Badiou on Speculative Realism

Badiou was kind enough to have 30min one-on-one sessions with students who requested them. I decided to conduct a short interview of sorts following from his celebratory comments regarding Speculative Realism and some of the themes presented in the course thus far which has centered on the theme of negation.
Q: In class the other [...]

Rumblings

Several interesting updates as of late:
Both Graham and Levi have interviews up on Another Heidegger Blog.
Reza has linked together several posts here paying particular attention to narrative-philosophical connections – especially those concerning video games and the possibility of  metaphysics videogame.
As has already been noted Collapse IV is available for download.
Late 2009/2010 promises to be a [...]

Speculative Realism 2.0

Below are my notes from the speculative realist conference in Bristol.  This is not a transcript but what I could manage while still trying to pay attention and enjoy the talks.  The titles are invented and were not given.  My notes on Toscano’s talk are pretty sketchy so if any one wants to submit some [...]

Speculative Anxiety

In the closing pages of The Mathematics of Novelty Sam Gillespie turns to the subject of anxiety to relate Lacan to Badiou. Anxiety for Lacan, as Gillespie points out, centers on the lack of lack – the empty ground of being (p. 118). In terms of other philosophers’ concept of anxiety it is [...]

The Catapulted Brain

Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain? appears a bit alien due to its friendly treatment of neurosciences – yet this is an oddness that is becoming more and more common. Philosophically, Malabou’s book presents itself as somewhat of an enigma – particularly in regards to its alliances – shifting from Deleuze [...]

CFP: Affirmation, Negation and the Politics of Late-Capitalism

The apocalyptic tenor surrounding recent financial crises has both explicitly and implicitly drudged up the undying leftist dream of a post-capitalist society. While Zizek has rightly noted that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, both his politics of refusal as well as Badiou’s politics of affirmation [...]

Call for Debate/Call for Papers – Speculative Realist Politics and Xenoeconomics

Given the posts at Splintering Bone Ashes (1, 2, 3) K-Punk’s responses (1. 2) as well as No Useless Leniency’s Comments (1, 2), Planomenology’s Comments (1) and connections here and here – It seems sensible to dedicate a space to these debates which center on capital, nihilism, utopia, hauntology and the neologisms of xenoeconomics and [...]

Non-Psychoanalysis pt. 2 – Desire and Law

Laruelle defines desire as that which:
“Designates, for non-psychoanalysis, the side of reality of jouissance, itself determined by the Real or Enjoying-without-enjoyment [Joui-sans-jouissance]. Deprived of its philosophical essence of desire of self or desire of the desire of the Other, it loses its determining role which philosophy, through Plato, and psychoanalysis, through Lacan, granted it.”
Laruelle immediately [...]

Non-Psychoanalysis pt. 1 – Drive and the Unconscious

The notion of Drive is one of the more heavily abused concepts of psychoanalysis while simultaneously one of it’s most extracted (save mirror stage induced alienation). Laruelle adopts Drive in relation to his vaunted force-of-thought and states that it is the “Other name for the force (of) thought as organon of the One and [...]

Meillassoux’s Heresy? or The Chaos-God

[The following is a collection of excerpts from a paper I am working on about Meillassoux, Quantum Physics and the return of the anthropic in systems categorically opposed to the high status of the human.]
The theoretical passage, or perhaps more accurately the gaping chasm, between Quentin Meillassoux’s rigorously critical After Finitude to his divinological contribution to Collapse IV ”Spectral Dilemma,” [...]