audio of Meillassoux’s course this semester at the Sorbonne

HERE.

link to recordings of the November 21-22, 2013 Simondon symposium

Held in Lüneburg. HERE.

Žižek on the fake sign language interpreter

A topic tailor-made for Žižek, of course. And despite a sprinkling of contemporary politics, his article reads more like a throwback section from The Sublime Object of Ideology. HERE.

But my favorite part was probably this, at the bottom: “This article was amended on 16 December 2013 to comply with our editorial guidelines.” Anyone happen to catch whatever outrageous claim in the first version may have prompted this disclaimer?

the OHP New Metaphysics series in 2014

These aren’t up on Amazon yet, but are coming soon from Open Humanities Press.

First up, we have Joseph Carew’s Ontological Catastrophe, a very provocative study of Žižek’s concept of the same name. Lots of German Idealism as well in this book, whose existence already seems to be somewhat known in Žižek circles. Tammy Lu has outdone herself with the cover design this time.

A few months after that we will have Plastic Bodies, the third book of Tom Sparrow, who has already emerged as one of the most productive authors of his generation in continental philosophy. This one will have a preface by Cathérine Malabou, who seems quite impressed by Saprow’s specific use of her favorite concept: plasticity.

the EUP Speculative Realism series in 2014

The Speculative Realism series at Edinburgh will be releasing quite a number of books in 2014, but we’re starting out in the spring with an impressive hat trick of books likely to make a big impact. They are available for pre-order now on Amazon, where you can also view the interesting cover designs.

Levi R. Bryant, Onto-Cartography

Tristan Garcia, Form and Object

Adrian Johnston, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism

As series editor, I have naturally read all three books very thoroughly more than once, and all three will prove to be well worth the cover price.

for Lovecraft fans in Baltimore

I’ll be speaking about my Lovecraft book at the Red Room on Saturday, February 22 (and will post a link here once they have one).

That’s part of an 11-lecture tour that goes: Texas Tech, Rice, Lebanon Valley College (PA), NYU, St. John’s College (MD), the Red Room, Oregon State, and the University of British Columbia.

The trip is already gut-wrenchingly packed, so there’s no room for further invitations on this one, I’m afraid.

lecture at Bilkent University, Ankara

My 50th and final public lecture of 2013 will take place on Wednesday evening here in Ankara, at Bilkent University. The topic, by request, will be Marshall McLuhan.

I’ve not yet been to the Bilkent campus, though I’ve been to visit its neighbor, the Middle East Technical University. And we live right in the midst of the Ankara University campus.

an Eagleton anecdote, told by Eagleton

The death of Colin Wilson is leading to the reprinting of a number of newspaper articles about him, including one by Terry Eagleton, HERE. But what really interested me in Eagleton’s piece was the following mortifying (though amusing) anecdote:

“I was once browsing in an Oxford bookshop when I came across a display of books offering simplified accounts of various subjects: Physics Made Simple, Astronomy Made Simple and so on. I caught a glimpse of a friend of mine standing before the display, a distinguished Oxford philosopher, who was leafing idly through the Philosophy Made Simple volume. Seizing the chance of a jest, I crept up behind him and murmured in his ear ‘That’s a bit difficult for you, isn’t it?’ He swung round in alarm, and my first thought was that he had had cosmetic surgery. But it was not my friend at all. It was a complete stranger. Muttering a few words of apology, I scampered out of the store.”

It may have been minor karmic payback for a minor moment of snobbery on Eagleton’s part, though I appreciate his candor in telling the story (as well as his candor in discussing his 16-year-old “existentialist” phase). I do recall Eagleton being less than polite to one of our Cairo undergraduates who naively asked him the digressive question, unrelated to Eagleton’s lecture, about whether he preferred Obama or McCain in the shortly forthcoming U.S. election.

In any case, I don’t share the widespread contempt among intellectuals for such books. If you look over the list of available volumes in any such series, you’re bound to find a few from which you could benefit. (The one I keep meaning to buy, assuming it exists –as it must– is “Cricket for Dummies.” Thus, I could hardly blame a cricket player for reading “Philosophy for Dummies.”)

What makes Žižek’s remarks on the “Shakespeare Made Easy” series in The Parallax View so funny is not that he briefly scores points at the expense of the series, but that he uses the series to make a clever philosophical remark about the non-literalizability of literary content.

In fact, this is one of the things I love most about Žižek as a human character. He’s not really a snob (I know some people find him to be a snob about some forms of pop culture, but I wouldn’t put it that way.) He’s not always nice about the things he dislikes, but this almost never takes the form of a sneering dismissal. The sneer is not a Žižekian weapon. Instead, he invests himself passionately in actually occupying a position other than the one he critiques. This is connected with his distaste for “beautiful soul” positions in politics, and that, I think, is Žižek’s most lasting contribution to political discourse, beyond any of his flagrantly unpopular positions.

Here’s an anecdote from my own experience, concerning a lecture by Žižek that I attended at Birkbeck in 2006. In it, Žižek made one of his frequent passing digs at Buddhism. The first question from the audience was an angry riposte from a Buddhist monk, who if memory serves was actually wearing a saffron robe (I doubt Žižek knew he was there, even unconsciously– the room was simply too full). Some intellectuals in Žižek’s position may have made disdainful gestures and moved on to the next question. Instead, Žižek enthusiastically doubled down and continued his assault on Buddhism in a briefly heated one-on-one argument that was surrounded by the inevitable cloud of laughter.

In a certain sense, it may always be rude to make public insults against people’s religions like that. But what I admired in the situation was that Žižek didn’t try to place himself in a position transcendentally superior to that of the Buddhist monk. Instead, he placed himself on the exact same level, and expended actual energy in fighting the arguments of the monk.

This is the sort of thing that gives Žižek his endearing comical streak, but also the thing that makes him so refreshing as an intellectual. We are all much better off for his decade-long run (and still running) as the most prominent public figure in continental philosophy– a term I continue to use without the least trace of irony.

it actually snowed in Cairo

The news stories say it was for the first time since 1901, which I’m willing to believe, though my colleague Shahinaz (a native Cairene) says it snowed once in the 1960s and another time in the 1980s.

Cairo isn’t hot all the time. I tried to make it through my first year in Egypt without owning a jacket, but had to cave in around Christmastime and buy one. It can get pretty chilly, especially at night. They don’t bother investing many resources in heated buildings, since most of the time it would be a waste, but that means that when it does get cold, you can be miserable even indoors. And it’s a deep, wet, bone-chilling cold when it comes.

Nonetheless, snow is almost unheard of. Cold is rare, and precipitation even more so, and the conjunction of the two is worse than rare.

Dennis Rodman returning to North Korea next week?

As a sports fan, an NBA fan, a Chicago Bulls fan, and a Dennis Rodman fan, I was already feeling like Rodman’s reputation had taken a hit this morning, after his friend Kim Jong Un slipped a bit further into the world of paranoid political psychosis usually found only in the pages of Machiavelli and Tacitus.

And now Rodman is going back? (HERE.)

Rodman has always been filled with surprises, of course, and not just the obvious ones (such as rainbow-colored hairstyles).

One of my favorite NBA stories (told on this blog before) involves Rodman and Jerry Krause, the widely loathed (and highly successful) former General Manager of the Bulls. It was evident after Michael Jordan’s return from retirement in spring 1995 that the Bulls needed a good power forward; former Bulls star Horace Grant had eaten them alive while playing in an Orlando uniform, leading to Chicago’s elimination from the playoffs.

We all know what happened– they picked up the troubled Rodman from San Antonio, and despite some erratic behavior, Rodman helped the Bulls win their fourth, fifth, and sixth championships. But the funny thing is that another of Chicago’s power forward targets, Jayson Williams of New Jersey, said the following at the time: “The Bulls called me in for three days of psychological tests. The next day, they signed Dennis Rodman.”

A hilarious statement when it was made. Jayson Williams was always a comedian, probably just a half-cut below Charles Barkley in witty quotability. And whereas Rodman was an erratic/eccentric disciplinary problem child who had nearly shot himself to death in an arena parking lot a few years earlier, Williams simply seemed a bit mouthy and irreverent, but otherwise quite stable. It certainly did look like Jerry Krause’s psychological tests were a waste of time if he ended up acquiring Rodman anyway– ostensibly the player with the worst psychological makeup in the league.

So, what happened in the ensuing years? Williams was charged (deservedly) with manslaughter and imprisoned on a lesser charge, with the trial bringing out that he often threatened others with guns and even killed his own dog by gunshot for no good reason. He was tasered by police after a hotel rampage, destroyed numerous trees in New York in a drunk driving accident, and punched a man in the face in a North Carolina bar fight. I’d love to get ahold of Krause’s psychological tests now. It would be fascinating to see how Rodman’s results compared with those of Jayson Williams, but obviously Krause chose the better citizen of the two.

In the meantime, Rodman’s expected “tragic” post-NBA life never really materialized. The only incident I remember is one where he was cited for excessive noise at a house party after his California neighbors complained.

And now Rodman reappears, on the stage of geopolitics. WTF? And it is likely that Kim Jong Un would have done even more poorly on Krause’s psychological tests than Jayson Williams did.

But I must admit, it always seemed as if Krause gave those psychological tests at least in part as a power trip. He once called in the harmless and lovable Pete Myers to “see where he stands mentally,” about which Myers reported: “I didn’t get that part. They know who I am. I’m Pete.”

There were also stories about Krause making players nervous in interviews with questions such as “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” He seemed to be having far too much fun with these tests, and I never took them seriously. But then he totally nailed it on the Rodman/Williams decision, when all of the rest of us would have blown it based on our mere prejudices about the respective psychologies of the two. Amazing.