Tuesday love

Here are two pieces of music composed by Friedrich Nietzsche. For now, I shall say that I love them insofar as they exist and can be listened to, rather than insofar as they are masterpieces.

The first: "An early Allegretto for piano, on which Nietzsche worked off and on from 1858 until it found its final form during his Leipzig study period. In it, Nietzsche used Beethovenian material, which becomes particularly apparent in the slow passage in the last third, which is reminiscent of the so-called 'Moonlight' sonata. In this recording, you can hear Michael Tannenbaum in a concert at the Evangelical Academy at Hofgeismar, Hessen, which took place there on October 28, 2000" (thanks to Nietzsche and Music).
The recording doesn't sound too good, but we shan't let that bother us.

From the same site, we have another piano piece: Hymnus an die Freundschaft (1874), written for his friend Franz Overbeck. Later he adapted the hymn to be performed with Lou Salomé's poem Prayer to Life.

A caffeine-induced state of mind

Such wonderful feelings I had last night at around three. I was sitting in the living room, Bach Cello Sweets (taste the sad) unfolding in the background, with a small cup of espresso in my belly. I was reading Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, and it was going smoothly.
I thought back to Sartre, sitting somewhere in Paris, 82 years ago. His eyes passing over the very same forms that were before me on the page.
I thought, along the lines of Beauvoir's attempt to become a coat by concentrating on it hard enough: 'if you immerse yourself completely in the sentences, dogmat, if you allow the words to fill your consciousness, you could be Sartre!'

Sociality

"You're just saying that cos Elusive-Hyphen was making fun of Heidegger and Wittgenstein in his lecture the other day!"
How not to make friends in philosophy. Luckily, I was talking to Mon and P, so it was more a question of 'how much can I alienate these two lovable lads?'

P is getting in the habit of telling me to "stop taking cues from M," which is becoming(-?)irritating since I don't believe he realises the extent to which my views differ from M's.
Speaking of whom...

M introduced me to a friend of his, who gave me an easy ride until 10pm, then asked "what is your relation to women?" Uh-oh. I am not effusive on this topic at the best of times, let alone around someone I'm trying to impress through an (over)use of thoughtful silences.
She had found me lacking in character, a defect I tried at once to deny and defend. That was foolish.
"I'm not so-and-so, and if I am it is only because of such-and-such," I crumpled.

Small alterations

As you may have noticed, there have been a few changes round here. I hope you enjoy the new look (which may well be tinkered with over the next days).

Formfilling

What a fun day! I met two of my lecturers to discuss my year-essays. For Dr Ampere, I shall be working on late Lyotard and the sublime, which will involve investigating the Levinas connection. We also discussed next year's modules, and he gave encouraging signs (I naturally get excited when the words 'Foucault', 'philosophy' and 'module' are mentioned in the same breath).
Elusive-Hyphen steered me away from a 'Bergson vs Sartre on freedom' essay, towards a Bergson and Merleau-Ponty comparative work. This is a project to which I am especially looking forward, since I am itching to investigate properly what distinguishes Bergson from phenomenology. Plus I can't wait to carefully and painstakingly describe 'the Image' in all its shimmering beauty.

Artists and philosophers

"Through having reached the percept as 'the sacred source,' through having seen Life in the living or the Living in the lived, the novelist or painter returns breathless and with bloodshot eyes. They are athletes - not athletes who train their bodies and cultivate the lived, no matter how many writers have succumbed to the idea of sport as a way of heightening art and life, but bizarre athletes of the 'fasting-artist' type, or the 'great Swimmer' who does not know how to swim. It is not an organic or muscular athleticism but its inorganic double, 'an affective Athleticism,' an athleticism of becoming that reveals only forces that are not its own - 'plastic specter.' In this respect artists are like philosophers. What little health they possess is often too fragile, not because of illnesses or neuroses but because they have seen something in life that is too much for anyone, too much for themselves, and that has put on them the quiet mark of death. But this something is also the source or breath that supports them through the illnesses of the lived (what Nietzsche called health). 'Perhaps one day we will know that there wasn't any art but only medicine.'"
Perhaps one day we will know that perhapsll hlealthFelix and Gilles, What is Philosophy.

Grauniad: corrections and clarifications

"Our obituary of George Psychoundakis declared that his memoir, The Cretan Runner, was translated "with inimical lyricism" by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Inimitable, we meant."

Friday

There was a party on friday night. At Hades and B. It was fun, though I did go around - in a rather higgledy-piggledy fashion - telling everyone why a dose of Nietzsche makes radicalism so much more fun.
Hades and I considered the ways in which the appearance (or name, etc) of a thinker affects the extent to which we open ourselves to their thought. Hades began by saying that he took an instant dislike to David Hume, because he hasn't a nice name. We agreed on the need to complicate this, since A.N. Whitehead has possibly the ugliest name in philosophy, and yet his late works make him seem marginally interesting, enigmatic, and cutting-edge.
I put forward that old favourite of mine: that it is possible to gather a lot about someone not by their looks but by their countenance, their bearing, their facial expressions, the way in which they hold themselves, and the 'look' on their hands. This view was bolstered, I thought, by an interview - which I saw last week - with Francis Bacon. Up 'til that point, I had only ever seen still photographs of him (ok, and self-portraits, but that is another matter). Frankly, his face repulsed me, in an astonishingly powerful way. Yet when I got to see it animated, talking, quaffing red tea, I fell in love with that face.

Tuesday Love

Isn't it marvellous that the study of philosophy allows room for quaint anecdotes about doddering old men? Dr Ampere regaled the class with tales of his neighbour, "who must be about ninety," going for his daily walk with the regularity of a metronome and the grace of a gnome. What's more, this wasn't just to pass the time, but served to illustrate Deleuze's Bacon.

I also love the ineptitude of The Times hatchet job on P.F. Strawson and analytic philosophy. Two wrongs don't make a right - newspapers pissing on Strawson's grave is not going to make forgetting the Derrida obituary fiasco any easier.

Come on baby, do the locomotion

I was cycling onto campus this morning, when I saw a man with a camera standing on the footbridge which crosses the railway line. A real live trainspotter! What a treat. I observed him closely as the time came. The eye of the duck, we might call it.
Along the track, I saw an unusual looking engine approach. Ah. Our anorak raised his camera, poised to strike. At this very moment (Richard Branson bless his heart) a Virgin Trains express hurtled past, completely blocking any view of the old locomotive. To his credit, the trainspotter remained calm, looking deadpan.

A bit of birthday Bosch

Attack of the Killer Bees

I found this strange 'game' - it involves directing a swarm of bees around a badly characterised cityscape. Endless hours of joy. Here.

Dogmat strays

I have been asked to contribute to a collective blog. 'An honour', I said. Now, those of you familiar with what I write here will not be unjustified in thinking "what the fuck, dogmat?"

"What the fuck" indeed. Seeing as the blog to which I shall be contributing draws some inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari, this might be confusing. I do not wish to go over what I have already said regarding these thinkers and the reading of them, here and here. Rather, I shall say that I hope to be involving myself in something unusual and interesting, and possibly even exciting.

Taking the brim_Took the broom is described thus:

"this group space of appreciation polemic_is Cabaret__positive interested___calL it enthusiasm_ poems, images, collage,audio theory of poems, Pop discourse of the same, lines of thought, a space_one desire-machine crossing the plane, crissing the other,plugging in,the transversality of verse, the metanoia of gloss and revision. 'Work' is defined as text,image either complete or in 'progress'__ Things mutate, everything transforms, metamorphosis."

Tuesday Love: cancelled due to foreseen circumstances

How can I talk about yes-saying on February 14. Millions of hearfelt words emanating from grotesque minds. No. Today, for one day only, I become a Nay-sayer.

It is a question of perspective

"He, I now reflected, [...] had always preferred the right-hand of the two salons at Sacher's café, as he would time and again maintain, because of the more comfortable chairs but primarily because of the much better paintings hanging there, I myself, because of the foreign newspapers, mainly the English and French papers, available there and also because of the much better atmosphere, actually preferred the left-hand one, and so we had, whenever I was in Vienna, whenever we went to Sacher's, and we liked going to Sacher's more than anything else, gone alternately to the left-hand and to the right-hand salon of Sacher's café, which in fact was better for our speculations than any other place, and hence the ideal one."
xcxxxxxxxplace,xxvvxxxxxxxxxxxxxThomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein's Nephew p97.

You're mad you are

A lethal cocktail of aspirin and vitamin C has induced in me a reckless mischievousness. I've been going around altering philosophy department announcements which should say "Nozick's attempt to solve the prisoner's dilemma" so that they read "Putznam's attempt..."
I took great effort to copy the handwriting, so it looks authentic. Now, I admit this jolly japery is a little bit 'culturally exclusive' (Seinfeld has been off the air for almost eight years you schmuck) but still, you don't have to be a New Yawk Jew to get the drift.
One day this kinda shit'll get me sectioned under the mental health act if I don't look out.

"Do you know what day it is, son?"
"Mus be 23 November 1963, sir. I remember clear cos I saw the newscast say President Kennedy got shot."

The corporate demon has climbed between the pages of my beloved books

I have been culling my books. Moving into a different room, I decided to cut my collection down to size. But it hasn’t been an easy process – I feel as if a small part of me has been lost forever.
Let me not get carried away. More importantly, we might wonder: ‘which part has been lost?’

Have you seen the latest fire hazard adverts? They feature the tagline: “You don’t have to die to lose your life,” accompanied by pictures of burnt sofas. Long gone are the days when vagabonds would stand in the street shouting “I’ve got my health and that’s all that matters!” Nope – nowadays you are your possessions. Throw my CD player away, and my soul is diminished. What happens if I get rid of all my possessions? Do I die? No. I die if I stop eating or drinking (but that is another matter: we all know what happens if you eat too much).

What has been lost in my book cull is a part of my consumer-self. Schopenhauer was right when he said that “the appropriation of a book is often mistaken for an appropriation of its contents.”

Tuesday Love

I love the way it feels a few minutes after taking painkillers. When I am sick - as I am now - they make me feel warm and contented. In fact, the sensation is washing over me at this very moment. Ah.

The weekend

I've just returned from a weekend away with the philosophy department. We stayed in a nice place in the countryside, and listened to papers in between eating and going for walks. On the first evening, I gave a short talk (students are encouraged to introduce and discuss a topic that they are interested in) about Bataille's economics. I presented Derrida's challenge - 'the gift is impossible' - and then tried to bring everything back together through the distinction between general and restricted economy. I attempted to explore the possibility of transposing aspects of one type of restricted economy (say, one based on potlatch) onto another type of economy - in our case, capitalist economy based on acquisition and accumulation. My conclusion? That the gift event and the theft event have the same potential for disrupting contempary modes of exchange. It was good fun, especially since I made sure to give an analysis of Bataille's apothegm: "the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space."

As you can imagine, the primarily analytic audience just loved it.

Matches, in his talk, wondered why we don't all want to be short-sighted, two-dimensional egoists, if that means we get to be liked and have lots of money and possessions. Hmmm, that's something for all of us to think about. While waiting to transfer onto that MBA course.
On the final day, Mon introduced Tarkovsky's Mirror, which we subsequently watched. I thought it marvellous, but I definitely need to see it another two or three times. True to form, Matches was puzzled: "what was that all about?" Sigh.

"A certain evolution of wealth, whose symptoms indicates sickness and exhaustion, leads to shame in oneself accompanied by petty hypocrisy. Everything that was generous, orgiastic, and excessive has disappeared; the themes of rivalry upon which individual activity still depends develop in obscurity, and are as shameful as belching. The representatives of the bourgeoisie have adopted an effaced manner; wealth is now displayed behind closed doors, in accordance with depressing and boring conventions. In addition, people in the middle class - employees and small shopkeepers - having attained mediocre or minute fortunes, have managed to debase and subdivide ostentatious expenditure, of which nothing remains but vain efforts tied to tiresome rancor.
Such trickery has become the principle reason for living, working, and suffering for those who lack the courage to condemn this moldy society to revolutionary destruction."

having attaimmed Georges Bataille, 'The Notion of Expenditure' in Visions of Excess p124.

Dogmat on the slide...