Deconstructing The Lulz

andrewggibson:

I am responding here to some of the comments made by Terence Blake to the second part of my review of Graham Harman’s The Quadruple Object here. In my post, I bemoaned the fact that Harman very often talks about how his philosophy can cope with actual…

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Dear God, I just hope and pray for the day that someone will do good commentary on Harman and OOP. It seems that today is not that day.

I just titled a paper I wrote on Levinas ‘Face-Off’

The politics of the local, having finally been liberated from the cartography of nations and the individualist ontology, in fact avoids imposing cultural identities on the unrepeatable uniqueness of every human being. Because it is faithful to the ontology of plurality, the local puts in play uniqueness without belongings and entrusts the sense of the relation to this alone. And this, in addition to evoking a passivity, implies first of all the preliminary activity of stripping ourselves of our western, eastern, Christian, Muslim, Jew, gay, straight, poor, rich, ignorant, learned, cynical, sad, happy—or even guilty or innocent—being. Indeed, the politics of the absolute local includes as a preliminary act the deconstruction of belongings, the marginalization of qualities, and the depoliticization of the what. What remains, because it was always there, is the question “who are you?” ad-dressed to the “you who are here.” This local, contextual space—which can be actively inaugurated anyway—is opened by this question in which the regulative principle of politics already resounds—namely, the priority of the who with respect to the what.

Cavarero, “For More Than One Voice”, 205.

Peak liberalism/ideology. Oh god.

whentherewerebicycles:

“Viewed through this lens, it is equally valid to say that cows exploited human desires for fat, compelling us to clear forests and protect them from predators, enhancing their reproductive possibilities. But domestication doesn’t end here. It is not simply that cows domesticated us in the sense of leading us to develop a set of practices such as raising cows and clearing forests so they would have more grazing land. No, the conspiracy of cows against humanity go far deeper. It is likely that cows also introduced extreme selective pressure on human populations dependent on cows for food, weeding out those members of our species that couldn’t tolerate high-beef diets and selecting for those that could. It’s likely that in many human populations cows changed our very genetics. As Scu has argued, we are addicted to meat. This addiction, in part, was carefully cultivated by cows themselves.

Note well, I am not saying this is good or that this morally justifies our ugly and ecological destructive treatment of livestock. I am saying that there are a variety of different teleologies involved in the evolution of cows. Some involved human aims. Others involved nonhumans such as chickens, cows, pigs, lamb, etc. The same could equally be argued for various grasses such as wheat, as well as a variety of other plants upon which we’re deeply dependent. And, I would argue, the same would be true of technologies, social groups, and texts […] 

There will never be a society composed just of humans because humans always dwell among a variety of different agencies including humans but also including all sorts of nonhumans. These nonhumans are never just wax for human intentions, but introduce all sorts of differences of their own that are irreducible to human intentions.”

-Levi Bryant, “The Materialism of Onticology”

fennels:

baronessvonbullshit:

memes will never die but you will

become a meme

Sadly, Hegel already showed why it’s nearly impossible to immortalize yourself in this way.

Hegel ruined everything :(

Cavarero provides an original and insightful rereading of this passage from Aristotle’s Politics [the passage that equates the characterization of ‘man’ as both the political and speaking animal] in the pages that follow. She shows that Aristotle does not simply claim that main is political “because he speaks and thus mobilizes the intrinsic communicativity of language.” Instead, she shows how for Aristotle, speech is, so to speak, that which distinguishes man from other political animals (like bees) because man is able to perceive and hence to speak of things that belong to the koninonia politike

A footnote to the introduction to Adriana Cavarero’s “For More than One Voice”

Oh, this looks like it’ll be pretty exciting.