This trajectory is found in the overman of Friedrich Nietzsche, the
supramental being of the Indian yogi-philosopher Sri Aurobindo, or as more
recently contextualized by Gilles Deleuze through the“superfold,” the result of
the folding into the human subject of the rhizomatic triplicity of genetic
code, information technology, and a language at the borders of signification…
The conference is organized by
- Makarand
Paranjape,
- Debashish
Banerji, University of Philosophical Research,
- Richard Carlson,
Pacific Weather,
Call for papers: If you have thoughts on any of these areas and would like to
participate in the conference, please send us a resume and an abstract of your
talk. Our email address is beyondthehuman2014@gmail.com.
The submission deadline is August 15, 2013. Those whose abstracts are selected
will be notified.
Use those GRE words you memorised – they were made for such occasions!
Everything is a discourse and a narrative; do not be afraid to embed yourself
in the dasein of the moment. See what I did back there? Use
words from foreign languages strategically when explaining key points and your
logic fails. It is unlikely that anyone in your audience speaks that language,
and if they do, words like dasein, ding-an-sich, or eudaimonia.
Not only will you appear scholarly, but you will be aided by two things: 1.
even if someone does know these terms, they are ambiguous enough to merit an
entirely different debate, allowing you to skirt the original issue, and 2.
actual scholars also use such terms when talking to each other, lending
legitimacy to the practice… Assuming you speak two or three Indian languages
and the Queen’s English, Western organisations will be grateful for your
expertise on that blasted subcontinent.
Bruno Latour’s Gifford Lectures from Ediburgh are now all
online
from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek
(Graham Harman)
Latour is not only one of the world’s most
important living intellectuals. He is also perhaps the most polarizing author
within Speculative Realist circles (maybe only Laruelle is equally polarizing).
Some of us are in awe of Latour’s
breakthroughs, while others in SR circles treat him (with what I myself regard
as an almost grotesque lack of intellectual taste and foresight) as a sophist
and a relativist hack. I’m as confident in my bet on Latour’s long-term importance as I am
on just about anything, and this despite serious disagreements with some of his
ontology, as I outlined in Prince of Networks.
the difference between my Lovecraft book and my
earlier Lovecraftarticle from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham
Harman)
In the article, I was very hard on the “Kantian” or noumenal reading
of Lovecraft and
defended a Husserlian reading of Lovecraft that
I also linked with cubism in the arts. The difference is that while writing the
book, I decided that both strands are operative in Lovecraft. There are two completely
different major stylistic devices at work in Lovecraft. One of them is the allusion to the unutterable, and I
no longer have any objection to relating that to Kant. The other is the one I
was championing exclusively in my article, in which Lovecraft claims to be describing
something literally but piles up such a ridiculous number of incompatible
descriptions that the bond between the objects and its qualities, while not
withdrawn into a noumenal realm, explicitly becomes an operative principle over
and above its list of qualities. This is what is most typical of Husserl, who’s
as anti-noumenal as it gets but is still a philosopher of objects over and
above their qualities. It’ll all be clear when you finally see the book.
There’s an introductory section, then I analyze 100 individual
passages (not plot summaries, but short passages) from eight of the key
stories, then conclude with some further thoughts. Work on the book only
increased my sense of Lovecraft’s
greatness as a stylist. I’m well aware of the objections that he overwrites his
prose and overloads it with adjectives, but rules like this are always beside
the point. You can do just about anything as a writer as long as you know how
to handle it. At most there is some unevenness in Lovecraft as a stylist, as often
happens with amateurs in any field who are isolated from mainstream critical
feedback.
Comment on Sri Aurobindo’s prose style – by Goutam Ghosal by RJ from Comments for IYSATM by RJ - Mar 4, 2013
I recently read a quote about writer HP Lovecraft that seemed applicable to Sri Aurobindo’s prose
style as well… (Lovecraft was,
IMO, a brilliant writer from a purely literary perspective, though obviously
nowhere near Sri Aurobindo in any sense. I don’t mean to compare them in any
other way than to point out that that comment is insightful.) Of course, even
if one is able to get “past” his style and understand him “intellectually” (like
a student of English literature might), one will not understand anything if the
consciousness is not ready.
Love, Death, and the Sub-Creative Imagination in J. R. R.
Tolkien
from Footnotes to Plato by Matthew David Segall
The chief import of Tolkien’s Art, as I understand it, is that its
example invites us to step into our own roles as cosmic artisans, just at that
moment in world history when so much seems headed for disaster… There is also a
spiritual side to the strange logic underlying Tolkien’s sub-creative vocation.
He says of all his “stuff” that it is “fundamentally concerned with the problem
of the relation of Art (and Sub-creation) and Primary Reality” (xiii). Primary
Reality is the world of daily life, of biological struggle, and, eventually, of
death. The sub-creator, in bringing forth a Secondary Reality (made not of
solid matter, but of story and myth), expresses a desire which not only has no
ordinary biological function, but which indeed usually finds itself at strife
with these functions (xiii). Despite its spiritual motives, the sub-creative
desire “is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real primary world, and
hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it” (xiii).
Death, even ifimaginary, is no less real for all that.
We human sub-creators have, again, two paths open to us upon encountering it.
Haridas Chaudhuri writes in The Evolution of Integral
Consciousness, “One devious root of war-mindedness is the dualistic logic
of the arrogant intellect – the logic of either/or. Dualistic logic says:
Either communism or democracy, either socialism or capitalism, is the ultimate
truth, and thus creates an irreconcilable opposition between them, diving the
world into two warring camps sworn to destroy each other.” Integral Church ~ Religion
2.0: The Formation of the Integral Church By Joran Slane Oppelt
It is a seed that was planted when I discovered the work of Arthur
Koestler and Ken Wilber and that sprouted when I realized that their life’s
work was a continuation of those who came before them — Socrates, Sri
Aurobindo, William James, Aldous Huxley. Continue
reading
Tusar N. Mohapatra March 4, 2013 at 1:35 pm
Sri Aurobindo’s notion of human unity doesn’t envisage any
antagonistic prospect between India
and Europe . Relying upon some stray quote to
build a sound economic scenario is therefore anomalous. [TNM55]
