Stefan Rossbach has a wonderful chapter in Observing International Relations: Niklas Luhmann and World Politics, edited by Mathias Albert & Lena Hilkermeir, 2004. The essay is titled “‘Corpus mysticum’: Niklas Luhmann’s Evocation of World Society.”

Rossbach, in discussing Luhmann’s links to early mystics and Gnosticism, has helped me realize why (despite the difficult, often dry reading) I felt an immediate affinity for Luhmannian theory. Back in the early 1980s, I was reading things like the Meister Eckhart, The Cloud of Unknowing, and St John of the Cross, as well as Zen Buddhism and other Eastern mysticisms.  As a 20-year-old, I found St. John of the Cross‘s negative theology, or via negativa, particularly fascinating.

Rossbach links Luhmann to mystics such as Jakob Boehme and Nicholas of Cusa. Here is one passage from Rossbach’s essay:

Contemplating the history of Western philosophy, Luhmann noted that 2,000 years of searching for “essence” had…

Laszlo Krasznahorkai’sThe Melancholy of Resistance lives in that grotesque realm between the real and the fantastic, its humor is only offset by its profound despair and deeply unsettling disturbance of our place not only in society but in the universe itself. In the first section of the novel we meet Mrs Plauf, an older woman who has been visiting friends and loved ones but is now on a return train trip to her own home town. Most of the action is from her pov, and we listen to her as she lives through a particularly trying voyage. Her sense of reality takes a sharp turn into the sinister when she discovers a man who is staring at here perversely. A young man, but also one who is filthy and seems ludicrously interested in her as a sexual object. As the trip goes on we find out about her life back home…

Responding to a post I wrote on Lacan’s discourse of the capitalist a couple years ago, Robert asks:

How would you describe racism according to the discourse of the capitalist (vs. the discourse of the master)?

I’m grateful for Robert’s question and find that it comes at a timely moment, as it just so happens that I’ve been thinking a great deal about the discourse of the capitalist as a result of the seminar I’m currently teaching on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and an on again off again I’ve been having with my friend Orpheus.

I don’t yet have a theoretically well defined answer to Robert’s question– and recently I’ve come to discover that my true love is not evaluating things, nor proposing how to solve them, but rather in understanding the why of things and how they function –however, I do have the beginnings of a hypothesis that might…

At approximately 10:30 EST tonight, the Juno spacecraft will enter the orbit of the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter.  Juno has been traveling there at 60,000mph for 5 years.  When she enters Jupiters orbit she will be moving at a speed of 165,000mph; faster than any device made by humans in history.  To put this into perspective, a bullet speeds through the air at about 1,700mph.  When Juno enters orbit, she’ll encounter more radiation than any technology we’ve ever built.  Background radiation on earth is about .39RAD.  In orbit around Jupiter it is about 20,000,000RAD.  You can listen to a hint of this hellish nimbus here.

read on!