The Immanence of Truth as a Process of Situating Eternity in Time

Senselogic

In my previous post I’ve attempted to trace, clarify and briefly define certain positions and oppositions within the philosophical field today. It is my conviction that at the root of philosophical enquiry lies a series of dialectical relationships between affirmation and negation, transcendence and immanence, reality in-itself and reality for-us, finitude and infinity, being and non-being.

In this post I will take it upon myself to further elaborate on these oppositions in the way of establishing my own position surrounding the void that splits as it unites transcendental empiricism and transcendental materialism.

Now, we know that according to Plato time doesn’t really exist and that it is merely a representation of the Real, an image of eternity beyond life as we live it. Needless to say temporality is the transcendental condition of human finitude, it is the truth of mortality that produces human subjects as beings in time. The change…

View original post 1,324 more words

The Butterfly Effect

Senselogic

The Butterfly Effect is a film from 2004 directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, in which Chaos Theory is applied to history and psychoanalysis. According to Chaos Theory an event which seems to be very insignificant in a sequence of events is in fact as important as any other event and the effects of a minor cause require some time to manifest themselves in relation to the macro situation. The main character in The Butterfly Effect “seizes hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”[1] 

With TheButterfly Effect the audience sees everything from the perspective of a young man who not only has flashbacks in the form of dreams, but who is also able to travel in time through reading his journals. As he reads the journal, first the words, then himself, and finally the whole room starts shaking…

View original post 1,090 more words

Terence McKenna: The Transcendental Object at the End of Time [Documentary]

The Three Modalities of Immanent Infinity: Life, Matter, and Thought in Henry, Deleuze, and Badiou (Audio Essay)

Full Text by Cengiz Erdem Here

A Brief Note on Kant

Senselogic

Kant’s initial project was to explicate the difference between “knowing-what” (pure reason) and “knowing-how” (practical reason) in the way of laying the foundations of a scientific metaphysics. Counter to Descartes^[1] and Hume^[2] he aimed at situating the subject within the limits of what can be known by rational human beings. The Kantian subject is embodied, embedded, and extended in space and time as opposed to the Cartesian subject thinking itself out of bounds in search of a God beyond the limits of sufficient reason alone, and the Humean subject as “a bundle of perceptions” according to whom all knowledge is rooted in sensory experience. Kant’s shifting conceptualization of the subject explicates the relation between the knowing mind and the acting/interacting body. The question is simply this: how does it further our understanding of the Kantian subject to situate it in particular discursive contexts?

By way of employing “the principle…

View original post 618 more words

The Immanence of Truths – Alain Badiou

Senselogic

 

THE IMMANENCE OF TRUTHSis Alain Badiou‘s forthcoming sequel to Being and Event, and Logics of Worlds… Here is Terence Blake’s translation of the book’s contents page shared by François Nicolas…

1. General Introduction

1. Speculative Strategy
2. Immanence, finitude, infinity
3. The absolute ontological referent
4. The two possible readings of this book

1. Prologue. Formal Presentation of the absolute location
2. Section I. The classical forms of finitude

C1. Destinies of finitude

S1. Modern finitude on trial: René Char

C2. The four types of finitude

S2. The localisation of the infinite in Victor Hugo

C3. The operators of finitude: 1. Identity

S3. Impersonality according to Emily Dickinson

C4. The operators of finitude: 2. Repetition

S4. Paul Celan: the work and the ordeal of masked repetitions

C5. The operators of finitude: 3. Evil

S5. Mandelstam in Voronezh: Make no concession to Evil. Neither plaint nor fear

C6. The operators of finitude:…

View original post 2,058 more words

Hyperstition: Altering the Supposedly Predestined Future, or, Utopia as Method, Structure, and Process

Senselogic

“It is easier, someone once said, to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism: and with that the idea of a revolution overthrowing capitalism seems to have vanished.”

~ Fredric Jameson,  An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army.

“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”

~ Fredric Jameson, Future City, in New Left Review 21, May-June 2003.

“As Fredric Jameson perspicaciously remarked, nobody seriously considers possible alternatives to capitalism any longer, whereas popular imagination is persecuted by the visions of the forthcoming ‘breakdown of nature’, of the stoppage of all life on earth – it seems easier to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than a far more…

View original post 5,741 more words

Dialectics of Time and Event from Kant and Hegel to Deleuze and Badiou

The Spirit shows itself as so impoverished that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mere mouthful of water, it seems to crave for its refreshment only the bare feeling of the divine in general. By looking at the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss.

~ Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit.

It would be best, perhaps, to think of an alternate world—better to say the alternate world, our alternate world—as one contiguous with ours but without any connection or access to it. Then, from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible.

~ Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic. 

via Dialectics of Time and Event from Kant and Hegel to Deleuze and Badiou: Hyperstition, or, Utopia as Method, Structure, and Process — SubSense

Cronenberg, Burroughs, Deleuze (2) – The Evil Spirit and The Spiritual Automaton

Senselogic

The Evil Spirit and The Spiritual Automaton

It is a recurrent theme in science-fiction-thriller movies that in time humanity turns into the slave of its own creation, namely of machines. It is precisely because of this fear of being replaced that humanity attempts to get out of time, out of the physical, and eventually falls on the side of what it was attempting to escape from; be that which they fall in the direction of metaphysics or pure-physics, in both cases their thought itself becomes machinic.

The Panopticon may even provide an apparatus for supervising its own mechanisms. In this central tower, the director may spy on all the employees that he has under his orders: nurses, doctors, foremen, teachers, warders […] and it will even be possible to observe the director himself. An inspector arriving unexpectedly at the center of the Panopticon will be able to judge at a…

View original post 1,345 more words

The Trouble With Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis — Subliminal Sensibility

| Backdoor Broadcasting Company | Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is one of the crucial issues dividing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two […]

via The Trouble With Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis — SubSense

Slavoj Žižek – Masterclass 1 & 2: Surplus-Value, Surplus-Enjoyment, Surplus-Knowledge

Slavoj Žižek – Masterclass 1: Surplus-Value, Surplus-Enjoyment, Surplus-Knowledge

Event Date: 18 April 2016

Room B01
Clore Management Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Torrington Square
London WC1E 7HX

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities  presents:

Masterclass 1:  From Pleasure-in-Pain To Surplus-Enjoyment

Slavoj Žižek (International Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities) –   From Pleasure-in-Pain To Surplus-Enjoyment

Jacques Lacan located the origin of his key notion of plus-de-jouir (surplus-enjoyment) in Marx’s notion of surplus-value, and it is worth exploring in detail the homology of the two notions, adding a third one, that of surplus-knowledge, a pseudo-knowledge in the guise of which our ignorance appears (“supreme” knowledge of God and other hidden forces, conspiracy theories, etc.). Such an analysis is crucial for resuscitating Marx’s critique of political economy, as well as for properly understanding today’s global capitalism and its ideological effects, up to fundamentalist violence.

Recommended reading:
Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Return of the Critique of Political Economy’ in Living in the End of Times (Verso 2010)
Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious (Verso Books 2015)

Slavoj Žižek – Masterclass 2: Surplus-Value, Surplus-Enjoyment, Surplus-Knowledge

Event Date: 19 April 2016

Room B01
Clore Management Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Torrington Square
London WC1E 7HX

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities presents:

Masterclass 2: Is Surplus-Value Marx’s Name For Surplus-Enjoyment?

Slavoj Žižek (International Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities) – Is Surplus-Value Marx’s Name For Surplus-Enjoyment?

Jacques Lacan located the origin of his key notion of plus-de-jouir (surplus-enjoyment) in Marx’s notion of surplus-value, and it is worth exploring in detail the homology of the two notions, adding a third one, that of surplus-knowledge, a pseudo-knowledge in the guise of which our ignorance appears (“supreme” knowledge of God and other hidden forces, conspiracy theories, etc.). Such an analysis is crucial for resuscitating Marx’s critique of political economy, as well as for properly understanding today’s global capitalism and its ideological effects, up to fundamentalist violence.

Recommended reading:
Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Return of the Critique of Political Economy’ in Living in the End of Times (Verso 2010)
Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious (Verso Books 2015)

via Backdoor Broadcasting

Three Modalities of the Immanent Infinitude: Life, Matter and Thought in Henry, Deleuze and Badiou

Senselogic

Abstract

In this essay I attempt to explicate the sense in which Michel Henry’s reductive rendering of Life as affectivity resonates with Alain Badiou’s subtractive rendering of the subject as eternity in time. I claim that these two modes of subjectivity are the two modalities of the Real manifesting itself as quality (Henry) and quantity (Badiou). As the two anti-thetical components of a complementary mode of being and thinking, Henry’s and Badiou’s shifting conceptualisations of the subject constitute a new understanding of the human. Henry’s patheme oriented subject takes the form of the human before its reflection in philosophy and objectification by science. This self as affect manifesting a non-human being of truth is compared and contrasted with Badiou’s matheme oriented subject driven by an inhuman truth of being capable of distinguishing between the human animal and the immortal subject. Henry and Badiou proclaim a move away from the human-animal-machine and towards…

View original post 17,664 more words

The Neurocognitive Revolution: Triumph or Agony?

Prometheus unbound to say the least indeed…

The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

Philosophy, in its longing to rationalize, formalize, define, delimit, to terminate enigma and uncertainty, to co-operate wholeheartedly with the police, is nihilistic in the ultimate sense that it strives for the immobile perfection of death.
…….– Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007

Donald Merlin in his Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (1993: see a Precise) once argued the australopithecines were limited to concrete/episodic minds: bipedal creatures able to benefit from pair-bonding, cooperative hunting, etc., but essentially of a seize-the-day mentality: the immediacy of the moment. The first transition away from the instant, the present, and toward a more temporal system of knowledge acquisition and transmission was to a “mimetic” culture: the era of Homo erectus in which mankind absorbed and refashioned events to create rituals, crafts, rhythms, dance, and other pre-linguistic traditions. This was followed by the evolution…

View original post 5,846 more words

Postnihilistic Speculations: The Ontology of Non-Being

The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

For speculation which founded itself on the radical falsity of the Principle of Sufficient Reason would describe an absolute which would not constrain things to being thus rather than otherwise, but which would constrain them to being able not to be how they are.
….Quentin Meillassoux

Is this what we’ve been waiting for all along? The movement beyond the troubled circle of Being and becoming, of Time and its figural and literal tropes of disquieting lapses into finitude? The fragments of this lie all around us in such thinkers as Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze, Badiou, Zizek, and so many others within this metamorphic thought of a non-thought, this disquisition of an anathema.

My friend Cengiz Erdem in his essay Postnihilistic Speculations on That Which Is Not: A Thought-World According to an Ontology of Non-Beingcharts such a history:

A speculative move in the way of mapping the cartography of an ontology of non-being…

View original post 4,401 more words

Contingency, Necessity and the Final Absolute

Zizek and the Hungry Seagull

Senselogic

View original post

Philo-Fiction, Chasm, and the Abstract Manifesto

The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

Abstract literature writes in clues, with clue words, but without hope.
…….– Nick Land, Abstract Manifesto

“Nothing was to have taken place. Less, even, than usual, or than standard procedure recommended. That was clear.”1 So begins Nick Land’s new philo-fiction, Chasm. True to this statement this strange amalgam of – can we call it philosophy, hyperstition, abstraction to the nth degree, an non-movement around absolute Zero; or, like those fabulations of Borges, Calvino, Ballard, Lem, or any number of anti-metaphysical metaphysicians of recent repute call this a dip in the labyrinth of a-literature? 

Reading Chasm is like entering a fog, a realm where the known and unknown cross each other in the night, their knives honed sharp and clean readied for the event that will never happen. Nothing can happen in this world. Yet, this is not some static world of timeless instants, but rather a world whose…

View original post 8,137 more words