Registration for Philosophy and the Outside III Now Open

Nicola Rubczak has informed me that the CRMEP postgraduate conference Philosophy and the Outside III: Materiality/Immateriality is now open. You can also see a timetable of speakers at the site as well.

Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, Paul: May’s finale; summer’s open vista

As semesters adjourn and quarters eye the end, InterCcECT invites you to propose summer projects.  What are your summer reading goals?  Writing goals?  Want to convene a session or working group?  InterCcECT wants you!

May is wrapping up with a theory bang around town; let some of these events this week from our calendar inspire your proposals to us!

17-19 May Which Way Forward for Psychoanalysis?
19-21 May Phenomenology Roundtable
20-21 May two talks presented by Paul of Tarsus Working Group

Nothing to Do With Philosophy

Below is the text from a recent conference (The Fracture of Nothing – On the Return of Nihilism) in which I recently participated. Though I eventually get to Deleuze & Guattari, and a brief reference to Laruelle, the bulk of the paper ended up circling around the work of J Dilla:

“You better stop, and think about what you’re doing.” This is the refrain from a Dionne Warwick song, in 1973, addressed to the lover she is losing, the lover with whom she is in a fractured relationship. What is the lover doing? What is it that the lover ought to stop and think about? Leaving the singer. And if the lover were to stop and think about it, what would the lover realize? The lover would realize what the singer already knows, and what the singer knows is what the song is titled: “You’re Gonna Need Me.”

Audio for “Honesty is a hindrence when you want to be what is true: On Islamic Taqiyya and Contemporary Philosophy”

A few weeks back I gave a talk on taqiyya and contemporary philosophy at Rowan University (set up by Ed Kazarian who blogs at A Dark Precursor). Some folks have asked for that audio and so here it is. Though be warned that about half of it is not new if you listened to the talk I gave in Liverpool over the summer.

Strangers & Hermits

The life of a hermit is not the life of a recluse or a shut-in—someone who remains indoors, to avoid strangers. Rather, geographical remove puts the hermit at a distance from the polis, and this remove is precisely the source of the hermit’s strange power. The hermit elects to make all of human life a stranger. I’ve been thinking about hermits since I started following the story of the “capture” of the so-called “North Pond Hermit”, in western Maine. As this story goes, a man named Christopher Knight was recently “captured” after having lived alone, in the Maine backwoods, for twenty-seven years. He must have left for this sojourn before he was of legal drinking age. He was only “discovered” because he had, apparently, been stealing food from camp kitchens to stock his larder. He was, in other words, considered a criminal and is currently being charged with more than 1000 burglaries. I was initially a little shocked to learn that police had to employ the aid of game wardens, in order to make this “capture.” Game wardens, of course, are trained in wildlife management. It’s almost as if the police were trying to trap and detain a mountain lion, or a bear. Apparently, he surrendered his goods and fell to the ground as soon as he saw the officers. But even after this, the police officers continued to narrate their investigation as though Knight were something other than human. They seemed to find his entire way of life unimaginable. They could not fathom the twenty-seven Maine winters he spent in a nylon tent. It was unthinkable, to one of the police officers, that Knight (who is clean-shaven) had not seen himself in a mirror for more than twenty years and had only glimpsed his own reflection briefly in pools of water.  There is, it would seem, something “mythic” about Knight’s tale. Occupying some exceptional state, outside of human civilization, The North Pond Hermit begins to assume the status of myth. These news narratives seem to relegate him to a kind of inhuman space—both “too much” (too incredible, too mythic) and “too little” (misanthropic, antisocial) for a human life. Incidentally, the courts have set his bail high, hoping to keep him in jail where he might be protected against media queries, and other forms of human exploitation.

The Ubiquity of Contempt

I’m about to talk about feelings. So, if you don’t like to talk about feelings, read something else.

OK. So, I really don’t have anything to say about Spring Breakers. I haven’t seen it. I’ve even tried to avoid thinking about it. But today, I let myself follow a link in an email from the Daily Beast to this piece, which includes a short debate, between Marlow Stern and Ramin Setoodeh, about the relative merits and demerits of the film. Their debate didn’t actually make me more interested in the film. Instead, what interested me was how Stern characterized Harmony Korine’s approach to filmmaking as contemptuous. He betrays a kind of contempt for the viewer. Setoodeh confessed that this contempt—which apparently oozes through the medium of the film and into the emotional world of the viewer—is precisely what he hated about the film. He seemed to be meeting Korine’s contempt, and matching it. Stern, on the other hand, seemed unperturbed by it. The overall aesthetic effect of the film was pleasing enough that he didn’t mind being treated contemptuously. I have to admit, I admire Stern’s cool remove and sense of blase. I find contempt the most difficult of all affects to deal with and I felt an immediate emotional solidarity with Setoodeh.

Review of On Diaspora

I just came across a really thorough and thoughtful review of On Diaspora, which I thought some might be interested to read. This is particularly because the author, Jon Bialecki, puts the book in conversation with recent work in Anthropology of Christianity.

Clayton Crockett on Deleuze

I wanted to bring to the attention of readers a new book by AUFS affiliate, Clayton Crockett. As the title suggests, Deleuze Beyond Badiou presents an account of Deleuze’s philosophy by taking as its occasion Badiou’s polemical reading of Deleuze. The account that emerges will be very useful to many readers of Deleuze. Though I am not here offering anything like a proper review, I should say that I found particularly compelling the way that Crockett emphasized certain concepts or themes — most notably the interstice, the three syntheses of time, and the time-image.

James KA Smith On Being Beyond Left and Right

So James KA Smith has often been a proponent of Radical Orthodox Christian political theology being “beyond left and right”, you know like Benedict XVI was. In recent days on his twitter feed he has come out against gay marriage. That is not surprising, though he’s of course couching it as a question of who gets to define marriage and doing so in an utterly idealist manner (so the state doesn’t get to in his view, but no discussion of how the state supports marriage and how that plays out in terms of equality). But he has also come out in support of the state of emergency provisions imposed by Michigan Governor Synder (R, of course) upon the City of Detroit. Suspending its democratically elected city government and installing an unelected “business manager” (we all know what this means…). He will bristle and sneer at this being called fascist, but this is exactly fascism. The state and capitalism coming together under a state of emergency. And the Christian witness to that fascism is a sneer at critical voices and an expression that the installed, unaccountable leader be a “catalyst for indigenous change”.

So, once again we see that beyond left and right always means right-wing policies plus a few token remarks about community and poverty. Or, like I said with Benedict, Bonoism but no gays.

The Cyberteacher

What I’m about to say verges on the apocalyptic. Perhaps, in large part, because they quickly disintegrate into hyperbole, apocalyptic discourses tend to be easily dismissed. So I’m just going to own it. I’ll only add that apocalyptics, undeniably, have a certain rhetorical value. I suppose I’m adding that as a gesture toward self-justification. But, I digress.

My actual concern is about the possible futures of higher education. This is a subject I’ve been somewhat myopically tracking in news feeds in recent months. One obvious reason for this is the fact that I’m a dissertating PhD candidate, going on the job market in the fall. I’m trying to discern as much about the possible futures of the academy as I can. So that I can speculate wisely. Overwhelmingly, it seems that the magical bullet distracting many from narratives of academic collapse (and titillating commentators like Thomas Friedman) is the MOOC. The Massive Open Online Course. I have so many things to say about the MOOC. I’ve already said some of them, elsewhere. But I want to avoid making this commentary a wastebasket of opinions and gripes. Mostly, what I want to think about here is the kind of digital pedagogy they’re likely to advance, and the spooky virtual specters of the cyberteachers who might operate them.