Badiou interviews Foucault

The young Badiou interviewing Foucault in 1965. French with Spanish subtitles. Hat tip, Zorlo Michael.

the brand lives on

Surely the only time that SPECULATIVE REALISM WAS DISCUSSED IN THE VICINITY OF A PIRATE FLAG.

Levi answers before I can

Critical Animal put up a “10 Questions for the Speculative Realists” post. I was going to try to answer it later, but LEVI ANSWERED IT PERFECTLY WELL BEFORE I COULD GET AROUND TO IT.

I agree with almost all of what Levi said.

Working from memory, Meillassoux should probably be called a “speculative materialist” (his own term) rather than just a “materialist.” The latter term can mean all sorts of things, and I happen to think Meillassoux is not remotely a materialist in the normal sense of the word.

I’m also less sympathetic to Foucault than Levi is. For me, the admirable Foucault is the Foucault of the interviews, where he seems so lively and open-minded. In his books, I find him to be not as good a philosopher as the best philosophers and not as good a historian as the best historians. I also fear that people often like him because they agree with his conclusions, which in fact is not one of the best reasons to like a philosopher. That’s treating a philosopher like a useful screwdriver or hammer instead of as a philosopher: “He advances my political agenda.”

While noting Foucault’s shortcomings, Levi defends him as follows: “In [Foucault’s] practice, by contrast, we see him discussing all sorts of assemblages that include human and nonhuman actors. This is what renders a Foucaultian object-oriented philosophy possible.”

The reason this cuts no ice with me is because Foucault doesn’t let the nonhuman actors act on each other. The nonhuman actors in his books always do nothing more than historicize the human subject. The human subject and its transmutations always remain at the center of the story. For this reason I instinctively never cared for him all that much. (But again, I genuinely love the interviews. There, he seems like the ultimate philosophical conversationalist.)

But… Critical Animal may be curious to know… I’m probably more on board with one particular political agenda than all the other speculative realists combined– animals. I stopped eating them when I was 7 years old, and I will not eat another. Where to go from there, I’ve never been sure.

“I forgot about that”

During my last 24 hours in Zagreb, while hanging out with Petar at various cafés, one topic that came up was Croatian basketball stars over the years.

Of course we talked about Toni Kukoc and the late Drazen Petrovic (partly due to the strange coincidence of walking right past Petrovic’s coach on the street on the way to dinner). Then Petar mentioned Dino Radja, and my thought and perhaps also my utterance was “oh yeah, I forgot about Radja.”

I’ve often wondered what it really means when we say that. If Petar had mentioned Jojo White or Cornbread Maxwell or Sarunas Marciulonis (and he did mention Arvidas Sabonis), in none of these cases would I have said “I forgot about him,” even though I have perhaps literally not thought of any of these other players in 5 or more years.

Somehow, Radja had slipped into a deeper, less easily accessible layer of memory. Obviously I didn’t forget him completely– a clear picture of Radja’s appearance came before my mind as soon as Petar mentioned him.

There’s probably some neurological meaning of this as well, of course. But in purely phenomenological terms, there seems to be a layer of memory that requires an impact from outside to be accessed.

One of my brothers, the one just a younger than I am, has an especial talent for doing this to me all the time. His active childhood memories seem to coincide to a strange degree with y own more deeply buried memories, so I’m always being amused by the stuff he dredges up, hopelessly lost to my recollection if not for him.

almost finished

Now only 7 pages to go in Prince of Networks… Authors may not be the most insightful critics of their own books, but my sense is that the final chapter is the best and most important, but also the most difficult.

But this fits the usual pattern of my books, as described several times on this blog already. Generally, I want to get readers up to speed on my previous works, whose ideas are needed to understand the new things I will talk about. Over time and with practice, one obviously becomes faster and more eloquent at describing past insights, just as the bottom layers of Troy or Byzantium become simpler and more compressed as new layers of the city are gradually built on top of them.

The later chapters are always the front line of battle for me, which usually makes them more exciting than the earlier chapters (at least for me) but also not as polished. Heidegger’s tool-analysis, which was once worth hundreds of pages to me, now flashes for a couple of paragraphs like a lightning-bolt before fading away into darkness.

Another reason for this effect (compressed and lucid early chapters, exciting but difficult final chapters) stems from the accident that I continually revise existing book drafts from start to finish in order to keep momentum going.

In other words, when ready to write Section 2 I will revise Section 1 to get into the right frame of mind for writing Section 2. When writing Section 3, I will first revise Sections 1 and 2 in order to build up a full head of steam for Section 3, and so on. The result is that my early chapters have often gone through two dozen or more polishings, whereas the later chapters may have gone through five or six.

This situation also means that I am always highly motivated to write the next book. For instance, I look at the final 80 pages of Prince of Networks and think: “this is really important material, but no undergraduate could ever sit through this in its current form. It ought to be simplified and clarified so much more than this, reduced to the point of being memorably formulated on a single index card.”

In other words, it’s good to finish a project feeling just a little bit sick and tired of yourself. It’s a good impetus to move on.

on the anthology

Levi tells the story of the forthcoming anthology The Speculative Turn, including some details previously unknown to me. Such as this:

“Prior to that, I only knew of Graham as the guy from DePaul (Loyola’s Continental rival) who had published a book fresh out of grad school and who was wearing a fidora in his books cover picture, i.e., I encountered him as an object of my envy and ressentiment.”

I’ll admit that the authorial hat is a bit of a back cover cliché. It happened mostly by accident. My friend Veronica decided we’d shoot a bunch of photos on the roof of the Zamalek Hostel, where I lived at the time. Most of the photos were straight-up photos of me with no “accessories”; just for fun I added a few with the hat and a few others with sunglasses. When we got the photos back from Kodak (digital cameras were not *quite* the norm yet in early 2001), we realized it had been a bit windy, and my hair was all messy in the non-hat photos. So it had to be with a hat, and even though I still cringe a bit at the clichéness of it, it’s sort of a nice photo– certainly better than the mean-looking one for Guerrilla Metaphysics where it even sort of looks (incorrectly) like I have a weird earring.

Unfortunately I never heard of Levi while in Chicago, even though we overlapped for a couple of years there. I went to a few events at Loyola in the early ’90s (I think Dennis Keenan’s Ph.D. defense was the first I ever attended; I’m pretty sure Sheehan and Sallis were on that committee, though my memories of the day are a bit hazy after 18 years).

By the time Levi was in Chicago, I was initially in final-stage dissertation Angst and later, after getting the one-year faculty post at DePaul, having a really enjoyable time during 1999-2000, even though Paul Schafer (greatest grad school roommate in the history of the world) had already left for New Orleans by then. I’m not the party-throwing type, but it’s the one year in my life when I regularly threw parties, all of them successful and memorable, so I guess I must have been very happy to be finished. The Cairo gig sort of materialized midway through that year. (It’s just gravy that DePaul wrote me this spring to announce that they decided they owed me $3,000 more for that year– a full decade ago! Unbelievably gracious of them.)

As for the anthology itself, Levi exaggerates my contribution… He and Nick did all the real work.

Now, an interesting question with broader philosophical ramifications… Would Levi and I have hit it off personally if we had met in Chicago in 1998 or 1999? Would there have been a good mutual influence, or would we not have been ready to have a useful philosophical conversation? Heck, we’ve never met even now, so there’s still a chance we’ll hate each other in person when we meet.

But the interesting question is– to what extent do you need to be sufficiently “ripe” to profit from a specific person? Certainly it is true that I have read some authors prematurely, not yet at the stage to get what they are talking about. The same is most likely true of people. There are surely plenty of missed meetings out there that would profit all of us greatly, but in this particular case maybe it was better to meet Levi through this anthology and as a blogging neighbor; otherwise, maybe we would have been sick of each other by now.

But it’s an interesting question, how big the “window” is during which a person can be meaningful for us. For example, I read Latour very late, through a chance recommendation– 1998. What sort of intellectual encounter could I have had with Latour 20 years earlier, in 1978? Not much of an encounter, clearly. I was a 10-year-old kid interested mostly in baseball at the time. And Latour was in San Diego just pulling out of his “social constructionist” phase. We wouldn’t have meant much to each other in 1978, no.

What about 1988? In other words, imagine I had read The Pasteurization of France when it first appeared in English. I was a college sophomore just getting seriously involved with Heidegger. Maybe the Irreductions appendix is just quirky enough to have interested me as a sophomore, but I probably couldn’t have made much of it.

In fact, Latour interested me largely as a Heidegger Counter-Environment. His focus on individual entities, and his wit as opposed to Heidegger’s pomposity… If I hadn’t been half-demoralized by Heidegger’s limitations (the other half, of course, was completely excited and energized) then it’s unlikely that I would have reacted as strongly as I did to We Have Never Been Modern, which didn’t even exist until the early 1990’s, unless I had been through a long and rewarding but somewhat tediously intense Heidegger apprenticeship.

The somewhat “realist” flavor to Latour was what captivated me, and that may not have been possible before about 1995. So let’s say that’s the first opening of the window– I might have strongly responded to Latour that early, but not too much earlier.

How late could the window have gone? Probably not too much later, simply because it’s harder to feel enthusiastically inspired by an author as you get older. Naturally, you never lose the ability to appreciate and incorporate good work. But the ability to be electrified by a new intellectual influence and to throw all of your eggs into the new basket is primarily a youthful ability. You need energy and resilience to do that, and you also need to be at an age where you don’t quite have your own fully developed agenda yet. Once you have that agenda, you tend to be working it out step-by-step with many complications, and new influences take a lot of energy to absorb, so sometimes you open yourself to those influences only somewhat hesitantly as you advance in years.

Let’s arbitrarily set the publication of Tool-Being (2002) as the closing of the window. I could still have read Latour after that date, and would surely have enjoyed his books very much. But they wouldn’t have sunk so deeply into my bones after that date.

That’s roughly a 7-year window for the Latour impact to be as big on me as it was. Could I possibly have missed the window? Most definitely. Even now, he is almost never mentioned in continental philosophy circles.

Take this example and shift it to other areas of life, and it becomes a fascinating theme… What was the “window” for various people who meant a lot to you in different ways? Or various books, or places, that were transformative for you? Things and people need to come to us at the right time.

getting off the number

I’m making this post for the silly reason that I just noticed there were 666 posts so far, and (for purely non-Antichrist reasons) I found that number disturbing.

In other news, I’ll be landing in London in about 48 hours.

one thing I wish I had emphasized differently

There is one point in the book where I think I initially made a stronger formulation before backing into a weaker one, and wish I hadn’t done so.

The point at issue is my criticism that Kant’s famous rationalist/empiricist distinction really just defines two ways of knowing the world, and that a stronger rift in metaphysical terms would be that between occasionalism and empiricism. (Sometimes I’ve said occasionalism and skepticism, but I think occasionalism and empiricism is better stated.)

My claim, as many of you know, is that Hume merely gives us the upside-down version of occasionalism. While occasionalism says that nothing is capable of forming relations except God, Hume says nothing is capable of forming relations except human custom or habit. Both raise one special, pampered entity to the throne, allowing it to be the seat of all relations since nothing else is capable of it. (Another way of putting it is to say that occasionalism believes in isolated substances and initially doesn’t know how they can relate, thereby requiring God to come in and create all the relations. Hume, a great fan of Malebranche incidentally, gives us the relations that always already exist in the form of habit, and merely denies that we can know there are isolated substances with autonomous power outside their being linked through habit.)

Well, here’s what I wish I had done a little bit differently… In recent lectures I’ve been saying that Kant doesn’t give a balanced compromise between the two extreme positions, as he and others sometimes claim. I’ve been saying that he really sides with Hume over the occasionalists.

However, there is one point in Prince of Networks where I initially put it differently, and I think more accurately, saying that Kant actually combines the worst of occasionalism with the worst of empiricism.

It’s the worst of occasionalism insofar as there are things-in-themselves that don’t relate to one another or (effectively) to us. And it’s the worst of empiricism for reasons that hardly need to be spelled out. I wish I had stuck with that formulation throughout the book, if only for provocation’s sake, rather than softening it later by putting Hume and Kant on the same side of the fence against occasionalism (which may be the most underrated position in the history of philosophy, the most meritorious philosophy that is regularly mocked by freshmen with the full encouragement of their professors).

And as a historical sidelight, until occasionalism is appreciated once more for its radicalism, it will be hard for Islamic philosophy to receive its full due in European circles. In the future I will claim even more forcefully that Islamic occasionalism provides most of the DNA for modern European philosophy. The Copernican Revolution of Kant has Iraqi roots, in fact, even more than Augustinian ones. It would be wonderfully perverse to trace European modernity (at least in philosophy) back to Basra, but beyond the enjoyable perversity of it, I also happen to think it’s true. People forget too easily that Islamic philosophy is by no means “non-Western.” It’s simply an alternate strand of the Judaeo-Greek intellectual tradition.

staredown in Zagreb

Another nice one by Marija Cetinic.

In this duel I am armed with an umbrella, while Martin Hägglund brings orange juice as his weapon of choice.

London talk on July 8

As usual, ANTHEM knows things about me before I know them myself. ANTHEM has an almost godlike alertness, in fact, as others besides me have noticed.

I am almost worried that someday I’ll go to the page and it will say “Graham Harman to be killed in car accident this afternoon. ANTHEM mourns the loss in advance.” (Just joking, Peter. And please don’t try that even on April 1st.)

But seriously, though I did know that I was giving this talk, I had no idea a flyer and announcement were already available on the web. “Port talk” means that they actually serve port during the lecture, if I’m remembering correctly what I was told.

Here’s the GOODENOUGH PAGE.

And here’s THE POSTER.