The period that roughly began in the latter
half of the 19th Century and lasted till about the 1960s in India is truly
a Golden Age in many respects. It was the era that spawned both an upheaval,
and a revival of the highest order. The revival was cultural and spiritual,
which transformed India
and helped an enormous mass of Indians rediscover their own selves. This
revival formed the moral, ethical, spiritual, and philosophical foundations for
the Indian freedom struggle against the British. In today’s parlance, it is
what is today known as Hindu revivalism.
A galaxy of extremely accomplished people who began
this process should rightly be regarded as the true progenitors of the freedom
struggle. As with pretty much everything that India should rightly feel proud of,
the Nehruvian state has long discarded these heroes. Perhaps a Swami
Vivekananda and an Aurobindo Ghosh happen to be the exceptions to this
Nehruvian phenomenon.
Ananda K Coomaraswamy happens to be one such
forgotten hero, a true intellectual warrior who waged a fierce war against
motivated attempts by missionaries and the West to distort and vilify Hinduism
and its various facets. It is a cruel testimony to the kind of depths that
we’ve plumbed because most Indians haven’t even heard the name of this giant…
Pretty prophetic and starkly accurate especially
when we note that the most successful failed B.A was Jawaharlal Nehru who
spawned an ecosystem which is dominated by the likes of the anchors of today’s
English news channels. The price India has paid for perpetuating the
Macaulayite education system is staggering. It has resulted in a continuing
erosion of national and cultural identity. Most of urban India today has
been reduced to a Wasteland inhabited by fabulous imitators of imported Western
ideologies… This is the kind of insight, forthrightness, and honesty that
characterizes everything he’s written, and that which today’s scholarship
lacks.
Histories
of violence and injustice leave marks of damage, despair, and pain. The central
question Daniel Philpott considers in his book
Just and Unjust Peace:
An Ethic of Political Reconciliation is: “What does justice consist of
in the wake of its massive despoliation?” The answer, Philpott argues, is
political reconciliation. At first glance, this answer seems odd… The justice
of reconciliation is not primarily the justice of desert (as in retributive
justice or what Philpott calls balance retributivism) or justice as fairness
(as in Rawls’s theory of distributive justice).
The justice of political reconciliation prioritizes
the repairing of relationships and evaluates the justice of an action on the
basis of what will achieve the repair that injustice creates; it is not
fundamentally about responding to individuals and their actions in a manner
that is in some sense fitting or due. Indeed, rather than resonating with the
justice of retributivism and distributive justice articulated and defended by secularists
and prevalent within liberal democratic communities, part of Philpott’s task is
to problematize and challenge these notions. Of course all traditions,
including secular liberal traditions, have their critics. Restorative justice
is a secular movement, and it is to this understanding of justice that Philpott
appeals when demonstrating that justice as reconciliation can become the
subject of an overlapping consensus that includes secularists. However,
restorative justice remains a somewhat minority view, and thus only a minority
of secularists are likely to be included in the consensus Philpott envisions.
This is a talk I gave back in September for
my colleagues at CIIS during our annual retreat to Esalen in
Big Sur, CA.
Alright, so those of us who haven’t been hoodwinked
by Latour litanies or a form of Husserlian phenomenology presented in a
pedantic form are kind of used to these occasional passive aggressive bullying
outbursts from Harman. The bullying rhetoric from OOOers of various stripes
functions in the same way each time, beginning with some proclamation of good
intention followed incredibly insulting remarks before then putting the onus of
the bullying on the one subjected to the bullying by claiming that it is in
fact they who scream at them…
But when I use the untrademarked version of speculative
realism I am thinking more of the general thrust of this movement towards
realism, engagement with the sciences, materialism, so not Harmanian OOO in any
specific sense. Nor am I thinking there is some filial relation. To my mind
non-philosophy is a living project, not a historical one, and so my claim,
understood by I think readers without weird label protecting agendas, is that
Laruelle’s realist theory sure looks a lot like other realist theories in
Continental philosophy. Harman is very fond of claiming that only he and de
Landa were calling themselves realists back in the 90′s. The truth is that the
early Laruelle as early as Principe
de minorité was calling himself a realist and exploring a form of
thought that would be neither correlatioinist nor absolutist (the main
difference between his work and Meillassoux’s).
Tweets
2h -
Levi Bryant @onticologist 4) This allows
me to bring in all sorts of Lacan, Marx, Baudrillard, etc., without reducing
objects.
2h 3) I've been able to develop a much more
robust place for semiotic machines vis a vis their account of incorporeal
transformation.
2h 2) Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's
account of content and expression,
2h 1) Just hit the 150pg mark in
Onto-Cartography. I'm currently working on a section chapter 5.2 entitled
"Content and Expression".
Back in the 1930s, a French psychoanalyst and
philosopher by the name of Jacques Lacan began his life’s work—an attempt to
create the framework by which the human psyche could be analyzed within modern
civilization. Such was his influence that Lacanian thought not only left a mark
on the field of psychoanalysis but found integration in Marxist thought, most
notably with Michel Foucault,
Jean
Baudrillard and
Slavoj
Zizek. Like many 19th and 20th century thinkers, Lacan was
particularly influenced by George Wilhelm Fredrik Hegel. After failing a
physical to enter the French army, Lacan took to studying psychoanalysis. By
1934 Lacan had published “On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the
Personality.” The work did not cause much of a ripple, except in Parisian
Surrealist circles.
The psychoanalytical umbilicus between Lacanian
psychoanalysis and Surrealism is fairly-well established. A young Lacan
published work in the Surrealist review
Minotaur, and associated
with Andre Breton and the radically-influential novelist and philosopher
Georges
Bataille(author of “The Story of the Eye”). Lacan, inspired by the
Surrealists and their automatic writing, went on to create work that inspired
philosophers like Gilles Deleuze (“Capitalism and Schizophrenia, co-written
with Felix Guatarri), Foucault (especially his
panoptic disciplinary consciousness) and Baudrillard (
simulated
reality); whose work in turn has helped us better understand the modern,
media-driven political world in which we live.
It is true that the Surrealists, only a few years
after coalescing, abandoned the idea of pure automatic writing, with Breton,
Bataille,
Louis
Aragon and Phillipe Souppault, amongst others, writing critical
Surrealist novels. But the efforts in automatism were vital. Language, ossified
by the upper classes and imposed on all throughout history, needed to be
liberated by “pure psychic automatism.” Breton may have been the “high priest
of Surrealism,” ex-communicating members for trivial transgressions, but he was
right about language.
At this moment, I, the writer, and you, the reader,
are partaking at a banquet of language that we did not create—a system
superimposed on our consciousness. The raw material of our minds is rendered by
the symbolic aspect of language, and there is no escaping it; unless one takes
psychedelics, descends into madness, attains a hightened non-symbolic spiritual
state, or disrupts the historical, psychological superstructure of language.
Abstract: Rather than delve into the potential
theo-logic of a Butlerian “constructivist” account of gender, this blog post
proposes that we pause, and instead question the discursive operations
undergirding the very idea of “the future of systematic theology.”
Originally, I wanted to outline a bit of a
Butlerian “constructivist” account of gender and examine the theological
overlay/import, to lay out what I see as a potential alternative to a
“Christianly gendered” theology… In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler is quite clear
that the socially-constructed self does not eliminate agency or norms, or even
the need for norms. The “problem is not with universality,” she explains, “but
with an operation of universality that fails to be responsive to cultural particularity
and fails to undergo a reformulation of itself in response to the social and
cultural conditions it includes within its scope of applicability” (6). The
task, rather, is to acknowledge and interrogate norms, to recognize the
ways norms function to constitute oneself in relation with the other. This is
what seems to be eschewed in many conversations that assume essentialist gender
claims—i.e. the assumed connection between feminism and receptivity.
As I say in an earlier footnote, for a critique of
gender—and sexual—essentialism—I highly recommend Butler’s Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. What Butler does is this text is
demonstrate how discourse shapes reality in terms of producing (gendered)
subjectivities, and that this has oppressive and violent consequences.
The deeper modern science goes in exploring Matter,
the closer it comes to an understanding that there is a spiritual
self-conscious being that manifests itself in the universe, and that Matter is
a form of Spirit. First, the scientists recognized that Matter is Energy. Then
further research yielded the understanding that Energy is Consciousness. When
we look at modern physics, quantum theory, string theory and other cutting-edge
theories, we find scientists now recognizing more and more clearly the
intentionality and the consciousness implicit in the world of Matter. Matter is
not dead, inanimate and simply dense “stuff”. It is actually alive with energy;
in fact, so much energy that releasing it can create enormous power as we see
in atom bombs and nuclear power plants!
What is missing when we see Matter as “inanimate”
is simply that we do not have the ability to see and understand the packed
intensity and density of Matter. Just as we now recognize an electro-magnetic
spectrum that includes waves that are both above and below our threshold of
perception, there are expressions of energy and consciousness both above and
below our ability to perceive them.
This, then, is the “constant” – the Individual
Mind. This is the “epistemological foundation” of this New Science. This
approach was inaugurated by Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School of
Economics, in the 1880s and, after him, fully developed by Ludwig von Mises
during the 20th century.
It was Mises, in the first 100 pages of his Human
Action: A Treatise on Economics, who first outlined the constant features
of the trading human mind, features common to us all - and these he termed
"mental categories" that are embedded within the mind's "logical
structure." Mises took a very different view of this mind, a view that
distinguished him from John Locke and many other philosophers, who believed
that the mind was a tabula rasaupon which experience wrote its own
story. “No,” said Mises, preferring to cite Leibniz, who said, “there is
nothing in the intellect that has not been previously in the senses – except
the intellect itself.”
In other words, the logical structure of the human
mind comes as a “given” to us – given, that is, before any experience. Indeed,
without it, we would not know how to “categorise” experiences. We would not
know how to "grasp the meaning" of the "concepts" these
mental categories represent. There would be no difference between us and the
animals – had it not been for our very human reason.
For example, Capital is one such category Mises
listed, and along with this he listed Income. These are to be found in the
minds of any nomadic herdsman who "counts his sheep" and, while he
may sell of consume some, makes sure that the size of his herd does not
diminish: that is, he is careful not to "consume capital." His
natural "good sense" makes him "accumulate capital."
