Transcendence or Immanence: Cake-and-eat-it-too-ism

  Unwrapping Christmas Gifts This is my last post on “The Autonomy of Affect” and I expect to go onto the rest of the book. Near the end Massumi makes a fantastic point about the somewhat false problem of transcendence vs. immanence, something that he also perceptively links to our spatializaton of concepts, and to his own prescription [...]

Žižek Asks “What is Spinoza?”: Tarrying With a Negative

Where Spinoza Diverts From History Through some recent cursory discussion in which arose the comparison between Lacan’s analytic three realms of Imaginary, Symbolic, Real and Spinoza three knowledges (Imaginary, Rational and Intutional) a very important homology upon which their differences are perhaps best spelled out, the subject of Žižek’s take on Spinoza reoccurred to me. I had [...]

Spinoza and State Torture and Other Unfeeling Things

Eric asked a very important question in response to my post on Spinoza, Cybernetics and Chaoplexity. I repost my answer if for no other reasons that it sketches out in its links significant ramifications of the theoretical interpretation of what an affect is, and the role of empathy in social consciousness. Additionally, the idea of [...]

Balibar’s Spinoza and Politics: The Braids of Reason and Passion

The life of the passions, like that of reason, is similarly conditioned by the struggle to persevere in being; like reason, the passions express a natural (though inadequate) mode of human Desire. Does this mean that the passions, which are a constant cause of conflict between men, represent the antithesis of sociabilty? Not at all. [...]

Some Rough Thoughts on the Conatus – Spinoza

Michael at Complete Lies asked in a comment on my last post for Spinoza’s take on the conatus, so I thought I should post my brief response over here as well. Perhaps this has some interest for others as well: The conatus is really central Spinoza’s telling of the world, though perhaps not with the [...]

Graham Harman’s New Weblog: Object-Oriented Philosophy

Graham Harman’s new weblog has begun, and one can only look forward to the Latour and Heidegger friendly development of his metaphysical thought (responded to in brief by me here). In his opening post, My Favorite Philosophers, he lists them in this order, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Plato and then an unexpected Brentano, Plotinus (a hidden favorite [...]

Visual and Lyrical Spinoza

In order to pursue the inner, intelligible yet affective kernel of Yannis Kyriakides’ lyrical rendition of Spinoza’s defintions of the affects, written about here, I shot and edited this short visual meditation on the music he composed, brought through the Latinity. It is but a stone I found in a stream nearby my house, caught in and expressing an aura [...]

Spinoza Opera, Spinoza Sung

I have had the extraordinary pleasure today of listening to what can only be called a Spinoza Opera, recordings of music written for the 2002 VeenFabriek performance of Spinoza: I am not where I think myself to be  [performance website]. It is an thought-provoking rendition of both Spinoza’s defintions of the affects, taken from the end of [...]

The Trick of Dogs: Etiologic, Affection and Triangulation, Part III of IV

A Spinoza Advisement to Reconcile Davidson to Wittgenstein Part III of IV, following part I, and part II        At this point I would like to leave off from Davidson’s theory, in its particulars, and take it up at another level, for Wittgenstein’s idea of a governing commonality of behavior sheds light back upon our [...]

The Reality of the Affects: Spinoza’s Plotinian Real

In counterbalance to the points made in the post below, I have the following thoughts which stem from Lilli Alanen’s response to Della Rocca: In reading Alanen’s response to Della Rocca’s “Rationalism Run Amok” I have a few questions. In particular it is her trouble with the idea that all affects are illusionary. Here is the germ of it: [...]