One of the many faces of contemporary philosophy expresses at least three interdependent emotional states which interchange depending on the occasion: a concern about how to relate to the Other, a repulsion against any kind of concepts, and a sincere fascination with the non-philosophical. It can all be said to begin with Levinas and Derrida,…
Category: Thought
Mythology’s Oblivion
An epoch – any epoch – can be assessed by both the quantity and the quality of its gods. Christianity has accustomed us to imagine a single god: an all-powerful Father as the hypostasis of human hope; and once that god has been declared dead, the two only gods we still seem capable of evoking…
Diagrams as Figures of Thought (a game)
In a “Klein bottle,” container and content become indiscernible from one another, and so their difference becomes iridescent (i.e. when look from different perspectives, each one seems to change into the other): Diagrams are perfect examples of “Klein bottles,” for they consist in turning conceptual content into visual form, which is also the reason why…
Enigma and Early Greek Thinking
People say that [Homer] died on the island of Ios when he found himself undone because he could not solve the riddle of the fishing boys. The riddle was: “We left whatever we caught and carry whatever we didn’t”. They were obscuring in riddle the fact they actually had discarded whichever of the lice they…
On Difference
In the first place, difference presents itself in two ways: as difference in nature (a dolphin is different from a violin because their respective natures differ) and difference in degree or gradual difference (it is now warmer than it was earlier this morning). Yet difference can be also thought in terms of archetypes and their…
Anthropology as Heterology
It was Herder (1744–1803) who coined the term Volkskunde (pl. Völkerskunde), which may be translated as the “knowledge” of the “popular traditions” and “cultural practices” of a given “nation” or “people.” But it was not until 1839 and 1843 that the first learned ethnological societies were established in Paris and London, respectively. The Ethnological Society…
On Leibniz
“Each singular substance expresses the whole universe in its own way, […] even if [somewhat] confusingly,” writes Leibniz in his Discourse on Metaphysics (§ 9). Let’s risk a gloss: There is no-one who has not received at least once, no matter how briefly, Athena’s or Eros’s or Ares’s visit (i.e. there is no-one who has…
The Other(s) – In Homage to Borges
I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me… – Borges We have already mentioned in a different context a passage in Jean Oury’s Création et schizophrénie in which, inquired by the therapist, a schizophrenic patient evinces her lack of self-recognition: upon looking at herself on a mirror, she sees no…
Turning Physics into Semantics: On Extra-Modern Magic
The real question is not whether the touch of a woodpecker’s beak does in fact cure toothache. It is rather whether there is a point of view from which a woodpecker’s beak and a man’s tooth can be seen as “going together” (the use of this congruity for therapeutic purposes being only one of its…
Что такое философия?
«Необдуманная жизнь не стоит того, чтобы быть прожитой» (Платон) Введение Философия это размышление о том, как мы видим вещи, когда видим их через те или иные идеи, и о том, какие идеи позволяют нам видеть вещи более богатым и сложным (на английском не «difficult», а «сomplex») образом. Также философия это создание новых идей, с помощью…