tired of the pocket

today’s new hangout

Yesterday she sneaked inside my sleeve and stayed there for two hours while I worked. Today it’s my shirt pocket. There are advantages to being very small.

a late-developing skill

I’ve been pleasantly surprised at Tamanya’s abilities to judge safe jumping distances, and to use the litter box easily.

But it’s also interesting to note a couple of skills that are less advanced than I would have expected. I’m not sure if it’s this way for all kitttens.

One is that she was initially very bad at licking anything from a plate. I suppose it makes sense that this would be acquired slightly later, once nursing is complete. But she’s getting a bit better at it now.

Another underdeveloped skill, however, is spatiality. A few times when I’ve removed the bottle after she’s gotten too crazily aggressive, and simply moved the bottle a foot or two away, she seems unable to track where the bottle went as I move it.

In similar fashion, she doesn’t quite seem to have a crystal-clear map of where the food dishes are. When she jumps off the bed and goes toward them, it’s like an explorer staggering in a blizzard in the generally correct direction, not like someone who knows exactly what they’re doing. (And no, I’ve noticed no problem with her eyesight. As long as something is immediately in her field of vision, she seems to see it perfectly).

I’m not sure what the exact term for this is, but she doesn’t yet seem to have the best sense of the overall connectivity of space. We’ll see how that develops.

re: Iran

Death in the Streets of Utrecht
via Azadeh Pourzand on 4/29/11

A letter to my beloved father, Siamak Pourzand, whose precious heart stopped beating in Tehran tonight in a torturous solitude imposed on him by the current rulers of Iran.

Your nightmare comes true when you are sitting at a café with your friend, enjoying your drink on a sunny day in Utrecht when your phone rings, you pick up, you hear your sister sobbing and screaming, “Dad is now finally free. He is not in their hands anymore. He died, my love.” You scream, cry, the world spins around your head. Your friend watches you in disbelief. All of a sudden a beautiful country like the Netherlands becomes hell. You die. You close your eyes, hold your head in your hands and wish to die. But you stay alive, because you turn into his “legacy”. All of a sudden you gain strength, you open your eyes, look at the world with courage and decide to never let him die. You begin to shake and sob. Your mind begins to race. Years turn into seconds and your life with him begins to march in front of your eyes like a chaotic movie. And this is how it all ends: on a lazy sunny afternoon in Utrecht.

I am filled with hatred, with anger, with the exhausting desire to avenge. But, I know I will not avenge. It is not in our blood to do to them and their families what they do to us. Or, maybe I say that the desire to avenge is not in my blood to comfort my being helpless. I could only watch him suffer. In fact, I was not even granted the right to watch him suffer. I had to imagine him suffer. This was all I was permitted to do in the name of Allah. Oh, Allah, if only you are as cruel as they make you be…

I do not even know where his dead body is lying tonight. Sitting in a forest in the Netherlands, wanting to go to Iran to at least hold his fragile dead body and hearing my family and friends forbid me to go to Iran. They say that I will not get the chance to even hold his dead body. Apparently, holding your father’s dead body is also against the Islamic revolutionary values.

And this is how Planet Earth proceeds.This will be the first night without me thinking of him before going to bed. I wish my insomnia could bring life back to his eyes. But he is gone. Forever and ever. I recorded his voice for 20 hours on the phone three years ago. He told me the story of his childhood and youth. I will push the play button, let his words and his voice comfort my disturbed soul and let him put me to bed like he did with his lullabies every single night for years.

I love you dad. You will never die. You are a part of me. They were able to finally kill you. But I will keep your legacy alive in this world. It is the most important promise I have ever made in my life. You will live. I promise. You will live more than ever.

I cannot stop my tears. But I know you will finally fly to me tonight and wipe off my tears with your invisible hands; just like 5 years ago when the Islamic Republic let me come and see you for 10 days. Remember how that first night I put my head on your lap and you patted me all night when I cried away all the years of having had you in their hands and secret prisons? You knew and I knew that this was the last time we were seeing each other. But, we pretended that things will change. They never did. But now things will change. Now you will finally fly to me.

I will never forget what they did to you. I will never forget how they tortured you with their disgusting hands. This is a promise! I will not let the world forget.

serious business in Toronto

My brother took this photo up there yesterday.

It could also be interpreted as directed at certain people in the philosophy of mind.

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.