2014: Writing in Review

A bulk of my writing on the blog in 2014 was dedicated to recounting or posting matters related to my next book, Egalitarian Moments. This reflected that most of time that involved writing in general--especially once we subtract writing slides and notes for the two courses that I had to prepare last fall ("Ethics and Social Issues" and "Topics in European Philosophy")--was dedicated to the book as well. I wrote almost all of Part II and the conclusion to the book last year. As a consequence, I rarely found the time to jot down other stray or incomplete thoughts on the blog. I also neglected to mention a few things that I wrote in 2013 that were published in 2014:

• Two entries for The Meillassoux Dictionary, edited by Peter Gratton and Paul J. Ennis. Those entries are for Descartes and Fichte.
• A chapter for The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, edited by Matthew C. Altman. To be more specific, the chapter, "The 'Keystone' of the System: Schelling's Philosophy of Art," is a concise account of what I've argued are the three fundamental features of Schelling's philosophy of art, as elaborated in Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art.

I also began two projects that will occupy parts of 2015:

• A talk at Saint Paul University here in Ottawa where I will be defending something called "curmudgeonly humanism." That term seems to be the only way I could figure out to describe the work of Kurt Vonnegut, so it shouldn't then be a surprise that the talk is about Vonnegut and Sartre. Concerning the latter, I've adopted the term humanism to oppose to a set of assumptions about political agency made by the New Atheists and the field of 'political theology.' (A belated Google search reveals that the term "curmudgeonly humanism" has been kicking around the internet--13 hits--but no one claims it as a developed philosophical position). It looks like this discussion might form the basis of my next book.
• A paper about Schelling, anthropocentrism, and speciesism, for a book on German idealism edited by Joseph Carew. More details on this project will be forthcoming.
• This isn't exactly a project, but I've also decided to write at least one scholarly book review in 2015 as well.

The Study

We moved into our current apartment last May. One of its appealing features was a spare room that has become the study. Most of my books on philosophy and theory are stashed in here. Fiction, baseball, art history, and, until two days ago, animal rights—all of these subjects are filed in the living room. To the center-right of my desk, I can reach the Rancière shelf. Below it is the shelf of various secondary sources. Below that: Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida, Bataille, Blanchot. The top shelf: Vonnegut. To my immediate right, the top two shelves hold existentialism, the middle two the Frankfurt School (including Benjamin and his Gesammelte Schriften) and select titles by Badiou, below that, Nietzsche and, as of last week, the Oxford King James Version of the Bible. The Nietzsche section seemed like the right place for the KJV. Some day, a publisher will bundle the Bible with Beyond Good and Evil/On the Genealogy of Morality.

I wrote almost all of what became Part II of Egalitarian Moments in the study. The placement of Rancière, Benjamin, or Badiou to my right isn’t some kind of ironic political statement, but rather done out of necessity. The shelves to my left are out of arm’s reach when I sit at the desk. My primary sources needed to be closer than that. Near the end, I had the last few titles I needed stacked on the desk. More Deleuze than I’d like to admit. Books by Oliver Davis and Samuel Chambers, Aisthesis in English and French, The Emancipated Spectator. While writing the conclusion, I’d repeatedly pull down Disagreement/La mésentente (it’s important to check both when citing passages from the English translation for reasons that Chambers elaborates at 91ff), although each time I’d return them to the shelf on the basis of the obstinate belief that I had covered that text in the Introduction and Part I.

At some point, sundry items and all types of paperwork began to pile into the study. There aren’t only books to my right. There’s a pile of (in this case, more than two) guitars in cases, as well as several boxes of music equipment and electronics that I’ve basically ignored since we moved. When it got cooler during the fall, I added to my left the fan we no longer needed in the living room and piled every single last piece of paper on top of my filing bins. That pile included a few bills (since paid) and a variety of drafts of the book stacked in increasing disarray. When it got tenuous, the paperwork commandeered the left side of the desk. Books claimed the right. When I typed, my elbows touched both borders. But the book is due soon, I’d think, and I could ignore what amounted to a highly organized disorder. Did I mention that the desk also had the printer, a cactus, a Boss DS-1 distortion pedal and a Dan-Echo? What exactly were those doing there? Thankfully there’s a booze cart for the whiskey, because it would be tempting to drink to make space. Which means that there would be space to write without the necessary focus to do so. Few of us mere mortals could do with philosophy what Hunter S. Thompson did with journalism.

This is the point in the narrative where everything teetering is supposed to topple. I’m faced with the thankless task of reporting otherwise. I submitted the manuscript and, after a week of procrastinating, I finally filed or recycled almost all the paperwork.

I did try out a few alternate endings. In one scenario, I fell into what 19^th century authors called dissipation, and used politically expedient broadsides to finance my debts from debauchery and gambling. However, Balzac wrote that one, unless it involved a portrait of rake that remained hidden through most of the narrative. That story is by Oscar Wilde.

In a different scenario, I will have been found four decades later, mummified beneath hundreds of drafts of my magnum opus. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened to Wittgenstein.

In the current scenario, the moment during which I’m typing this piece, the same cat who obstructed my review of Diagne’s African Art as Philosophy and who napped on Descartes’s Philosophical Writings and Sartre’s Critiques littéraires is laying on my left arm, pinning my wrist against keyboard. That means that there must be more room on the desk.

At the moment, the quandary revolves around reorganizing the books to my right. I’ve read numerous authors describe their writing techniques: how many words to write per day, strategies for note-taking and revisions, daily schedules, and reflections on organizing material (Stuart Elden, for instance, is assiduous in his reports on his Foucault project). When I write, these techniques and strategies change. I hand write most of my material before typing, or at least I used to. That meant that everything I type is a second draft. At points, during Part II, this became counter-productive, so I had to type the first draft and revise later. At one point I was cutting and pasting drafts. With scissors and tape. While all these aspects were open to change, the shelving of primary sources remained the same. Now that the book is done, this shelving isn’t as convenient. For example, it might be a while before I revisit Walter Benjamin’s work, so it probably shouldn’t occupy the shelf to my direct right—though it was useful for an important part of Chapter 3. Nor do I really need the rest of the Frankfurt School or Badiou on the shelf below.

There’s no moral to this story. That’s where this was supposed to be heading. However, aside from an essay on the anthropocentricism of Schelling’s nature-philosophy, I don’t have any writing commitments for 2015. Yet. That means I don't have a clear idea about how to reorganize the shelves. Perhaps that is part of the writing process. That is, not writing is part of the writing process. I have a few rudimentary ideas about an essay on Rancière and Jean-Luc Nancy, and a more unconventional essay on humanism, but it’s probably more important, given that I’m less than two weeks removed from submitting the manuscript for Egalitarian Moments, to spend some time wasting time.

Two Pictures (Bury the Lede)

I try to recycle paper. It comes with printing papers repeatedly, given that I feel like I edit more efficiently and with more focus when faced with the printed page. This page turned up when I was printing answer keys, but it never made it back into the stack. It's from a talk I gave on Rancière, Sartre, and seriality at the EPTC in 2013. The red ink was jotted before combining this talk and my article, 'The Nothingness of Equality' (published with Sartre Studies International) for the book. It turns out that those two sentences in red weren't added to what I had considered to be the final draft of Chapter 2. I suppose I had thought that they were redundant, given that the paragraph they're crowding was a quick synopsis of what I had already written for SSI--but they've been added to the final version. If my handwriting is cryptic, the passage underlines how Rancière opposes his egalitarian politics to the particular interests of sociological groups.

These are--were--the last two blank pages of a notebook I started on Rancière in November 2011. A large part of the book was handwritten in first draft in this notebook, though it did take three years to finally complete it. It being the notebook.

And the manuscript for Egalitarian Moments; it's done as well, and due to be published in July 2015.

Writing on Schelling, Again

I recently completed an essay on Schelling's philosophy of art for an anthology that will be published as the Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, edited by Matthew C. Altman.

The most difficult part of writing an essay on the topic is that I've already written and published a book about it. My files show that I spent a few days working on it in April of this year, two in August, and then most of the paper--probably around 8000 words of it--was written just a few weeks ago in late October. The rest of the time was spent with writer's block (more specifically writer's block concerning the topic of Schelling's philosophy of art).

I'm pretty sure everything on this page was eventually cut

That's correct. Writer's block, about a topic I had already written a book about. And I think that's the reason it happened. It took some time to figure out how to re-organize the material into a shorter format. The book cuts Schelling's philosophy into chronological chunks: Chapter 1 runs 1795-1796, Chapter 2 through 1798, Chapter 3 through 1800, Chapter 4 through 1804, and Chapter 5 through 1810 (through the often neglected Stuttgart Seminars). The chronological organization allowed me to introduce the principles of Schelling's system, as their significance shifts over time, and to relate them back to the philosophy of art.

For the essay, I decided to tackle his philosophy of art thematically. After introducing the topic, I use the first section to argue that Schelling introduces his philosophy of art to subvert the primacy of practical reason in transcendental idealism. I tackled this issue in the third chapter of my book, but the essay version has allowed me to correct an oversight in Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art. For whatever reason, I neglected to mention that Kant calls freedom, "insofar as its reality is proved by an apodictic law of practical reason," the "keystone" of the system. In the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling refers to the philosophy of art as the "keystone" of the system. In the essay, I make it clearer that Schelling was deliberately appropriating the metaphor. I also reference Coleridge's observation that Fichte introduces activity, rather than a substance, as the "key-stone" of the system.

In the next section, I discuss the systematic importance of the power of imagination. Again, this is familiar ground, as I argue that Schelling does not dismiss the philosophy of art once he announces the system of identity-philosophy or absolute idealism. Instead, he maintains that art is important because it is produced by the power of the imagination (Einbildungskraft), which is the power of esemplasy (as Coleridge translated it) or forming-into-one (Ineinsbildung). A thematic presentation, rather than the chronological presentation, of this claim seems to be much stronger. I feel that all the work it took to write this essay is justified by the results of this section. Hopefully future readers will appreciate it as well.

I also used this essay as an opportunity to reconsider the status of Schelling's idea of a new mythology. In F&NSPA, I argue that Schelling ends up mythologizing politics, and a few readers have seemed to think this is a kind of Marxist imposture on his work. Maybe it is. Admittedly, I'll always appreciate the egalitarianism of the new mythology of the "System Program" over the statism of the 1804 Wurzburg Lectures (partially translated in Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, ed. Thomas Pfau). This time, I introduce what other readers may someday think is another imposture, interpreting the idea of a new mythology in light of Ranciere's work on aesthetics. The general idea is that the politics of the new mythology, were it to be realized as a concrete community, would foreclose on both politics and the politics of aesthetics. Or, to paraphrase Schelling's discussion of creativity in the Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, were the community to be realized as community, it would cease to be creative and it would become an instrument of its creation.

Finally, a spoiler. The last sentence is: 'If anything, his willingness to relentlessly interrogate the very ground of philosophical thinking demonstrates Schelling’s abiding fidelity to, as the anonymous author of the “System Program” once phrased it, the "polytheism of the imagination"'.

Now, you'll need to read the essay to find out how I get there.

Rancière's Latest: "Aisthesis"

Many different factors play into how a person chooses his or her dissertation topic. When I began my PhD studies, I figured that I would be writing something on recent French philosophy. I had, in the previous few years, been reading lots of Badiou, Agamben, Lacan, and others. And then, in early 2005, I decided to write a dissertation on Schelling's philosophy of art. Not much had been written on the topic, nor, for that matter, on Schelling in general. I don't even know if I had thought about it in those terms--at most, I must have still been in that phase where reading Schelling was one of  the more unique (and sometimes more bizarre) experiences I had had in studying French and German philosophy (not to say that this experience no longer happens...). The project would also give me a chance to read up on Kant, Spinoza (and then, to my chagrin, Jacobi), Fichte, and Hegel, and work on my German.

Over the years, explaining my decision would remain a complex task (this ended, incidentally, when I published the book), especially if the person asking knew that I went in thinking about French philosophy. Eventually, I started telling these people that the best reason to work on a historical figure is that he or she would never publish anything new while you were trying to finish your dissertation: so if Schelling leapt out of his grave and presented a new system, we'd have bigger problems than my dissertation.

Since I've been working on Rancière, this joke was the first thing I thought of, when I discovered that he's recently published a new book on the aesthetic regime of art, entitled Aisthesis (Galilée, 2011).

The Nothingness of Equality

I've been putting the finishing touches on an essay that ought to see the light of day sometime in 2012 (it has already been accepted for publication). If you were in Montréal last April at the Sartre Society conference, you've already heard parts of it. If everything works like I want it to, it will eventually form part of a chapter in my book on Jacques Rancière. Here's an abstract of what you have to look forward to:

The Nothingness of Equality: The ‘Sartrean Existentialism’ of Jacques Rancière 

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.

Jason Wirth Reviews "Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art"

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has published a review by Jason M. Wirth of my Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art. Read it (HERE) and you will find that Wirth concludes:

Shaw has given us a thoughtful retrieval of the problem of art that invites us into the epicenter of Schelling's project.

Amazon and Print on Demand

For all the night owls, like myself (via Scu at Critical Animal):

Carol J. Adams, who you might know as the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, has published a post on her blog about Amazon's print-on-demand "service." I've received a few of their reproductions, and of those, a couple have really stuck out due to  the cheap materials used, including the cover, the cover ink, the paper, and the binding (wait, what the hell else is there to a book [and I don't mean that in the Derrida 'question the oeuvre' kind of way--that's a topic for another post, perhaps]? Maybe the black ink isn't as glossy either...), and, of course, the barcode on the back page. Now, I'm not necessarily against print-on-demand, especially if it results in the handful of Routledge titles that I am interested in becoming affordable. But, as Adams, points out:

Apparently, it is common to have an agreement with publishers that they can produce copies of a book if it is out of stock. However, Amazon is apparently determining what being "out of stock" means in a very flexible, self-interested way. If they receive an order and they, Amazon, are out of stock of the book, they are producing their own rather than obtaining the book from the publisher's warehouse.

This sounds questionable at best, and as a published author, I would prefer that the copies of my book taking up space in Continuum's warehouses go first before anybody starts printing on demand, so that someday a more affordable paperback can replace the hardcover. 

The Trouble with Titles

I'm not very good at giving my work good, let alone catchy, titles. Take, for instance, the title of my book on Schelling: long ago in the dissertation proposal process, I had a series of clumsy titles that ended with my advisor crossing out whatever I have proposed, and writing underneath, "Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art." As we all know, the name stuck.

For my tentative project on Rancière, I've struggled as well--what would capture the unity of the various chapters, ranging from discussions of Descartes, Marx, Schiller, and many others (one must allow for a few surprises...)? At the moment, I think this does it: Political Aesthetics: Reading Philosophy after Jacques Rancière. This is, of course, subject to change.

Schelling Book Available

According to the Continuum website, today is the release date for Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art in the United Kingdom and the 'Rest of the World.' North and South Americans will have to wait until February 10, 2011. I received my author's copies a few weeks ago, so I can vouch for their hardcover existence.

I first wrote Continuum with my proposal for the book on December 2, 2009, and I received my copies on November 18, 2010. That seems--this is only my first book--like a quick turn around. I've traveled from furious revising and excitement, to apprehension, to wanting to modify extravagantly the galley proofs, to apprehension and doubt, to, with the book in my hands, excitement.

The hardcover price is prohibitive for most of my readers, I know. If you want to read a copy, I have two suggestions: 1) order it for your library, or, 2) if you've got a bit of background in Schelling, write a  philosophy or aesthetics journal and ask for a review copy. This could get you both a hardcover copy of the book and a line on your CV. The more critical interest, the more likely we see a paperback edition.

Update: I forgot that I had yet to post Jeffrey Reid's blurb about the book. Now seems like the time:

“Philosophy of art provides a privileged opening onto the complexities and metaphysical dimensions of Schelling's system, an amorphous construction that extends through the diverse productions of the philosopher's lifetime. Fittingly, Devin Shaw has adopted a genetic approach, following the philosopher’s virtually inchoate accounts of art in his early writings, through its explicit embodiment in his philosophy of identity, to the later writings on art, which, because of their apparently marginal character, are usually overlooked. Dr. Shaw’s original and important contribution shows how Schelling's philosophy of art is informed by his earlier philosophy of nature, while anticipating his later work on the metaphysics of freedom and his crepuscular writings on mythology.” – Jeffrey Reid, Associate Professor, Philosophy, University of Ottawa, Canada

Schelling Book Preview

I happened over to the Continuum page for my book, Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art, and discovered that the free preview is up, which includes the "Introduction" and the beginning of the first chapter, "Dogmatism, Criticism, and Art." Check it out, and once you're convinced of its merit (see what I did there?), please order the book for your university library.

I'll be writing about my experience at the Radical Philosophy Association meeting later this week.

Thoughts on the Schelling Book and After

Today was the day that the typesetting and proofing and indexing of the Schelling book (if you're not already in the know, it's here) was supposed to be finished, and...we made it.

To think, only a year ago, to the day, I was writing Chapter 4, which is about Schelling's philosophy of art during the period that he held to a position he called absolute idealism (1801-1806), and which, as almost everybody knows, he developed with Hegel, before their later break over that one book that Hegel published in 1807...

I've already discussed, in a very schematic fashion, Schelling's absolute idealism and his philosophy of art on the blog (parts one, and two), and the nice part is, much of this discussion doesn't appear in the book, so if you read it, it won't be redundant. In fact those posts are more than likely going to be used for a future paper about Schelling and Hegel.

But a year ago, to the day, I was still grappling with a flaw in previous Schelling secondary-lit. Most people follow this line: Schelling's philosophy of art was important when he held to the subjectivism of transcendental philosophy (through the System of Transcendental Idealism), and when he dismissed that subjectivism, he no longer needed artistic production as the 'keystone' of the system. I argue that he still needs the philosophy of art, in fact, he makes recourse to artistic production to move his changing system along through 1807.

During the period of absolute idealism, Schelling argues that philosophy constructs a system from the perspective of reason itself, and in the lectures later published as The Philosophy of Art he argues that artistic production in the form of mythology provides the historical content of the transition from the infinite to the finite. That is, philosophy deals with the infinite as the perspective of reason, and art (via the imagination/Einbildungskraft) 'forms into unity' the historical content of art through mythology, art presents the absolute in finite form. Far from dismissing art, Schelling needs it to give content to the absolute. (now I know that some might say that nature-philosophy does that as well, and it's true, although Schelling claims that art is a superior truth; we have to just leave it at that for the moment).  But I argue that the historical content that art is to provide is itself formally different than what the so-called perspective of reason (absolute idealism) tells us about the world, and the two can't be, or weren't, reconciled. This sends us off to Chapter 5, which you are all going to have to wait for.

Now, I had been rehearsing this post for a few weeks, because I was going to tell you that, for the first time in years, I didn't have a project with a deadline at hand for the first time since I spent the summer reading the three volumes of Foucault's History of Sexuality (that was the summer between my BA and the start of my MA...in 2001).

But it's no longer true. I've volunteered to review Rancière's Dissensus, and last week the RPA accepted my conference abstract on a critique of Laclau and Agamben, both so far apart and yet so similar in not quite grasping, for very different reasons, the uses of violence. 

However, with just that gloss, I know what you're thinking: between the time you write the abstract and the time that it's accepted, you've been reading a lot of Fanon and Lukacs, and now you're quite certain that the paper has transformed into something entirely different and you're right. Laclau's got to go, and you've got to get serious about Agamben's tendency to turn historical violence into metaphysical violence. Hell, you might even get a chance to throw in a critique of Zizek, because they have a common fault: too much early Benjamin, not enough later Benjamin.

Yeah, that's it, that's exactly what I'm working on. Imagine if conference abstracts started reading like the paragraph above...

Schelling's Philosophy of Art in a Nutshell

Or, the most recent draft of the cover copy of my book:

Schelling is often thought to be a protean thinker whose work is difficult to approach or interpret. In Freedom and Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art, Devin Zane Shaw shows that the philosophy of art is the guiding thread to understanding the relationships between three of Schelling’s original contributions to philosophy as they are expressed in his work from 1795-1810: his idea of freedom, his philosophy of nature, and his philosophy of art. Schelling’s idea of freedom is developed through a critique of the formalism of Kant’s and Fichte’s practical philosophies, and his nature-philosophy is developed to show how subjectivity and objectivity emerge from a common source in nature. The philosophy of art plays a dual role in the system. First, Schelling argues that artistic activity produces through the artwork a sensible realization of the ideas of philosophy. Second, he argues that artistic production creates the possibility of a new mythology that can overcome the socio-political divisions that structure the relationships between individuals and society. Shaw’s careful analysis shows how art, for Schelling, is the highest expression of human freedom.


Any suggestions? I'm sending it off by the end of the week. The final draft, which differs somewhat from this version, is here. See my posts on Schelling here (part one and part two).

Off to Continuum...

Last week, I announced that Continuum is publishing a revised version of my dissertation as Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art, and today, I sent the penultimate draft to them. Two months of writing and revising, done. Now I've got another view months of clarifications and copy editing (and three conference presentations to write over the rest of 2010; but that's another story). However, at this moment, it's time for some rituals of closure. It's time to discard all the previous drafts, all those sheets of printer paper littering the apartment. It's time to take all the library books back to the office.

And then it's time to get back to the blog. I've haven't been writing much lately, which is probably understandable. But I've been keeping up, and watching the readership grow along with the work of Jason Smith (here's his latest review), Matt McLennan (his latest) and the occasional piece by Sean Moreland (one more link for his essay on Salinger). Last week, Joshua began posting choice youtube videos, a feature that I hope he will continue, putting one of his favorite hobbies to work. Before getting back to blogging in the next few days, however, I just wanted to say thanks to the other contributors for the quality work.

Forthcoming: Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art

Continuum has added my book, Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art, to their website. If you've noticed that my review output has lagged in the new year (I've got a stack of books I'd like to discuss...), it is because I have been revising my dissertation to turn it into a book. The initial revision process is now almost finished; I'm not writing any more content, just cleaning up whatever mistakes remain. I can't say that I'm not excited about seeing this through to press.