In Anna Longo’s essay The Contingent Emergence of Thought in Quentin Meillassoux’s Time without becoming she explicitly states that Meillaussoux’s goal is to demonstrate that reason is not only able to know the in it-self but also to know it as completely heterogeneous and totally independent: thought can know dead matter as something with which it shares nothing, not an origin, nor the condition of its being.1 Two things this does: first, it makes of Meillassoux an absolute dualist; and, second, it seems to align him with the trope “dead matter” or the inorganic that has been a staple of both mechanistic philosophy and scientific naturalism for centuries. As she tells us Meillassoux’s materialism is defined by its ability to “access things as a total exteriority, to access them as completely different from the living intelligent subject. This materialist assumption entails an original solution to the question of the genesis of…

Modern societies, in pulling down all the old barriers, all the prohibitions, rituals, and symbolic conceptions that once worked to curb human violence, unleashed new forces of unprecedented creativity. But these were counterbalanced by new forces of unprecedented destructiveness, so that the world was transformed into a single community of human beings living under the threat of being reduced to ashes, scattered among piles of radioactive rubble.

Little by little, Economy emancipated itself from the shackles of the sacred. Once held in check by religion, and then by politics, it has today become both our religion and our politics. No longer subject to any higher authority, it cannot decide our future, or make us a world in which to live: it has become our future and our world. Advanced postindustrial societies have been well and truly mystified, in the original sense of that word, and their politicians hoodwinked. The result…

 

Finally able to begin a back log of reading material that I’ve put off for several months. Several works in the past year or so have come out dealing with Speculative Realism (SR). Four in particular I’m in process of reading are

1. Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects by Peter Gratton
2. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism by Steven Shaviro
3. The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism by Tom Sparrow
4. Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes by Peter Wolfendale

For personal reasons I started with Tom Sparrow’s work which outlines a case against the anti-realist tradition of phenomenology which he argues lacks both a method and a hard core kernel of realist philosophy. He takes Merleau Ponty to task in his appraisal of phenomenology as a style of philosophy, when Ponty states that in his opinion: “the responsible philosopher must be that phenomenology can be practised and…

Throughout the corpus of his writings Zizek will return to one central or core theme: the Hegelian notion of “Substance as Subject”. I decided to gather a few entries as a way of getting a handle upon this thematic. Yet, this notion seems to be bound up with the difference between potentiality and virtuality, along with his concept of retroactive causation.

from Less Than Nothing

For we Hegelians, the crucial question here is this: where does Hegel stand with regard to this distinction between potentiality and virtuality? On a first approach, there is massive evidence that Hegel is the philosopher of potentiality: is not the whole point of the dialectical process as the development from In-itself to For-itself that, in the process of becoming, things merely “become what they already are” (or were from all eternity)? Is not the dialectical process the temporal deployment of an eternal set of potentialities…

The difficulty is that it is the form or structure, not the content, that must be transformed to produce genuine psychodynamic or political transformation.  One might believe that they’ve produced a radical transformation by switching from donuts to coffee, but both are still toruses.  The structure remains the same.  This was the criticism of Soviet style socialism.  At the level of content it had changed the nature of distribution, but structurally, in its reliance on the Fordist factory model, it still had the same structure or form of alienation.  Similarly, one does not undermine patriarchy simply by putting a woman in charge.  Patriarchy is not defined by its content– a particular gender occupying the position of power –but by its structure:  an autarch at the top structuring social relations.  It’s that structure that has to be addressed, not the organ of a person that occupies a particular point in a…

My artist’s eye is quick to see what my friends and family often miss. I imagine you can relate! The artist’s eye never slumbers, never pauses.  Throughout the day, all day long … its constantly searching….  for textures, colours, shapes, lines, patterns and tones.

Beach Rock Textures, Esperance W.A. debiriley.com

Maybe that explains why some are just a wee bit tired at the day’s end,  we’ve been very busy. Doing double duty!

Texture in Nature Photographs

I love the way the rocks and escarpments create textured craggy faces against the sky, and  how different trees have such unique textures to their bark.  Angophora with their cobalt violet skin and dimples, cedar with their maroon and burgundy scales, scribbly gums with the graffiti written all over their trunks.  My friends and family generally, don’t really notice such things. But I’m always looking for “Painting”  subjects and ideas!

I admit, I can…

At the time of writing, it’s been a very dry spring. It’s looking more like second fall around here. The Noodler’s Red Black  and Rome Burning I’ve been using lately are really helping with that fall color feeling.

Here’s some sketches from the smaller of our neighborhood cemeteries: Notre-Dame-des-Neiges.

These are sketched in a Moleskine Folio Watercolor Album, (11.75 x 8.25″) – which is a beautiful book, with this very wide format. But it is frankly just a little bit too large for every day use. It takes up a lot of room in a bag, and I’d definitely consider a backing board and bulldog clips to hold it open when drawing.  It wants to flop around, fall off my knees, or otherwise behave badly. I’m starting to think that a book bigger than you can easily hold in one hand calls for an easel for sketching. But if I was going to do that I’d just paint…

The key philosophical implication of Hegelian retroactivity is that it undermines the reign of the Principle of Sufficient Reason: this principle only holds in the condition of linear causality where the sum of past causes determines a future event— retroactivity means that the set of (past, given) reasons is never complete and “sufficient,” since the past reasons are retroactively activated by what is, within the linear order, their effect.

– Slavoj  Zizek – Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

Graham Harman’s first book Tool Being takes note of Zizek’s concept of retroactive causation saying:

The present book roughly accepts Zizek’s concept of retroactive causation, though without accepting the attitude of “deflationary realism” with which Zizek frames this concept. In the end, his problem will turn out to be that he restricts retroactive causation to a narrowly human realm, and orbits around the same unique gap between human…