The Necessary Intersections of the Human Body: Spinoza

Radical Experiments With Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Body There has always tugged at me a kind of vast and unexplored consequence of Spinoza’s defintion of a single “body” or “individual,” especially when seen in context with his general expressionist ontology. It is that Spinoza defines a body so simply, given in a matrix of the world understood [...]

Conjoined Semiosis: A “Nerve Language” of Bodies

The Polyvalent and Cross-tongued At times with an idea it is best to come up to a phenomena and embrace it as exemplary, a way of showing to others the heart of what you mean, and something of this comes through in the example of Conjoined Twins. I was discussing with my wife the nature [...]

Aggregates, Groups and Trans-semiotics

The Antinomy of Objects Levi at Larval Subjects makes an very interesting post which seeks to point out the constitutive difference between “objects” (or “groups”) and assemblages, how a Unity can be seen to come into being out its “sub-assemblages”; and how this antinomy between an Object and its parts can be best described in [...]

Witnessing Ontologies of Difference

The Full Nelson of Plato Larval Subjects posted what Levi calls “the Full Nelson” of Plato, the exemplary text from the Phaedo which has condemned all of Western Philosophy to a certain kind of choke hold that ever since we have been trying to get out of (to transmute Hegelian dialectics into a single trope [...]

The Synth of Photosynth: Subjection and Engagement

Here: Photosynth of Popolopen Creek [link did not work, now it does] Still experimenting with the notions of Space implict and explicit in Microsoft’s new Photosynth service. Above is a still from my second trial, the first was talked about some in context with Graham Harman’s Object Oriented philosophy. As you might see from the still, the [...]

Augustine’s Own (Anti-)Private Language Argument

An Origin of Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument? I stumbled upon this proto-Private Language argument, even shorter than Wittgenstein’s. The more that I read Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, the more I get the feeling that Wittgenstein indeed had read this text fairly closely (I see many parallels in thought, including the tantamount notion that words are things defined [...]

The Coldness of Spinoza: Was He Really a Spock?

“When he happen’d to be tired by having applyed himself too much to his Philosophical Meditations, he went down Stairs to refresh himself, and discoursed with the people of the House about any thing, that might afford Matter for an ordinary Conversation, and even about trifles. He also took Pleasure in smoaking a Pipe of [...]

Ten White Horses

A Brief Biographical Sketch of Campanella: For Those Unfamiliar Tommaso Campanella had nearly given up when he wrote: I fear that to die is not to improve The human state, for this I do not die: So great and wide is this miserable nest, That, so long in change, there’s no escape. “The Caucasus Sonnet” lines 1-4 [...]

The Súmbolon and the Gold Coin of Poetry

Súmbolon: A. tally, i.e. each of two halves or corresponding pieces of an ἀστράγαλος or other object, which two ξένοι, or any two contracting parties, broke between them, each party keeping one piece, in order to have proof of the identity of the presenter of the other (LSJ) Some quotes from Nietzsche that I never [...]

The Analogy of Philosophical Wealth

Graham Harman makes an interesting analogy by which the philosophical Zizeks and Derridas of the philosophy world are like the Warren Buffetts of the economy. Unlike the somewhat rather weathy Republicans, the ultra-rich are actually liberal minded and generous, not sweating the small stuff, like the 80 million they lost in the market yesterday. These [...]