Deconstructing The Lulz

rhizombie replied to your post: leviathvn replied to your post: leviathvn…

u guyz r cute

Yes. Tell me more. Feed my ego.

(Thank you though! This is always nice to hear from one of my favorite people on here :D )

rhizombie replied to your post: rhizombie replied to your post: rhizombie…

theory partyyyyy

The only party I really want to be having ever, to be honest. You’re all invited, by the way.

leviathvn replied to your post: leviathvn replied to your post: …

hatred of democracy and disagreement are great places to start! his article who is the subject of the rights of man does a good job of outlining essentially his whole project as well

Damn, I really do have to check that out. I’m almost certain I’ll like him a lot, but he’s just been this tangential figure for me lately and I haven’t been able to get to him. Especially since I’ve been really ambivalent about philosophy and theory lately (although, you probably can’t tell from my blog since that’s like 90% of what I do on here).

getradified replied to your post: rhizombie replied to your post: rhizombie…

Whoever you prefer to read, just try and use their ideas to make the world less fucked up and were cool.

Same. That’s really, like, a total summation of my position on things. Everything else is just fun debate on things. That’s why I get so tired of a lot of the Marxist/Anarchist debates on here: they’re both like “fuck capitalism, sexism, racism, etc.” (when done well, which is rare, but that’s another issue) and I just don’t really care beyond that point? The rest is just splitting hairs, but splitting necessary ones, but that shouldn’t generate as much hate as that does on here.

rhizombie replied to your post: rhizombie replied to your post: towerofsleep…

I think our disagreement is probably on Zs interpretation of JD then. Every instance ive read or heard Z talking about D has been not just polemical rhetorical posturing but gross generalizations and caricatures. Im more familiar with D than Z tho

Ah, see, I’m almost the exact opposite. Maybe we should read more of both then? Or at least that’s already my plan with Derrida - I can’t totally recommend reading Zizek to anyone because I know there’s a lot of fucked up stuff he does in his books (even if I think he’s worthwhile on some level regardless).

Point is: theory’s cool, we’re cool, let’s party, yay!

rhizombie replied to your post: towerofsleep replied to your post: About that…

I agree generally, but if SZs problem is with the academic reception of Derrida, why doesnt he say that instead of making facile caricatures he tries to pass off as representative of JDs work? I find it disingenuous

But, I mean, most of the time he does. If he uses Derrida in a book or something and it’s not a moment of outright criticism of him, then he usually uses a single quote or so by Derrida as a fulcrum point to think about ‘larger’ cultural issues precisely because he more interested in those.

Derrida isn’t his enemy; what can only be called (horribly) ‘Derrideanism’ is. And in the few-far-between moments where he engages with Derrida directly, it’s usually with his later ethical work more than anything, and he’s usually really explicit about engaging with Derrida in those moments. 

But I don’t think I’ve ever really seen him just out-and-out say shitty things about Derrida. He usually talks about him in friendly terms, even if he is critical. 

I mean, there be a brief polemical essay or two, but when you’ve written 51681684615186 essays, there’s bound to be a few of those. And those tend to be more rhetorical posturing than anything that should be taken seriously in any way, as Z. would be the first to admit. And let’s not pretend that Derrida and others didn’t fall into that sometimes too (e.g., even though this wasn’t a part of the ‘text’ of the piece, how else are we to interpret Derrida’s invitation to Foucault for the presentation of ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ except as a somewhat polemical move? I could probably think of others, but I don’t know Derrida well enough for that).

Thanks for the compliment. I was too busy in that last post trying to be coherent and forgot to mention that. I do really appreciate it.

rhizombie:

any of you “into” object oriented ontology and can explain to me why I should care?

I’m going to be really broad here, because I’m in the middle of class and so I can’t go into this too deeply.

• I think it’s an interesting part of the rejection of Kantian idealism that still runs rampant in contemporary philosophy through the guise of phenomenology (and it’s heirs/critics - Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze (this one’s the most questionable), etc.). Meillassoux tries to critique on the grounds of Finitude - he says that we can have access to a type of Absolute knowledge that goes outside of an individual’s “thrownness”. In opposition to this, OOO (well, mostly Harman) retains an idea of human finitude but just places it over the relation between any object and another (i.e. he dethrones the authority of the subject-object relation without turning it into some kind of being-world relation or something). In this sense, I just think it’s doing really interesting things philosophically, so that’s one reason.
• I also think they’re doing something interesting with Deleuze, a lot of the time. Harman, Bryant, etc. are all really influenced by Deleuze, but are somewhat critical of him, and from a position that’s pretty original. I still haven’t really worked out how this relation to Deleuze is playing out though, so I can’t say to much about that.
• Their ideas are being taking up a lot in a bunch of different disciplines now (English departments are taking up the work a lot, architecture departments have been working with it a lot (along with a lot of other ‘artistic’ disciplines), and there’s more I haven’t mentioned). So it’s interesting in the sense that it’s just becoming a widely influential area of study. Oh, and Bryant is trying to take OOO to talk about Gender relations and stuff, but none of that work has actually come out yet, so it’s still to be seen how that plays out.
• Also, I think it just follows from people like Badiou and others that have been trying to think through the failures of the politics of the thinkers coming out of ‘May ‘68’ france. So they’re just one arm of a plethora of groups trying to think through these problems
• And for the most part, they’re just really great writers and a lot of fun, so that should be a good reason to read them anyway.

I also appreciate that a lot of the work being done in OOO is being taken out of the academy. Or even important ‘academic institutions’. It’s not that ‘academics’ are bad in some sense, but that housing philosophical discourse only within universities (for the most part) is a negative thing. This is the first time in a while that I’ve seen a lot of people talking about philosophy without having years and years of background knowledge into highly specific parts of it - which means sometimes it’s really clumsy and uncritical, but it’s also opening up a lot of avenues for discourse outside of traditional paths for it, which I really like. I mean, Bryant teaches at some small community college and is at the forefront of a new philosophical outlook is a really cool phenomena in its own. 

I don’t know, I’m super excited about it for reasons that I can’t quite pin down yet. I suggest giving it a looking through, though, especially since I think it gets a lot more flack than is deserved. I’ve yet to see anyone give a sustained critique of any OOO type projects that don’t amount to “you read ‘x’ philosopher that I like a lot wrong’ or ‘I hate the type of rhetoric you use’ or ‘I fundamentally misread everything you wrote because I wanted to critique it from the beginning’ (Zizek’s the worst offender here). So until I see that, I’m going to continue to support it on some level.

just wait till you get to the part where she completely misreads Foucault and Deleuze!

I haven’t read the ‘Dialogues’ she’s quoting from, but I got the impression that a lot of people on here would think that about her analysis. But, regardless, I kind of just take the whole thing as a good warning to myself on how not to let notions of a totalized subject enter into my discourse (as a white,western, male ‘intellectual’ of sorts). So, yeah, that’s kind of the light I’m reading it in, not having the requisite source-knowledge.

Sorry if I’m belaboring a point here, especially if you’ve already decided to move beyond the whole OOO/SR discussion, but I just found this post by Bryant that I thought you might find interesting in trying to answer the question of “what’s the point of looking into OOO?”

I mean, you can disagree with the claims of people working in OOO and stuff, but it seems really hard to see them as absolutely useless, or not worth looking into. They’re worth looking into, and I don’t think enough people are giving them a good enough chance, especially when that whole “toy story of philosophy” comment actually passes at all as being a description of OOO (even jokingly).

[I know I could have just sent this to you via a message or something, but I thought it was a good post generally, so I wanted to post it here as well.]

guydebatwing:

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