Laruelle, the Non-Euclidean and Spinoza

  Tracing Out Laruelle’s Kantian Reduction of Spinoza I’ve been having a (very loose) discussion of the relationship between Laruelle and Spinoza over at An und für sich, where Anthony P. Smith is helping me understand where Spinoza and Laruelle diverge. In the last day I’ve been reading up on this nexus, combing through Laruelle’s Response to Deleuze where most of [...]

Back When Speculative Realism was, err, Both Speculative and Real

An und für sich has a nice post up on Laruelle, that begins with a mournful nostalgia for a pre-capitalized Speculative Realism. Unfortunately I never witnessed this brief but golden moment for I was introduced to the movement through the exploitive fourth, but I have seen the afterglow: In addition to making me nostalgic for a time when [...]

The “heart” of Neo-Liberalism, blah, blah, blah

While I try to shrug off all this Neo-liberalism this, and Neo-liberalism that, as other blogsters are using fancy acronyms for Neo-liberalism as if they are busy making entries in the Merck manual, this one passage of qualifications and analogies from the Neo-liberal hating Levi Bryant I find interesting (yes, he has equated Neo-liberalism with Nazism recently): [...]

Graham Harman’s Bad Poetry

Harman makes a note of the criticism no doubt someone has directed towards his writing: Another example is when people accuse a philosophical text of degenerating into “bad poetry” (this is a popular one). The people who use this phrase would be no more supportive of good poetry than of bad; they simply want to [...]

Levi Apparently Has Never Read Harman’s Theory of Causation

Who Is Taking Harman’s Theory Seriously? Levi writes in defense of Harman’s so-called Theory of Vicarious  Causation, after summoning the authority of the Principle of Charity a principle by whose force he tells me that I must assume that Harman actually knows what he is talking about when he proposes a brand new theory of causation. [...]

Pornographic Ecology: Hearthism and the Logic of Political Action

Ecographies The subject of Eco Porn came up over at Tim’s Violent Signs, as he highlights and discusses the site Fuck for forest (FFF), which touts itself as a ‘all natural” ”sexy” way  save the planet. The site and project are one thing (at a few glances, too lallapolooza-burning man/member porn-site for me), but Tim’s general juxtaposition [...]

The Soul Crushed and Twisted by the Mechanical Arts – Plato

Plato’s Prisons of Techne I repost here the quote from the Republic that in usual Platonic, imagistic language is full of potential truths. Here we find Socrates discrediting primarily the sophists, but really by virtue of a whole class of technically skilled [techne] workers, those whose power and knowledge consists in their experiences, and standing, [...]

Bourdieu on Blogging: Where to Find Symbolic Capital?

Living Beyond Your Means, On Credit I don’t have time to summarize in depth, but some may be interested in this discussion over at the Latourian blog We Have Never Been Blogging: Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop. In our back and forth I quote from Bourdieu, from his Homo Academicus, a passage meant to describe the [...]

The Play of Fascist Objects: Object-Orientation and Latour: Updated

Adriano has a really articulate comment he put up under my posting on Latour’s implicit Fascism, Fascist Bindings In Latour: The Blinding Glory of Non-Human Agency. I have to comment on this later, but his essential Bourdieu vs. Latour political point is certainly a compelling one. Its has a double-edged blade when put to Harman and Levi [...]

Fascist Bindings In Latour: The Blinding Glory of Non-Human Agency

–– I’m still reading and digesting the essay, but Steve Fuller’s critical treatment of Latour, with its deep investigation into the economic and political matrix out of which it came is extremely interesting reading, in particular for those that imagine that there is something inherently liberating by either Flat Ontologies, or the raising of objects [...]