yet another kitten theory

Kristine, who is a great cat lover, has the following idea. She says that aggressive feeding behavior in cats is normally curbed socially by the mother and siblings. Kristine suggests that I hiss like a cat the next time Tamanya shifts from normal feeding mode into “Mad Max” onslaught on the bottle and my poor hand, which is all scratched up at the moment.

This sounds worth a try.

Plastic Bodies Against Phenomenology

Here’s Tom on HIS NEXT BOOK PROJECT. I found his argument persuasive.

It’s good to hear someone like Tom attack the anti-realism of phenomenology. Normally that critique is made by people with a, let us say, sadistic-oral attitude toward phenomenology (that’s a joking reference to the previous cat post, people). And I generally find anti-phenomenology people to be far too quick, and not always aware of what’s being attacked.

For all its dessicated school variants and its generally evasive approach to the reality of the world, phenomenology remains probably the most important school of philosophy in the past century, and there is much to be retrieved from it. People who are in too much of a hurry to pulverize it always make me suspicious.

To give a specific example, I’m always baffled whenever someone is able to learn nothing at all from Husserl.

two kitten theories

The first theory that came in about today’s suddenly aggressive bottle-feeding behavior was that, if raised by a feral mother, Tamanya may have had to fight with her siblings for food.

The second theory is natural oral sadism.

Both theories are plausible, and both rely on the subsidiary theory that her true personality was covered up for the first few days by trauma, unfamiliar surroundings, parasite infestation, etc.

It could be either of these. But she’s definitely healthier and more energetic all of a sudden, and a naughty streak has appeared for the first time today. For example, I was lying down on my back on the couch at one point. She came and sat on my chest, remaining there for several minutes like an innocent angel. Then suddenly, without warning, she rushed straight at my face and acted like she was going to claw it, then held off at the last possible centimeter.

Now she’s pawing my lips and crying, which means more milk is needed.

OOO and Badiou

There are a number of glaring differences between the two approaches, of course, but it is occasionally striking to discover how many features they share in common. On the whole Levi saw this more quickly than I did, but there is one especially jarring congruence in Theory of the Subject— namely, Badiou’s use of indirect presentation and his corresponding use of ‘allusion’ (cf. ‘allure’), a term he draws from Mallarmé. (Anyone who’s read my book Guerrilla Metaphysics will remember the key role of allusion/allure there.)

Consider this statement from page 72 of the delightfully readable Bosteels translation of Theory of the Subject, which would not be out of place in my essay ‘On Vicarious Causation’:

“A term is that which presents the vanishing term to another term, in order together to form a chain… To function as a combinable element amounts to presenting the absent cause to another element.”

“Presenting the absent cause to another element” is exactly what “objects” do for me.

Or on the same page:

“the effect of its lack lies in affecting each written term, forced to be ‘allusive,’ ‘never direct’…”

In my model, of course, all thought, all language, and indeed all relation whatsoever (even between inanimate terms) can only be indirect.

These are very nice passages from Badiou, though there are still a number of flat-out incongruities between the two positions that I’ll be writing about in the near future. To give just one example of a difference, the two dialectics described by Badiou have nothing to do with the two axes of the fourfold that I describe (despite the rampant occurrence of quadruple structures throughout Badiou’s thinking). Badiou’s “structural dialectic” is a horizontal strife between placed forces in the world, while his “historical dialectic” is a vertical one in which the outplace affects structure. There doesn’t seem to be enough going on within the outplace to suit my tastes; the role of the outplace is to mess up structured situations, not to have much internal articulation in its own right. In short, this is not quite an object-oriented model, but another Lacan-inspired model in which the excess or real behind presentation is used as an alibi to cover for what is actually still an idealist position. (Even Meillassoux in my interview of him in the Edinburgh book makes the criticism that just as wobbly chairs are still chairs, wobbly subjects are still subjects.)

The root of the problem may simply be Badiou’s insistence that what is unknown will eventually be known. This is what prevents his ‘outplace’ from being Heidegger’s ‘concealment’.

Nonetheless, I’m generally inclined to say that Theory of the Subject is my favorite book by Badiou.

All right, that kitten is crying again…

a kitten question for anyone who knows the answer

She’s been driving me crazy all day with a new problem I don’t understand. After a certain period of bottle-feeding, she suddenly becomes extremely aggressive, puts her claws and teeth out, and tries to attack behind the bottle nipple to the larger volume of milk itself, which is of course physically impossible since there is no opening other than in the nipple.

All that I can think of is that she’s unsatisfied with the volume of the flow and wants more at once, but that is contradicted by the completely full mouth of milk I see her have when drinking the normal way.

If anyone has run into this problem while bottle-feeding kittens before and has found a solution, please let me know. She’s attacking my hand as part of the attack on the bottle each time, and those little claws already hurt.

Tamanya and the Science of Logic

Fed up with the Miller translation of Hegel, she’s going to fetch the original German text in the Meiner edition.

Levi on behalf of all iPad users

HERE, Levi asks all WordPress bloggers to turn off Onswipe. He explains the reason for this request in his post.

It’s quite simple. I just did it myself and it took no more than a few seconds.

re: the royal wedding

I forgot it was even happening, which I suppose would have been impossible to do if you were in the UK with a day off of work and every newspaper in sight talking about it constantly.

Maybe it’s just that we’re all 29 years older than for the last one, but somehow this one felt a touch more hollow, even though William must be more popular than Charles was even then. Whether this has more to do with the continued erosion of royalty or of weddings as institutions in the past three decades, it’s hard to say.

I do remember the Charles/Diana wedding pretty clearly, and seem to remember it being fairly stiff and awkward. But I was only 13 and may have been off the mark.

best feeding photo I can come up with so far

Thank the maids for keeping the room this clean, not me.

do you laugh or cry at this?

Michael Flower sends me the following poll graphic from MSNBC in reaction to the posting of Obama’s birth certificate. (You can enlarge it by clicking on it.)

In some ways I almost find the 11.3% orange category more appalling than the 37.6% green.

At least the 37.6% are irredeemable naysayers, energetic Obama-haters, and/or racists trying to look respectable by hiding behind pettifogging legalese complaints. We never expect anything much better from such people, even if 37.6% is an alarmingly high proportion of them.

What I really don’t get is the 11.3% who seem to have been persuaded by seeing the birth certificate. Can you imagine that attitude? “Hey, we still haven’t seen any proof that he’s really American! I have my doubts! Oh… Now I’m satisfied. Thanks for showing it to us.”

In principle I ought to love those people, just because I always love people who are willing to have their views falsified by actual evidence rather than continuing to churn out the same old opinionated dogmatic crankery. It’s generally a good sign when people are that responsive to information that surprises or satisfies them.

But in the present case, it seems so bizarre ever to have doubted the point in question in the first place.