finished the Laruelle review

NDPR says it’ll be posted in about four weeks. They have a long queue of finished reviews already, and will apparently shut down for a week in early August to switch to their new website. It’s a very valuable service.

Opinions may differ, but I find that the actual writing of book reviews is as easy as it gets, since you’re just trying to summarize what someone else said and express an opinion about it. The reading and note-taking are a different story, however. That’s the really draining part.

As for Laruelle, I’m afraid I remain unmoved at present. So, there’s an immanent and non-thetic experience of the One that trumps everything ever done in the history of philosophy and makes all philosophers interchangeable pawns in a game of difference. Even assuming that said experience of the One were demonstrated (and it is merely asserted, as far as I can see), and even if it were effectively differentiated from the neo-Platonic One (a differentiation which again seems to be merely asserted), I’m not sure where it gets us.

His writing style can also be brutal. The occasional upside is that he comes out with a nice little aphorism once in awhile. But the rest of the time, it sounds like all of his key terms have been thrown into a blender and are being re-blended in every sentence.

This criticism occasionally comes up in our part of the world, directed against various figures, and the usual response in defense is this: “Math and science are hard to read too!”

But that’s a false analogy, and I think Michel Serres is the one who nailed it, in Latour’s interviews of him for the Univ. of Michigan Press. HERE.

When terminology is used in mathematics and the sciences, it’s a shortcut. It’s a symbolic abbreviation: a way to say more using fewer words.

But in the humanities, loads of terminology is often a way to say less using more words. The role of language in the humanities is different anyway, I would argue. You’re not supposed to be using symbolic shortcuts in the humanities. Instead, you’re supposed to be bringing your readers as nearly as possible into the direct presence of what you are talking about, and to this end it’s important to write as well as possible, to make sure that your readers are seeing exactly what you want them to see and aren’t being blinded or bored by your terminology.

This is why the SNARXIV satire site that mocks the jargon of scientific papers, as hilarious as it may be, simply is not as devastating as Sokal-type lampoons of jargony humanities papers. The sciences aren’t failing when they write like that; we do fail when we write like that.