Human Competence: Achilles On the Mend

  Carl at Dead Voles wrote a pair of ruminations that flowed from an all-too-honest confession of how to write a philosophy paper by Graham Harman (apparent Graham linked to the comments, and then deleted the link, finding the criticism out of bounds). First he critiqued Graham’s very helpful suggestions on how to structurally spruce [...]

Is Latour an Under-Expressed Spinozist?

Selections from The Prince of Networks This posting works as something like a hypothetical dialogue, a reading and response to the first twenty pages or so of Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks. Each of the Latourian points below are largely the words and descriptions taken directly from Harman’s forthcoming book on the renowned sociologist of science, presenting him as a [...]

The Unlived Life and Unnecessary Triviality

Poetix offers a beautiful post on the meaning of the unlived life Latourian/Marxist valuation and its necessary connection to vitalism. “A premise of Marxist economic theory, in particular of the Labour Theory of Value, is that exploitation is odious: the “surplus value” extracted from workers is a part of their life (that is, of their labour) which is [...]

The “Angry Men” Theater Within Beruit: Acting Freely

Zeina Daccache has pressed her passion  for the transformative effects of theatre right into the heart of an unresolvable situation, men largely caught without recourse to or expression for their confined state, a penance paid within one of Lebanon’s most violent high-security prisons. She tells of how nearly 200 persons showed up in an open [...]

Heidegger’s Confusion Over “Truth”

The Blanketing of the Truth The problem is that Heidegger as he examines the Greek concept of truth (aletheia), even as it is investigated by Plato in The Sophist, begins with Aristotle. We can see this plainly in his recounting of the “history” of truth in his lectures on the Platonic Dialogue, as he moves as [...]

Heidegger “Never says…” and Harman says…

The Ghost of Kant Graham Harman wants us to pay very close attention to what a metaphysical thinker says, and not what his framework for thinking implies: What sorts of relations, then, would inanimate things have amongst each other? Well, “Heidegger never says.” But does this mean we can draw no conclusions about it? After [...]