Continental Philosophy

From the blog “How to Live”, a post by Simon Critchley.

The Inhumanities, a new group blog dedicated to exploring the question of the animal in all of its philosophical valences.

We are pleased to announce our first event, an intervention in and reading of Matthew Calarco’s Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. We plan to cover a chapter a week, and the first post on the book will be up this coming Tuesday, 9-1-09. We encourage everyone to participate in comments, or emails. Calarco has been kind enough to agree to follow the discussion, and post a response at the end of the discussion.

Remember, if you want to email us just drop us a line at inhumanitiesblog@gmail.com

Ed Hackett is running a poll on the best continental philosopher:

Link

Jodi Dean has been summarizing and reading Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics.

Link to her posts

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How To Live!

Richard Clarke’s Philosophy’s Other, which I know and highly recommend.

Paul E. has set up his own Heidegger blog, appropriately named: Another Heidegger Blog!

Judith Butler,‘What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’

Robert J.C. Young,‘Foucault on Race and Colonialism’

Scu’s new blog, Critical Animal, entries on Foucault’s ‘Society Must Be Defended’

From Jodi Dean

When is a Truth not a Truth?

When it has to be excessively enforced.

This is how Zizek responds to Stavrakakis’s siding with Badiou on the matter of totalitarian danger.

Badiou warns of the totalitarian danger of enforcing a truth on a situation and ignoring the nameless or multiplicity of reality that resists subsumption under a truth-procedure. Zizek criticizes Badiou on this point on the grounds of an incompatibility between truth and excessive enforcement. He writes:

a Truth is never enforced, because the moment the fidelity to Truth functions as an excessive enforcement, we are no longer dealing with a Truth, with fidelity to a Truth-event.

This doesn’t strike me as convincing, particularly insofar as Truth is determined retroactively. For this determination to be made, ruthless enforcement may well be necessary. Perhaps the better way to put this is to say that ‘excessive’ has a termporal characteristic. What may seem excessive at one point is later determined to have been just right, even measured as a response. The indeterminacy here is unavoidable.

Zizek’s example of Stalinism is particularly problematic. He says that the truth that was not a truth that Stalinism enforced was the vision of a centralized planned economy. This is a problem for a number of reasons.

Continue reading

Richard Crary has been reading Blanchot’s The Space of Literature and is sharing his thoughts.

Link to his blog: The Existence Machine

This is the second part of the previously mentioned blog entry by Fish.

Link to the second part

Jodi Dean has a number of posts on Laclau and Copjec

John Protevi has a new blog (John McCumber and Robin Durie are also contributors).

“Meta-Philosophy: Reflections on the Practices and Institutions of Philosophy.”

As John explains: “As the title indicates, we’d like to provide a forum for discussion of issues relative to philosophy in the world and in the university.”

A quick roundup of some Nietzsche material:

Via cross-x forum:

•  Jason Caro, "Of Our Favorite Nietzschean Question", Political Theory, Vol 27 (6), Dec 1999
•  Michael Ure, "The Irony of Pity: Nietzsche contra Schopenhauer and Rousseau",Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 32, 2006

Audio files of Rick Roderick's lectures on Nietzsche

And Brian Leiter's response to Aaron Ridley

An entire blog dedicated to Jacques Ranciere!

Link

An exciting announcement from John Protevi:

I’ve begun two new group blogs, inviting friends to collaborate. I won’t be in charge in any sense; I’m just handling the administration as it were. The new blogs are:

1. 4EA Cognition. The “4EA” in the title stands for “Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective” Cognition. It’s a purposefully long list of attributes that signals our desire to explore ways of thinking about cognition that depart from standard cognitivist models.

2. Outside Philosophy. Although I’m a philosopher, I work in a French Studies department. There are quite a few people like me, who, for one reason or another, are philosophers who don’t work in philosophy departments. I thought this group blog would be a good forum for us.

I hope you’ll visit and spread the word!

Via Jodi Dean:

Last weekend, another political theorist asked me why I thought Agamben had become popular. Someone asked Paul a similar question a couple of days ago. It's interesting that people ask this question. I've not heard it asked about, say, Zizek or Badiou. So why do people ask it? And, what's the answer?

Link 

Via The Différance Engine:

In the year after Butler’s award for bad writing, and in response to it, Martha Nussbaum wrote an article entitled “The Professor of Parody” for the American magazine, New Republic. In this article she made a sustained critique of Butler’s writing style along with what she perceived to be the intellectual milieu from which it comes. She summarised Butler’s position in two ways:

• Butler’s work is a new ‘symbolic feminism’ disconnected from materiality.

• In it, subjectivity is limited: there is no escape possible, only parody from within oppressive structures.

Here are her detailed criticisms as they relate to methodological issues.

Continue reading here

Via I Cite

Philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek provides his commentary and observations about Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men. The filmmakers recently spent time with Mr. Zizek after identifying him as an important element in their research because of the unique philosophical view he offers on both the implementation of governmental power, and the damaged emotional state of a refugee.

In this transcript, he discusses issues including the foreground/background dynamics of the film, infertility and politics. Zizek brings a complex and informative view on Children of Men’s portrayal of London, the emotional state of the characters and overall vision of the film.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK:

For me, Children of Men is a model of a kind of materialist subversion of a reactionary classic, because the novel is obviously a spiritualist Christian parable of resuscitation, bringing new life and so on. The novel ends with baptizing. It’s clear Christian parable. The film is a model of how you can take a reactionary text, change some details here and there and you get a totally, a totally different story. I would say that it’s a realist film, but in what sense? Hegel in his esthetics says that a good portrayal looks more like the person who is portrayed than the person itself. A good portrayal is more you than you are yourself. And I think this is what the film does with our reality. The changes that the film introduces do not point toward alternate reality, they simply make reality more what it already is. I think this is the true vocation of science fiction. Science fiction realism introduces a change that makes us see better. The nightmare that we are expecting is here.

The rest