quick Warsaw summary

It’s pretty hard to get an intellectual shot in the arm from leaving Paris for 4 days, but that’s precisely what I got from my new friends in Warsaw. It’s a very serious and sincere group of people, devoid of pretense, and (my goodness) they’re widely read: several of them have such encyclopedic command of American literature that I couldn’t possibly catch up even if I tried to do so starting right now.

There were a number of positive things that happened there, but my overriding impression was that only rarely have I spent several days in the company of a medium-sized group of people so intensely serious about new ideas. The only really comparable situation that I’ve experienced for that amount of time was London in the early “Genesis of Speculative Realism” days before people started to scatter and fragment a bit.

While in Warsaw I also did start to feel the extent to which internet-based time is the weak link in my overcrowded schedule, so it’s less likely that you’ll be seeing 15-post days from me in the near future.

There’s a funny anecdote about how these Warsaw guys know about us. Larry (that’s the Anglicized version of his name, very hard to pronounce or even spell in its raw form) was in a barber shop in Paris a few years ago and ran across a newspaper article referring to the PUF Métaphysiques editorial collective (During-Maniglier-Meillassoux-Rabouin). He started chasing down the references, one thing led to another, and now there’s a Polish Prince of Networks coming out, among other things. (As far as I know, an Alberto Toscano’s Schelling article was the first SR-related thing they ever translated.) A lot of other interesting things are going to happen too.