Shaviro on George Molnar, Powers

HERE, and Steven also compares Molnar with OOO on certain points.

I’m quite fond of Molnar’s book as well. In addition, he was quite a character: abandoning a promising analytic philosophy career to shift towards hard-core leftist politics and failed efforts to thrive as a professional gambler.

Molnar re-entered academic philosophy towards the end of his life as a sort of adjunct-type lecturer, if I’m remembering the arrangement correctly. He died of a heart attack in 1999.

Did I forget to mention that his family was smuggled out of Hungary during WWII by legendary Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg? As I said, remarkable character, and I think readers of this blog would also enjoy his witty and very clear book Powers, completed after his death by Prof. Stephen Mumford of Nottingham.

Incidentally, Steven quotes “hailstones and tar” from one or more of my Latour Litanies. In Claremont he was joking about how tar often shows up in my litanies, and he wondered aloud as to why.

There are two reasons, both of them personal and trivial:

1. As a dinosaur-loving young child, I was especially interested in tar pits and the tragic deaths of dinosaurs in them.

2. Outside my bedroom window in childhood was a flat roof, and it often had to be tarred in order to prevent rainwater leaking through into the room beneath it. My parents tarred it themselves at least once as a weekend project, and I thought it was a fascinating substance: painfully hot at first, but later of a half-solid, half-liquid sort of consistency. We always enjoyed walking around on it after it had cooled down a bit.

As for hailstones, I doubt the fascination with them needs to be explained. There’s a real cosmic violence to them. What I especially found fascinating was how easy it is to see hailstorms coming towards you. You can often see hailstones falling two blocks away, for example, and then they gradually approach just as a car would approach.