sweet effay

Well, what do you know? On the day I decide to return to blogging after my extended Christmas break, an anonymous fan (or sociopathic stalker) comments upon my absence in the post below. Hoorah for synchronicity!

When not listening to doom and black metal (at least, I think that’s what it is: I’m a bit hazy on these specialist genres), interspersed with Marilyn Manson for light entertainment, I’ve been reading stuff. In fact, I’ve been re-reading lots of stuff and somewhere along the line, I’ve remembered just what it is that I like about philosophy: It’s the rabid crazed material on the edges of respectability, rather than the staid academic navel gazing which passes for 'proper thought' in most places. To this end I’m dividing my time between Kant and, for the first time in years, A Thousand Plateaus; the latter read as ‘a second Critique of Teleological Judgment’ (Iain Hamilton Grant), in order to see whether you can really radicalize Kant via ATP, once you’ve stripped out all the wishy-washy liberalism (or Bergson, for the technically minded) in the latter. If you’re unlucky, there will be a lot more on this to come.

I mention it now because of a couple of things which have appeared on other blogs. Firstly, Dogmat bemoans the all-pervasive presence of pseudo-Deleuzians at my old alma-mater. Now, I’m not altogether sure who or what he (or is it she?) means, but even back in the good old days, it was generally accepted that most people working on Deleuze (and Guattari) didn’t know their arses from their elbows and were to be roundly abused whenever the opportunity presented itself. Perhaps these people have come to infiltrate Warwick, I wouldn’t like to speculate. However, if so, I have a suspicion that they are probably exactly the sort of Deleuzians that Dogmat’s commentator, Marc Martel, approves of. Marc rails against the Deleuzean (sic) circus (which I can sympathize with) and then complains that it has become philosophy for clowns. What the hell is wrong with clowns? As Dogmat puts it

Clowns, eh? Those sad, determined faces. There is no lightness, no real joy to be found in the circus - a heavy, frightening place filled with jeering laughter.

Which, to me, sounds exactly like what the philosophical arena should be. There are people who complain (with some justification) that Deleuze is just a bloody hippie. Rather a clown than a hippie. Oh, and Marc? Everybody knows that clowns eat and breathe Marx.

I’m not sure whether the pseudo-Deleuzians are linked to this, which looks vaguely interesting. I used to get roundly abused in some quarters for taking What is Philosophy? seriously. I don’t really like it now, apart from the ‘Geophilosophy’ chapter. Just to go all Bergsonian for a minute, I think that it is a false problem; the real problem is what is philosophy for? Once you’ve worked that out, it’s easy to say what philosophy is.

The second thing was by one of those people who used to abuse me over What is Philosophy? I’ve always hated Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and would be hard pressed to think of a better example of a text that served as a perfect illustration for the following:

In the humpty-dumpty world of dubious, joyless ‘wisdom’ that is the phenomenology-choked liberal-democratic academy, Marx’s most crucial insights are thus inevitably regarded as embarrassments, to be condemned, in the language of the Roman master class, as ‘vulgar’. Since it is entirely in the class interests of the State-funded academy to downplay or ignore questions of economic determinism and cultural privilege, the history of ‘academic Marxism’ has inevitably been an essay in tedious paradox.

So why has Mark K-P abandonded the demons and started getting so worked up about hauntology? I think we should be told.