Long Sunday

The Echo of the Subject

I've been looking around for an online version of Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, "The Echo of the Subject," in Typography:  Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics.  It would be a useful and provocative starting-place, I think, to assist in weaving certain themes together.  But maybe, in the end, it's better not to blog about such things, or at such length as would be necessary.  I'll settle for quoting just the very beginning, to give a taste.  (Let it be said that I'm not at all sure this is a great idea, however.  Maybe it's still a good idea, if it encourages some people to read further, or at the very least:  "it's pretty bad but nothing terrible.")

Johnson on deconstruction

Prof. Barbara Johnson, in her excellent Introduction to her own translation of Derrida's essays in Dissemination, makes this very valuable comment on Derrida's method:

Italy!

And you may find yourself in another part of the world -- Talking Heads

W(h)ither the Philosophy of Pop?

"Do you realize how ridiculous you must sound when you bring into the classroom, the place where should be taught universal truths, this [spluttering]…this rubbish. This is little more than a propoganda campaign for MTV. Pop caters to the lowest common denominator; the energy of pop is too often the testosterone-fueled energy of male adolescence; the languages of pop are impenetrable, ephemeral jargons; it locks into stereotypical patterns which relate purely to physiological artefacts and thus have no significance whatever to philosophy. Man will always have need of entertainment; this is not, however, philosophy; or even philosophically interesting. There is no philosophy, nor politics, in pop."
               -Grayson Darkling-Furniss 

"All art...is...essentailly poetry [Dichtung]"
                -Martin Heidegger

Having heard the phrases, "pop philosophy" or, "the philosophy of pop" resonate in certain corners of the 'sphere, having read this generous transcription by Robin; (from whence the quote above); or this post in particular by K-Punk (since followed up by many others); or, going even further back, this good interview by Infinite Thought...well here a mammoth post, with generous (but hopefully not ponderous!) excerpting from an article by Mark Greif follows...

Screw Your Mother

Baudrillard has an interesting piece in the latest New Left Review.  What struck me is how it seems to share a theme that Jodi just pointed out regarding Bartleby's "I prefer not to."   Both point to a fundamental refusal:

But France, or Europe, no longer has the initiative. It no longer controls events, as it did for centuries, but is at the mercy of a succession of unforeseeable blow-backs. Those who deplore the ideological bankruptcy of the West should recall that ‘God smiles at those he sees denouncing evils of which they are the cause’. If the explosion of the banlieues is thus directly linked to the world situation, it is also—a fact which is strangely never discussed—connected to another recent episode, solicitously occluded and misrepresented in just the same way: the No in the eu Constitutional referendum. Those who voted No without really knowing why—perhaps simply because they did not wish to play the game into which they had so often been trapped; because they too refused to be integrated into the wondrous Yes of a ‘ready for occupancy’ Europe—their No was the voice of those jettisoned by the system of representation: exiles too, like the immigrants themselves, from the process of socialization. There was the same recklessness, the same irresponsibility in the act of scuppering the eu as in the young immigrants’ burning of their own neighbourhoods, their own schools; like the blacks in Watts and Detroit in the 1960s. Many now live, culturally and politically, as immigrants in a country which can no longer offer them a definition of national belonging. They are disaffiliated...

Deleuze on Hume

Deleuze on Hume

from Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature

Preface to the English edition

WE DREAM SOMETIMES of a history of philosophy that would list only the new concepts created by a great philosopher – his most essential and creative contribution. The case of Hume could begin to be made with the following list:

Bartleby in power

At the end of The Parallax View, Zizek presents Bartleby's "I prefer not to" as the key figure of a new politics, a politics that moves past "the politics of 'resistance' or 'protestation,' which parasitizes upon what it negates, to a politics which opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation."

What is involved in this position?

The Day After President's Day

Harvard University, in a post-President's Day gift to the world, announced today that the second most controversial President in the United States would resign from his position effective the end of the current the academic year.  While not quite as famous as the most controversial President in the United States, who has instituted a torture archipelago, a number of illegal wars, and even more illegal polices at home, Lawrence H. Summers is nonetheless widely -- and justifiably -- loathed for saying a number of really dumb things.  (More dumb things.) By resigning now, Summers dodges a second no-confidence vote by the members of the arts and sciences faculty, scheduled for February 28.

In his letter of resignation, Summers writes:

As fulfilling as they have been in many ways, these last years have not been without their strains and moments of rancor. After a period of sabbatical and reflection, I look forward to taking up the tasks of teaching and research at the University and to returning to my professional preoccupation with questions of national and international economic policy. In the meantime, I hope and trust that we will together move through the remainder of this academic year in a spirit of good will and constructive engagement with the work of the University.

I will treasure the continuing friendship and support of so many exceptional colleagues and students at Harvard. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to have served as Harvard's President.

More: Inside Higher Ed, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Chronicler

This is the second installment of my (non)series on Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History, for which see here. I have made it all the way through the Theses, basically keeping up with my one-a-day regimen, as well as reading through (with next to no comprehension) the "Theologico-Political Fragment." I'm finding that it's better the second time through. My subject for today will be the third section, which follows in German and in the translation linked above:

annihilation

Perec on Friday

The first in an occasional series, foreshadowed by "techniques of the reading body".

W or The Memory of Childhood. The "or" in the title is ambivalent. It straddles the conjunction's two meanings: both (either) repetition, as in "right or starboard"; and (or) difference, as in "right or left." For this is a book that likewise straddles two narratives, two stories that both repeat and differ. On the one hand, a fiction involving a deaf mute child, shipwrecked off Tierra del Fuego, whose name has been appropriated by an army deserter. On the other hand, a memoir of Perec's own life in the shadow of his parents' deaths, his father we are told in the forces as the Germans advanced on Paris, his mother in or on the way to Auschwitz.