strange behaviour was significant, oh yes! Of that my friend, there is no question.
I fear there is terrible fate in store for us.

All that reading, and yet we still talk rubbish

I spent yesterday in the library, chin-wagging in the company of Brn, a self-confessed 'bergsonismian'. I had just been reading the 'Immediate Structure of the For-itself' chapter from Being and Nothingness - what an exhausting business! I am rather fond of Sartre, but by the end of that bit, in which he tries to construe 'negation' in every possible way, I was fantasizing about Bataillean excess. It was beginning to feel like the nothingness is not in my mind but in my brain... Dear god, I'll even put up with writing essays on Deleuze and Nietzsche all year to avoid that special Sartrean emptiness. (Those two are all about positivity and overflowing, right?)

Anyway, Brn was chuckling about how there are so many new continental philosophy students in our department this year, but that the philosophy of mind staff contingent keeps on growing. How could it be that those ubiquitous 'market forces' that dominate British life suddenly lose their strength when it comes to philosophy student-staff ratios? I think "bizarre" is the word he used.

Naturally, the discussion smoothly progressed on to how far away from here I am going to try to take myself next year. Brn mentioned that Newcastle had something of a continental slant but that the department was situated in Physics (something about a large donation). All I could add to this was that I knew of one lecturer there, and that he was interested in that legendary physicist, Maurice Blanchot. Then I recalled meeting one of our new MA students, who came from Newcastle, and that his big interest was, um, Eastern philosophy.
In any case, this startling jumble of conflicting information was the source of much puzzlement; Brn got especially excited about the possibilities for thought: "Eskimoes and African philosophy" he mused.

How dogmat enjoys his red tea

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending a party at Glueboot's house. An evening of quiet, happy mayhem. I heard Tome defend Kant's lifestyle ("...he never left Konigsberg..."); I tasted, and didn't like, a mistakenly opened 1982 Chateau Aajg!hqegba; I perused Gb's not insubstantial book collection; and I listened - with increasing admiration - to a part-time postgrad afflicted with "night-terrors" tell me how to get hardship funding and such like.

Flu

Both my housemates are ill. It is like living in some kind of perverse Levinasian world, where I am a fragile creature, vulnerable to the violence (ie. violent coughing) of the Other. What's more, their illness is my responsibility - their reproachful, snivelling faces seem to say: "You are not ill. You don't know what it's like. Why aren't you sick? What's so good about you anyway?" They, literally, wish me ill.
A rather sorry state of affairs indeed.

"To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration [...]
Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not 'liberate man in his own being'; it compels him to face the task of producing himself." -Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment.

All the advice in the world can't save us now

Ah! Autumn. The wilting leaves, the fresh freshers. Friendships renewed, grudges remembered. But best of all: new modules - vistas of thought opening up before our bleary eyes! And don't you just love all the advice the professors dispense at the beginning of the first term?

Aesthetics: "Don't approach the text expecting to understand every sentence at first sitting; do you think Kant wrote this masterpiece for it to be consumed like a trashy novel? Rather, try to get a feel for the rhythm of the work, and push through what you cannot understand."

Epistemology and Metaphysics: "This is not meant to be read like a novel. Ensure that you understand each sentence as you go; if you pass over things, you will get 'lost' very quickly."

Of one thing, we can be very sure: DO NOT READ PHILOSOPHY BOOKS LIKE NOVELS! Beyond this, well...

Dogmat joins the war effort

Heat: thick as thieves?

I have just seen Michael Mann's Heat, and, as k-punk says (here), it is a very 90's film. K-punk emphasizes the 'renouncing of the passions' which appears to be at the heart of proceedings. In fact, there is a constant tension between reason and sentimentality which not only provides a background to the action, but which also makes Heat the film it is.

Neil McCauley's twice uttered line, "don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner," expresses a new sort of pragmatism; how would a professional thief act were he purely rational? This formalistic feel is heightened by the anonymous cityscapes and what goodie Vincent Hanna calls "dead-tech, post-modernistic bullshit" homes.

However, as the plot unfolds, we find that the clean break from the world of Mafiosi and blood feuds is nothing of the sort. Midway through, McCauley assumes the role of patron as he - forcibly - attempts to restore his crewmate's marriage. But perhaps the most striking piece of old-school banditry comes near the end when, approaching the airport, McCauley cannot resist going after a treacherous former crew-member.
We might say that Heat embodies the capitalist preference for Protestantism over Catholicism. Loyalty and family ties are not antithetical to the money-making project (as Mafia success amply demonstrates), so long as they aren't allowed to disrupt the order of business.

So we see that Heat does not break cleanly from its "Coppola and Scorcese gangter flick" predecessors, precisely because the characters populating this film are still struggling to break from their own criminal heritage.