Archive for 2009

here too there are gods

There is something slightly paradoxical about the gentle warmth that radiates out from electronic devices.  Electronics is supposed to be cool: The heat — a byproduct of other operations, a sign of an irreducible inefficiency — betrays this coolness. Can a semiconductor be a superconductor? This is a question for physicists. But this much, at [ READ MORE ]

growing up

The problem of living, and of growing up, always comes down to this: how can we remain true to our youth. Or rather: how can youth remain true to itself. With each new generation the problem assumes a new form, and sometimes history involves tectonic shifts of a greater order. Every past answer is a preemptive [ READ MORE ]

alien graveyard in Rwanda

According to the Weekly World News, Dr. Hugo Childs, the Swiss anthropologist said, “There must be 200 bodies buried there and not a single one of them is human.” What is so curious here is the idea  of the body that is not human.  The ET is characterized by just this peculiarity: unlike animals, it [ READ MORE ]

Hölderlin/Sade (critique of pleasure II)

“She guards the treasures of daily life, but also of the night, the highest good. This is why the prostitute is a listener. She rescues the conversation from triviality; greatness has no claim upon her, for greatness comes to an end when confronted by her. She has seen every man’s desire fail and now the [ READ MORE ]

abstract pleasures

The internet grants an unusual  insight into abstract pleasures: pleasures that are neither physical and sensual, spiritual, or even intellectual — that are not related to the experience of a given faculty of the mind or the body; that have neither the duration of sensation or contemplation, and yet also have no relation to the [ READ MORE ]

Gigi: towards a critique of quaintness (Gilmours Girls II)

The Gilmour Girls is the Hesiod of modern television.  It is all about genealogy: the generations have proliferated with a wonton, incestuous power. The present moment barely exists in itself, but is inscribed into the history of birth: a novelty that has already been written over by what it has become. New children are born, [ READ MORE ]

third culture

The self-serving character of this appropriation should not be underestimated. Third culture, a name given to a principle for a new relationship between the human and the natural sciences. A new principle, implicitly to be compared to an old principle, that, they argue, never worked very well, ergo the division between the two disciplines that [ READ MORE ]

pinball

The traditional role of the game, once deprived of a pedagogic, let alone sacral, function, has been to waste time.   Having to gamble is the fate imposed on those who do not labor: when all time is measured as labor time, then true leisure (rather than the recreation time of the laborer) is possible only [ READ MORE ]

On beauty

It is the serial killer’s responsibility to exceed in beauty every attempt by the cops or the psychologists to apprehend him, and it is always a him. He is an aesthete who, whether his victims are skinned, decapitated, defenestrated, dismembered, skewered, raped, or stewed, always admires them for their appearance, with an utterly uncultured, almost [ READ MORE ]

How I met my mother (French Theory, by François Cusset)

The critique of the critique of critique, like the old man in the sphynx’s riddle, is left, in the end, with only one leg on which to stand. Still kritizierbar is this alone — the myth of a heroic beginnings, of grand gestures, of new vistas, new worlds of thought, that might appear (ah… Baltimore… [ READ MORE ]

nip/tuck

Agamben wrote of the doctor who, terminally ill with leukemia, turns his body into a laboratory. This marks a certain extreme point in the production of the biopolitical body.  But what are we to make of the plastic surgeons who operates on the mere surface of bodies, and even their own — or, rather, who [ READ MORE ]

analytic philosophy

One is reminded of a fraudulent magician who uses the magic box of language to smuggle in contraband arguments. It would be so much more honest to dazzle, or whisk away&#[ READ MORE ]

utopianism and popular culture

The essence of popular culture is wit: that startling conjunction of things that do not seem to belong together. The dialectic of popular culture would be a dialectics to the second power: the reason of the phenomenal is not its hidden reason, but its manifest unreason. There is no moment of dissolution inherent to the structures [ READ MORE ]

Geist on the installment plan

The love of novelty is the modern form of enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm for new technology is  its most seductive, numbing form.  The old Schwärmer sought to leap into the unconditioned.  Religious fanatics in contrast are seldom Schwärmer these days — there outlook is legalistic, fundamentalist. The technological Schwärmer is a dialectician: he starts out from the absurd detour [ READ MORE ]

Gestirnlichtung (stars’ hollow)

Watching the Gilmour Girls, I keep on expecting a serial killer to jump out from the bushes.  But there is nothing random in this association (it is, I grant, more than an expectation… perhaps even a desire… but a whimsical desire: not the desire for blood, but for a sudden comic denouement): Rory Gilmour’s archetype [ READ MORE ]

before and after finitude

The entire argument of After Finitude is built on a subtle, but all the more commonplace  misinterpretation of Kant.  Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” did not institute ”correlationism.”  Rather, it showed the way out of the  ”correlationism” that tacitly determined every traditional metaphysics, and that, in fact, rendered vain the pursuit of metaphysical (ontological) truth.  The structure of knowledge, [ READ MORE ]

house

The theme of all television is the tenuous relation of the public and private. Every essential genre of television involves a different relation to liminality: to the threshold that first constitutes the private and public through their reciprocal relations. In  police and medical dramas, the gesture is always the same: violation. And the most important [ READ MORE ]

Reaching Reading

Achieving the feeling of having already read something is indispensable for reading it well. This sounds more paradoxical than it is. The first time you read a text, there is an anxiety that arises from not knowing its parameters, not knowing, in short, how much it will require of you. Every text could be the [ READ MORE ]

Antinomy of Fidelity

On the absurd imperative to be untrue (the demand for difference, or toward a truly historical scholarship): Be untrue! 1. To be untrue to this imperative is to be true to it. In the first intuition, this is correct (since to be true is to be untrue to the imperative); on the second intuition it [ READ MORE ]

fugue III

Granted that violence follows upon flight, that violence is a flight from flight: this only suggests the absolute, dire necessity of a critique of flight — of thinking a prospect of flight that does not simply reproduce violence, that does not produce violence as the flight from flight. We may even concede that no actual [ READ MORE ]

On Staying Put

Traditionally, a metaphysics of morals manifested itself in the concept of flight, if not in every actual flight. Flight was flight from God and flight from the self — fugere se ipsum, whose remedy for Augustine was carried out in his confession: “retorquebas me ad me ipsum” — you turned myself back to myself, which [ READ MORE ]

kritik der fluchte II

Just as the critique of violence seeks to articulate the interior structure of violence, ultimately seeking to think violence (which has always been understood by reason in the only way reason can understand things: as the relation of means to end) in terms of the relation, no longer thinkable by reason, between a pure, non-violent [ READ MORE ]

toward a flight from flight

Flight from violence reifies violence and gives it its power for the first time, if, that is, violence is seen as the origin and object of the flight. We risk false consciousness, do we not, if we praise flight, as we do if we praise diaspora or displacement or servitude. What does it mean to [ READ MORE ]

zur kritik der flucht I

At least one addendum to the critique of violence is necessary: a critique of fleeing. For it would be a mistake to think that history (or evolution) has only to do with modalities of violence (law-creating, law-preserving, and law-destroying), or, for that matter, with law. It is only from the perspective of law-creating violence that [ READ MORE ]

On Theories of Time I

A. Better than the continuum (and its interruption) B. is the phenomenological near and far (not presence and absence). Near is the farthest, far the nearest, but C. better than this ideal of appearances: Proust, repetition and difference[ READ MORE ]

Academic Essays I

The structure of address of an intellectual (I won’t say academic) essay: not to whom it may concern, but what element in the addressee (in potentia any) it concerns and what element of the stuff (in potentia any) is made visible to awaken that element in the reader. There are many more ways to fail [ READ MORE ]

Toys and Games I

Social and political differences that have installed themselves between the 1970s and today can be ascribed to a transformation in children’s activity. Let us say that toys have been exchanged for games. With this change-over in the object of desire, a shift in the meaning of play has occurred, which, as a consequence, has re-determined [ READ MORE ]

the theory of suffering

The most difficult thing is to find the point at which the impossibility of individual and historical existence converge.  Very few have found this. Most have retreated to a terrain where thinking is still easy, or at least possible.  But it is with this double impossibility — the impossible thinking of the impossibility of existence [ READ MORE ]

Things and Signs I

One has to read to learn to read. This is the stumbling block that no one has yet overcome, the child who triumphantly misspells her name no more than the adult who doodles aimlessly while waiting for a voice on the phone. Moments in which we suddenly can’t read what we have already read are [ READ MORE ]

experiences

The idea is not the ground or measure of experience, but its illumination. There is, however, no simple correspondence between experience and the illumination of experience.  The illumination of experience is a decision that at once belongs to experience, and transcends it.   Every experience awaits illumination, and yet what it awaits is not absent, but [ READ MORE ]

listening to radiohead for the first time, 17 years too late.

Part of the charm of music  is its “occasionality”: a song, composition, style, or artist can show up in our lives anonymously.  We can hear it many times over without knowing what it is.  And thus, at the same time, we can enjoy the names of groups and composers without the slightest idea of “what [ READ MORE ]

Crutches

Who believes anymore that the problem of representation requires another moment in the theoretical limelight? Or a better question: when do theoretical fashions become threadbare? I mean this in the most practical sense of the word “when.” At what moment does the makeshift construction, pieced together — holes, cracks, misfits and all — out of [ READ MORE ]

Rhetoric of Evolution

When you give an infant a pacifier for the first time, it seems like a miracle. Suddenly there is nothing to worry about, for parent or child. The mystery of its cries, the ineptitude of the parent, the existential terror of mortality reflected in natality, the political terror of an as yet totally undominated life–all [ READ MORE ]

Our current task

For current left political theories, there seem to be two possible foundations, two basic structures out of which develop distinct justifications for what at first appears to be a similar politics. One structure takes mathematics as its basis, the other hermeneutics. One bases its politics in an ontology in turn based on multiplicity. The other [ READ MORE ]

Automatic Thinking

Across what counts as the main elements of the modern psyche, the tendency toward automatic thinking is too high. By this I don’t mean what behavioral psychologists call a negative thought that comes to mind over and over during a day or in a specific situation. The tendency toward automatic thinking is not psychological; it [ READ MORE ]

demectomy

It is no accident that so many reality shows begin with 12 contestants.  One genealogy of the reality show might indeed trace it back to the jury system, and the odd practice, so characteristic of the anxieties of liberal democracy, of sequestering.  The reality show, indeed, brings to its breaking point a paradox endemic to modern [ READ MORE ]

Ghost and Crime

If the psychic has suddenly become such an important television personality, it is not only because of the rise of a vague “new age” spirituality.  Nor is it that the psychic is essentially, radically telegenic: that the psychic’s vision is nothing but a form of tele-vision, and thus coincides perfectly with the medium that would [ READ MORE ]

“the sweatshops of hollywood”

The reality show is the Fordism of Post-Fordism: the attempt to impose the factory model of production, with its gestures of surveillance and control brought to a perverse refinement (the contestants are given only alcohol and no food, and are deprived of sleep for the sake of making them work badly) , on precisely those [ READ MORE ]

Ron Morosan’s Theatrum Emblematicum

Critique traces an idea that shimmers, barely perceptible, in an artwork. Critics may accomplish this skoteinoscopy by making a correspondence between the artwork and one of several simulacra. They either relate it to a complex of commitments and fantasies called the “artist” or show the work’s inner relation to an intractable philosophical question; a certain [ READ MORE ]

the strange celebrity

Most celebrities are relatively simple. If the location of celebrity of is the triune relationship between the divine, the heroic, and the universal, the ordinary celebrity involves a simple connection with an aspect of this relationship.  We, in turn, connect with the celebrity through this connection.  The celebrity type involves a certain conflation of an [ READ MORE ]

A*theism

One way in which religion is more rational than science. It says simply “because” and offers no further reasons for submitting to its code. The arbitrariness of the content of God’s will coincides with a historical view. These habits, customs, names, and — even — reasons have no other ground than the demand to submit [ READ MORE ]

lost in transliteration: on criticism

Watching an American detective show with Korean subtitles, set in the Korea town of Las Vegas, I became witness to a most remarkable sleight of hand: the name 박 (Pak), anglicized into “Park,” became “바크” (pak’ŭ).  A slight difference shatters the propriety of the proper name: a most remarkable property theft.   Having passed through [ READ MORE ]

allegory of reading

I was reading J.M.G. le Clézio’s extraordinary novel, and I began to wonder whether the place named in the title was real. And so I did what people do these days. I meant to type Onitsha, but my fingers, or was it my mind, slipped: I typed Onishta instead. Only a few hits came up. [ READ MORE ]

the king of pop

“Finally, it’s time to write and think this body across the infinite distance that makes it ours, that brings it to come from a site more remote than any of our thoughts: the exposed body of the world’s population. (Whence a necessity still completely indecipherable: this body calls for popular writing, popular thinking.)” [Jean-Luc Nancy, [ READ MORE ]

more definitions

A philosophy can be defined as a singular set of aporiai, plus the methodological question how to remove them. Literary theory can be defined as the demonstration of the moral question how to live if we do not remove them[ READ MORE ]

Artworld’s Refuse

It is a favor bestowed on very few realms of contemporary life to have added to its name the suffix “world” — permanently and without qualification, not even demurring with a hyphen! The world-like quality of the artworld is supposed to derive more from the sense of its sphericity, its closedness, than from the usual [ READ MORE ]

on critical method (the raccoon trap)

I remember the following description of a raccoon trap from a book I read as a child:  a narrow tube,  just wide enough for the animal’s clenched paw to pass through, opens out into a slightly larger cavity where a shiny piece of metal has been placed.  The raccoon reaches inside, unclenches its paw to [ READ MORE ]

the visionary

If the Virgilian gesture of constituting imperial time as remembered memory is now only possible through the uncanny synthesis of archetypal (which is to say originally productive, imaginary) memory and fantasy, it is above all because the memory had been transformed into pure imagination. The memory of memory gave way to the imagination of imagination. [ READ MORE ]

on the phemenological value of celebrity

Lest we forget, the roman heritage of this word brings with it a republican politics of the throng, the crowd, the multitude, envisioned as as unruly, politically potentially ruinous, but always susceptible to repression by means of the brightest spectacle, caesar’s golden crown, crucifiction, or the crimson blood spattering the floor of the circus maximus. [ READ MORE ]

disappearing objects

Conversation, you might say, is a rattling of the chains of communication. Restrictions on what can be communicated become audible in the silences, such that the incommunicable converts into communicables. Exchanges that can be called conversations do this. It is less that they manifest discrepancies and misunderstandings between even the most familiar of interlocutors than [ READ MORE ]