another tsunami

A TSUNAMI HIT AMERICAN SAMOA, killing at least 22 people. And as we all remember too well, those numbers tend to increase drastically.

The magnitude of the 2004 tsunami is still shocking. I’ve seen a couple of places that were hit by it (the Andaman Islands, and the Indian coast near Pondicherry) and it’s still hard to believe it. The story I still find most horrifying is of the woman south of Pondicherry whose ten children were all on the beach when the tsunami hit, and none of them were ever seen again.

Gratton disagrees

At the Philosophy in a Time of Error blog:

“I should say I don’t see what Graham is on to by rating Levinas one of the best reader of Heidegger in France… That makes me want to see the article, though I strangely realize that my first articles on this were probably published around the time OOP wrote his, so it’s like having a discussion five years too late. But for me Levinas represents the overwrought political readings of Heidegger, and I’m not sure how OOP can side with a reading that, in essence, says ‘Heidegger was not transcendental enough.’ Now, I guess logically, this might be a better reading of Heidegger, since he would be less transcendental than Levinas, but that’s not where I think OOP is going. I agree that Levinas’s reading of Heidegger is not simple rejection—this was the point of one of my articles—but on the other hand, I’m not sure I see how Levinas is a more subtle reader than Derrida or Janicaud or other figures in France. That said, the Levinas of the late 40s did excellent phenomenology. Great discussion of time and Bergson in the lectures of the mid-70s. But, I guess I would say it’s still hard for me to get past all the Levinasians ‘that’s totality, that’s totality!’ ‘I’m not hearing you…’ maneuvers that come from Totality and Infinity. “

I don’t know about five years too late, but it’s true that Peter and I have a lot of catching up to do on basic disagreements. It feels like I know him well through philosophy business, but actually he started at DePaul a few months after I left, no overlap at all. What this means is that we’ve really only had a few extended chats at conferences, not the hours of protracted conversation that often arise between classmates or colleagues.

First, I have to ask– Janicaud as a better reader of Heidegger than Levinas? Nothing against Janicaud, about whom I wrote favorably in Guerrilla Metaphysics, but there is a real mismatch of magnitude and even genre here. Janicaud was a solid scholar, but Levinas was one of the handful of the most significant original postwar thinkers. (Granted, one could claim anyway that he got Heidegger wrong and Janicaud got him more right, but still… I don’t think Janicaud as an interpreter of Heidegger goes beyond solid, and on a few points I think he’s really off the mark.)

As for Derrida, my readers already know that I remain relatively unimpressed. Gratton’s not with me there, and that’s fine, but this is perhaps not the time to argue Derrida’s stature.

What I should ask is, in what sense does Levinas give a “political” critique of Heidegger? There are the obvious references to the Holocaust, but after what happened to Levinas’s family in Lithuania and France, I say: let’s cut him some slack there.

When Gratton reads the article, what he will find me saying is that Totality and Infinity criticzes Heidegger from three separate directions:

*In one sense, Heidegger doesn’t go deep enough. He misses the Other. This is the only critique of Heidegger that people usually talk about in Levinas. But it has the added virtue of being true. Levinas is simply right that the “futuricity” of Heidegger is not a future at all, but simply the side of the present that we might call “projection”. On the whole, way too much emphasis is placed on the ethical moment of Levinas, and he is thereby presented as some sort of pious secular rabbi wagging his finger and telling people what to do. Too little attention has been paid to the Bergsonian side of Levinas. Remember, Levinas thought Time and Free Will was one of the five or so greatest books in the history of philosophy. And Bergson is at least as important a root of Levinasian alterity as religion is. Levinas needs to be treated as a philosopher, not just as a pious outsider lecturing philosophy for not being nice enough. So many of the critiques I hear of Levinas, particularly from the Baby Boom generation, have amounted to nothing more than: “Who is he to tell me how to live my life?”

*But if the first Levinasian critique of Heidegger is that he doesn’t go deep enough (by missing the good beyond being), the second critique is that he goes too deep. Heidegger not only misses the Other, he also misses enjoyment or the elemental. Things are not just implements plugged into further implements and so on ad infinitum. We always stand somewhere in particular, enjoying fine things that are a terminus of attention without further reference. This is somewhat recognized by readers of Levinas, but still nowhere near as talked about as the Other, which both suffocates all other Levinasian themes and is read too one-sidedly as an ethical doctrine though it is also a metaphysical one (with neglected Bergsonian roots; in fact, Levinas is the only figure I can think of who in any way brings Heidegger and Bergson in contact).

Interestingly enough, these first two critiques of Heidegger are nicely combined in Levinas’s ambiguous use of the word “sincerity.” Sometimes Levinas uses sincerity to mean the immediate enjoyment of things that does not go beyond them toward a wider system of purposes: I merely enjoy the coffeee or the cigarettes, etc. But at other times sincerity is a word of transcendence for Levinas, and refers to our movement beyond the here and now toward alterity.

*the final critique combines the first two. This is the Levinasian concept of substance, which no one ever talks about at all. The sole exception I know of is Lingis in his 1997 Catholic Philosophical Quarterly article, an obscurely buried and neglected piece that is in fact one of the more important articles ever to emerge from the entire American continental philosophy scene (a scene with which Lingis, who is very much a traditional phenomenologist despite his wild persona, is completely out of synch).

Levinas makes an important critique of Heidegger’s reading of entities as ready-to-hand. Things must first be substances before they are ready-to-hand; the same thing can support multiple usages, for instance. Levinas is perhaps the only philosopher of substance among the post-Heideggerian French.

(Lingis’s argument is especially important to me for biographical reasons… In 1991 I wrote my M.A. paper for Lingis– in typical Lingisian fashion, he was out of town and I had to FedEx my thesis to “Poste Restante, Guatemala City”. His major criticism of my argument was along these same lines, and it changed things for me. I had previously been committed to the idea that “there is no such thing as ‘an’ equipment, entities form one vast holistic system.” Lingis challenged that claim, though in 1991 he was still just expressing it as a hunch, by way of numerous concrete examples. But by 1997 we had his Catholic Philosophical Quarterly article, and around the same time The Imperative, in both of which he argued his point quite clearly. But ever since I first heard him make that point, in the letter responding to my M.A. in November 1991, I realized that he was right, and that the autonomy of individual entities needed to be accounted for more rigorously.)

In general, Levinas looks a lot more impressive if we focus on his critique of Heidegger in the late 1940’s (which is pathbreaking) then if we pull the usual move of taking him as a foil for Derrida. And yes, when the dust clears, I do think Levinas is going to turn out to have been a lot more important than Derrida. There are such serious philosophical instincts at work in Levinas, and ideas that have not yet been properly explored.

As stated in a post the other night (as I was browsing the Table of Contents of The Speculative Turn) phenomenology has not fared especially well in the recent generation. It’s been under assault from several quarters. Most of these criticisms have been accurate. But nevertheless…

Once phenomenology makes its likely comeback in reformed condition (namely, stripped of its undeniable idealism) then Levinas is going to be seen in his full importance, because he’s one of the figures who sets the table for a reformed phenomenology. The critics of phenomenology generally critique its peripheral features, while failing to assimilate the object-oriented insight that makes up its very core.

Philosophy Today

My favorite thing about Philosophy Today (based at DePaul University, of course) is that they’re the only journal that consistently publishes articles earlier than promised. I woke up today and looked in the inbox and found the proofs to the article and a November publication date, at least 6 months earlier than expected.

This is an article on Totality and Infinity and on what I see as three separate criticisms of Heidegger found there. Levinas is far from used up, he’s simply been viewed so far in a caricatured sort of way. I’ve always seen him as the most innovative of Heidegger’s readers in France, and yes I’d certainly rate him above Derrida in that respect. It’s still a minority view, but one I’m willing to bank on.

This article was originally my talk at the Levinas conference in Bulgaria in October 2006. And by the way, I really love Sofia. Lots of tree-lined brick streets on which to walk and think. Those are happy memories.

There was supposed to be a conference anthology, in book form. After a couple of years that was bogged down, so I asked for and received permission to send it out as an article instead, and the Bulgaria people graciously agreed. (As time goes by, I find it more frustrating to have things appear only many years after completion.)

speaking of Chandler

Speaking of RAYMOND CHANDLER, he has to be one of the patron saints of literary late bloomers. He published his first story at age 45, and his first novel at age 51. By age 70 he had published his seventh and final novel, and made a lot of money despite his writing being of the highest literary quality.

Chandler was always bright and insightful, just couldn’t get it together until his mid-forties. It happens, if somewhat rarely.

They say that every author has a few projects in the back of the mind that they “hope to write someday”. One of those projects in the back of my own mind would be a joint biographical sketch of Chandler and H.P. Lovecraft. What an interesting comparison/contrast.

*both wrote in genres denigrated as “pulp,” though detective fiction is generally viewed as less “nerdy” than science fiction/fantasy

*Chandler born 1888, Lovecraft born 1890

*Lovecraft is often considered a “late bloomer” himself, but did his best writing from around ages 35-45, while Chandler didn’t even get started until 45 (and truth be told, some of his early stories are God awful and nearly unreadable, at least in my opinion)

*Chandler was a suave womanizer, Lovecraft a fearful mama’s boy, but both married stunning divorcées

*Chandler was a brave soldier (for Canada) in the trenches of WWI; Lovecraft made a comical effort to enlist that was denied, probably due to mental health issues raised by his mother

*Chandler’s literary power is centered entirely in the character of a sole first-person narrator: Marlowe. Chandler’s novels are unthinkable without Marlowe. He started writing The Long Goodbye in the third-person but found that he couldn’t do it and had to start from scratch. By contrast, Houellebecq is surely right that Lovecraft’s human characters are literary non-entities, and exist only in order to observe the horrors unfolding around them.

*Lovecraft died sure that his writings would die with him. Chandler lived to become a bestseller and a star Hollywood screenwriter, holding his own in arguments with celebrities of the order of Hitchcock.

Many interesting contrasts between these two as well as similarities. But I’ve often found it eerie that Chandler picked up writing just when Lovecraft left off and prepared to die– as if they shared one muse who promised only half a lifetime for each.

“Chinatown”

I actually don’t have a strong opinion about how the Roman Polanski case ought to play out. On the one hand, I’m simply shocked that it’s still being pursued this late after even the victim wants to drop it. On the other hand, drugging a 13-year-old girl in a hot tub is precisely the sort of thing the legal system ought to be hammering very hard. So, I’ll probably not react strongly either way, however it gets resolved.

But I do feel really sorry for what happened to his life at the hands of the Manson Family, and I do really like “Chinatown.”

Obviously people always point to the Raymond Chandler connection, but I never find Chandler quite as dark or cynical as some people think (or as dark and cynical as “Chinatown,” even).

he’s not alone

From Adrian Ivakhiv’s Immanence page, that visually soothing elvish forest of the blogosphere:

“But I’m of course not the only one pursuing the resonances between Whitehead and Deleuze: Shaviro, Stengers, Keith Robinson, James Williams, and Michael Halewood (and to some extent, at least, Eric Alliez and Jeffrey Bell) are among the others doing that. Not that that makes any of us right…”

It’s true, Ivakhiv is not alone. I’ll have to make the counter-case in print at greater length.

multi-tasking

It’s remarkable how one’s self-conception can evolve over the years. I’ll post this as a bit of (auto)biography, not because my own case is of inherent interest, but because the topic is interesting in its own right. And the topic is this… We generally assume that we know ourselves better than others know us. Most of the time we think we have a good read on our own strengths and weaknesses, and in both cases (strengths and weaknesses) we tend to think that we have identified abiding personal traits. But of course, some of these supposed abiding traits are really just surface phenomena that have to do solely with our present situation, and are easily changed when our situation changes. Other traits are more durable, but it may take years to identify which ones they are.

15 years ago, I would have called myself a terrible multi-tasker. My self-assessment was that I could only get work done if focused intensively on one project for a lengthy period of time. And perhaps that was true many years ago. But now I find myself a multi-tasker to an almost absurd degree. I won’t even list all the numerous activities in which I’ve had to be involved in the 44 hours since returning from Paris. And, I find that I like it. It’s energizing.

Another one already mentioned on this blog… As recently as 10 years ago, I would have described myself as a highly introverted person. That seems like the sort of thing that should be a fundamental and durable personality trait, right? Well, it only took a few semesters before Egyptians (Egyptians, the most outgoing nationality I have ever encountered) were asking me how I could be so friendly and outgoing and know so many people. It sounded simply wrong at first, but then I realized they were right. The Egyptian environment somehow brought out a different side in me. It had been there in some sense, but was somehow smothered by the American high school, undergraduate, and graduate environments. Or maybe it was simply smothered by youth, in my own case, for whatever reasons.

Going back to the late 1980’s or so, I must have been one of the quietest students in seminar at St. John’s, often horrified about speaking, and rarely able to formulate my points before the discussion had already moved on. It was almost impossible at the time to imagine myself as a teacher, but a few semesters later I found teaching easy and exhilarating, and a few years after that I found public lecturing to be the same, right from the start. Still not sure how that happened.

Or again, go back to as recently as the summer of 2002, and you would find me with not one philosophical publication. And at the time I was 34 years old, no baby any longer. But just seven years later I’m on track to write more by retirement than anyone will want to read. (That’s partly because I’m one of those to have flourished under the “publish or perish” mandate. As I’ve explained before, there was a hard 60% tenure quota in Cairo at the time, which we had already exceeded in Philosophy. I loved it here and wanted to stay, but had zero chance of staying unless I really blew down the door on quantity of publications. So I did, and the habit stuck.)

I suppose there are two lessons from all of this. The “metaphysical” one (and here is one point where I always agree with Paul Churchland) is that introspection is vastly overrated as a source of immediate, infallible knowledge. It is quite often the case that we learn who we are through the feedback or mediation of others, not through digging around privately in our own psyches, which in fact is usually a hopeless exercise in which one can barely distinguish between the important and the unimportant.

And that leads to the second lesson, which is the “practical” one aimed at younger people… You don’t really know yourself yet. It takes a very long time. You have to see yourself in different situations at different ages, just as great cathedrals must be viewed in different moods at different times of day.

So I guess I will check the box and classify this as an “advice” post.

Bourdieu in support of Whitehead

Lee Braver forwarded this quote to me back in early July, but I just dug it up from my inbox now. I guess I get too much email.

Anyway, this passage is from Bourdieu (normally not one of my heroes, but I like this one):

“Logical criticism inevitably misses its target: because it can only challenge the relationships consciously established between words, it cannot bring out the incoherent coherence of a discourse which, springing from underlying mythic or ideological schemes, has the capacity to survive every reductio ad absurdum”

Outline of a Theory of Practice, 158)

Most of Whitehead’s best remarks on the nature of philosophy come very early in Process and Reality. Read the introductory sections, and you’ll already have his central thoughts on the topic.

The point is not that “argument is worthless,” the point is that it has a subordinate role in philosophy, which I would (and will) argue has more in common with rhetoric than with dialectic. I suppose it was McLuhan who really caused me to see rhetoric as the art and science of the background behind all explicit dialectical and perceptual figure. But Aristotle is really the first great thinker of this, and there is a reason that he spent as much as half of the day teaching his students rhetoric. It wasn’t because “people are fools and sometimes need to be tricked rather than argued with reasonably.” It was because the enthymeme, or implicit argument, is at least as powerful as the explicit one. Nothing is more pointless than watching a bunch of aggressive people trump each other in argument. One isn’t always left with very much afterward.

follow-up

On rereading the last post I worry it may have sounded more harsh than intended. Rest assured, I enjoy Ivakhiv’s blog quite a lot.

Here’s another way to look at the problem…

Latour, for instance, says that time is produced by the work of individual actors.

Now, can you imagine Bergson saying that? Can you imagine Deleuze saying that? Individual actors are simply not key philosophical personae for Bergson or Deleuze. Yet they are the absolute center of the philosophies of both Latour and Whitehead. That’s what the “ontological principle” means. One cannot possibly ascribe the ontological principle to Bergson or Deleuze (or Simondon).

That’s why it is a mistake to lump large groups of these people together as philosophers of process or becoming. (Which I don’t even regard as synonyms– Whitehead’s “process philosophy” means the opposite of what many people think it means. What it means is a continual perishing of instantaneous actual entities. There really isn’t any becoming in Whitehead at all. Entities vanish and are replaced by others that vanish just as rapidly. Ditto for Latour.)

It is very important that this be seen clearly, or our conception of the various philosophical options now available will become cloudy. That’s what I meant to say in the last post.

Ivakhiv’s latest

Sorry, I still don’t have enough time on my hands to get into a point-by-point discussion with ADRIAN IVAKHIV’S LATEST POST. However, I have to say that I find less convincing material in this post than in perhaps any of his others. Just to mention a few points:

*”This seems to be classifying each thinker according to the way they present space — as made up of actual individuals (Whitehead) or objects (Latour) versus something more amorphous in Deleuze — rather than how they present time. In contrast to the philosophical mainstream, which each of them opposes or critiques in some way, all three present time as emergent, open, and in a process of creative becoming.”

For Whitehead as for Latour, time is made of occasions. Actual entities last only for an instant. Then they are gone. They have perished. By contrast, I don’t see how the concept of “instant” makes any more sense for Deleuze than it does for Heidegger. In short, Whitehead and Deleuze are as opposed on time as they are on space, so it cuts no ice when Ivakhiv claims I’m trapped in some sort of spatializing of the problem.

And as for this: “all three present time as emergent, open, and in a process of creative becoming.” Almost anyone’s theory of time could meet this standard. I don’t see that this makes for much of an alliance.

*”In Latour this is less clear, but he says so little about objects and so much about processes of network-building, i.e. relational processes, that I think it’s fair to include him in this category.”

Latour doesn’t speak about “objects” because he uses terms like “actors” or “actants” instead. And actors and actants appear on virtually every page of his writings. Hence, it’s not at all true that he speaks “so little about objects,” except in the trivially literal sense that “objects” is my term and not Latour’s.

Also, Latour talks about relations, not relational processes. Latour talks about actors in one state of relations, then talks about how things change so that actors are later in another state of relations. This is by no means the same thing as claiming that process, change, becoming, or flux are prior to stasis.

I think what has happened is really pretty simple. People have decided that traditional philosophy focused too much on stasis and substance. Instead of this, they hold, we should champion process, becoming, and creativity. And for this reason, they want to read every philosopher they happen to like as champions of process, becoming, and creativity.

*”I also think that both [Latour] and Delanda are discussing the same sort of thing — processes of network-building or assemblage (as a verb)”

Latour and DeLanda is a fairly tough alliance to build. DeLanda like Roy Bhaskar ridicules “actualism,” the notion that things are reducible to their current actuality, which is why DeLanda is more interested in attractors and the like than in concrete entities in specific states. By contrast, Latour is probably the great actualist of all living philosophers. An actor for Latour is never anything more than it is here and now. Potentiality is impossible, etc.

*”It’s true that for Whitehead, ‘everything that happens has its reason in the constitution of some actual entity,’ but that’s only the case if we take that ‘constitution’ as including the relations that make it up (including the “lure” of God, if we use his theological language, that brings out the creativity of every actual occasion/entity).”

To my mind, this merely confuses what is really a very simple issue.

Whitehead makes it very clear that “actual entities” are the root of his entire philosophy, just as Latour makes it clear that “actors” are the root of his.

Try the following sentences, and see how they sound.

*”For Whitehead, everything that happens has its reason in the constitution of some actual entity.” True. In fact, merely basic.

*”For Latour, everything that happens has its reason in the constitution of some actual entity.” Another true statement.

But now try these…

“For Bergson, everything that happens has its reason in the constitution of some actual entity.” Doesn’t pass the straight face test.

“For Simondon, everything that happens has its reason in the constitution of some actual entity.” Has it so backwards that it’s time to start from scratch.

“For Deleuze, everything that happens has its reason in the constitution of some actual entity.” Give me a break.

“For DeLanda, everything that happens has its reason in the constitution of some actual entity.” Completely false.

I’m not even sure what more I can do to argue the point. If people want to lump a whole bunch of “creative philosophers of process” together in one sack, I can’t stop them, but I don’t see the merit of this. It’s certainly true that both Whitehead and Deleuze are critics of the traditional theory of static substance. But they criticize it in completely different ways (Deleuze undermines it: substance is too specific; Whitehead overmines it: substance is not specific enough). And moreover, they are hardly alone in criticizing static substance. Kant does too, but for completely different reasons. Heidegger does too, but for completely different reasons. Nietzsche does too, but for completely different reasons.

In short, there are so many possible utterly different reasons for rejecting traditional substance that to group all such rejecters together is about as helpful as putting all right-handed philosophers in a group. I exaggerate only slightly.

But this is one of those arguments that often feels hopeless to me, because I think I’ve already argued the point as well as one can, and yet people still want to act as though “process” is a relevant term for gigantic swathes of recent philosophy that are often exact opposites on the most basic philosophical questions. It simply isn’t very philosophically illuminating to say that both Deleuze and Whitehead like change.