I would be more interested to give less importance to the referred ‘Intellectual-Principle’ and to consider this ‘light’ as something ‘external’: so to broaden its implications to the body (and not only to the ‘eye’), so to talk less about an in-sight and more about an out-sight as a fact, ie, and even also to dissolve Plotinus’ mysticism and tackle the question in a more materialistic fashion.
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- ‘Aversi sumus, perversi sumus’ : Augustine and the Eclipse of God
- Monday, January 23, 2012 at 2:18 pm
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Naxos
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Naxos
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I have not read Reid’s post but It is very obvious that the option 1) that he poses is not ‘a good one’ for a philosopher that aims realist thinking. Realism is not at all a philosophical problem. The very stake for the philosopher that aims realist thinking is to confront the fact implied in option 1) and extract and create from it ideas and conceptualizations of what philosophical activity -ie, thought, is actually transcendent to. We can think that it is precisely because it is not a comfortable philosophical position that option 1) must be taken without implying any distinctions. Afterwards is left to realize that option 2) was not really a plausible option after all, but the consequence of adopting the position implied by option 1).
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- Transcendental Dynamism I: A note
- 20 January 2012 at 7:47 pm
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Naxos
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Thanks for this, both John and Anthony
I still truly think that there is no reason out of the academic frame that would give sense to the distinction between non-philosophy and philosophy. This distinction still reproduces the old scholastic categories as it gives certain predominance to philosophy as something exclusive of academic work. Out of this frame, philosophy does not support this distinction. Though, Laruelle’s take seems to be a good try, if we account John’s clarifications. Thus, this effectuated radicalism implied by Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’ does not go as far as it should be. Before being “a discipline that appropriates for itself the exclusive right to think at the highest levels of thought”, philosophy is the way of life that’s open to life itself as an experience immanence: as i have referred elsewhere: philosophy is not a school-game, it is rather something vital that can only be experienced by the affirmativeness of an event that breaks with history and that exposes the philosopher to the intensities that compounds his singularities and that appaer to put in risk his own sanity. - Comentado por Naxos en:
- Can We Think Democratically? Laruelle and the ‘Arrogance’ of Non-Philosophy
- 10 January 2012 at 7:21 pm
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Naxos
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Thanks for your reply. I want to emphasize that my previous comment was more like indicating the problem of reification when we refer to ‘power’, that’s why I brought the importance of knowledge in Foucault’s work. I think that Foucault’s work should be considered retrospectively, say like implying the genealogical view -the one he implied himself to his own work-. So the first Foucault is fundamental, from the History of madness to his Nietzsche, Genealogy and History, including of course his other master pieces, mostly The Order of Things, Archaeology of Knowledge, and The Order of Discourse. In all this period, which endured more than 10 years, the idea of knowledge is his prime concern: these 5 oeuvres are Foucault’s vertebral column and show its own consistency and continuity. Though it was somehow a latent topic, it was not but until The History of Sexuality I (the will to knowledge), that he would theorize about power. But the things he actually did with the notion of knowledge are the base of all this further theorization.
What he did with the notion, methodologically and epistemologically speaking, is a bit more than what you have referred, so my present comment would try to complement and recall the importance of this aspect in that respect. In the Order of things, for instance, it is just admirable how he extracts the notion of ‘episteme’ by tracing a transversal line between linguistics, economy and biology, constituting the ‘knowledge of the epoch’ that he analyses etc. In this sense, the notion of ‘episteme’ means knowledge as a sedimentation in history, or in other words, a stratification. In Archeology of knowledge he extends all this implication in terms of discourse and the importance of enunciation, where ‘truth’ is just a vector allowed by the sedimented knowledge of determined epoch (the episteme) etc. In the Order of discourse he synthesizes systematically all these historical implications of knowledge etc, but it is until Surveiller et punir that he makes the analytical passage from ‘knowledge’ to ‘power’ -as he focus his research in the disciplinary mechanisms (institutional) that form and mold the bodies etc. It is not a discontinuity at all that his take on sexuality would imply power in a more specific way than knowledge, but then again, for him ‘knowledge is power’ (or to better put in terms of sexuality, ‘knowing’ is power’ etc). So, the notion of knowledge is the magma with which Foucault worked until the end of his days: is not the care of the self implying the knowledge of ourselves, the exercise of courage and frankness?
All this roughly put, of course, but with this regard, I truly think that the least we can do while we want to refer to ‘power’ in terms of Foucault, is to background it admittedly to all what he did with the notion of knowledge (and to have clear in which sense they are related or mutually implied): a notion which is not a bad parameter to account the trajectory of his thought within all his consistencies, continuities, fractures and crises: a measure that would avoid the reification of the word ‘power’ in our own politics-related theorizations.
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- Power: Breaking the Liberal Domination-Resistance Paradigm
- 10 January 2012 at 1:58 am
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Naxos
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Qué agradable leerte, Santy. Y sí, ¿qué hace que nos preguntemos por lo que nos queda, cuando lo que nos queda no puede ser más que la vida, así, la vida desnudita, así, la vida frontal, sin promesas ni trascendencias? Reminiscencias de mala conciencia, incredulidad, desconfianza, y nihilismo. Pero es Nietzsche quien nos saca de ahí y nos eleva hasta ella afirmándola: es la pura vida lo que nos queda, y nada más: sí que sí
! un gran saludo, desde acá
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- Una pregunta imposible
- 9 January 2012 at 7:42 pm
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Naxos
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Great post. I do want to share how it is useful to be concerned about language when we refer to ‘power’. We know that for Foucault ‘power’ was just one aspect of his genealogical/epistemological investigations: his theory of it was though just a temporal bridge between his work on discoursiveness and on what he finally developed in terms of modes of subjection, the care of the self etc. If there were several ‘Foucaults’ (there are at least 3, Foucault the genealogist, Foucault the theorist of power, and Foucault the parrhesist ) it’s not easy to refer to one of them without bringing one or both of the others. Foucault was pretty aware that theorizing about power would always mean a certain reification/substantialization of the word: and in this sense, there is no way to refer to ‘power’ in foucaultian terms without ascribing its relation with knowledge. To this point, when we talk about power we actually are talking of knowledge as its primal form, and this is crucial for understanding Foucault’s philosophy. For instance -though it is clear that it is just a way to put it: to say ‘disciplinary power’, is not to say ‘knowledge’, at the end of the day? For Foucault ‘power’ is exercised by and among bodies, and this means certain knowledge of which relation can be embodied or not, depending on how power is exercised and situated. Is not great how Foucualt refers to the ‘exam’ as a disciplinary mechanism that would covert knowledge in power? The relation between power and knowledge cannot be left without mention, if we want to advance a broader view of Foucault’s philosophical/political preoccupations.
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- Power: Breaking the Liberal Domination-Resistance Paradigm
- 9 January 2012 at 6:12 pm
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Naxos
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Tim,
This anti-nihilism death ray sounds too familiar to me
though, i really don’t see how you would engage it with ‘Hyperobjects’ (not that i already know what the hell a ‘Hyperobject’ is, neither that am really keen to know, honestly). But i just wanted to share that negating nihilism would not double down on it. There is no really way to tunnel it (what ever that might mean). Negating nihilism can only lead to one thing (not an object, please).I leave this as homework for you to think rather to run your ‘Hyperobjects’. Just take notice in which sense the aritmetics of your lived-experience are failing here. Why?
cheers
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- Anti-Nihilism Death Ray
- 9 January 2012 at 12:47 pm
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Naxos
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Oh but this is definitive: ‘agencement’ and ‘dispositif’ should be considered as the same sourced conceptualization: Deleuze admiration of Foucault archeological viewpoint says a lot in this regard: while the notion of ‘agencement’ was firstly coined by Guattari, Deleuze complemented and matched it with Foucault’s original ideas about ‘discoursive sockets’ (there is even an early 1970′s article where Deleuze suggest this similarity between Guattari and Foucault). But it is interesting to see how Deleuze and Guattari initially developed the notion in terms of ‘dispositif’ in their 1975 book about Kafka, chapter 9, entitled ‘What is a dispositif?’. Then we see that later, in ATP, they would finally use the same ideas and almost the same words to define it, but now expressed in terms of ‘agencement’. Perhaps this leads to the break of Foucault and Deleuze friendship: Deleuze considered that the term ‘dispositif’ would still have some significant residues that would connotate ‘pleasure’ above ‘desire’, thus he dismissed the term and kept the guattarian notion ‘agencement’. In ATP, the word ‘dispositif’ is just simply inexistent.
To this point, despite Deleuze and Guattari developed the term ‘agencement’ in many respects, the basic notion of ‘collective agencement of enunciation’ could not but be ascribed to Foucault’s ‘discoursive sockets’. Can we say then that Deleuze took Foucault’s original ideas without his permission? Was this part of the reason why Deleuze went silently hostile to him? Could this explain why Foucault felt intimidated by Deleuze conceptual obsessions? The fact is that, after Foucault`s death, Deleuze was pretty obfuscated, he knew he was in debt with Foucault not only in terms of friendship but also in terms of his conceptual project and particularly with respect to the notion of ‘agencement’, which became very important. Feeling a lot of regret, we can see how Deleuze yielded tribute to Foucault by writing the most incisive and exponential book about him, and later -in the 1988 homage to Foucault organized by Canguilhem where he participated-, by writing an exalted lecture also entitled ‘what is a dispositif?’. The fact that the chapter 9 on Kafka’s and his 1988 lectured tribute would share the same title also says a lot: it is clear that Deleuze retrieved Foucault the credit he deserved regards to the notion of ‘agencement’, in a way to reframe all its foucaultian conceptual potency in terms of ‘dispositif’.
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- Assemblage/apparatus: using Deleuze and Foucault (2011)
- 7 January 2012 at 3:27 pm
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