humanperson105

[humanperson105]

Gabriel Catren on German Idealism

German idealism was the first philosophical movement to address the problem of deciding to what extent and under what conditions it was possible to construct a philosophy of the absolute capable of sublating the hyper-relativism of post-critical modernity. Let us then begin with a central question: what is the philosophical project that we have inherited from German Idealism? And let us resolutely assume the risks of a laconic response: German Idealism is the movement that began to develop the project of synthesizing Spinoza with Kant, that is, Spinozist immanentism (the thesis that we are born, live, and die both in and for the absolute [...]) and Kantian transcendentalism understood as a philosophy of the finite subject, of the transcendental conditions of possibility of its experience and the resulting limitations of this experience. [...] To synthesize Kant with Spinoza, to devise an immanental transcendentalism, means synthesizing a philosophy of the finite subject with a philosophy of the absolute, conceiving of a post-critical non-dogmatic absolutism [...] Gabriel Catren - Pleromatica pg. 20-21.

#German idealism #philosophy #theory #Gabriel catren #Pleromatica

[humanperson105]

Loose notes vol. 2 (Nihil Unbound)

Extinction (being-nothing) is the unbindable trauma of determination in the last instance of transcendental decision (unilateral duality) as death drive/will to know (inorganic/organic, death/life, etc). Thought voids being by naming it and is the sacrifice/mimicry to/of the inorganic surrendered to insulate consciousness and life from trauma. Contra Badiou, naming being the void can only take place with the objectifying transcendence of thought as a thing. The thanatosis of enlightenment is the purposelessness of reason, in contrast to reflexivity, in its mimicking of the inorganic (death drive), as thought is already a dead inorganic thing. Bataille thought sacrifice was the necessity of waste caused by the excess of the accursed share; for Adorno, Horkheimer, and Brassier, sacrifice expresses the logic of the death drive as a primal attempt to bind the excessive unconscious trauma of extinction through the attempt to return to the inorganic through mimicry. Adorno and Horkheimer want reason to produce a sublation of culture and nature to overcome the destructiveness of the death drive, but the thanatosis of enlightenment reveals the death drive and its logic of imitation of the inorganic to be the basis of reason itself. Non dialectical negativity never reaches the concept and remains a thing or object; there is no subject of cognition. 1st level of repression: unilateral duality of inorganic/organic, dead/alive, etc. 2nd level: unilateral duality of noise/information and input/output. “… the void can never surface as such, it can never occur, never take place, for it is nothing but an empty name devoid of reference, a letter that fails to designate, a sign without a concept.” (Brassier, Stellar void or cosmic animal?) Informational reservoir > informational sponge > epistemic engine; much like monads, these are differences in degree rather than differences in kind. Reason/normativity determined in the last instance by nature/cause. Language and normativity are particularly advanced forms of global/transindividual information exchange. Information is a closed system (noise/information and input/output), but epistemic engines are (irreversible) open systems.

#philosophy #theory #Ray brassier #Humanpersonnotes

[humanperson105]

Loose notes vol. 1 (General concepts of psychoanalysis)

Three theories of the unconscious: 1) Natural/vital/energetic unconscious: Nietzsche, Spinoza, Bergson, and Deleuze/Guattari (theories of the will, Phusis, force, or Conatus); 2) Traumatic unconscious: Freud in BPP (oedipal or existential trauma whose repression is the unrepresentable core that consciousness is organized around) and Brassier in Nihil Unbound; 3) Symbolic unconscious: middle period Lacan and Zizek (the unconscious as gap or unsublatable remainder left behind by the development of consciousness that cannot be admitted into retroactive history or memory, ex: Schelling in The Ages of the World); “There are three modalities of the Real: the “real Real” (the horrifying Thing, the primordial object, from Irma’s throat to the Alien), the “symbolic Real” (the real as consistency: the signifier reduced to a senseless formula, like the quantum physics formulas that can no longer be translated back into, or related to, the everyday experience of our life-world), and the “imaginary Real” (the mysterious je ne sais quoi, the unfathomable “something” on account of which the sublime dimension shines through an ordinary object).” (Zizek, Organs Without Bodies, pg. 92) Land is somewhere between 1 and 2, and Schelling is somewhere between 1 and 3. There are many parallels between Freud and Nietzsche, superego and the theory of guilt/debt in the Genealogy, but they diverge insofar as: 1) Freud is a masochist (health as minimal necessary neurosis) and Nietzsche is a sadist, and 2) the psychoanalytic theory of trauma is a kernel of negativity that has no place in Neitzsche's affirmative positivity (Deleuze expunges trauma from his reading of Freud ex: death in Difference and Repetition is a productive shock that forces us to think, and in Anti-Oedipus death is a vacuole of lack necessitated by anti-production).

There are two poles of desire: Freud: psychosis and neurosis (ordinary psychosis is introduced by the late Lacan and Miler as a third pole); Lacan and Zizek: drive and desire; and Deleuze and Guattari: paranoia and schizophrenia.

#Humanpersonnotes #philosophy #theory #psychoanalysis #psychoanalytic theory

[humanperson105]

I'm gonna start posting my notes on here. I have a ton of stuff saved that I don't really want to put in essay form. I started this blog to get feedback and start a dialogue with other people interested in theory. I hope notes will be a little more approachable and if nothing else clear some things up.

[humanperson105]

[humanperson105]

《惊闻90后青工诗人许立志坠楼有感》 "Upon Hearing the News of Xu Lizhi's Suicide" by Zhou Qizao (周启早), a fellow worker at Foxconn

每一个生命的消失 The loss of every life

都是���一个我的离去 Is the passing of another me

又一枚螺丝松动 Another screw comes loose

又一位打工兄弟坠楼 Another migrant worker brother jumps

你替我死去 You die in place of me

我替你继续写诗 And I keep writing in place of you

顺便拧紧螺丝 While I do so, screwing the screws tighter

今天是祖国六十五岁的生日 Today is our nation's sixty-fifth birthday

举国欢庆 We wish the country joyous celebrations

二十四岁的你立在灰色的镜框里微微含笑 A twenty-four-year-old you stands in the grey picture frame, smiling ever so slightly

秋风秋雨 Autumn winds and autumn rain

白发苍苍的父亲捧着你黑色的骨灰盒趔趄还乡 A white-haired father, holding the black urn with your ashes, stumbles home.

[humanperson105]

Though some photographs, considered as individual objects, have the bite and sweet gravity of important works of art, the proliferation of photographs is ultimately an affirmation of kitsch. Photography’s ultra-mobile gaze flatters the viewer, creating a false sense of ubiquity, a deceptive mastery of experience. Surrealists, who aspire to be cultural radicals, even revolutionaries, have often been under the well-intentioned illusion that they could be, indeed should be, Marxists. But Surrealist aestheticism is too suffused with irony to be compatible with the twentieth century’s most seductive form of moralism. Marx reproached philosophy for only trying to understand the world rather than trying to change it. Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead propose that we collect it. Susan Sontag - Melancholy Objects

A perfect example of not only what Lyotard famously called an "incredulity towards metanarrative",  but also how an anti-metanarrative is still a metanarrative.

Itemization: Stream of Consciousness After the Death of the Subject

We have, in postmodernity, given up on the attempt to ‘estrange’ our daily life and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish, ways; we have given up the analysis of it in terms of the commodity form, in a situation in which everything by now is a commodity; we have abandoned the quest for new languages to describe the stream of the self-same or new psychologies to diagnose its distressingly unoriginal reactions and psychic events. All that is left is to itemise them, to list the items that come by. [...] They have not been transformed, or lent some higher meaning; they remain what they were before, transient and of no particular interest. Nor are they lifted into the timeless eternity of classical literature, posterity and the canon: you can dip into them wherever you like and they will not be any more quotable or Virgilian; they will, in fact, remain quite as nondescript as before. But Knausgaard has written them, and written about writing them, and this is the story, not of his own experiences, but of the writing of these non-reflexive sentences, about which we do not even feel his writer’s cramp or his aching shoulder, his blurred vision.

Itemised - Fredric Jameson

#theory #susan sontag

[humanperson105]

Mikhail Lifshitz: Marxist Aesthetics and a Critique of Modern Art

What is important to me is to mark the main features of the worldview we are offered as the lodestar of the future art – the renunciation of realistic pictures, which Picasso sees as an empty illusion, that is, deception, and the affirmation of a wilful fiction, designed to spark enthusiasm, that is, the conscious deception of mythmaking. [...] Let’s just say that the main inner goal of such art lies in suppressing the consciousness of the conscious mind. A flight into superstition is the very minimum. Even better is a flight into an unimaginable world. Hence, the constant effort to shatter the mirror of life or at least to make it muddy and unseeing. Any image must now be given qualities of ‘unlikeness’. In the way, pictoriality recedes, eventually becoming something free of any association with real life. [...] Once it was enough to present a few geometrical figures on the canvas to avoid any associations. Now this is too little. The self-defences of consciousness are so refined that even abstract forms are reminiscent of something real. That requires an even greater degree of detachment. Hence, there appears anti-art, Pop Art, which largely consists of the demonstration of real things, enclosed in an invisible frame. In a sense, this is the end of a long evolution from real depictions to the reality of bare facts. It might seem we’ve already achieved that goal: the life of the spirit has ended, the worm of consciousness has been crushed. Still, that is an empty illusion. The ailing spirit’s attempts to jump out of its own skin are senseless and hopeless. When reflection revolves around itself endlessly, it only gives rise to ‘boring infinity’ and an insatiable thirst for the other. [...] Yes, ‘modern art’ is more philosophy than art. It is a philosophy expressing the dominance of power and facts on lucid thinking and poetic contemplation of the world. The brutal demolition of real forms stands for an outburst of blind embittered volition. It is the slave’s revenge, his make-believe liberation from the yoke of necessity, a simple pressure valve. If it were only a pressure valve! There is a fatal connection between the slavish form of protest and oppression itself. According to all the newest aesthetic theories, art’s effect is hypnotic: it traumatises or on the contrary blunts or calms a consciousness that no longer has any life of its own. In short, it is the art of a suggestible crowd at the ready to run after the emperor’s chariot. Why am I Not a Modernist? - Mikhail Lifshitz

Lifshitz's critique of modern art and its "hypnotic effect" targets modernism's romantic heritage and its animating desire for art to redeem what it sees as a fallen world through acts of a sovereign will possessed by a singular genius (hence the reference to the "emperors chariot"). Its no coincidence the notion of the genius is a quintessentially Roman notion that Walter Benjamin found in the works of none other than Goethe that entailed "the patriarchal idea that every culture, including bourgeois culture, could only thrive under the protection of and in the shadow of the absolute state." (Benjamin - Goethe: the Reluctant Bourgeois) Hitler's status as a failed artist, by now such a trite fact as to be included in the encyclopedia that is middle-brow pop historical consciousness, is a testament to the prevalence of this desire for a despot-as-artist that romanticism, among other things, has left in its wake. Fredric Jameson's antidote to the culture of the crowd seeking a new art school Ceasar is “a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system…” (Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. pg. 54). Lifshitz and Jameson endorse a realism that attempts to allow the masses to understand the world so they may one day change it.

#philosophy #theory #fredric jameson #Mikhail Lifshitz #marxism #Proleartthreat

[humanperson105]

Itemization: Stream of Consciousness After the Death of the Subject

We have, in postmodernity, given up on the attempt to ‘estrange’ our daily life and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish, ways; we have given up the analysis of it in terms of the commodity form, in a situation in which everything by now is a commodity; we have abandoned the quest for new languages to describe the stream of the self-same or new psychologies to diagnose its distressingly unoriginal reactions and psychic events. All that is left is to itemise them, to list the items that come by. [...] They have not been transformed, or lent some higher meaning; they remain what they were before, transient and of no particular interest. Nor are they lifted into the timeless eternity of classical literature, posterity and the canon: you can dip into them wherever you like and they will not be any more quotable or Virgilian; they will, in fact, remain quite as nondescript as before. But Knausgaard has written them, and written about writing them, and this is the story, not of his own experiences, but of the writing of these non-reflexive sentences, about which we do not even feel his writer’s cramp or his aching shoulder, his blurred vision.

Itemised - Fredric Jameson

#philosophy #theory #fredric jameson

[humanperson105]

via lagrimasx

[humanperson105]

Badiou, Infinity, and the Multiple

Badiou begins the second meditation of Being and Event with the central axiom of Parmenides philosophy: 'If the one is not, nothing is.' By contrast, in Badiou's own words, "My entire discourse originates in an axiomatic decision; that of the non­-being of the one." (Being and Event Pg 31) The dialectic of the one and the many and the concomitant question of the existence of the one concerns the problems inherent to the conception of totality and the various incoherencies that result from both the existence and the inexistence of the one.

In Badiou's reading of Plato's Parmenides, the dialectic of the one and the many results in aporia and has no conclusive resolution. For Badiou, Plato's verdict regarding the unthinkability of the many, what Badiou calls the pure multiple, is a result of what he calls the count-as-one, or the necessity of thought to present the pure multiple as one to render it intelligible. Badiou can assert that the one is not and that therefore nothing is, as for Badiou, the nothing or Void is the unthinkable pure multiple.

Therefore, what should be thought here is rather that 'nothing' is the name of the void: Plato's statement should be transcribed in the following manner; if the one is not, what occurs in the place of the 'many' is the pure name of the void, insofar as it alone subsists as being. The 'nihilist' conclusion restores, diagonal to the one/multiple opposition, the point of being of the nothing, the presentable correlate-as name-of this unlimited or inconsistent multiple whose dream is induced by the non-being of the one.(Badiou pg 35)

Badiou can endorse the Platonic theory of participation, that the non-being of the one participates in our sensible experience, but suspend Plato's verdict regarding the unthinkability of the Void. This is due to Badiou's view that the intelligibility of the pure multiple and its identification as non-totalizable infinity have only become possible following the advent of set theory and the notion of the transfinite found in the work of Georg Cantor. The unpresentability of the pure multiple, or Void, allows Badiou to endorse the Lacanian definition of the real as the impasse of formalization and leads Badiou to generalize the unthinkability of the pure multiple in Plato's philosophy to philosophy as a whole. Throughout Being and Event, Badiou seeks out the impasse of the real in thinkers like Spinoza and Aristotle, among many others. In this regard, Badiou's treatment of Hegel is instructive regarding Badiou's conception of real infinity (the transfinite), the real's relation to his overlapping theories of the event and the subject, his view of the purpose of philosophy, and what I refer to as a dialectic of division rather than a dialectic of sublation at the heart of his theory of truth and its relation to his affirmation of the multiple against the one.

In his Logic, Hegel famously distinguishes between "good" and "bad" infinity. "Good" infinity is "good" only in the sense of being a true infinity, which for Hegel entails an infinity that contains its own limitation, in contrast to the "bad" or false infinity, that whose limitation is external. Hegel's distinction between internal and external limitation is a result of Hegel siding with Parmenides and asserting that the one is; if anything falls outside the infinite, then it can neither be infinite nor one.

Hegel's notion of contradiction is not applicable to just any pair of opposites or contraries. Contradiction, for Hegel, is a relation of determinate negation: A and not-A. For example, on and off does not constitute a contradiction, but on and not-on does. Bad infinity, the not-finite, is not a true infinity as it has an external limitation in its negation, the finite, and the same goes for the finite, which has an external limitation in the not-finite or bad infinity (this is crucial for grasping Badiou's conception of the infinite). The bad infinity can become good only by sublating (to suspend and preserve) this contradiction in a whole that contains the contradiction of A and not-A as moments or qualities of the whole. For infinity to interiorize its limit, the finite must become a moment of the infinite.

Hegel identifies this double process as comprising the true infinite because it does not have any intrinsic limitation. There is nothing about it that brings it to an end. There is nothing outside it. Its determination consists in that very process consisting in the finite and the nonfinite reverting into one another and not being either just separated from one another or united with one another. (Richard Dien Winfield - Hegel's Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures pg 137)

Hegel is not a thinker of synthesis but rather of syllogistic integration. As Mao says, the dialectic is a "one that divides into two". Hegel's one is without foundation or ground, and this causes it to collapse in on itself, split itself into two, and then subsume this split within a new whole that promptly splits again and again ad infinitum. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. The one is self determinative; as it cuts itself, it differentiates and expands without ever finding closure. This is why Hegel (and Marx) can think totality without rejecting change or becoming; just as the finite is a moment rather than the limit of true infinity, becoming is a moment of Being.

In the chapter of Being and Event devoted to showing the impasse of the real in Hegel's philosophy, Badiou attempts to defend what Hegel refers to as "bad" infinity in the guise of the non-totalizable transfinite. The importance of the transfinite for Badiou lies in its making possible the thinking of a quantitative infinity that cannot be sublated into the "good" Hegelian qualitative infinity. The absence of such a non-totalizable quantity is, for Badiou, the impasse and point of failure of Hegel's thought. Quantitative infinity is necessary for Badiou not only for rendering the Void of inconsistent multiplicity intelligible but also for providing an external limitation to Being and the dissolution of the one - the very thing that causes Hegel to dismiss quantitative infinity - that is integral to the true focus of Badiou's thought: the Event and the subject of truth. Throughout Being and Event, Badiou is at pains to establish that the event does not belong to the ontology of the pure multiple. "With the event we have the first concept external to the field of mathematical ontology." (Being and event pg 184) Without this extrinsic limitation to being there could be no event and no expressions of subjectivity in the fidelity to an event.

In Badiou's dialectic of belonging and non-belonging (all and not-all/finite and not-finite), there is no whole or totality that contains the moments of the dialectic, only diachronic cuts in the “one”; a dialectic without sublation/suspension. This is why Badiou adopts a dialectic of the “one into two” alongside his espousal of a meta-ontological role for philosophy in Being and Event onward; prior to this (see Badiou's The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic), Badiou's dialectic was purely one of splitting, division, discontinuity, and differentiation: “the one into one” (the one splits into two separate ones), or, “the one into none” (a split that affects a subtraction of the one). Badiou can adopt this position as he relegates the thinking of being to set theory and, concomitantly, relegates the task of unifying subjective truth events into a universal discourse to philosophy. Following Sartre in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Badiou's theory of subjectivity finds its expression in a Fichtean voluntaristic act carried out by a group subject rather than a class in and for itself (for example, see Sartre's discussion of the storming of the bastille). Badiou is not a thinker of history and change understood through periods of transition, but rather of singular ruptures without precedence. The sheer quantitative excess of being leaves open the possibility of the non-ontological event, the subject, and the subtraction of truth from knowledge.

#philosophy #theory #alain badiou #parmenides #hegel

[humanperson105]

Cahiers: "Why the division into twelve tableaux?" Godard: "Why twelve, I don't know; but in tableaux to emphasize the theatrical, Brechtian side. I want to show the 'Adventures of Nana So­ and-so' side of it. The end of the lm is very theatrical too : the final tableau had to even more so than the rest. Besides, this division corresponds to the external view of things which would best allow me to convey the feeling of what was going on inside - unlike Pickpocket, which is seen from the inside. How can one render the inside? Precisely by staying prudently outside.

The greatest tableaux are portraits. Velazquez, for instance. A painter who tries to render a fa only renders the outside of people ; and yet some­ thing else is revealed. It's very mysterious. It's an adventure. The lm was intellectual adventure : I want to try to film a thought in action - but how do you do it? We still don't know."

Godard in an interview

[humanperson105]

Samuel Beckett - Ill Seen Ill Said

#beckett

[humanperson105]

If our emotions are no longer "real," it's because they are no longer strictly personal; we've passed a certain threshold, and entered this new, singular, anonymous space.

- Quoted from Steven Shaviro's essay on My Bloody Valentine

#my bloody valentine #theory #philosophy

[humanperson105]

Death, if that is what we wish to call that non-actuality, is the most fearful thing of all, and to keep and hold fast to what is dead requires only the greatest force. Powerless beauty detests the understanding because the understanding expects of her what she cannot do. However, the life of spirit is not a life that is fearing death and austerely saving itself from ruin; rather, it bears death calmly, and in death, it sustains itself. Spirit only wins its truth by finding its feet in its absolute disruption. Spirit is not this power which, as the positive, avoids looking at the negative, as is the case when we say of something that it is nothing, or that it is false, and then, being done with it, go off on our own way on to something else. No, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and lingering with it [tarrying with the negative]. This lingering is the magical power that converts it into being. – This power is the same as what in the preceding was called the subject, which, by giving existence to determinateness in its own element, sublates abstract immediacy, or, is only existing immediacy, and, as a result, is itself the true substance, is being, or, is the immediacy which does not have mediation external to itself but is itself this mediation.

G. W. F. Hegel - Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit - pg. 20 - 21. (Emphasis mine)

#Hegel #phenomenology of spirit #philosophy

[humanperson105]

Maurice Blanchot - The Space of Literature pg. 103.

#maurice blanchot #theory #philosophy #continental philosophy

[humanperson105]