corrected date for Q & A with Jon Roffe

It will be on November 30, not on November 25 as previously stated on the “coming appearances” section of this blog. No change on the other three events in Melbourne, the first of which is tomorrow night.

What a beautiful city Melbourne is, by the way.

Žižek’s correspondence with the jailed Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot

In The Guardian, HERE.

p.s. on the Gabriel video

My recent visit to Bonn included fascinating discussions with Maurizio Ferraris and Markus Gabriel about the extent to which metaphysical realism requires a realism of knowledge. (Obviously, my position is: quite the contrary.) Both of them gave interesting counterarguments.)

One thing we find in both authors as well as in OOO is the “Latour Litany,” a listing of objects that is by no means an “argument,” but is a powerful rhetorical means of invoking a certain flatness in things. This in itself signifies a deep agreement between the three of us.

Ferraris’s position, which you can now read about in English in his wonderful book Documentality, involves a distinction between natural and social entities that is foreign to my own views. Ferraris seems influenced by Vico in his contention that since social objects were produced by us, they are not impenetrable to logos in the same way that natural entities are. This led him to object, to his friend co-author Derrida, that there is nothing social outside the text.

In Gabriel’s case, let’s wait for the publication of his forthcoming book Fields of Sense, which will give the latest version of his own realist position. My sense of Gabriel’s position in Bonn was that he sees problems with privileged mathematical or scientific attempts to grasp the real (as found now in a number of continental rationalist positions), but that he also thinks direct access to the real is nonetheless possible. This has something to do with his unorthodox reading of German Idealism, and culminates in his theory of fields.

The latter point interests me especially, insofar as we are now seeing an explosion of theories of fields or zones of existence. Latour’s new book is one example, Souriau’s modes of existence (reborn largely through the hard work of Latour and Isabelle Stengers), Sloterdijk’s discussions of spheres, Badiou’s theory of worlds, and, let us not forget, Luhmann’s theory. Tristan Garcia is a more ambiguous case, but in some sense his philosophy is also meant as an encyclopedic theory of zones of being.

I’ll have something to say about these new “zonal” ontologies (which differ somewhat from the regional ontologies that grew up in the phenomenological crib) in the second half of Prince of Modes, the sequel I’m now writing to Prince of Networks.

But for now, three cheers for Gabriel’s contention in the Tedx video that the maxim that “all things are connected” is a bad one. Holism has had a good run, but is now reaching the point of exhaustion.

Bogost on technological exhaustion

It’s a pessimistic piece, but one that I think hits home for most of us. HERE.

Generally, I am unsympathetic to media nostalgia. But I do miss paper letters delivered by the postal service.

Markus Gabriel’s September Tedx talk in Munich

“Unicorns exist, but the world does not.” Prof. Gabriel summarizes the argument of his recent German bestseller, Warum es die Welt nicht gibt.

schedule changes for Australia

The dates, events, and titles of my papers have changed slightly for Australia, a trip coming up soon. The updated information is at the top of THIS PAGE.

Egypt today

I’m not there at the moment, but there are worries that today could be another of the more difficult Fridays, with a number of pro-Morsi protests scheduled.

more on Rolling Jubilee

The movement gets a mention in The Guardian HERE.

Give them a small donation, and they will purchase roughly 20 times that amount in someone else’s debt (medical debt for now, which underlies 60% of U.S. bankruptcies, ridiculously enough), and simply write it off. This has to be done for purely random beneficiaries, or it will be treated as a taxable benefit.

It’s quite ludicrous, isn’t it, that it’s so easy to buy supposedly binding debt at such heavily reduced prices? But that’s part of what Rolling Jubilee is trying to show us.

You can read about Rolling Jubilee HERE. Which reminds me, I need to send them some more, and convince friends and family to do the same.

 

 

lecture in Lisbon tomorrow

HERE.

It will be my first time in Portugal since 2002. I was there on vacation with my father that time, but also happened to be there for Portugal’s fancy Euro rollout at midnight on January 1, 2002, replete with a laser-generated hologram of the Euro symbol.

Thinking I ought not to miss this historical moment, I stood in line at a bank on January 1 for a good long time to get a sample of the new currency. It turned out later that I was simply in line behind dozens of paranoid pensioners who thought they needed to trade in all their escudos that day or lose their life savings. In fact, you could already get as many Euros as you wanted from ATMs and even as change at McDonald’s. It was a complete waste of time, but an interesting sociological experience.

assemblage theory in international relations

I’ve contributed a chapter to THIS BOOK on the topic, edited by Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis, to be published shortly by Palgrave Macmillan.