Thales Would Beg to Differ

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Thales would beg to differ with the following passage from Joyce's Ulysses:

What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach, and thenar or sole of foot?

The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.

Christopher Watkin, Difficult Atheism

Forthcoming in Symposium: Jason Harman reviews Christopher Watkin's Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Quentin Meillassoux. Harman writes:

Watkin’s text seeks to chart contemporary French thought’s attempt to attain “a thinking that is truly without God” (1), through an analysis and critique of Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Quentin Meillassoux. It should be noted upfront that for sheer breadth and depth Watkin’s work is astounding. Watkin, I am led to suspect, feels perfectly at ease inhabiting the minds of Badiou, Nancy and Meillassoux. Further, where contemporary French philosophy often dallies in the obscure, Watkin’s rendering—with ample citations from a wide selection of primary texts—both clarifies and sharpens. Throughout this text, Watkin ushers the reader into the intimate circle of philosophy’s leading minds—certainly no small feat.

Despite these merits, Harman notes several shortcomings with Watkin's approach, that you can assess by clicking here and reading the review.

This is the second review that I have read of Watkin's book, and it (that is, the book) looks to be quite thought provoking (perhaps it also pairs well with Martin Hägglund's Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life?).

Note that I'm no post-secular! philosopher. I think that the works of Spinoza (obviously the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) and Marx are still the best approaches for dealing with the relations between religion, philosophy, and politics--and from what I gather, they both avoid the pincers of Watkin's critique (go read it!). I do think, on the other hand, that many contemporary attempts to go, as it were, post-theological, don't take enough from these approaches.

The Nothingness of Equality

I noticed that I hadn't yet posted a link to the "The Nothingness of Equality: The 'Sartrean Existentialism' of Jacques Rancière," which was recently published in Sartre Studies International (it's behind a subscription wall). In case you are interested, here's the abstract:

In this essay, I propose a mutually constructive reading of the work of Jacques Rancière and Jean-Paul Sartre. On the one hand, I argue that Rancière's egalitarian political thought owes several important conceptual debts to Sartre's Being and Nothingness, especially in his use of the concepts of freedom, contingency and facticity. These concepts play a dual role in Rancière's thought. First, he appropriates them to show how the formation of subjectivity through freedom is a dynamic that introduces new ways of speaking, being and doing, instead of being a mode of assuming an established identity. Second, Rancière uses these concepts to demonstrate the contingency of any situation or social order, a contingency that is the possibility of egalitarian praxis. On the other hand, I also argue that reading Sartre with Rancière makes possible the reconstruction of Sartre's project within the horizon of freedom and equality rather than that of authenticity. 

This essay is part of what is shaping up to be Part I of my eventual book on Rancière. At the moment, I have it planned that the themes in this paper will follow those addressed in my paper on Cartesian egalitarianism (here), and will be followed by a discussion and critique of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason.

Eduardo González Di Pierro, De la persona a la historia

Forthcoming in Symposium: Antonio Calcagno reviews Eduardo González Di Pierro's De la persona a la historia. Antropología fenomenológica y filosofia de la historia en Edith Stein. Calcagno writes:

Di Pierro’s text is the first scholarly study I know that systematically traces the use and development of Stein’s views on history. One of the classic critiques levelled against early phenomenologists concerns their seeming lack of historical awareness. However, this is a misreading of the early phenomenological tradition. There is great sensitivity to the role of history in shaping our sense of things, as is evidenced by Stein’s work on values and politics, which Di Pierro nicely signals.

A Short Note on Rancière and Class

I've argued previously that class is an important category in the work of Jacques Rancière. Rarely, however, do we find such a direct reference to class as in this short piece in the Guardian, discussing the revival of Marxism:

[The author is talking about class with Owen Jones, author of Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class...] "If I had written it four years earlier it would have been dismissed as a 1960s concept of class," says Jones. "But class is back in our reality because the economic crisis affects people in different ways and because the Coalition mantra that 'We're all in this together' is offensive and ludicrous." [...]

This chimes with something Rancière told me. The professor argued that "one thing about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that's to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?"

Things even get a bit stranger when he discusses the "gravediggers" of capitalism, a figure that Rancière often criticizes (he treats it as a synecdoche for "historical necessity," which he dismisses below):

After all, I suggest to Rancière, the bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancière refuses to be downbeat: "The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis and to use them to disarm its adversaries. But we must not reverse the idea of historical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The gravediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over-exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today's popular movements – Greece or elsewhere – also indicate that there's a new will not to let our governments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people."

Symposium

Looking back at June, I see that posting here has dropped dramatically. I'm going to pin that on the various projects that I've taken on over the past year, several of which have (or were supposed to have deadlines) in June and July.

Nevertheless, I didn't write this post to provide excuses or reassurances (if you needed them...). Instead, I'd like to announce that I've take over as the book review editor for Symposium, the journal for the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy. 

For the readers of The Notes Taken, this means that I will periodically be posting links to the book reviews that will be published in Symposium. The journal's policy is to publish their book reviews online in advance of publication. I think this should be the default position of any academic journal. In a sense, a review offers the reader both a preliminary discussion of the book in question and, perhaps, some motivation for reading it. If it's tucked away in a journal that either isn't online, or barricaded by a pay wall, it could be overlooked for a more accessible review. And for the author, let's face it: hardly any academic prestige accrues for book reviews, so you may as well have a readership.

That being said, the first review here fulfills some of the functions I just described. Rachel Loewen Walker's review of Paola Marrati's Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy makes the case that

it is within the Cinema books that we find the most developed politics of Deleuze’s work, a politics which refuses modernity’s obsession with agency as the freedom and action of the subject, and instead foregrounds movement and perception as contributors to the agency of thought. Hence cinema, as discussed through the movement-image and the time-image, becomes a primary frame of reference for the development of such a politics. 

While I'm not a Deleuze-and-politics kind of person, Walker's review left me with the impression that I ought to reconsider my view. If she talked me into reconsidering Deleuze's work on cinema, I'd say Walker makes a strong case for considering Marrati's book.

Schelling Society Conference Schedule

FIRST ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SCHELLING SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA (SSNA) 

AUGUST 30 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2012 

SEATTLE UNIVERSITY (SEATTLE, WASHINGTON USA) 

THURSDAY EVENING AUGUST 30, 2012 

Except where otherwise noted, the conference takes place in Piggott 100

6:00 PM Address and words of welcome: Jason Wirth and Sean McGrath

6:15 PM – 7:45 PM SESSION 1 Moderator: Sean McGrath (Memorial University)
1. Lore Hühn (Freiburg University), “Schelling’s Metaphysics of the Will: Schelling’s Freedom Essay and 19th Century Philosophy”
2. Markus Gabriel (University of Bonn), “Mythology and Modality: On the Very Idea of a Positive Philosophy”

7:45 PM Reception Piggott 106

FRIDAY, AUGUST 31, 2012 

9:00 AM-10:30 AM CONCURRENT SESSIONS (SESSIONS 1A AND 1B)
PANEL ONE-A Moderator: James Kilcup (Loyola Marymount)
1. Benjamin Berger (Warwick, UK), “Schelling’s Speculative Astrophysics”
2. James Depew (Western Ontario), “Schelling’s “Ethnogony”: Indigeneity as Lived Mythology”

PANEL ONE-B Moderator: Anthony Bruno (University of Toronto) ROOM TBA
1. Jared McGeough (University of Western Ontario), “An Indigestible Remainder: ‘Spinoza’ in Schelling and Hegel”
2. Christopher Yates (Grove City College), “Offspring of Chaos: Artistry and Imagination in Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift”

10:30 AM-10:45 AM coffee

10:45 AM-12:15 PM SESSION 2 Moderator: Jason Wirth (Seattle University)
1. Rainer Zimmermann (University of Munich), “Deriving Kalokagathía from Schelling’s Grounding of Nature”
2. Iain Hamilton Grant (UWE Bristol, UK), “The Depth of the Unfathomable: Epistemology and Potency in Schelling’s Dynamics”

12:15 PM-1:45 PM lunch (on your own)

1:45 PM-3:15 PM SESSION 3 Moderator: Benjamin Graham Woodard (Western Ontario)
1. Michael Vater (Marquette University), “Bringing Nature to Light: Schelling's Naturphilosophie in the Early System of Identity”
2. Devin Zane Shaw (University of Ottawa),“‘From the Original Night of Particularity’: Nature and System in Schelling’s Aphorisms on the Philosophy of Nature”

3:15 PM-3:30 PM coffee

3:30 PM-5:00 PM SESSION 4 Moderator: Tilottama Rajan (Western Ontario)
1. Bruce Matthews (Bard College), “Plato's “Sublime Idea” and Schelling's Inversion of the Kantian Architectonic”
2. Edward Beach (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire), “Schelling versus Hegel on the Problem of Circular Logic”

5:00 PM -5:15 PM break

5:15 PM-6:45 PM SESSION 5 Moderator: Kyriaki Goudelli (University of Patras)
1. Joe Lawrence, “The Harrowing of Hell: On the Birth and Death of God”
2. Philipp Schwab (Freiburg University), “Schelling’s ‘Failure’ and the Non-ground: Heidegger’s Readings of the Freedom Essay”

6:45 PM Reception Piggott 106

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2012 

9:00 AM-10:30 AM SESSION 1 Moderator: James Kilcup (Loyola Marymount)
1. Kamalini Martin (Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram, Bangalore, India), “Schelling’s Idea”
2. Marcela Garcia (University of Munich), “Emphatical Being and the Late Schelling’s Interpretation of the Copula”

10:30 AM-10:45 AM coffee

10:45 AM -12:15 PM SESSION 2 Moderator: Moderator: Bernie Freydberg (Duquesne)
1. Sean McGrath (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “Post-Ecclesial Christianity: Schelling's Philosophy of Revelation”
2. Jason Wirth (Seattle University), “Plasticity: Art and Nature”

12:15 PM-1:45 PM lunch (on your own)

1:45 PM-3:15 PM SESSION 3 Moderator: Elizabeth Sikes (Seattle University)
1. Scott Scribner (University of Hartford), “Idealism's Corpse and the Prosthetics of Suicide”
2. Christopher Lauer (University of Hawaii-Hilo), “Be Still, Our Beating Heart: Schelling on the Organics of Intimacy”

3:15-3:30 PM coffee

3:30 PM-5:00 PM SESSION 4 Moderator: Benjamin Graham Woodard (Western Ontario)
1. Bernard Freydberg (Duquesne University), “’…More Aristophanic than Tragic…’?: Schelling’s Provocative Urfaust Interpretation”
2. Kyriaki Goudelli (University of Patras, Greece), “The Eternal Beginnings of the Divine and the Present Future”

5:00 PM-5:15 PM break

5:15 PM-6:45 PM SESSION 5 Moderator: Bruce Matthews (Bard College)
1. Tilottama Rajan (Western Ontario), “’Idea’: The History of the Term in German Idealism from Kant to Schelling”
2. Andrzej Wiercinski (Freiburg University), “The Restoration of the Unity between Nature and Spirit: Schelling’s Eschatology in the Stuttgart Private Lectures”

6:45 PM Reception Piggott 106

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 2: OPTIONAL NATURFORSCHUNG AT MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK

THE 2013 MEETING WILL TAKE PLACE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO AND THE 2014 MEETING WILL TAKE PLACE AT BARD COLLEGE IN NEW YORK

CFP: The Monster Child

The Monster Child: New Essays on Children, Horror and Monstrosity in Film

A call for papers for a proposed collection co-edited by Markus Bohlmann and Sean Moreland

As an area of research which has to date gone largely unexplored, the many variations on the image of the child-as-monster in global popular cinema invite critical consideration through a variety of theoretical approaches.

We are soliciting abstract submissions for a collection of original essays which explore various critical themes and theoretical angles related to "monstrous" children in film, a topic which has to date been paid too little attention, not only within the field of childhood studies, but also those of film and horror studies.

We welcome approaches including, but not limited to, the following:

- childhood and youth studies

- horror/gothic studies

- queer studies

- gender studies

- postcolonial studies

- narrative studies

- psychological/psychoanalytic studies

- film studies

- family structures

- camp studies

- sexuality studies

- closet-structures

- Approaches inspired by Deleuze/Guattari, Lacan, Sedgwick, Foucault, Zizek, 

  Powell, Kincaid, Stockton, Edelman.

We invite considerations of films that situate themselves in terms of the horror genre (for example, The Exorcist, The Unborn, The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, The Brood, It's Alive, Grace, Children of the Corn, Interview with the Vampire, Let the Right One In, The Pit, The Orphan, Phenomenon (aka Creepers), Twitch of the Death Nerve (aka Bay of Blood), but also films that court other genres and styles which feature some variation on the theme of the child-as-monster.

Even in films where the monster-child may appear in a minute role, its presence can radically change the effects of a cinematic text, lending itself to a unique opportunity for exploration and investigation into a wide array of interconnecting domains.

Contributors are invited to submit an abstract (250-500 words), current contact info and brief bio (or CV) as attachments (doc, docx, or rtf files) by no later than October 31, 2012 to: monstrouschildren@gmail.com. Please include “abstract submission” and the title of your abstract in the subject line.

Sean Moreland earned his PhD at the University of Ottawa, where he teaches sessionally.  His research interests include 19th and 20th century American literature, Gothic and horror fiction and film, and psychological theory and criticism. He has written a number of recent articles on contemporary American, Canadian and Indian horror films. He is co-editor of the volume Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror (McFarland, 2012) and is also in the early stages of co-editing a volume on horror and diaspora.

Markus Bohlmann is a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa, where he also teaches. His doctoral thesis examines the Deleuzian contours of "the child" in 21st century American literature and film. His research interests include Deleuze studies, childhood studies, queer studies, and sexuality studies.

Cartesian Egalitarianism Essay Published

As a reader of this blog, you've probably heard that I am working on a book about Jacques Rancière. In the first two chapters, I seek to trace the egalitarian precedents to his work. In doing so, I place Rancière in the Cartesian and existentialist lineages in French philosophy. 

In "Cartesian Egalitarianism: From Poullain de la Barre to Rancière," which is now available in Phaenex 7.1:

I present an overview of what I call “Cartesian egalitarianism,” a current of political thought that runs from François Poullain de la Barre, through Simone de Beauvoir, to Jacques Rancière. The impetus for this egalitarianism, I argue, is derived from Descartes’s supposition that “good sense” or “reason” is equally distributed among all people. Although Descartes himself limits the egalitarian import of this supposition [restricting the import to the evaluation of epistemological and metaphysical claims], I claim that we can nevertheless identify three features of this subsequent tradition. First, Cartesian egalitarians think political agency as a practice of subjectivity. Second, they share the supposition that there is an equality of intelligences and abilities shared by all human beings. Third, these thinkers conceptualize politics as a processing of a wrong, meaning that politics initiates new practices through which those who were previously oppressed assert themselves as self-determining political subjects.

For previous discussions on this blog, see here and here.

A Brief Entry on Schelling

I've spent the last month or so writing entries on Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling for The Jean-Luc Nancy Dictionary. This task has forced me to summarize the life and work of Schelling, for instance, in something like 500-600 words. That's no easy task. Here is my work in progress.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) is a German philosopher who made important—though now often-neglected—contributions to the metaphysics of German idealism, philosophy of nature, philosophy of art, and theology. His work is typically divided into various periods (cf. Dunham et al). During the first, which culminates in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), Schelling undertakes a critique of post-Kantian transcendental idealism, in which he develops a nature-philosophy and a philosophy of art. Nature-philosophy aims to demonstrate: first, the natural basis of the subject’s activity, and second, an organic concept of nature that emphasizes the centrality of nature’s productivity (the Spinozist natura naturans) and the processes of chemistry, electricity, and magnetism, rather than reducing natural processes to a merely mechanistic physics. The philosophy of art, which Schelling called the “keystone” of this system, has three characteristics. Artistic production, or what he calls “aesthetic intuition,” demonstrates the unity of unconscious (natural) and conscious production; it realizes concretely (in the real) what philosophy demonstrates ideally (in contrast to practical reason, which can only approximate its object, the categorical imperative); and it opens the possibility of producing a new mythology which can unite a people in an organic community.

In 1801, Schelling announces “his” system of philosophy, a bold return to metaphysics in the aftermath of the Kantian critical project, that he calls identity-philosophy or absolute idealism.  While nature-philosophy and the philosophy of art play prominent roles in this period, Schelling advances (in collaboration with Hegel) a critique of the subjective idealism of Kant and Fichte. Rather than positing the practical subject or absolute I as the foundation of the system, he argues that philosophy must proceed from the identity of subject and object. This identity is necessary, he claims, to explain the correspondence of the knower and what is known—subject and object—rather than presupposing it.

The third period includes Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809) and the various drafts of the Weltalter (Ages of the World). During this period, Schelling turns against, and critiques, the presuppositions of identity-philosophy—in short, the idea that logical necessity qua reason is the basis of all intelligibility. His philosophy of freedom explores the natural and historical-theological conditions necessary for human freedom, which is conceptualized as an existential decision rather than modeled on the categorical imperative.

The final period of Schelling’s work, which is characterized as the philosophy of revelation, takes shape around 1830 and remains a central preoccupation until his death. Though this work was only published posthumously, he delivered parts of it at the University of Berlin when he assumed in 1841 what was once Hegel’s chair in philosophy. Schelling aims to integrate critical or negative philosophy with what he called positive philosophy. Negative philosophy (which is associated, in modern terms, with post-Kantian philosophy) serves to eliminate what is contingent from the “first concepts of being”—it is confined to the essence or whatness of beings (2007: 144). Positive philosophy thinks the thatness or the fact of existence of God using the historical-theological resources of Greek mythology and Christian revelation.

On the basis of the differences between these periods, many commentators have concluded that Schelling was a protean thinker who never brought a system to conclusion. This conclusion overlooks his continued attention to the relationship—despite the changing significances of the terms—between “freedom” and “system.” For Schelling, free activity precludes and prevents the possibility of a completed system. In his Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795-1796), for instance, he argues that a complete system cannot be lived by a philosopher: at that “moment [its creator] would cease to be creator and would be degraded to an instrument” of his or her system (1980: 172).

Works Cited

Dunham, Jeremy, Iain Hamilton Grant and Sean Watson. Idealism: The History of a Philosophy (Durham: Acumen, 2011).

Schelling, F.W.J. (1980). “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” in The Unconditional in Human Knowledge. Trans. Fritz Marti (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 156–218.

–––– (2007). The Grounding of Positive Philosophy. Trans. Bruce Matthews (Albany: SUNY Press).