Reading Bataille’s Story of the Eye

okay

young-earth-lysenkoist:

young-earth-lysenkoist:

misshegel:

This morning, I took a sneak-peak into Anti-Oedipus (why?) and I’m already disappointed.

I really, really hate the fact that Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus are considered the “go-to” Deleuze books. Difference and Repetition and Logic of…

I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss D&R/LoS though. For one thing, I couldn’t imagine anyone who is into psychoanalysis disliking either book — the influence of Freud and Lacan is pretty obvious and overwhelming in both. When Deleuze attacked psychoanalysis later on, it wasn’t as an outsider but as someone who had internalized psychoanalytic thinking to such a degree that he felt the need to escape it. (If the concept of “anxiety of influence” applies to anyone, it definitely applies to Deleuze vis-a-vis Lacan.) Though I’m no fan of Levi Bryant (his first book is okay but his OOO stuff is just unfathomably terrible), he has some pretty accurate things to say about the ridiculousness of opposing Deleuze to psychoanalysis in some black-and-white way, as so many “Deleuzeans” tend to do:

It is clear that Deleuze’s later work with Guattari often receives disproportionate attention. A glance at earlier works such as Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, and Coldness and Cruelty reveals Deleuze in close dialogue with Lacan’s work. Indeed, Lacan himself noted this, referring to Coldness and Cruelty as the finest study of masochism yet produced in Seminar 14, and devoting part of his seminar to the study of DR and LS in Seminar XVI. Throughout these earlier works, Deleuze endlessly elucidates the concept of the dark precursor through reference to objet a, and draws on Lacan’s account of structure in “The Seminar on the Purloined Letter”, to elucidate his conception of dual serialization.

As for Deleuze’s “anti-Hegelianism”: I think that, to some extent, it’s also the product of an anxiety of influence. He was a student of Jean Hyppolite, after all. Honestly, I can’t think of a single 20th-century thinker who comes closer to Hegel in terms of his general approach to philosophy: Both refuse to simply oppose other philosophers by taking positions different from theirs — rather, they attempt to elucidate the mechanisms of every position in a way that reveals the underlying universal structure or movement of thinking; for both the point is not simply to dismiss the mistake but to understand its truth as mistake (what Hegel calls “error” and Deleuze calls “stupidity”). (One could argue that Derrida does this as well, but Derrida’s method seems to me to involve a dissolution of all metaphysical systems, as opposed to the universal and systematized “meta-metaphysics” of Deleuze and Hegel.) It’s precisely because both are attempting the exact same project that Deleuze sees Hegel as such a rival.

Furthermore, it’s easy to be misled by terminological differences which make the opposition between Deleuze and Hegel seem to be greater than it actually is. At the heart of Deleuze’s anti-Hegelianism is his opposition to “negation” as a fundamental underlying principle. However, Deleuze’s “problematic” or “virtual” is at least something like negation, negation being its representational “shadow”; whereas Hegelian negation is not, say, Aristotelian negation, but rather something like a positive force. (It’s important to remember that even here Deleuze isn’t denying the reality of negation but merely its priority — negation exists at the level of representation, though ultimately a product of “sub-representational” difference.)

All of this is to say: if you forget everything you’ve ever heard about Deleuze (especially from “Deleuzeans”) and read Difference and Repetition with an open mind, I think you’ll find a lot in there to enjoy. (Of course, reading all 300+ pages of D&R requires a considerable investment of time and energy; the first time I read it it would pretty much take me an entire day to get through 10-15 pages. However, Chapter 2 of the book — “Repetition for Itself” — is pretty self-contained and does a good job of outlining most of the main themes of D&R as a whole. It and the essay “How Do We Recognize Structuralism” are probably the two best entry-points into the Deleuze of D&R.)

retorsion:

• Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
  
  
• The Cyborg Manifesto
  
  
• Situated Knowledges
  
  
• When Species Meet
  
  
• The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness

(via elektrokardiogrammatology)

Oh yeah, we managed to get a house yesterday and it’s £150 a month cheaper than what I’m paying for at the moment and it’s clean so I’m pleased.

I’d reserve it for selfies. 

(Source: afronaut)

(via foucaultthehaters)

controproducente:

Building a landscape: Utrecht, the “park on the roof of the highway” (by P.Gerhard)

(via architectureofdoom)

(Source: goethes-fist, via pseudobollocks)

murmurationfestival:

For us, locomotives already have symbolic character because we met with them in childhood. Our children, however, will find this in automobiles, of which we ourselves see only the new, elegant, modern cheeky side. There is no more insipid and shabby antithesis than that which reactionary thinkers like Klages [insert contemporary name here] try to set up between the symbol-space of nature and that of technology. To each truly new configuration of nature—and, at bottom, technology is just such a configuration—there correspond new “images”. Every childhood discoveres these new images in order to incorporate them into the image stock of humanity.

- Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project 1927-1935

(via memejacker)