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!