Back

So it's been a while. But I come bearing news of paper topics. Maybe that's all I use this for, but it helps to just throw out general outlines, and maybe think as I write.

Within the last day or so I've more definitively sketched out an idea for my Deleuze "Difference and Repetition" paper. I think I"m going to take what Deleuze presents in D&R and try to sketch out its political implications. In short, what are the political implications of Deleuze's ontological project? It seems, oddly enough, that Derrida's political writings lend themselves well to just what this would be. It seems that Derrida's democracy-to-come maps well onto Deleuze's ontology. What's interesting, and this just may be my complete lack of knowledge in the area, but it seems as though there is a lack of writing concerning the relationship between Deleuze and Derrida. I'm not saying it's not there, but it's not real prevalent. Whats more interesting than that is the lack of engagement between Deleuze and Derrida themselves. I think Derrida refers to Deleuze in no more than 5 places, and all that's coming to my mind now is a footnote that Derrida refers to Deleuze. On Deleuze's part in relation to Derrida, I'm not sure how often he refers. Nonetheless, this is somewhat striking to me due to their proximity. Both being poststructuralists in France at the same time, one would think there'd be a more extensive communication between the two, but as far as I can tell, there wasn't. Anyhow, it seems to me that Derrida's democracy-to-come fits well with the role of the eternal return in Deleuze. While many are wary of Derrida's political commitments, whether associating deconstruction with a political temperament of inaction and undecidabilty, as well as a distrust of this quasi-messianic l'avenir that comes with Derrida's democracy-to-come, I think that it is best understood as that which is constitutive of the test of Deleuze's eternal return. The relationship between Deleuze's virtual and actual realms links well to democracy, as such, in Derrida, and various political manifestations thereof. We'll see how it goes.

For my Kant "Critique of Judgment" paper, I think I'm going to use Lyotard's "Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime" and Deleuze's "Kant's Critical Philosophy". I'm thinking I can read Deleuze as presenting a picture of Kant in which the first two Critiques result in a severe division between on the one hand reason and the laws of nature, and freedom and morality on the other. While Deleuze finds this fissure fascinating, he ridicules Kant's attempt to ressurect a unified account in and through the Third Critique, namely in the latter half of the book concerning the teleological. This section, as well as the Analytic of the Beautful, establishes an affinity between the faculties and nature, establishing subjective purposiveness, etc. It seems to me that the general thrust of Deleuze's reading sees the division rejected by Kant, with a subsequent attempt to salvage. A covering over this fracture, so to speak. This being the case, however, I feel that Deleuze's reading can be supplemented with Lyotard's. Lyotard's engagement with the sublime results in a field in which the subject, as such, is denied, not accomplished. Whereas the beautiful allows Kant to rejuvenate the subject, the transcendento-critical subject, the sublime, in Lyotard's reading, is symptomatic of the fracture of the first and second critique split. Analytic of the Sublime as suplement to Analytic of the Beautiful in Kant's eyes; Lyotard as supplemental to Deleuze in my paper.

I'll talk about Ancient Greek and the Atomists some other time.

We'll see.

Back

So it's been a while. But I come bearing news of paper topics. Maybe that's all I use this for, but it helps to just throw out general outlines, and maybe think as I write.

Within the last day or so I've more definitively sketched out an idea for my Deleuze "Difference and Repetition" paper. I think I"m going to take what Deleuze presents in D&R and try to sketch out its political implications. In short, what are the political implications of Deleuze's ontological project? It seems, oddly enough, that Derrida's political writings lend themselves well to just what this would be. It seems that Derrida's democracy-to-come maps well onto Deleuze's ontology. What's interesting, and this just may be my complete lack of knowledge in the area, but it seems as though there is a lack of writing concerning the relationship between Deleuze and Derrida. I'm not saying it's not there, but it's not real prevalent. Whats more interesting than that is the lack of engagement between Deleuze and Derrida themselves. I think Derrida refers to Deleuze in no more than 5 places, and all that's coming to my mind now is a footnote that Derrida refers to Deleuze. On Deleuze's part in relation to Derrida, I'm not sure how often he refers. Nonetheless, this is somewhat striking to me due to their proximity. Both being poststructuralists in France at the same time, one would think there'd be a more extensive communication between the two, but as far as I can tell, there wasn't. Anyhow, it seems to me that Derrida's democracy-to-come fits well with the role of the eternal return in Deleuze. While many are wary of Derrida's political commitments, whether associating deconstruction with a political temperament of inaction and undecidabilty, as well as a distrust of this quasi-messianic l'avenir that comes with Derrida's democracy-to-come, I think that it is best understood as that which is constitutive of the test of Deleuze's eternal return. The relationship between Deleuze's virtual and actual realms links well to democracy, as such, in Derrida, and various political manifestations thereof. We'll see how it goes.

For my Kant "Critique of Judgment" paper, I think I'm going to use Lyotard's "Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime" and Deleuze's "Kant's Critical Philosophy". I'm thinking I can read Deleuze as presenting a picture of Kant in which the first two Critiques result in a severe division between on the one hand reason and the laws of nature, and freedom and morality on the other. While Deleuze finds this fissure fascinating, he ridicules Kant's attempt to ressurect a unified account in and through the Third Critique, namely in the latter half of the book concerning the teleological. This section, as well as the Analytic of the Beautful, establishes an affinity between the faculties and nature, establishing subjective purposiveness, etc. It seems to me that the general thrust of Deleuze's reading sees the division rejected by Kant, with a subsequent attempt to salvage. A covering over this fracture, so to speak. This being the case, however, I feel that Deleuze's reading can be supplemented with Lyotard's. Lyotard's engagement with the sublime results in a field in which the subject, as such, is denied, not accomplished. Whereas the beautiful allows Kant to rejuvenate the subject, the transcendento-critical subject, the sublime, in Lyotard's reading, is symptomatic of the fracture of the first and second critique split. Analytic of the Sublime as suplement to Analytic of the Beautiful in Kant's eyes; Lyotard as supplemental to Deleuze in my paper.

I'll talk about Ancient Greek and the Atomists some other time.

We'll see.

So it looks like this is how it's going to be...

Dennett, Churchland(s), this is Hegel.........Hegel, this is Dennett and Churchland(s).


Now that we have gotten the formalities out of the way, you will both be part of my paper.

Magritte and Hegel

So a fellow grad student of mine called my attention to the fact that Magritte painted a painting entitled "Hegel's Holiday". Painted in 1957, this is what it looks like:






He jokingly said I should write my paper for my Phenomenology of Spirit on it; which would somehow go over horribly with Rockmore, because we're dealing with Hegel, not Magritte.

But then I was thinking it'd be interesting not just to analyze the painting in relation to Hegel's philosophy as representing that philosophy, but to, in turn, analyze it from within Hegel. To use Hegel's aesthetic theory to interpret the painting, which Magritte supposedly believed expressed perfectly Hegel's dialectic. So I thought that be a great project. If only I knew Hegel's aesthetics.

Changes

So it's been a while. This year's been kind of rough, moving away from the people I love and like to a city completely foreign to me with nobody I really know here. And grad school's been a lot of work; but it's good work. It's stuff I really love doing and getting into, it's just that you realize that you spend 8 hours a day immersed in it and kind of wonder what the point is.

The main proprietor of this pressure and confusion was, in a way, brought on by a lack of anything to write papers on. It was getting to a point where I needed to have something started, and hadn't, and should have started figuring stuff out a while ago. So that got to be a bit much. But I sat down and really hammered out paper ideas this past weekend, and began to outline their structure a little bit throughout the week so far.

For Heidegger I initially thought I was going to do this critique of Being and Time, focusing on his use of Discourse as this constituitively primordial structure of Being-In and Being-With. It was going to take on a similar form as the Levinas paper I wrote last year as a writing sample for applications. Basically using trauma discourse as a problematization of traditional conceptions of discourse. But as I kept working with it during the school year, it just wasn't laying out well. There were parts in the book where I could destroy him, and then there were other parts I just couldn't see myself being able to get beyond. He just seemed to have a way to get out of it. So I struggled and struggled with trying to find a way into this critique and couldn't really resolve the problem I was having. And it was beginning to bum me out because it was getting to the point where I needed to start writing, but I had spent so much time trying to work a way into it to no avail. So then I realized I don't have to critique him, but could use his project as a way of facilitating a clearing for traumatic discourse, opening up a space within which it and other ethically demanding discourses could build, grow, and develop. So the beginning of the week was trying to find a way to start heading in that direction, followed by a couple pages written.

For my Walter Benjamin class I haven't really been too worried. Class is really laid back as are the paper requirements. But I hadn't really laid out the structure of the paper yet, so that was worrying me. I was able to do that earlier today, and began writing, with about 8/9 pages pumped out this evening. I decided to try and trace his use of the image of the "threshold" throughout the Arcades Project. And it's been really interesting. It sort of forms this thread throughout the work both implicitly and explicitly. What I'm really interested in is the way in which it could be tied into deconstructive notions of sovereignty. I've read a little concerning it, and just read a paper by Michael Naas last night that addresses Derrida's notion of laicite vis-a-vis sovereignty. Agamben's work seems to be operating within this horizon also. I'm sure a million others. Anyways, I see a similar concern for issues of boundaries and exclusion in Benjamin. I don't think it'll develop in this paper, but the possibilities for future work are definately there.


As for Hegel. No clue. Nobody has any clue what to do with that book, Phenomenology of Spirit. The books goddamn impossible, not to mention the fact that Hegel seems to be able to incorporate anything thrown at him into his project. So who knows. I'll eventually just have to throw something together with blinders on and pump out a pile of proverbial shit.

But making progress on these papers has lifted my spirits.

I can't wait for break and friends.

new

I realize that it's been a while since I've posted anything in this. But not for no reason. Grad school has finally started after an almost start a year ago, followed by the said year, and then here I am. The move was good, and I finally feel like I'm starting to get settled.

As far as the program goes, I'm really excited for it. It seems to be a department that is on the upswing and is in transition. Or maybe it's at this fork in the road and the exciting part is that it's making decisions as to which way to take (don't even bring in Robert Frost here, please). So that's a good thing. Initially I was worried as to just what classes would be like, but after going to a week of them, they are essentially the same, just on a much higher level.

With that said, I feel like I'm way in over my head as far as a knowledge base goes. While undergrad got the ball rolling for me, a lot of my learning came from me myself. That being the case, I feel like I'm somewaht playing catch-up here. The exciting thing, though, is that I feel that all this information is sinking in faster than it ever has. Maybe that was the problem; it just never sank in before. Anyhow.

I'm taking Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit", Heidegger's "Being and Time", and Philosophy of Walter Benjamin. Hegel is an eye-opener. Not in the sense of, man I've never really looked at the world in this way, so much as its the goddamn hardest thing I've ever tried to read. Upside of things with that is that the class is being taught by Tom Rockmore, who is big name in the world of philosophy. Look up Hegel in Wikipedia, and the first bibliographic entry is Rockmore. So he knows his stuff; but what's interesting is that he has this super progressive/controversial reading of Hegel that nobody seems to like. Instead of Hegel the proponent of the Absolute, of a religious Spirit, or of an dialectical reading of history that somehow gave rise to both Marx and Fukeyama and their respective 'end of history's', you get a reading of Hegel as this historical contextualist, almost relativist. So that's refreshing. If you're going to read Hegel, it might as well be interesting.

The Being and Time class is good too. It's being taught by Dr. Rodemeyer who is a Husserl scholar. So we're reading Heidegger through somebody who studies Heidegger's teacher, which should bring in some good historical lineage stuff, or however you want to put that. In other words, we get to see what Heidegger is coming from also. She's real thorough in class and has an intersting class structure, the most exciting of which she previews the reading for next class, and thereby gives the main points/structure of the reading that we'll be doing at home. That way you have an idea of what you're getting into when you start reading, and it eliminates basic questions next time for class. I'm interested to see how the text gets interpreted in class.

And the last class is the Walter Benjamin class. For that, we're reading his "Arcades Project", which is this gigantic text, wherein which he examines 19th century Parisian Arcades. Sounds dry, but the way the book is set up is really cool; it's a bunch of extracts from various texts of the period that Benjamin collected and reassembled, interspersed with his comments and notes, etc. What it ends up being is this analyses of the beginning of capitalism, but read through the eyes of a marxist of sorts that is all the while a mystic Jew to some degree. So there's this interesting dialectical structure going on, as well as this complex relationship between one who dislikes the tenets of capitalism, though is still very open to the glamour and beauty of things, of commodities. It deals with fashion, art, technology, etc.

So yea, that's enough for now. New entries to come; they won't really be political anymore, but will probably be me trying to work out ideas for stuff I'm dealing with in class and these texts, and eventually paper ideas. So until then and stuff.

Locals

I'm going to attempt to look into some of the more local political stuff going on regarding the upcoming election. Senatorial, gubernatorial, etc. Hopefully I'll be able to write some things about that.

Administration Wanderings

In today's New York Times, senior administration officials hint at something interesting, and by interesting I mean troubling, and by troubling I mean ironic, and by ironic, I mean troubling.

Faced with a new report which has nothing but confirmed suspicions long held by many, it appears as if the situation facing the Bush Administarion/Iraq government is that of civil war. Not strife, not resistance, but both of those anddd civil war. So what does this mean for the government (in the twofold sense of US/Iraq)?

' “Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,” said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.

“Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect,” the expert said, “but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy.” ' (NYTimes, 8-17-06, "Bombs Aimed At G.I.'s in Iraq Are Increasing").

It appears as if the administration that has been put on this earth to spread democracy, to put freedom on the march is now considering alternatives. Unfortunately this won't be the first time that the US has backed such regimes.