I'm a philosophy student that tends to post about really serious things unseriously and about really unserious things seriously.
I was once described as a "beautiful, intelligent iguana".
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
towerofsleep replied to your post: About that last post:
interesting, people dont talk about this
Yeah, Zizek’s talked about his relationship to Derrida in multiple interviews. And as of late, he’s been trying to bolster the name of Derrida back up again because I think he senses that there’s a definitive movement going away from Derrida in critical leftist circles (probably toward Deleuze on the francophile level of things) and wants to try and bring of some of his better points out again. I mean, in one of his more recent books (“In Defense of Lost Causes” I think) he prefaced a part that was talking about Derrida saying something along the lines of “After considering him an enemy for so many years, it’s time to consider him in a positive light again now that his dominating influence is dwindling”. His main problem with Derrida has always been how he’s been adopted in academia/culture more largely rather than anything specifically with Derrida. Same with Deleuze and a lot of other people, on that note.
But people try to gloss over Zizek’s Derridean influences because the “Lacan/Derrida” opposition is so ready-made that it makes it an easy, uncritical ‘in’ to critiquing the stuff Zizek’s doing without having to encounter any of his actual critical and brilliant moments. I mean, that’s not even to mention that half the time Zizek’s seen as some pseudo-Lacanian when his real love is German Idealism, especially Hegel (though he’s been showing more love for Schelling lately). The whole discourse around him is so shitty, it’s appalling. Ugh, I hate Zizek ‘scholarship’, or the ‘scholars’ that write about him.
Oh my goodness! I had not seen this. But I must be doing something so right with my life if this video makes you think of me.
[By the way, I’m publishing this publically as a message for everyone else to go see this video].
Edit: I mean, just look at how cute it is:
towerofsleep replied to your post: Since were discussing Mackelmore…
That rack really annoys me for farly obvious reasons. Still not sure if Im being unfair, esp. since my gf likes it, but I agree with Brandon Soderbergs article Stop Saying Nice Things About Macklemore.
Yeah, sorry, I probably should have been a bit more nuanced with that. I was a little drunk while writing it.
My general point was that I don’t think the articles that say Macklemore’s just causing a sort of “gentrification of thrift shops” is the best way to look at the song, even if to a great degree they’re right. Also, note, when I first heard this song, I didn’t know that it was like some “really popular thing” - meaning that I thought it was a parody video from the beginning and not by someone that produces music for a living. Like, I thought it was something close to those SNL music skits with Andy Samberg or whatever. So that really colored how I approached it.
Oh well, Macklemore really isn’t worth talking about either way. I was just drunk and vomiting text on the interwebs.
towerofsleep replied to your photo: Im trying to write about Husserl and Heidegger,…
good lord man, youve NEVER had an espresso? I started in on that stuff when I was 15.
interruptions replied to your photo: Im trying to write about Husserl and Heidegger,…
espresso is probably the thing most responsible for my completion of an undergraduate degree also tell me if the parfit is any good, im looking for a spring break book
I’ve been staying away from espresso precisely because I’ve been living off of coffee. It’s always a bad sign when you start switching to the ‘stronger stuff’ to keep an edge.
But, if it does help me complete my undergrad….
Also, I don’t really plan on reading the Parfit. Right now at least. It’s just really big and glaring on a bookshelf next to me, and it keeps on distracting me from Heidegger/Husserl, and reminding me of the word ‘parfait’ and the fact that I actually have no idea what a parfait actually is.
I do hear it’s really good though! I know Evelyn spoke really highly of it about a year or so ago, and talked about it in multiple posts (at least I think it was Evelyn - I’m sorry if I’m wrong!). Also, it does seem to be a challenge to the dominance of Rawls in analytic moral theory today, which I’m fully in support of, because fuck Rawls. But the thing is a damn tome, so that’s something to keep in mind.
towerofsleep replied to your audio post: How have I never heard the Nicki Minaj part of…
dude that is literally the best part of that album
I remember seeing some discussion a few months ago about how that part was fuckin’ killer, but I was being pretentious and was like “Oh, fuck Nicki Minaj, stupid pop music, etc. etc. I’m an asshole”. I finally listened to it the other day, though, and I can’t seem to stop.
[First off, I hope you don’t mind me publishing this publicly. If you do, just let me know, and I’ll take it down. It’s rare that I don’t answer a message privately, mostly because I’m never sure when it’s appropriate.]
I do know of one map of philosophy that seems pretty good. You can find it here. It’s a really detailed map, but it’s also really muddled. I wish it somehow had the ability to close off nodes (like, if I just wanted to see what springs off from Husserl, I could close off the other branches of the network). So, basically, I wish it were interactive. Also, it’d be cool if it were three dimensional, instead of so flat - a network cloud would be a lot clearer/cleaner with this many nodes. I don’t even know a program you can make that thought with.
But I agree, this would have helped a lot when I was younger. Actually, it’s still helpful. But it could also be terrifying to someone new to philosophy - so many nodes! Either way, it’s a really cool project.
[Also, it’s annoying that the colors aren’t labeled in any way. :/]
towerofsleep replied to your post: Writing an essay principally citing Badiou,…
In what sense is consciousness immaterial?
I’m thinking of it like this: I think consciousness is an emergent from the material processes of neurons and stuff (I don’t think anyone disagrees with this really, anymore). But further, I want to claim that both (1) this is a strong emergence, in the sense that consciousness isn’t reducible to the material processes that make it up and (2) that this type of emergence isn’t apropertyof neurons or whatever interacting, but is an entirely separate object, in some sense.
But this object doesn’t have any material parts that make it up that we can study empirically. It’s not a case of “whole is greater than parts” per se, but instead that “the whole is different than the parts”. But there is some notion of plenitude here, in the sense that I don’t think consciousness would be ontologically reducible to the material base that generates it (partially just because I’m against ontological reduction more generally). So consciousness is immaterial, but real, in this view of it.
Also (briefly) this leads me to thinking about free will. The common view against free will, at least with consciousness, is that we are really “nothing but” the neurons, or (even more basically) the atoms that make up consciousness. But if it’s true that consciousness isn’t ontologically reducible to its material base, than I can’t see why that base would have complete causal control over the effects of consciousness, even if neuronsetc. are the condition for the possibility of consciousness. There’s more distinctions than this, but I think this could allow me to talk about the possibility of (at least) a weak version of free will. Because I think to hold on to (even weak) determinism, you need to have a strong sense of the possibility of ontological reduction, which I think is wrongheaded from the get-go, so I want to argue against it.
towerofsleep replied to your post: Oh my glob, the European Graduate School looks…
it’s not a real school though, it’s a fancy summer camp. i feel pretty certain that a large percentage of attendees would be insufferable.
Really? Everything I was looking at said it had M.D. and PhD programs. If that’s true though, it’s super sad. Because I was looking at the list of lecturers and got waaaay too happy (Haraway, DeLanda, Zizek, Badiou, even Geert Lovink [who’s a super badass media theorist, one of the best I’ve encountered]).
And I already thought that some of the attendees might be horrible. I mean, the pictures on the website is just like “white male, white male, white male”, which is terrible for a department that looks as innovative and awesome as that one.
Even if it is a summer camp though, it’s far better than most summer camps I’ve ever heard of.
towerofsleep replied to your post: So, in the past few (2?) days: Had friends trying…
horrifiedsideeye.gif
Yeah, that’s basically been my face for the past few days straight. It was as if, because I haven’t been as social as usual lately (for whatever reason), everyone just got together and said “let’s remind you why you hate most people with a really concentrated dosage of asshattery”.
towerofsleep replied to your post: I’m really ambivalent towards an ethics of the Other and a Derridean notion of Hospitality
The way I see it, it’s precisely the withdrawn nature of the other that generates the ethics. We have to make an effort to be open to other exactly because we do not have access to them. We encounter them only in their withdrawn-ness.
No, I totally get that. I get that it’s the absolute alterity of the other that draws us into this ethical dimension (and hence why ethics is ontological for Levinas, in some sense). My question is though, if the other is radically other, completely independent of my senses and any attempt to turn them into the ‘same’, then how does the ethical call reach me? Like, there still has to be some medium of connection even if only because, in articulating its alterity, the other is still articulatingtoward me.
It’s really Humean, the whole problem, even though I wouldn’t put it under a problem of causation, per se. It’s not about how one object causes an effect in another, and our knowledge of that effect, but just of how two objects are able to interact at all in the first place.
