Madness and incivility

I've been reading about Foucault, and I've taken some concrete steps (it's a mafia thing, mixing metaphors and all. You sleep with the fishes someday dogmat...). On the political front, he had Groupe d'information sur les Prisons. Following the great man, I have started wearing my activist Save Arrested Development teeshirt. Never mind that I watched the show downloaded off the internet for free, and that it has already been cancelled. 'Revolution o muerte' whatever the weather. Concerning technologies of the self, I have been teaching myself to throw with the left arm (which would be good since I am actually left-handed). For some reason right just felt right.

Now I know what you're thinking: "someone showed him that funny bit in Zizek's Orgasms without Bodies about the yuppies reading Guattari and Deleuze."
All I have to say is: we don't call them 'yuppies' anymore - it's now 'pinstriped cnuts', or simply 'the gainfully employed'.

Those conspiracy theories...

Come on. There I was, trying to defend ole Uncle Sam, and then the big fool goes and pulls a stunt like this. Yes, stun belts in court. Three cheers for justice.

Tuesday love

I've hit the mother lode. Have you?

France. Another crack.

I think there is some confusion concerning my attitude towards the revolting French students. If you are a regular reader, you will probably know that I support violent protest by default (particularly if it 'turns nasty').
All I wanted to do was point out that some manifestations of resistance are less significant than others. We all remember the mother featured in Fahrenheit 911 grieving her dead soldier son. We can also recognize that this sort of thing has the potential to change attitudes in a country like the United States. But in the end, we snort with derision at people who all-of-a-sudden turn pacifist coincidentally at the same time as they lose a loved-one at war. Magically Tony Blair and George Bush become liars when Private Johnny gets blown to pieces in a ditch somewhere in terrorist-land.

And so with the students. Not a peep from them in November (even Socialist Worker struggled to find evidence of this). Then: oops, laws concerning their immediate financial future get changed and suddenly it's 'solidarité!'

I still support them. I still dislike 'reform' or 'modernization' (ie. becoming more American). Nonetheless - and perhaps it is the tiny anarchist hiding inside me - I was far more encouraged when the banlieus erupted, spontaneously, last year.

Mis-spent youth

I watched the Commonwealth Games cycling road-race on Saturday night. It was quite nostalgic: the South African team was made up of some of the lads who used to thrash me in the high school league. While everyone else was reading Camus and self-harming, I was struggling along in the gutter behind these bastards. I remember how frightening some of them used to be. He was rumoured to ride his mountainbike in the sand dunes for strength training. And he had a spell riding with Lance Legstrong at US Postal.
We mustn't forget that this is the only race where South Africans and Australians can seem so fast, since there are no Italians, Spanish, French, Belgians (or Americans, for that matter) to worry about. God Save the Queen indeed.

Thought for the day

"No one is accountable for his deeds, no one for his nature;
to judge is the same thing as to be unjust."
vcvbctnnhe Friedrich Nietzsche Human, All too Human I §39.

France

What are the French students up to? Does this really surprise anyone? The banlieu protests were, to my mind, far more interesting. Imagine if the chavs rose up and started a revolution!
Students on the other hand; who gives a toss - that's what they do (or at least, that's what they should do).
My hope for the latest unrest is a little less of this:

and a little more of this:

Going postal

I'm spending a lot of time in the post office these days. The book business is booming. Well, I've sold three, but you gotta start somewhere.
Yesterday, I happened upon Eeshandazadeggi, and we had a good talk. It was funny: at one point he was struggling to say something like 'untotalitizing totality' when a post office customer intervened (her first mistake): "do you mean 'totalitarianism?'"
"No no no" he mumbled, waving the interferer away.
Mostly our discussion consisted in him talking about a book he'd read, and me saying that I didn't know anything about that thinker. Lukacs...Heidegger...Baudrillard.
I couldn't resist making fun of Baudrillard though. He's kind of like Zizek, someone who, in one of Lewis's possible worlds gets taken seriously, but who just gets laughed at in this world. A kind of Walter Mitty character, if you will (it amuses me that this is considered an insult; I would love to be a fantasist).
Speaking of which, I am trying to construct a conspiracy theory about how I am surrounded by conspiracy theorists. Leaving the post office with Eeshandazadeggi, we stopped to talk to P. Interestingly, the initials of my interlocutors spelled 'ESP' (coincidence? - I think not, my friend!). I am also alarmed by the fact that the two clevererest undergraduates in the philosophy department believe the 9/11 Twin Towers extravaganza was laid on by the CIA. Now I know their reasoning processes are probably fatally flawed, given that they both love Heidegger and Wittgestein, but still...

In other news, I am finding ever new and inventive ways to entertain myself while reading. To begin with, I laugh out loud every time Renaud Barbaras uses the word 'rigorous', which is about twice every page. When the espresso twitches get especially bad, I amuse myself by emitting loud and bizarre noises, over the blaring Mahler, then imagining with glee the look of consternation on my elderly neighbours' faces.
Now before you get to thinking that I am some sort of yob, I would like to point out that these aren't your ordinary elderly neighbours. Mr Respectable wears a leather jacket and pilot sunglasses. In the quietest, loneliest loneliness, it is possible to hear the soothing rhythms of machine-gun fire issuing from his Playstation. One foot in the grave he is not.

Tuesday love

"In Heaven, Everything Is Fine.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine.
You've Got Your Good Things, And I've Got Mine.

In Heaven, Everything Is Fine.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine.
You've Got Your Good Things, And You've Got Mine."
asdfasdfasdfadfasdfadsfadsfadfsddddd (Eraserhead)

Zones of indetermination

Nothing much to report. I am engaging in a little endeavour called 'work'.
Reading Matter and Memory til my eyes bleed. Scrutinising Merleau-Ponty til my hope gives out.
The beauty of scholarship: I have already composed two poetic footnotes to enliven the study I have yet to write.

Tuesday love

I had a nice little walk in the countryside around campus earlier today. There is nothing better than cold air and bubbling brooks to stimulate the mind. So let us exalt 'taking a stroll in the greenery'. On this point I find myself closer to the views of logging expert Martin Heidegger, than to those of Michel 'I hate the outdoors' Foucault - quite a turn up for the old books.

Continental Eclecticism: an idiosyncratic report

Friday was a good day. I listened to some talks, I met some new people, I realised that you cannot plagiarise if you do not understand. There was a conference at my university (organised, in part, by Glueboot, if I am not mistaken). We had the honour of a keynote speech from a Paris professeur.
In the bar afterwards, I asked him what he thought of an American student's presentation, which covered his area of expertise.
"Shall I be honest? Well, since I wrote on this material ten years ago, I felt a little surprised and annoyed that she didn't appear to know my work! That is my narcissistic answer. Otherwise, I was glad that her attempt wasn't as good as mine."
A little later, I suggested to him that, if I had been her, I would have been very nervous, since he is the leader in this field of research (ie: go easy, man).
"I don't look terrifying do I? Ok, ok, I was a bit hard, but only because she seemed to have all the answers - 'you want ontology, I'll give you ontology; you want epistemology, I've got it too' - so I thought I would ask a difficult question, concerning external relations, which should cause Deleuzians some difficulty..."
A fascinating character, though I admit that I am easily seduced by French philosophy teachers (and, increasingly, French philosophy students). An alarming trend, I have noticed, is the wish for continentalists from the continent to come to England to work on continental philosophy. All is not peaches and cream t'other side of the channel after all.

Friday was also remarkable in that I had one discussion about Heidegger and technology, and one discussion about Husserl and 'doing phenomenology'. Tome had just read Barbaras' Desire and Distance, a short book which I am using for the Bergson/Merleau-Ponty endeavour. We had a long discussion about whether it is worth embarking on the vast project of trying, not to read, but to do, phenomenology.
I also had the opportunity to talk to Fargone the Farsi. It is funny - every time I speak to him he seems to be going through a 'Lacan phase'. A year ago, he was talking about mirrors and development, and the other evening his catchphrase was 'nom du père'. We had a short discussion about Nietzsche, but didn't get far since he was trying to talk about complexity in psychoanalytic terms, and I wasn't. It was interesting nonetheless.

Carry on up the Amazon

I have been selling some of my books on Amazon marketplace. I made my first sale on thursday, a copy of that great work, An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology. As I was packaging the tome, I couldn't resist slipping a bonus book into the envelope. So I sent off this marvellous epistemology text along with André Gide's The Vatican Cellars, plus an offensive note ('Philosophy is love of wisdom: there is more wisdom on one page of Gide than in a whole book of Dancy').
I know that this kind of tomfoolery isn't exactly in the spirit of entrepreneurship, but the thought of someone receiving such a package fills me with endless wonder and fascination.

Sartre, Club Maintenant, and 'the people'

"Right from the beginning of the street the crowd were pushing and shoving to get into the hall where Jean Pulse Heartre was going to give his lecture.
People were using all kinds of tricks to needle through the eagle eye of the chastity belt of special duty policemen who had cut off the district and who were there to examine the invitation cards and tickets, because hundreds and thousands of forgeries were in circulation.
One group drew up in a hearse and the coppers stuck a long steel spike through the coffin, crucifying the occupants to the elm for eternity. This saved having to take them out again before the funeral and the only trouble caused was that the shrouds would be all messy when the real dead men came to use them. Others got themselves parachuted in by special plane. There were riots and fighting at Orly too to get on to the planes. A team of firemen took them for a practice target and, unlacing their hoses, squirted them straight in the bull's-eye of the battle where everybody was miserably drowned. Others, in a desperate attempt, were trying to get in through the sewers. They were being pushed down again by hob-nailed boots which jumped heavily on their knuckles every time they gripped the edges of the man-holes, trying to get a hold. The sewer rats took over from there. But nothing could dampen the spirits of these aficionados."
kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkknnnnnnnkkkkbbkkkkkkkBoris Vian, Froth on the Daydream p93.

Being with the Other

"The interval between the other and me can never be overcome. It has to be cleared of a prioris, freed from prescribed or solipsistic certitudes, arranged as a reserve of silence appropriate neither simply to me nor simply to the other, space between us where we are going our way toward one another through the gesture (of) speaking."
ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddmdjdddddLuce Irigaray, The Way of Love p66.

Tuesday love

Today I would like to celebrate the art of Pierre Klossowski - thinker, writer, artist, and French translator of Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche.

Above: Scene with the young Ogier and the Commander of St. Vit, 1982.
Below left: Lahire and the young Ogier, 1972. Below right: Le petit Rose.

Back to the Future

Axel and I were watching the German possible-worlds scenario film Run Lola, Run when we got to thinking about time-travel. Naturally, our discussion required that we accept a common sense, spatialized conception of time, if only to give the screenplay writers a fighting chance; reading Bergson and listening to Elusive-Hyphen's diatribes against "Hollywood's obsession with time-travel" made this fairly difficult.
Axel's opening view was that, if we accept a strong determinism, then it is not inconceivable that our irruption into the causal chain, when we go back in time, is always already part of the 'causal account'. That is to say, our actions as a time-traveller in 1975 would be determined, but determined by states of affairs in 2006.
I objected by saying that, given our assumptions (ie, our commonsensical, simple-science fatalism), a problem arises because, from these very assumptions, it follows that the state of affairs in the world at any moment is determined by that of the prior moment. And since on our simple model time unfolds in a 'straight-line', we encounter the same difficulty as Kant did on the question of free will: how does anyone, or anything, intervene in the causal chain, since causal determinism is true a priori (or in our case, by definition)?
To clarify - my problem with time-travel has to do with the magical appearance, in the causal order, of undetermined events, even though we know that they are determined by events in the future. To accept this outlook, we must adopt the view that all of history is simultaneous. The problem now is that our claim that 'every state of affairs is caused by the state of affairs immediately prior' loses all meaning, since we have no way in which to grasp such a temporal understanding of causality.

Our concerns developed from thinking about what would happen if you travelled back in time and murdered the 'young you'. Would the later 'you' simply evaporate? Would you find it impossible to kill the 'younger you'? These are pressing questions. But I think it is high time I recommend taking a look at Bergson ('how is forgetting possible?').

The shoe store

Listening to a lecture on Franz Kafka, I drifted off into reminiscences of the time I spent working in a shoe store. There were some characters: the second generation Pole whose only remaining outward signs of polishness were his blonde hair, and much-parodied tendency to pronounce 'a' like a 'u', as in 'Buttersea Bomber!' (his oft-repeated refrain).
Our assistant manager, part Moroccan, maintained a reassuring serenity, punctuated by moments of anger or jollity. His physique was notable for its slightly bandy legs (such as one might find on a cowboy).

Power/Knowledge

"I believe that anything can be deduced from the general phenomenon of the domination of the bourgeois class. What needs to be done is something quite different. One needs to investigate historically, and beginning from the lowest level, how mechanisms of power have been able to function. In regard to the confinement of the insane, for example, or the repression and interdiction of sexuality, we need to see the manner in which, at the effective level of the family, of the immediate environment, of the cells and most basic units of society, these phenomena of repression or exclusion possessed their instruments and their logic, in response to a certain number of needs. We need to identify the agents responsible for them, their real agents (those which constituted the immediate social entourage, the family, parents, doctors etc.), and not be content to lump them under the formula of a generalised bourgeoisie."
aaaaacontent to lump aajjaaaaMichel Foucault, 'Two Lectures', in Power/Knowledge p100-101.

Commentariat

Man, Colonel Chabert had me laughing into my keyboard with this comment:

"The longest threads on this site came from mocking or dissing someone's
favourite tv shows - its got to be the most unacceptable thing you can do. You
can abuse Palestinian militants or feminists or altermondialist actions all you
like, call them fascists working for the Man, but disrespect the television!
That's too far! Moralizing, killjoy...its really remarkable. Yet it's not hard to
find out what every hour we each spend in front of the tv is worth to the
Masters. So the radical refusal of destructive, market greasing activity will be
put off indefinitely, while the radical refusal of constructive action will
remain the default position, as ever...."

Guilty as charged guv: when I do have a tv in the house, I can't resist a bit of 70's film action ('twas Smokey and the Bandit last sunday - diamond).

Colloquium

I've spent the evening at the expense of the philosophy department, in the company of a fairly eminent French thinker (as a clue to his identity, we can say that a dumbass nouveau philosophe might call our man a 'deckhand on the ship of fools').
During his talk, he spoke about Masoch, and how Deleuze, in breaking up the sadist-masochist unity, articulates an account of masochism which is deeply subversive. At dinner, he distinguished himself as uncompromising, yet warm. He returned the wine, and left most of his meat untouched; delicate french tastebuds recoiling from Coventry cuisine.

Unfortunately I was a little too overwhelmed to have anything interesting to say to him. I felt less like an interlocutor and more like an anthropologist (see this rare species! a genuine thinker! what books does he read? what films interest him?)
When I did talk, I expressed an interest in attending a module based on his current research, rather than him regurgitating old Mademoiselle Plateaux material - a remark which seemed to impress him. I, in turn, was impressed when he explained why he teaches in England ('it is a question of deterritorializing...', 'they let me do what I like...') .

Otherwise, there was department gossip, but I refuse to report it here, since I am trying to kick the habit. I have something of an antipathy towards forming a 'continental bloc' - I would rather simply commit a grievous bodily harm offence against the person in question. Of course, my concern is that, once in prison, I will be compared less to causes célèbres Negri and Genet, than to Schlick's mad student murderer...

A project

What would you say if I told you I was (physiologically, rather than psychologically) addicted to a certain substance, even though I have never ingested that substance?