Me on Meillassoux! (audio recording)

Here is the audio from the Continental Philosophy Research Group seminar on Quentin Meillassoux’s ‘Time without Becoming’ I gave last Wednesday. It is a little bit long at one and a half hours and listening over it again it is clear that I start to zone out a little toward the end especially my characterization of Meillassoux’s next book. I think it will give people a nice insight into what people in UCD are interested in and what kind of reaction Meillassoux’s work comes up against. I found it quite difficult to defend Meillassoux ‘on the fly’ but it certainly helped clarify a number of issues for me regarding my own position and thesis work. So I must thank all the people who were there. The question and answer section will also be of interest to Deleuzians, Hegelians, Kantians, Adornites, Heideggerians, Derrideans, Nietzscheans and Platonists. Toward the end I also sort of give an idea about what my thesis, and the book, will try to do.

New Blog from Stuart Elden

Stuart Elden has just started a new blog and he is dealing with the news about the closure of the Middlesex philosophy department. Do please check it out. I am glad to see Elden writing on all this as his work is always reasonable and considered.

Save Middlesex Philosophy

Sign the petition

Facebook group

Updates can be found on Nina Power's blog.

Info:

“MIDDLESEX TO CLOSE ITS TOP-RATED SUBJECT
Late on Monday 26 April 2010, the Dean of the School of Arts and Education at Middlesex University, announced the closure of all its Philosophy programmes, including the largest MA programme in Philosophy in the UK. Philosophy is the highest research-ranked subject in the University, and Middlesex is the highest rated of all the post-92 institutions in the subject.

Restriction of student opportunities and choice
Philosophy at Middlesex is one of only a handful of programmes left in the UK that provides both research-driven and inclusive post-graduate teaching and supervision aimed at a wide range of students, specialist and non-specialist. It is the main centre in the UK for the study of European or ‘continental’ philosophy.

Research
The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy is the main centre for ‘continental’ philosophy in the UK, with an established international reputation, frequent visiting speakers from abroad and increasing numbers of postgraduate students. There are currently 63 postgraduate students in the Centre: 48 MA students and 15 PhD students. 5 PhDs were awarded in 2009. These are remarkable numbers, especially for a small group of six staff.

The Middlesex Philosophy submission to RAE2001 was graded 5, and the 2008 submission was awarded a GPA of 2.80, ranking it joint 13th out of 41 institutions entered in Philosophy above both its main competitors, Warwick and Sussex. It has hosted 2 Leverhulme Fellowships in the last 6 years, and recently completed a £245,000 AHRC-funded research project, ‘Concept and Form: The Cahiers pour l’analyse and Contemporary French Thought’ (which included production of a major web research resource). It recently submitted an application for a 2-year AHRC Project Grant on Transdisciplinarity, and held an international event on Transdisciplinarity in French Thought at the French Institute).”

21st Century Heidegger - added speaker: Andrew Haas

Just a quick note that we have added Andrew Haas to the lineup for the 21st Century Heidegger conference alongside Miguel Beistegui and Joseph Cohen. Our final speaker will be announced shortly.

Being is Flat

I thought this was a really cool visual tool for explaining some of the ideas behind OOO. From Levi Bryant's talk at the OOO conference.

CFP: Twenty First Century Heidegger

Call For Papers: Twenty-First Century Heidegger

DATE: 10th-11th September 2010
VENUE: UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland, University College Dublin


KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Professor Miguel de Beistegui
The University of Warwick

Dr Joseph Cohen
University College Dublin


This two-day conference intends to explore, expand, and contest contemporary research on the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger. The principal aim of the conference is to examine the oppositional,complementary, and sometimes contradictory ways in which Heideggerian scholarship has been developed in the first decade of the twenty first century. Scholars are invited to critically address fundamental questions in the Heideggerian scholarship, including its direction, problems, and potential. The conference hopes to bring together the increasingly disparate approaches to Heidegger’s work, whether those approaches are traditional in their employment of phenomenology and hermeneutics or whether they apply Heidegger’s thinking in new and surprising ways. Papers from a wide variety of disciplines including, but not limited to, philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, cognitive sciences, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, political science, language studies, literature, film studies, geography, and architecture are encouraged. It is hoped that, by bringing together both traditional and contemporary scholars, the conference can initiate, facilitate, and foster further research and collaboration related to Heidegger’s philosophy.

The following list—which is by no means exhaustive or exclusive—contains some of the themes the conference intends to address:

Classic problems and questions of phenomenology and hermeneutics
The overcoming of metaphysics as a task of a new epoch
Papers on recently published volumes from Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe and
recently published translations
The significance or insignificance of the existential analytic for
contemporary society
Space, place, and dwelling in Heidegger’s work
Potential applications of Heidegger’s topology, topography, and geography
Heidegger’s influence on environmental thought and architecture
Heidegger’s relation to literary and film studies
Heidegger’s relationship to Eastern thought and his reception in the East
Political and social issues arising from Heidegger’s engagement with
National Socialism
Heidegger’s contribution to the philosophy of science
Heidegger among the psychiatrists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists
The post-modern and post-continental engagement with Heidegger
The future of Heidegger’s philosophical thought


The conference language is English, and each speaker will be allotted twenty minutes of presentation time. Please e-mail an abstract of approximately 250 words to: heidegger2010@gmail.com. Please include a separate page with the title of the paper, the name of the author, your institutional affiliation, and e-mail address.


ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE: July 23th

Organizers:
Paul Ennis
Dr. Tziovanis Georgakis

Post-Continental Voices webpage/release date

Link.

Just noticed the O books webpage for the book is up. The publishing date is 29 Oct 2010.

The blurb:

This collection of interviews brings together seven post-continental thinkers to discuss their own personal academic development, their experiences of graduate school and their hopes for post-continental philosophy. Each thinker has been chosen for their importance, popularity and potential. Opening with a short introduction this book offers a rare insight into the world of academic philosophy from the inside. Acting as a handbook to post-continental philosophy this book will prepare students for the unique challenges facing academic philosophy in the coming years. The following thinkers appear in the book: Graham Harman, Jeffrey Malpas, Lee Braver, Stuart Elden, Ian Bogost, Levi R. Byrant, and Adrian Ivakhiv.

Interview with Jane Bennett by Peter Gratton

Peter Gratton has just posted an interview with Jane Bennett of Vibrant Matter fame.

Gratton also provides a handy overview of her ideas as an intro so that is worth checking out too. I really enjoyed this line from Bennett:

It doesn’t make sense to me to say we are “simply” our materiality — there is nothing simple about materiality, and neither are material forces and flows best figured as determinate and deterministic. The need to be kind and respectful to other bodies will remain, regardless of whether one understands human individuals and groups as embodied minds/souls or as complex materialities.

Continental Philosophy Research Group

The first post from my own department's Continental Philosophy Research Group has just been posted. It is on Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and it presented by Shane Ward. The discussion today was excellent and it was certainly one of the more vibrant philosophical discussions I've had in a long time. I'm presenting next week on none other than Meillassoux.

If anyone wants to help spread the word about the CPRG blog feel free to post a link.

The Contemporary Continental Terrain

I had planned on posting the presentation I was to give in UCD at the ‘Continental Philosophy’ reading group, but since most people expressed an interest in one on Meillassoux I figured I’d morph this into a blog post. In the reading group my plan was to provide an outline of what ‘continental philosophy’ means to me these days. I tend not to think of this label negatively or that it somehow limits us in some way. I’m quite proud of it as a label and I wear it openly – although not dogmatically. My own department is well known for its expertise in phenomenology and many here are adherents of the phenomenological method in one way or the other. I had planned on plotting some of the internal critiques of phenomenology that also fall under the label of ‘continental philosophy’ recognizing that the Anglo-American critique is of a different breed altogether. What fascinated me when I started to attend conferences was not the encounter with Anglo-American students, who were either bluntly dismissive/disinterested or else wrapped up in their own debates, but the encounter with the new continental style. This style has almost no phenomenological content and I found myself relegated to someone working on the ‘history of philosophy’ or else someone who should really get with the program.

It is possible, but presumably against the whole idea of philosophy, to insulate yourself enough so that you never have to have these encounters. These are plenty of conferences on phenomenology, plenty of strong phenomenology departments, and enough books on Heidegger to keep us going for decades. The average continental conference will often lay out a large array of panels but it is by no means necessary for a continental conference these days to include a distinct panel on phenomenology (which is not to say that some might sneak in – this I try to do myself!). If phenomenology is mentioned it’ll probably be discussed as passé, but this is not done in a nasty way – rather things are assumed to have simply moved on. What has it moved on to? Well it has moved toward reconciliation with metaphysics and it is often called ‘continental metaphysics.’ This is a beautifully Hegelian label since it signals a benign allegiance to the continental tradition, but it carries along, in a nice sublating style, what was once rejected, but is now renewed in continental thinking: metaphysics. If you still think that the preeminent task of continental thinking today is to ‘overcome metaphysics’ or the ‘metaphysics of presence’ then your task has become doubly difficult – you are not only rallying against the old forms of metaphysics, but also the new metaphysics – a metaphysics that speaks in your own language and quotes the same people you do.

This is something different than the label ‘post-continental’ which is sometimes deployed pejoratively as a way to suggest that we are all somehow beyond continental thinking. The idea is that the remaining practitioners of continental philosopher are a hopelessly deluded bunch with no rigour – we are supposed to like the fuzzy stuff and to run away from the hard stuff – like logic. The people who use ‘post-continental’ in this sense probably think we all belong in comparative literature. I have tried to use the phrase in a different sense, one that I think defies its pejorative connotations, and I use it to introduce thinkers who have clearly progressed beyond mimicking the great phenomenologists, but who nonetheless retain an affinity with the tradition. This is one way to think of the term: as a development upon rather than a moving beyond continental thinking. I also tend to deploy it at conferences in a different sense to lock together the dyad of Deleuze/Badiou to signal to my audience that I am discussing the post-phenomenological landscape. By no means do I want to suggest that this is the proper way to use the term. I’ve had enough debates about my own particular usage to last me a lifetime (in Dundee especially!), but until someone comes up with a handier term I’ll stick with it.

This dyad I find particularly important because both Deleuze and Badiou, who I must stress I do not want to want to introduce as the ‘new’ but as a way toward the new stuff, are both distinctly post-phenomenological i.e. neither depends on a kind of phenomenological jumpstart to get somewhere else. They develop their systems in open indifference to the phenomenological tradition hence why their work has proved so refreshing. Like most Anglo-American philosophers post-continental people think the phenomenological heritage sounds like one long, tortured language game with nothing to offer at the end. It looks like a meta-discourse: navel gazing about navel gazing. Since phenomenologists tend to discuss nothing else but other phenomenologists (with some notable exceptions: Lingis) then it has long since forfeited its claim to be anything else but a meditation on the history of its own development. I am sure we can all at least recognize our flaws here, but unlike the encounter with Anglo-American philosophy, where there might genuinely be a lack of charity/sympathy in the dialogue, both Badiou and Deleuze are critical without, I think, being hostile.

What is interesting about the post-continental thinkers, from the perspective of lineage, is that they have developed their own minor, somewhat subversive ‘canon.’ Peripheral names begin to crop up: the Stoics, Hume, Bergson, and Whitehead for example with Deleuze. Badiou even discusses positively such phenomenological villains as Descartes as when he ends his magnum opus Being and Event with a meditation on Descartes/Lacan. In France this revised mathematical form of philosophy has been quite influential and it culminates in my own favourite contemporary thinker: Quentin Meillassoux. It was pointed out to me recently that this choice could not be more anti-Heideggerian and reflecting on Meillassoux lets me think about I can live a kind of double-life: the hypnotizing flicker of the phenomenological reduction on the one hand and a bold and assured speculative rationalism on the other. So clearly Badiou does not begin by bracketing the natural/theoretical attitude. The truths of science are not to be set aside nor are they somehow to be discussed in that tortured, faux outraged manner that phenomenologists tend to discuss science: as a kind of abstracting, objectifying or representational mode of looking at the world. For Badiou representation, at least mathematical representation is quite capable of capturing the real and Deleuze argues that philosophers should not complain about being too abstract – they should, as John Mullarkey explains his position, become more abstract.

Badiou is fascinating for this reason personally. You do ontology with mathematics!: set theory in Being and Event, category theory in The Logic of Worlds. But this is no dry formalism. Badiou is perhaps the most politically engaged philosopher there is at the moment – after, as is perhaps obvious, Slavoj Zizek. Badiou presents some difficultly because of this mathematical reliance and I’ve witnessed at conferences a certain confusion about the denser mathematical aspects of his theory (a generalized confusion openly admitted in the best Gadameresque style of mutual aid), but from what I can gather at the moment a wide range of graduate students are working on Badiou and the political in particular. Badiou, alongside Deleuze, represents perhaps the strongest challenge to phenomenology there is. The two together are a force to be reckoned with!

Then we have speculative realism moving forward. With the Dundee conference things have moved on I am sure – the very name has been altered. Graham Harman has suggested that with the success of the Dundee event “...I don’t think it would be off the mark to speak of ‘post-Dundee speculative realism.” In a paper I have submitted I want to discuss this turn as second wave speculative realism: the speculative realist community and all that entails. OK so what unites this community? The operative term is not so much speculative as it is realist. As one of the few continental realists about the place it is probably obvious that these thinkers sparked my interest. Certainly their existence has confirmed that I am not totally mad/alone when it comes to this important epistemological decision [ontology is different, but that is perhaps for another discussion]. Most of the speculative realists tend toward some form of realism – it could be mind-independent realism, ‘mathematical’ realism, phenomenological realism [which is a tradition in its own right of course], direct/robust realism, or as in my own case conceptual realism [and even Hegel was a conceptual realist!].
This is an important shift in our often quite antirealist tradition.

In my work in progress paper I was given a really nice way to think about speculative realism and it came, perhaps unsurprisingly, from the Anglo-American side of things where speculative realism tends to get something of a better response than in more traditional continental philosophy circles – although this seems to be changing. I was asked if what was going on was a kind of reworking of the ‘Tractatus’ such that a speculative realism begins at the end: rejecting that ‘what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence’ and then running backwards to ‘the world is all that is the case.’ Except there is a slight modification that runs as follows: ‘what we cannot talk about directly we must speculate upon’ and from this speculative vantage point we reassert our right to know ‘what is the case.’ All people, as Aristotle tells us, desire to speculate. If we give up our metaphysical intuition that speculation can be rational, rather than wild, then we veer dangerously close to getting lost in the woods with Heidegger forever.

New Paper: A Contemporary Challenge to Transcendental Phenomenology

I was hoping to post this on my return from Sweden but things seem to messed up travelwise to make it there. The paper was supposed to be delivered at the Nordic Society for Phenomenology conference, 2010.

Here is a link to the paper.

I have seen the future brother and it is...

Readers may have noticed that things have gone a little bit quiet here, but I have taken the past week or two to reassess exactly what it is I see myself as doing. I figured I’d lay out my master plan for the coming years as I zero into my PhD submission date sometime this year. Pretty soon I’ll have fulfilled my yearly tasks –a couple of conferences (Dundee, Stockholm), submitted a bunch of articles [one on Deleuze, one on Heidegger and space, one on Heidegger and technology, and two that are at the might-be-articles stage that are both on nature/science including a collaboration if all goes well, one I think from the Dundee conference, and a possible article on the Husserl-McDowell connection]. Obviously this will mean that I will be somewhat exposing myself out there a little bit more since I have not written much previously and this time next year I think it should be pretty clear where I stand on a few issues. I should also have Speculations out by June-July and we have leapt from 5 to 7 articles in the past few weeks and I think people should find it helpful as a kind of place to keep the speculative realism ball rolling (on this I have a few things to say in a reading group in two weeks and I’ll post up the idea, but essentially I’ll be hinting at where I think SR can go). There is also the Heidegger conference in September which is now more or less a few weeks away from CFP stage, but of course I’ll keep everyone informed about all that. On another side note my own department has started a ‘Continental Philosophy Research Group’ – I’ll post a link to the blog when all is set up, but I think it’ll give people a taste of what is happening here in UCD [including not one but two Hegel symposiums!].

But what I really want to talk about is the book [the sole authored one; the interviews are at the presses as we speak!]. Once I’ve completed my first chapter (yes you heard that right...) of the thesis I’ll probably have things locked down by the time I hit Bonn in June. This first chapter will introduce what I am slowly coming to consider my concerns proper: conceptual-transcendental-phenomenological realism. Essentially I want to explore the fringes of Braver’s notion that there is a history of continental antirealism and argue for the other side, but without claiming that continental realism is the ‘true’ state of affairs – in other words it is not a refutation and the best I could hope for in deference to that wonderful piece of scholarship is some kind of supplementary role. My first thesis chapter will make up the core of the book for Zero but I see it more and more as a preparation for my proposed case study of continental realism: Heidegger (the choice being based on my own familiarity but also because I worry about his absence in all the new work you guys are doing). So this summer I’ll be doing a Harmanesque Manhattan project of reading as much Heidegger from beginning to end starting in July and ending in September [so I won’t pull off the whole thing just the texts that I think are useful for the thesis]. Obviously this will change the nature of the blog and my interests, but it might make for interesting reading nonetheless and be a little bit more faithful to the blog title. After that I hit Freiburg and I’m still not sure what I’ll study but perhaps a similar case study of another continental thinker (so many choices!, but Hegel is a distinct possibility although I have met such awesome Hegelians I wonder whether I should pick someone else since they have him covered so well].

Anyway this is all to come, but for now my goal is to finish those articles in May freeing me up for the completion of the German idealist backdrop that is required at the beginning of my thesis. I have Stockholm next week and I’ll be bringing Meillassoux’s critique to the phenomenological research community so it should be interesting! I’ll post up the paper, but I’ll see if I can get some recordings of papers that might be relevant to the SR community, but I’ll also try to grab some Heidegger papers if possible since it is one of the few conferences I’m attending in a long time where Heidegger is all over the place (hence the need for the conference in September).

Dundee report for Speculations (report needed)

If anyone is interested in writing up a short report on the Dundee conference (few hundred words) do let me know. If nobody is willing to do so how do the various bloggers feel about having their blog posts collated into a report?