Much like the Bible, A level religious studies textbooks are an infinite resource of seriously bizarre imagery and argument (I wouldn't much fancy answering '"Jesus is Lord" - but is he God?' in an exam, though it certainly appeared on a past paper). Teaching Wittgenstein this week (in half a lesson - ah, the depth of learning FE provides). I was explaining the relationship between forms of life and the rules that bind communities of speakers. One of the students sticks up his pudgy hand and says: 'Miss, can we play one of these language games?' They couldn't work out why I was laughing, so I reassured them that it was a wholly adorable thing to say. Well, you have to keep 'em on side, else they might sit on me and that would seriously hurt, given that most students appear to the spawn of blue whales and mammoths.

Apparently, 20 years or so ago, it used to be de rigueur to sleep with the students if you were an FE lecturer (well, perhaps not de rigueur, that would be weird. Perhaps just de facto, or something less French). Even if I were an amoral creature with a penchant for 'barely legal' religious studies students (and I hasten to add I'm not!), I would surely be crushed by these kids and their futuristic giant bones. What happened in the past decade? It's not like I grew up with rationing. Breast milk must be more like milkshake these days, or something.

The debonair and baroque sphaleotas turned up last night, which was a cavalcade of classical allusion and wit, as usual. First class putdown of the night (of some academic philosopher who shall remain nameless): 'she's written more books than she's read'. Just so.

One of the best nights out for a long, long time the other day for Simon Reynold's booklaunch/discussion panel. All the speakers were great - Morley in particular (but guess he's had more practice than most). Raincoat Gina Birch was neat - her passion for conceptual art and desire to make music in the wake of Patti Smith and the Slits was expressed articulately and honestly, as was her surprise that the band had influenced so many. I briefly asked her what she made of the Raincoats mention in that not-so-bad US teen flick 10 Things I Hate About You (a modern-day Taming of the Shrew). She said she wasn't sure about the casting of the lead character, but otherwise thought it jolly. How sweet!

From this fortnight's Private Eye


K-Punk thinks this comparison is unfair to Lemurs.



Let's just hope Gorgeous George won't have fathered 10% of the world's population in a few generations' time. Though let's hope he beats Oona: 'the first ever white, black, female, Jewish Muslim since Michael Jackson' (also care of PE).



We liked this one a lot. Something less 'whimsical' to follow....er, you never know.

At this point, I really have just one question: what could k-punk's 'modern naturalistic religion' be? If we examine the following claim:

The only way to destroy theism is to reject all forms of transcendence, personalism, and dualism. Thus Theism might always be about meaning, but what religion would look like if monism were asserted AGAINST theism is an open question.

What seems to be proposed is a form of Pantheism (though what makes it particularly 'modern' is not clear) - the denial of transcendence, supernaturalism, the refusal of the notions of persons as free self-conscious moral agents. Also a refusal of any Cartesian physical body/non-physical object separation. So far, so Spinoza. It's not clear why one would need Lacan, Badiou or Zizek to bolster this classical, if perennially subversive, naturalistic determinism (especially as k-p further objects to what he considers to be 'Badiou's voluntarism and crypto-phenomenology').

So, the final statement, that 'what religion would look like if monism were asserted AGAINST theism is an open question.' But is it really an 'open question' as to what this religion would look like? Monism has been asserted 'against' theism many times, not only by Spinoza (but also e.g. Hinduism, Buddhism), and not always in, er, 'progressive' ways (and if you object strongly to 'crypto-idealism', consider that one could perfectly well be a idealistic monist). Why monism? And what kind of monism? substance? attributive? What relation does this monism have to the kind of religion that would believe in or depend upon it?

The second part of my question concerns the use of the term religion. In time-(dis) honoured-academic style, here are the OED definitions:

1. the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods >a particular system of faith or worship.
2. A pursuit or interest followed with devotion.

Obviously we can set aside the first definition, as it's quite clear you don't mean that, but what of the second? Apart from it sounding like someone's dedication to building model airplanes, we could understand it in Spinozist or even existential terms as a commitment to a certain set of axioms/principles/beliefs and the life lived in accordance with these. Spinoza's determinism permits, of course, room for an increase in the level of knowledge reached: 'The highest conatus of the mind and its highest virtue is to understand things by the third kind of knowledge.' (Ethics, Book 5, Proposition 25). Whilst everyone knows that the historical reception of Spinoza oscillates between deeming him the 'God-intoxicated man' sive the most profound atheist, it's not clear at all the retaining the term 'religion' is going to add much to a Spinozist naturalist monism.

So, from a Spinozist, or k-punkian (!) standpoint, where lies the real difference (ontologically, existentially, politically) in having commitment to religion or having no commitment to religion, if one is already convinced of Spinoza's framework? Without immense etymological knowledge, I can't be sure, but one definition of religion appears to derive from the Latin "religio" used by the Romans, before Jesus Christ, to indicate the worship of demons. Do we really need to perpetuate such a black metal mode of existence? (stop nodding, effay - and cheers for the Venom! favourite line so far: 'do you believe in God/he's chained up like a dog/and every hour he screams'...!!!!!).

Something on Badiou's piece on Spinoza coming up next.

Plantinga began his paper, for reasons I now forget, with the claim that there are 11,000 professional philosophers in the US and 400 in the UK. I don't know how this works out proportionally per population, but it might go some way to explaining why American PhD candidates tend to talk to you at conferences about their relation to the 'job market', whilst UK students just stare into their pints. I get the impression that becoming a philosophy lecturer in America may not be viewed as quite the incomprehensible suicidal career choice it is in Britain (if, indeed, it could ever be described as a 'choice'). But I suppose there must be a fair few hundred unemployed philosophy PhDs skulking around libraries/bookshops/psych wards in the US too.

Judging by the intellectual standards of the conference, however, it wouldn't be hard to reinvent oneself as a theologian - nothing that came up was in any way more difficult than the A level syllabus we teach to 16-18 year olds (and, indeed, many of the criticisms presented were much the same as the students intuit using only their 'pure faculty of reason').

So, anyway, k-punk reports on the theism conference so I don't really have to, which is just as well as I fell asleep in at least three of the papers, committed conference-goer that I am.

I have some problems with his concluding paragraph, however (see the discussion below), which mirrors certain debates recently circulating around the fetid air of Infinite Thought Towers:

Ultimately, it was clear from yesterday's papers that theism and its discontents remain in a kind of twentieth-century gentlemanly stand-off. Literal belief in the personal, interventionist God who listens and acts is countered by a disenchanted assertion of secularism or by a faith that has disavowed literal belief. Within Spinoza, Lacan, Zizek and Badiou lie the philosophical resources from which a modern naturalistic religion that offers a way out of this impasse could be built (my italics)

.
In Plantinga's paper, naturalism was presented, unusually, as the opponent of science, the former allegedly taking up a form of machinic immanentist hyper-atheism that denies for all eternity that there could ever be a theological explanation for any event, law, regularity or exception. No God or anything like God. Science proper, however, according to Plantinga, doesn't draw such dramatic anti-theological conclusions - it merely makes these kinds of explanations improbable (but, ta da, this is just what makes miracles miraculous). Naturalism, he claims, tries to answer the same questions as religion: where we come from (yet this question is surely refused by naturalism), prospects after death (minimal!), what is 'real' (nature and what we can understand thereof). But this is perhaps to neglect the dysteleological stance at the heart of many kinds of naturalism: mechanistic pantheism still scares the theists more than we might believe. So much so that they can't accept what it means in extremis (i.e. in reality...)

There is something downright weasely about Plantinga's separation - just because the myriad reductions of science don't themselves draw conclusions about how our misconceptions and intuitions must be dispelled, this is not to say that naturalistic conclusions don't follow from the knowledge garnered from such research (and are perhaps left to be drawn out by an anti-foundational naturalistic philosophy). In creating such an artificial separation, however, Plantinga preserves room for a kind of theism that doesn't have to draw naturalistic conclusions: e.g. with regard to collapse theories, God could be the cause of the collapses, and of the way in which they occur (Plantinga actually argued this): 'But very many philosophers, theologians and scientists who are wholly aware of the quantum mechanics revolution still apparently find a problem with miracles and special divine action generally'. No kidding....!

It's hardly the case that scientific reduction, for all its 'indifference' to human worries and concerns, would logically or reasonably permit such theological hyper-speculation. If there is nothing in science that 'conflicts' with special divine action (e.g. miracles), this is not because the two are in any way compatible, it's simply to assume something intransigently at the outset (e.g. that miracles 'happen', and that God directly intervenes in the world, both demonstrated by the Heidelberg Catechism, apparently), and ignore the fact that there are meta-scientific (or philosophical) descriptions to be drawn out of scientific reduction that do indeed have severe consequences for philosophy and theology:

philosophical ontology can neither ground nor disregard the ultimately physical description of the universe provided by the natural sciences (Ray Brassier from alien theory).

As a way out of the dichotomy of, on the one hand, belief in a personal God and, on the other, a form of secularism or disenchanted religion, k-punk proposes instead 'a modern naturalistic religion', which would presumably combine Spinozist determinism, the 'wisdom' or knowledge that would result from properly understanding and organising encounters, and some aspects of the other three thinkers (Zizek, Lacan, Badiou). What puzzles me is precisely how the materialism of the former is to be aligned with the explicit anti-naturalism of the latter (well, who can really conclude anything about Zizek, but certainly for B and L). Is there not a kind of conflation of materialism and naturalism in this Deistic call for a new kind of 'religion'?

How can one be a materialist and at the same time, an anti-naturalist, as I would argue Badiou is? Take the status of thought and the cosmos in Badiou's work. Is there any attempt to account for the genesis/structure of either in a naturalistic (ethological, neurological and/or Spinozist) way? No. Thought is radically disjunct from any naturalistic account thereof, just as ontologically there can be no cosmic monism (multiples of multiples never equal 1). Religion is always an attempt to reintroduce the question of meaning (thus, non-coincidentally, what is the meaning of theism), and 'natural religion' is perhaps the worst combination of ontological universe-acceptance and theological hermeneutics. To be continued...

now all posts are justified, and turn up on a separate page if you click on the date link at the bottom of each entry. Hopefully I won't now be too intimidated by the quality of my template to write again.

Giving up the black stuff and replacing it with less stomach-eroding drinks is painful: tea is methadone to coffee's smack. And my head really f-ing hurts! They don't write the side-effects of coffee withdrawal on the side of the packets do they? Is it any coincidence, then, that capitalism agrees to run its agents on a diet of over-priced capuccinos and mocha-latte-pooky-shakey-pinis? I think not.

There's a surprisingly sweet video here of a Burmese woman double-breast-feeding a couple of orphaned tiger cubs. Well it is Sunday.

hey, all those of you who moan when my blog crashes your browsers, complain no more! king of queens and queen of kings northanger, an entity as splendid as they are mysterious has fixed everything. In return I have promised to write a post on a topic of northanger's choosing which will turn up in a few days. For now I can only bow my head in nouminous wonder at the majesty of technological knowledge and its subtle passage through elect representatives of an otherwise perverse humanity....

Whilst we're pointlessly answering tests on a saturday night, as I sit here feeling ill and tired after listening to theologians all day (report tomorrow), here's another test from glueboot - she didn't ask me to do this one, but what the hey. You'll never guessed what I turned out as....

You scored as Existentialism. Your life is guided by the concept of Existentialism: You choose the meaning and purpose of your life. “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” “It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.” --Jean-Paul Sartre “It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.” --Blaise Pascal Existentialism 75% Utilitarianism 65% Justice (Fairness) 60% Kantianism 50% Nihilism 30% Hedonism 20% Apathy 10% Strong Egoism 5% Divine Command 5% What philosophy do you follow? (v1.03) created with QuizFarm.com

glueboot desires I take this test, apparently.

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Samuel Beckett's Comment c'est/How It Is.

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

All the men who moan in Thomas Bernhard novels. And the Marquise de Merteuil from Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

3. The last book you bought is:

Simon Reynolds Rip it up and Start Again, yesterday

4. The last book you read:

Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception

5. What are you currently reading?

I am infinitely reading Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason; some Elfriede Jelinek for sadistic non-relief.

6. Five books you would take to a desert island.

Kant's First Critique, Hegel's Science of Logic, Marx's Capital, the complete Plato and Dante's Divine Comedy. Gosh, it's just like Desert Island Disks....

7. Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

Not that I care if they do it or not, but undercurrent, adam kotsko and/or anthony smith from the weblog, and northanger. Why? because they're all splendid and yet I don't really know any of them (apart from undercurrent a little bit).

What the hell does contemporary theism look like? Do people still wring their beards over the problem of evil; does the publication of a new Richard Dawkins book make them pray yet harder; how can the argument from design retain any salience in a world in which more McDonalds wrappers exist than bibles (er, probably)? Tomorrow I get to find out the answer to all these questions at the meaning of theism, which includes papers by Alvin Plantinga, Richard Norman, Anthony Kenny and John Haldane.

Plantinga's arguments against evolution are truly hilarious, for example: 'Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely that the tiger he sees will eat him.'

Plantinga does come up with attractively named hypotheses like 'transworld depravity', though, so let's hope he steers away from his devastating attacks on naturalism and Darwin....

But who will attend? Will it be populated by be-sandled men with obscure facial hair?... What do theologians eat? Are they bigger than normal human beings? more teeth, perhaps? or reversible knees like horses? Full report to follow...
........................................................................

Many thanks, btw, to northanger and rob in particular for aid in stabilising the parlous state of my template. May the image of Plantinga never haunt your dreams....

A sweet apology and a great quote from the aleph-suggestion person:

'Sorry that Aleph messed up your template... But I guess that's what
infinity can do.

"There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all
others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics, I
refer to the Infinite." -- Jorge Luis Borges, Avatars of the Tortoise'

have resigned myself to the current state of template ugliness. Perhaps undercurrent will send some help, as his blog always seems to look very pretty, grovel grovel. How can I get a picture in the title, for example? Is it even possible?

Anyway, it all began because I was trying to take up the suggest of a nice reader who recommended I replace the backwards-n with an aleph (more appropriately suggesting infinity). Obviously I couldn't just have done that, as that would have made sense and been quite pretty, and now you see the results of my misguided tinkering. Hopefully when I learn a bit more about what goes where in the template I can do such things....apologies to all non-interested-in-blog-details readers I may still have left....

So, Pascal's wager with the kids today: they perked up a little when I said it was a little game they could play - the stake: your life, your one life! Like a theological scratchcard for the terminally listless. So were they convinced that betting on God was worth the Sundays in church, the bended knees, the clean living in return for the (potential) promise of eternal bliss? Were they hell. 'But I like doing what I want', said one Billie Piper wannabe (the early one, not the Dr Who incarnation) from the back. 'Sure you do,' I replied. 'But what if your wager paid off?' 'But miss, I like all these earthly pleasures. Can I go to the loo?' and so on.....

you'll notice I have almost completely ruined the layout and colour-scheme of my blog. This'll be because I randomly replaced lots of bits in the template without knowing what I was doing. Unfortunately, I have now saved over all the bits that were there originally, so it looks like I'm stuck with it. If anyone has a link to a page that explains how the hell you alter colour/font/size of headings (and which heading h1, h2, h3 etc. refers to), please send to: infinitethought@hotmail.co.uk

Listening to Charles Clarke on Tv today talking about ID cards, it became clear that the contemporary moral compass consists of the balance between, on the one hand, a bag of kittens; on the other, a bucket of evil. i.e. "you are good folk. Your computer-chipped iris-scan cards will exude goodness. No need to worry. Your sleep will be pretty and you will dream of domestic bunnies covered in velvet" vs. "you are a terrible destructive person. Whilst you lie awake in the midst of deserved terroristically-induced insomnia, you'll be metaphorically smearing yourself in molten badness of the very worst kind. Seven-faced devils will scratch at your arms as you desperately try to change the name on your ID card with your stolen car key." And so on for the next thousand weeks.....

If I even voted I would pick the candidate with the nicest name, just as my Grandmother does.

hope you like it....obviously a combination of bad Russian and bad maths, like most Marxism. The backwards 'N' is not of course an 'N' in Cyrillic, but a vowel that sounds like 'ee'. The Ø is the null set, the empty set, the set that contains nothing and operates as the basis for a formal theory of numbers. And, er, that's as far as I'll go, I think. Complaints to the usual address.

In other news: thinking of getting my terribly bad Nietzsche tattoo removed. I was 19. I should have known better. It's written in my best friend's handwriting, though, which is quite touching, but, er, really, if I am ever to be A PROPER GROWN UP PERSON, I should probably sort these things out.

Plus: I get to play oboe tomorrow. That least attractive of instruments ('mummy, can I play the flute?'), it now holds a certain charm for me: damn, I could have been the next Heinz Holliger. And jazz oboe, that much misunderstood genre, is just about ready for some sort of revival, much like late Sartre and the novels of DM Thomas (eep, could I be any more retro-neo-zeitgeist-y. Errr, um, eek, etc...). So, this Greek composer needs some oboe samples for his neo-classical post-rock opuses (or 'opera', whatever the plural is) - wish I had a cor anglais really: lower, spookier, and so on. But will attempt to prove that I can 'improvise' and not just follow scores...any jazz tips gratefully received.

Just to prove once again that undercurrent is on to something with the 'geo-political hag' compliment-disguised-as-an-insult, here are some of the latest blogs to link to IT:

the bad rash from Barcelona/Devon: has 'a keen interest in, political theory and the history of philosophy and philosophical logic', and a big thing for Royal Trux. Funnily enough, so did I. 1995's Thank You was my favourite LP for ages, particularly 'Fear Strikes Out'. Was disappointed by 1999's Veterans of Disorder as was sweet effay when I gave him a copy. But there you go.

goMONist a Turkish blog who tends to write about...erm....well....I don't know really. Perhaps ideology and anti-fascism, if my linguistic guesses are correct.

Finally sex drugs and post-structuralism, which links to me, something about Robert Anton Wilson, Web Deleuze and an Alexander Shulgin blog (jealous, effay?!). The email address is Italian, but I'm not really sure where the author resides. Mainly consists of a series of attempts to demonstrate the cogency of Deleuze's arguments via psychopharmacology and music festivals: 'When the Woodstock rock festival 'emerged out' (of all the previous rock festival repetitions) it was a singular event, all the subsequent series of Woodstocks (Woodstock 2000, 2001, 2002 etc..) are not a repetition of the same Woodstock festival iterating itself as the same festival throughout time, but rather the repetition of that singular event (i.e. the original Woodstock festival). This has the paradoxical meaning that what is actually involved in repetition is the always repetition of a singularity - not repetition of/as the same, the common or the general'.

So there you have it. Infinite Thought: conceptually egalitarian, distinctly populist and border-free since 2004. Still waiting for someone to access the blog from Antarctica though.

Whilst 'fallen to the Communists' is my favourite euphemism for that deeply unfortunate bloody affliction that monthly plagues our no-tail comrades (women: 'the-subject-not-supposed-to-know-that-she-is-the-irony-of-the-community' if you amalgamate Lacan and Hegel), there's something perennially intriguing about imagining alternative endings to now impossible histories - Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle as the Nazi victory over the Allies in WWII. There's possibly something even more interesting about imagining fictional characters out of their usual contexts and placed in 'real' historical situations, which are then subsequently altered solely because of their presence....

So 'Superman: Red Son', a DC 'Elseworlds' story - the alien Kal-El lands as a baby, not in the US but on a collective farm in the Ukraine, grows up under Stalin's protection as a thoroughly dedicated Communist, and eventually takes over when the old man dies. The whole world glows red whilst the US, an isolated and unstable capitalist country, falls into destitution and ruin. Genius chess-playing president Lex Luthor manages to turn it round and, with the help of Batman (now an anarchist whose dissenting parents were killed by one of Stalin's henchmen) and the Green Lantern (a GI, imprisoned by communists in some imagined Malaysian war in the 1980s, who spends his lengthy captivity imagining building a prison camp for his red captors, in real time: 'it took three days to build the foundations...') they attempt to take Superman on...



Lots of great dialogue - 'I'm just another alien bullying a less developed species and it's morally unjustifiable' - more heat deaths of the universe, Soviet iconography (Superman's 'S' becomes a hammer and sickle as you can see above). The political elements are perhaps a little underdeveloped, but, er, they may well have gotten in the way of a good story, as per usual.

So, it was that and Agamben's State of Exception this weekend. Using a somewhat idiosyncratic presentation device, each section is divided into points (chapter 1 is 1.1 to 1.11) with Hebrew alephs denoting reflective paragraphs just below each of the main points. What I don't quite understand is the logic at work in the separation of points - they don't seem axiomatic enough to be numbered in this way, and of what significance is the א? If anyone has any idea, I would be interested to know.

Back to the CDR tomorrow. I'm guessing you all know what that means by now....

Firstly, a piece from the Village Voice whose first paragraph wonders what Adorno might have written on his blog: blog culture invades academia. Includes quotes from 'British cultural theorist Mark Fisher, author of the renegade cultural studies blog' k-punk!

Secondly, and really spookily, a week or so after my cloning philosophers from their book-hair post, the monkey came across this: 'From Alan Bennett's diary: "20 December 1983: I am reading a book on Kafka. It is a library book, and someone has marked a passage in the margin with a long, wavering line. I pay the passage particular attention without finding it particularly rewarding. As I turn the page the line moves. It is a long black hair."' (from Tom Lubbock's article on Patrick Caulfield, The Independent, 15th April).

Thirdly, from Tv Eye in Private Eye, whose writer (whoever it might be) is one of the most consistently amusing people in the world, a discussion of the media coverage of the Pope's funeral: 'At some point the BBC teams were obviously told to be careful not to speak about the Pope in the past tense, so that, bizarrely, a commentator on News 24, during a biographical package, declared "The Pope is born in Krakow in 1920", seeming to be announcing, 85 years too late, the opposite of the expected news.....a post-Paxo culture of television presentation in which hosts sneer and gurn knowingly when a politician gently suggests that his party might slightly have improved the NHS suddenly gave way to hours of programming in which astonishing supernatural claims were accepted with a sympathetic nodding.'

Cinestatic party tonight. Wonder if they'll let me play my Rammstein CD.

Hume on miracles today with the religious studies kids. Perversely enough they all turned out to be even more skeptical than Hume himself: 'but why should we trust Hume when he says that other people aren't trustworthy?'. They're smart these kids, even if they do subsist on a diet of deep-fried sawdust and state-subsidised McFlurries.

When Hume attacks 'ignorant and barbarous nations' for their willingness to believe in miraculous happenings ('a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity'), we all laugh these days - ha! America! Richest country in the world (er, mais, drop the debt). At least half of them believe they've been abducted by aliens, surely! There's no correlation between economic 'success' and public rationality - and we should know, we're British!

But, as the philosophy seminar speaker posed tonight, when an electrical appliance resting on ice falls through as the weather gets warmer, there is a shock of the inhuman thing's relation to the other inhuman thing. Yes! There so is. There is a weird metaphysics at work, here as everywhere.

Kevin Maguire in today's Daily Mirror, as the conclusion of a discussion of Rover's immoral 'fat cats' suggests 'Capitalism needs regulating until it can be replaced with something better.'

In other news, what does anyone mean by subject...Ever? transcendental? phenomenological? political? group?...is capital the only true subject?

Is there even a plot to be lost?

This malaysian blog kubus dubuk pastoral has just linked to infinite thought. Without being able to understand almost anything of what has been written there, just look at how neat it sounds:

'Aku bangun perlahan-lahan dan aku buka pintu. Ashir datang membawa senyum ironik. Di tangannya McDonald's Breakfast meal. Aku ambil dan aku gamit dia ke dapur. Sifar makanan McDonald's yang aku gerit perlahan-lahan membuat aku sedikit ceria. Ke mana, aku tanya Ashir, yang sedang menyalakan Sampoerna - hadiah dari aku.'

'Ah, kali ini Inggerisnya lancar pulak! Dia ceritakan pada aku kenapa separuh rakyat Samarkand menonton O.C. dan Everwood. Class War, Marxist, Emancipatory knowledge. Perlu faham kapitalis. Ryan itu anarkis. Seth itu ultra anarkis. Doctor Brown, ah, kenapa kliniknya percuma? Deleuze, Negri, Heidegger, Agamben. Konklusinya: Anarkis adalah satu-satunya posisi di Asia Tengah ini yang masih boleh dipakai.'

It's tempting to try and learn it. Wonder how long it would take.

limited, inc writes very interestingly on the continuing relevance of 'saint sartre' and the US persepctive on (the current lack of) left philosophical icons.

'no slave revolt has ever succeeded by pennypushing': quite right. What strikes me as I reread the Critique of Dialectical Reason is the audacity of Sartre's project: a unified notion of capital-H History, the thesis regarding the contingent necessity of the foundational role of scarcity (and could we say that contemporary consumer capitalism operates with a logic of the 'scarcity of enjoyment'?), the exhaustive attempt to analyse the ontological status of individual and collective formations, to explain why and how History must be understood dialectically. Not to mention the effort to comprehend, without recourse to notions such as the 'cult of personality', the rise of Stalin and the corresponding theoretical arrest of Marxism. There is much more to be said - will return to this.

The journal Historical Materialism invites you to a seminar on:

Lukacs sans Proletariat, or, Can History and Class Consciousness be
Historicised?
NEIL LARSEN
(University of California at Davis, author of Determinations: Essays on
Theory, Narrative and Nation in the Americas, Reading North by South:
On Latin American Literature, Culture, and Politics and Modernism and
Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies)

12th April 2005
4-6 p.m.
Room 116
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG,
(Russell Square Underground station)

First they came for the rabid nihilists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a rabid nihilist;
Then they came for the libidinal materialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a libidinal materialist;
Then they came for the transcendental idealists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a transcendental idealist;
Then they came for the phenomenologists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a phenomenologist;
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me.

'The Baccalauréat in France is something incredible, in its antiquation. In Rouen-Le Havre recently, the subject of the philosophy paper was: 'Epictetus said to a disciple: "Live Hidden". Comment.' Can you imagine - giving a question like that to school-children of sixteen in this day and age! Not only the reference is outrageous of course. Ten per cent to 20 per cent of the candidates thought that Vis Caché (Life Hidden) was Vices Caches (Hidden Vices), imagining perhaps that this was ancient orthography, and interpreted the quotation to mean: 'Hide your vices.' They then developed at length the idea of Epictetus along the lines 'If you have vices, then satisfy them, but secretly.' The funniest, and saddest thing of all is that they approved the formula of Epictetus! 'For it is like that in society, one can have a vice, but one should practice it in solitude.' Innocent answers, showing what bourgeois morality is in fact like; pitiful answers because these pupils obviously thought, 'Epictetus must be famous, if I criticize him I might get 4 out of 20 and fail, the only thing to do is to agree with him.' There is no relationship, no contact whatever between these young people and their teachers. Bourgeois culture in France is destroying itself. Thus for the moment, regardless of the eventual future, I believe that a radical negation of the existing culture is the only possible option for young militants - a negation which will often take the form of violent contestation.' - Jean-Paul Sartre, 'The Itinerary of a Thought', interview with New Left Review, 1969. Published in Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. by John Matthews (London, New Left Books: 1974), p. 63.

Just watched the not-very-brilliant Open Your Eyes, and just after it had finished, the announcer mentioned that tomorrow night we could see the 'modern remake'. Now, given that the original is from 1997, and the remake Vanilla Sky 2001, is this four year gap really long enough to separate the modern from what preceded it (the pre-modern? the pre-millennial?). Or is this temporal division split instead along hollywood/non-hollywood lines, where everything from the former is by definition that which constitutes the modern, and everything else (everything European, let's say), is automatically nothing more than prequel material for the 'real' version which would be the Hollywood remake? Like many contemporary Japanese horror films, or even British comedy shows like The Office, is seems possible that these cultural objects exist only to be remade by 'America' and then sent back to the rest of the world under cover of their neutral, all-encompassing, global sheen.

Without his translations we are nothing. My Persian pals, in particular, might enjoy this interview with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem (novelist, philosopher, filmstar and, er, Badiou's mate): 'The Iranians, they're a superior people, extremely complex.' I don't disagree....

There's another Kacem piece at this extraordinary site, a bilingual (fr/eng) 'interactive emergent multifield review of art and essays'.

Back to undercurrent's translation: both Kacem and Rémy Bac have some splendid lines:

'I had a discussion with a young Derridean not far from here and this is the reflex of Derrideans: You try to explain to them that Althusser really understood something of Marx, and straight away, they tell you that that's dogmatism. That's the reflex of social democracy.'

'So, 'Deleuze, everyone's mum!', no thanks.'

'Everyone thinks. Everyone thinks, but philosophy thinks about thought, that's the only difference.'

Wonder if undercurrent will translate the other Ironie Mehdi Belhaj Kacem interview at some point, but definitely hope he'll get round to producing an English version of Event and Repetition.

My university library is currently holding a booksale. The campus is soon to close, and in order to 'economise' and 'centralise', they must rid themselves of an entire third of their collection, before shifting the rest elsewhere. Their only criterion for dispensing of items appears to be 'whether anyone has taken it out in the past five years'. Obviously this counts against keeping books because of their intrinsic, or even moral, usefulness, and points to a purely faddish and managerial approach to literature. So what if no one has taken the French version of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason out for half a decade - you can't be brutal when it comes to these things! It's not a business, you kultur-destroying bloodhounds! Besides, that kind of thing will probably be read inside the library, rather than taken home.

Ok, so I got lots of books very cheaply (everything from Descombes to Gilson to Sartre to the Churchlands), and have been idly flicking through them. It reminded me of something I occasionally notice when I'm reading second-hand books - the hairs (presumably human) they contain. Odd black locks caught in the bindings, eyelashes, grey bits, strands of something altogether more ambiguous....momentarily disconcerting, I shake them away and try and forget that I'm not the only person who ever read this book (how dare they! Perhaps they understood it better than I did! Unthinkable!).

The point is, given that I find hairs in virtually every second-hand or public book I come across, would it be possible to find out anything about their owners, genetically, I mean? Could you possibly even clone someone from the DNA in book-hair (leaving aside the question of whether you would want to)? What if we went through Kant or Nietzsche's library, located an odd strand, determined it wasn't from one of those silly wigs men used to wear, and made a new Kant or Nietzsche (or Marx, or Feuerbach, or Schopenhauer...)? Books would thus document the history of civilization in an entirely new way....

So, I recommend libraries do not rid themselves of their collections just yet, in case a great mind once took out a collection of poetry and left a hair in it.

Of course, this would not apply to electronic libraries. Nevertheless, when I look at my friends' keyboards, they too are often full of hairs. Thus we should perhaps archive computer keyboards for the same reason.

Note to those cross with me for closing comments:

It has come to my attention that certain people think it was 'arrogant' and 'over the top' to close the comments facility (by the way, all the comments people wrote are still there, and will return when I reopen them). I find this a bit surprising - I didn't block comments because I didn't like what people were saying (though, of course, one tires quickly of uninventive requests to f-off and so on), I closed them because it was taking up too much time to read them all. I have a PhD to finish this year, and checking the blog every 15 minutes is not conducive to this kind of work. It was nothing personal. I will reopen them (if I still have any readers) in November. Any other comments can be sent to me by email.

Just so we're clear, I never once blocked anyone, and deleted a grand total of three comments the whole time the blog has existed. For related thoughts on these issues, see this post by jodi dean.

Horrah! Continuum are reissuing my blog namesake in their relatively new, ethically applaudable, 'books that look like sweeties to be devoured by millions on buses and trains' series. And look, it has a big fist on it, rising up like the paw of a commie colossus from out of the corrupt sclerotic stasis of contemporary democracy, soaring above the meretricious seas of the hypocritical malevolence of the ideology of human rights and post-9/11 finitude-mongering.

as the cinestatic mail is now full, and I can't bear to delete the messages, I have created a new contact: infinitethought@hotmail.co.uk.

I was recently published in a journal in discussion with Simon Critchley and others about Badiou. My bit goes like this:

'Critchley: There's a risk in subtraction, or throwing out the pathetic baby with the bathwater!

Me: But pathos simply happens all the time.

C: No, it's not what happens all the time.

Me: But it is.

C: I think the opposite.

Me: Pathos is everywhere, everyday. It's every tiny tragedy of every cake you didn't get to eat or every friend you miss or whatever. It happens all the time. Surely what is interesting about Badiou's project is its subtractive dimension?'

Man, do I feel proud about that particular exchange.

persian empire: negri in iran report from radical philosophy.

Went to see Downfall. Bruno Ganz is great, and Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler), a giddy fantasist, living out the last few days in a haze of resolute commitment to a regime crumbling bloodily around her, is just as good.



Stamp used by Heidegger in his letters, October 1944, when he directed the philosophy seminars at Freiburg, taken from the cover of Heidegger l'introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, by Emmanuel Faye.

If you've not come across it before, Bernhard's description of Heidegger in Old Masters is unsurpassable:

'Stifter in fact always reminds me of Heidegger, of that ridiculous Nazi philistine in plus-fours. Just as Stifter has totally and in the most shameless manner kitschified great literature, so Heidegger, the Black Forest philosopher Heidegger, has kitschified philosophy, Heidegger and Stifter, each one for himself and in his own way, have hopelessly kitschified philosophy and literature. Heidegger, after whom the wartime and postwar generations have been chasing, showering him with revolting and stupid doctoral theses even in his lifetime - I always visualize him sitting on his wooden bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife who, with her perverse knitting enthusiasm, ceaselessly knits winter socks for him from the wool she has shorn from their own Heidegger sheep. I cannot visualize Heidegger other than sitting on the bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife, who all her life totally dominated him and who knitted all his socks and crocheted all his caps and baked all his bread and wove all his bedlinen and who even cobbled up his sandals for him. Heidegger was a kitschy brain.....a feeble thinker from the Alpine foothills, as I believe, and just about right for the German philosophical hot-pot. For decades they ravenously spooned up that man Heidegger, more than anybody else, and overloaded their stomachs with his stuff. Heidegger had a common face, not a spiritual one, Reger said, he was through and through an unspiritual person, devoid of all fantasy, devoid of all sensibility, a genuine German philosophical ruminant, a ceaselessly gravid German philosophical cow, Reger said, which grazed upon German philosophy and thereupon for decades let its smart little cow-pats drop on it....Heidegger is the petit-bourgeois of German philosophy, the man who has placed on German philosophy his kitschy nightcaps, that kitschy black night-cap which Heidegger always wore, on all occasions. Heidegger is the carpet-slipper and night-cap philosopher of the Germans, nothing else.'



X marks the spot: Heidegger amongst Nazi rectors, coming to show their support to Hitler at the Leipzig Congress, 11th November, 1933 (also from Faye).

In other news, Infinite Thought is a year old today. Thanks for reading.