Virtual City of the Sun

How Philosophies Stand Citied The City of the Solarians Here we find a virtual model of Campanella’s utopian City of the Sun (1602), written of in the year that he received his life sentence for a leadership role in a local failed revolution in Calabria, apparently with the anticipated help of the Turkish fleet, (not to [...]

A Response to Larval Subjects

It seems that Larval Subjects and I had a bit of back and forth over the importance of Lacan in reading the projects of both Deleuze and Guattari. New to her/his weblog, I did not realize the extent to which she/he was committed to Lacanian principles, and my struggle to provide a Deleuzian/Spinozist critique of Lacan ended [...]

Do Küsse and Bisse rhyme? Penthesilea, breaking the injunction

I am reading through Larval Subjects’ crisp recapitulations of, and comments upon, Lacan, [here and here, etc.] And a single line come to me as she/he talks about the non-totalizing effects (or capacities) of language. There is a logic of ”masculine” and a “feminine” failure (incompleteness or inconsistency). The line comes from Kleist’s incalculable play “Penthesilea”, at its lexical apex/end. As [...]

Strategies of Recursivity…the Nemian Lion

O pudor! hirsuti costis exuta leonis Aspera texerunt vellera molle latus! I re-came upon this notepad thought pattern, and the two lines of Ovid. There is a certain sense in which we “wear” our philosophies which bristle with affective and protective tensors of sense, constructed recursively, in self-reference, so as to make a coherence, a non-reductive circulation [...]

Dust…Beware Fantasies of Being

For tho’ he had vanished, tho’ entombed not, Thin, as if the awe of a fugative, was the dust. Lines 255 and 256 of the Antigone stand in the way of any purely immanent, plentitudnal reading of the world’s ontology. A thin layer of dust has made the body of Polynikes “disappear”. In order to understand [...]

A Poem Worth Remembering (subjunctive)

If… Rudyard Kipling If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in [...]

Guattari’s Four Ontologies

For those who have never looked into the thought of Felix Guatarri, the nearly effaced thinker of the pair D & G, for which the name Deleuze can come to regularly stand, I post below a significant section from Gary Genosko’s admirable treatment of Guattari’s primary ideas, Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction. The selection deals [...]

Spatial Voice: Wuthering Heights and Speakings from the Heart of a Topos

[I have been discussing and thinking-about some of Eliminative Culinarism's analysis of Deleuze in terms of hauntology, her/his notion that in the self-affirmation of a line of flight produces a fundamental negative-determination, a negative-binding against the ground of the undetermined, which results in the haunting by the Dead (if I summarize it correctly). It lead me to [...]

Keller’s “Water” and Anarchic Hand Syndrome

The Mystery of Language Above is the pump at which Helen Keller learned her first word, “water” (signed). The account of which is here: Helen had until now not yet fully understood the meaning of words. When Anne led her to the water pump on 5 April 1887, all that was about to change. As [...]

Big Dog: Our Selves

Witness (and I do mean witness…behold) the latest robotic lifeform, Big Dog. What I am most interested in are my (and others) instictive ethics responses to this display. Watch the quadruped climb with jutting rhythm up the hill, making almost a prance of it, watch it recover elegantly from a sidelong kick, and wince as [...]