Alexander > Recent Status Updates

"The democrats, you see, were not in the least embarrassed about limiting the freedom of the press when it came to dealing blows to the left".

Trostsky, 1932, or my Twitter feed, circa yesterday?

This is genuinely such an *exciting* book of philosophy. Every meditation (chapter) brings something new to the table, and there's this real feeling of adventurousness and pioneering - as if exploring uncharted land. It is an absolute mental workout too, and there's a real intensity to the whole thing: there's just so much jam packed into every sentence. The praise this book gets is entirely deserved.

As manufacturing in Europe looks to shift to the US as a result of insane power prices, suddenly the arbitrary decision to read about power policy in my little island seems alot more apposite.

Found myself in the capital city for the weekend, so appropriate time to knock over some, uh, policy reading.

The Big Book Arc is here.

Apropos nothing, a book about not needing hierarchies.

In lieu of real life adventures into parallel universes in which I get to experience all the glittering wildness of far away lands and exotic and strange peoples and times, I have decided a good book of anthropology will do just fine. Star Wars eat your heart out.

I did not mean to start reading this book today. I'd accidentally left home without a book, leaving me listless and bereft of any reason for being for the day to come. But the bookshop, as it turned out, had a bunch of new soft-covers of this in. And lo, was the day redeemed.

100 pages in and I haven't wanted to throw this book off a bridge, not even a little bit! Achievement! But really, Badiou here is a far more gentle and easy-going expositor than I thought he would be going in. So far anyway. They tell me the bits on the generic and forcing are a bit of struggle, but one bridge at a time...

One thing that is wildly striking while reading this is just how closely philosophical thought on the infinite has paralleled the philosophical development of the concept of 'life'. In both cases, there is something - the infinite, life - that outruns either intances of the living on one hand, and the finite on the other. The way in which each pole braids into the other is dazzlingly similar in both cases.

Frege on empiricism and psychologism: Boo! Hiss!

Frege on concepts: *gentle repose and eternal beatitude*.

A reread. Virno is *the* best concept-monger writing at the moment. He builds philosophy like lego-blocks, one piece at a time, deliberately and meticulously. Additionally, if you ever wanted to understand Deleuze's 2nd synthesis of time from D&R (memory), this is the book to go-to. It doesn't mention Deleuze a single time, but it's all here, and wonderfully exposited nonetheless.

3 Reading Notes:

(1) So far, more of a historical survey than a theory, but we'll see where it leads.
(2) At one point, there is a discussion of the 'aevum' - a temporality specific to angels, with one wing in eternity and the other in time, perched half-way between the two. It's a beautiful idea.
(3) One can think of eternity as simultaneity and time as delay. This is a cool idea.

I really like the idea of thinking about time in terms of 'simultaneity' (S) and 'delay' (D) because these are, as it were, inherently 'temporalized' terms. This in distinction to 'succession', which relates instead to moments or instants which progress. The time(s) of S&D are pluralized, 'a' time that relates to a two and not just a one 'in motion'. It's a way of thinking time in ordinal, rather than cardinal terms.

Phenomenology, demolished: "If one perceived a building in German cities after the Second World War from a strict frontal perspective, then one quite often had to go around to the side in order to know whether one really saw a building or simply the intact wall of a demolished structure. Husserl did not consider such a possibility".

RIP Descartes, 1596-1650 AND 1956: "Only specific and never absolute doubt has ever become dangerous to the ideologists. Absolute doubt joins of itself in the parade through the goal of method, which is once again to be produced out of method itself. Doubt simply shifts judgement to preparing for assuming the vindication of pre-critical consciousness scientifically in secret sympathy with conventional sensibility".

This is truly extraordinary. I don't know anything else that deals with the themes it does quite like this.

This is terrible.

I'm allowing myself one (1) measure of (undeserved) smug self-satisfaction at knowing that, having read Rose's Hegel contra Sociology before this, I may have possibly read the only book on Hegel in existence that is not, in fact, cited by Johnston. Winning!

Hegel dropping fire on Kant: "The examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument [of knowledge] is the same thing as to know it. But to seek to know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he has learned to swim".

I called this a 90s book, but the discussion of Roe v. Wade here - as seen through a deconstructive lens - sharply shunts it right into the present: "As women, our rights can always be undermined ... Our only protection is the call to responsibility, which is precisely why the recognition that law is always deconstructible increases rather than decreases responsibility".

God this is like peak 90s philosophy. Hegel is the big bad; Openess to the Other is the big Good; Différance is the principle that underlies it all; and in the background is the liberal/communitarian debate, a Gordian knot cut through with the power of post-structuralist philosophy. No complaints though! Like wearing an old comfy sweater.

I always tell my students to signpost as much as possible: tell me what you are going to argue, and why. Explain to me the significance of what you are saying. I may have to dial that back a bit. This book is 90% signpost and 10% argument. It's still good, but my God sometimes you just want to tell Kates to get on with it. Also he has a weird hate-boner for (Derrida scholar) Leonard Lawlor, which is off-putting.

Bought this years and years ago at a friend's wedding held in a second-hand bookshop-barn. I did not go home with someone that night.

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise - The two most important concepts Deleuze ever developed were that of 'intensity' and that of the 'surface'. This book's first two chapters teat each of them, respectively. So that's a thing.

Husserl - or at least *this* Husserl - is not as mind-numbing as everyone had led me to believe. He just likes to make alot of distinctions!