yesterday and today in Bonn

Yesterday Markus Gabriel developed a full-blown ontology of “fields of sense.” I’m hoping that at some point there will be a Gabriel/Tristan Garcia dialogue, because despite some pronounced differences, they are playing in roughly the same arena (and are approximately the same age, so maybe there are “generational” reasons that flattish ontologies are on the rise). Gabriel has read Garcia’s big book, so an eventual encounter between the two may already be in the cards. They seem likely to end up as major figures in German and French philosophy, respectively, so such an encounter might do much to end the relative impenetrability of those two national traditions in recent decades.

Today will be Ray Brassier on Sellars, one of his favorite philosophers, with whom he does unexpected and interesting things. Let’s see what happens today.

I was also going to mention Žižek’s opening statement from the other day, which I found very powerful. He mentioned Jonathan Rée’s Guardian review of Less Than Nothing on June 27, which you can read HERE.

Žižek responded in particular to the following statement:

“He never discusses poverty, inequality, war, finance, childcare, intolerance, crime, education, famine, nationalism, medicine, climate change, or the production of goods and services, yet he takes himself to be grappling with the most pressing social issues of our time. He is happy to leave the world to burn while he plays his games of philosophical toy soldiers.”

Žižek began by asking, with delicious sarcasm: “How dare I write a book about Hegel without discussing childcare?”

But then he made a more general point. Statements such as Rée’s, he said, amount to blackmail. They now represent the mainstream attitude, and are no longer subversive as they were in the 1960’s. It is time, Žižek said, to do philosophy for its own sake again, and without apology.