just because it’s been awhile

The raw 2:15 preview of Godzilla vs. Mothra, entirely in Japanese.

My favorite part of the preview: Mothra flapping and dragging Godzilla by the tail.

My favorite part of the movie: Mothra dying of old age in the middle of the fight.

object-oriented feminism

I wouldn’t know how to go about constructing one, but others apparently do. Ian Bogost just emailed me live from a panel underway on that topic in Indianapolis at the conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. The speaker now presenting is Professor Wendy Chun of Brown.

Ian says 8 papers in all on the topic.

a question I’ve always had about the public image of Paris

Here’s NBA Commissioner David Stern, talking about the possibility of an NBA division in Europe 10 years from now:

“I think we’ll have a division and I think the Heat will play in Boston one night and then they’ll go to Paris and spend a couple days on the Champs-Elysées shopping and relaxing,” Stern said

One thing I’ve simply never understood is why the Champs-Elysées is usually the first or second obligatory thing that must be mentioned when speaking loosely of Paris. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a big, ugly, noisy street where I would only go if specifically needing to buy something that was known to be for sale there. And this is Paris we’re talking about, Queen of World Cities. You can do much better than always mentioning a big, ugly, noisy street that is definitely not a place for “relaxing”, contra Commissioner Stern.

Is it just me, or is the Champs-Elysées maybe in about 47th place on the list of things to do while in Paris?

finishing touches on the Meillassoux book

I’m now putting the finishing touches on the manuscript, which means trying to make the writing as clear and interesting as possible.

With this project I’ve followed my now near-religious custom of banging out a quick first draft, then revising incessantly. It was my failure to do this that made the dissertation take longer than it should have, and I have a visceral horror of that graduate school era of procrastination and alibis, a night from which many never emerge. “Real artists ship,” as Steve Jobs once beautifully put it. Keep procrastinating and you’ll never have to succeed or fail; that’s why people do it.

In any case, I think people will find this book both useful and thought-provoking. Other interpretations of Meillassoux are certainly possible, but the point is– people should do them. Don’t just gripe and one-up. Instead, do something!

This book will provoke some different interpretations, I hope, and there are a couple of things that even Meillassoux himself won’t like (though the treatment in general is highly positive).

Those who are already familiar with Meillassoux’s writings may prefer to start with the interview and then the excerpts from L’Inexistence divine, which is a much weirder book than you might expect. Who actually predicted Meillassoux would say that justice can come about only through an omniscient and omnipotent Christ-like mediator who then abandons all this power voluntarily once the world of justice is achieved? Religion is attacked not for naivete, but for idolatry and blasphemy. There are a number of such surprises in the book, and watch for the mention of Lucifer late in the day. (He could also have named Captain Ahab in that particular passage.)

The child is also a key concept in the book, though I’ll let you wait until Fall 2011 to read about that.

So is beauty, though in a modified Kantian fashion that I personally wouldn’t accept.

Whether you like or dislike The Divine Inexistence, after reading the 27,000 words I translated, you will have to admit it: Meillassoux has guts. Who expected a new French philosopher, born in the 1960’s and coming from a deeply leftist-materialist background, to come out in favor of a (temporarily) omnipotent Messiah paving the way for a God who suddenly comes into existence for no reason whatsoever?

And this is what’s so interesting about the Meillassoux phenomenon. While he will always have many admirers as he deserves, it is highly unlikely that he will ever have many literal disciples. I can’t imagine too many Francophone or Anglophone 23-year-olds suddenly arguing seriously that the virtual God may someday appear for no reason at all. (Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s hard to imagine too many people literally proclaiming this.)

This may be a built-in effect of Meillassoux’s style of doing philosophy. For philosophers who mostly just develop a method, like Husserl, it’s easy to convert lots of people to the fertility of such a method. In Heidegger’s case, there is a certain tone that people like, and none of the content (except for the political stuff) is so extreme as to be impossible to affirm with a straight face.

What Meillassoux does, by contrast, is construct a very large tower by purely argumentative means. He is very confident in the conclusions he draws from his arguments, even as they become increasingly unusual throughout the book. (And as everyone who reads him knows, he is such a careful arguer that it’s not always immediately evident how to disprove his arguments.)

But in order to be his literal disciple, you would actually have to follow him through all or most of those logical steps. And this is going to be difficult for most people to do, given the rather stunning conclusions at which he often arrives.

In short, for all his friendliness and lucid expository abilities, there is a rare spirit of solitude to his work.