cities starting to seem small

Coming from a tiny little place of 3,000 people as I do, I always thought it was sheer affectation when New Yorkers would go on and on about how Chicago felt “small” and “slow.” Chicago always seemed gigantic and infinite to me.

But after a decade in Cairo, I’m finally starting to see what the New Yorkers meant. After Cairo, Boston seemed pretty tiny (my first time there since setting foot in Egypt for the first time) and Providence is now beginning to seem positively claustrophobic.

Robert Jackson on the Meillassoux book

HERE.

Rob was saying yesterday that there are two different tones in my writing, depending on whether I’m writing about someone else’s work or defending my own positions. That’s probably true, though I’m not quite sure I quite grasp the terms he’s using yet.

the new U.S. pennies

I can’t take them at all seriously. The reverse side looks like it was designed by DC Comics.

The Tale of Genji

That’s the only book I picked up at the Harvard Co-Op. It was foolish to buy a heavy book, since there were still hours left in the day, and my luggage is already near or at the maximum weight, but so it happened. Not sure I can even read it right away, but maybe I will. Never read it before.

Boston

Someone who read my review last night said I make Laruelle sound intriguing. Glad for that sign that I was fair, but there is something a bit insane about his writing that turned my brain to pulp after three days of reading and reviewing him. It was like sharing a long car trip with a brainwasher. Work would have been futile today.

So, I came to Boston. Very fond of this city, but was only here three times before, and never since 1999. The occasion of that trip was to interview (successfully, Thank God) for the job in Cairo.

a Swedish blog review of The Quadruple Object

HERE.

Meillassoux book available in U.S. now?

I’m not sure, but it’s listed on today’s “New Book Tuesday” page of Columbia University Press, which is doing distribution for the book on this side of the Atlantic.

HERE.

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.

Addendum to the previous post

The iPad is giving me a hard time making an addendum on the previous one, so I will add it here as a new post instead.

The remarks in the last post were prompted by Laruelle, though Derrida does the same thing on a regular basis.

I’m aware that Badiou seems to be an exception, since he speaks in positive terms of classical philosophy as any kind that resists the critical injunction of Kant. I appreciate both the sentiment and the definition. I’m simply not convinced that Badiou meets his own criteria for classical here.

one thing I don’t like about most post-WWII French philosophy

Somehow, they all think that referring to someone else’s argument as “classical” automatically means to strike a devastating blow.

No, it doesn’t. There are both original and blandly academic ways of getting back to the classical roots of a problem. Leibniz, for instance was extremely “classical” by the standards of his century, far more so than Spinoza, but Leibniz was every bit as original as Spinoza, even if he remains a bit less popular at the moment.

The way to be avant garde is to oppose academicism, not to oppose classicism. The two things are not the same. This is true also in painting. Cézanne’s admiration for Poussin is a case in point. The novel is not the same as the original.