What follows is the synopsis and chapter one of Carlos’s new book project, which is provisionally titled: Ulysses’s Mast: Prolegomena to a New Critical Philosophy. The book argues that contemporary philosophy has lashed itself to Ulysses’s mast to sail past what Adorno called the coincidence of identity and positivity, being and plenitude. Ulysses’s mast thus…
Seeds of Singing – or, What Else Can a Soul Be and Do
Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) ends with one of the characters, “Paolo,” a bourgeois middle-aged man, running naked through the wilderness out of shame, a profound anti-bourgeois shame. For, while Paolo is able to break off with the bourgeois order that he himself incarnates as both a bourgeois father and businessman, he proves incapable of replacing it…
“It’s a Giraffe” – or, the Dangers of Russian Mysticism
We have written elsewhere on Russian Christian Neo-Fascism. When, in February 2022, Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine we were temporarily residing in St. Petersburg, where Sofya was involved in several artistic projects and Carlos was about to start teaching contemporary philosophy at the European University. In the wake of the invasion we left St….
Russian Christian Neo-Fascism and the Twilight of Practical Reason
Kant’s statue in Kaliningrad, vandalised by Russian hooligans in 2018 “No You Kan’t!” – The Telling Provocation of a Russian Vice-Admiral In September 2020 we illustrated an entry titled “What Is Philosophy?” with a picture of Kant’s statue in present-day Kaliningrad (former Königsberg) splashed with pink paint by Russian hooligans as a mean to protest…
The Eidos of a Mango Tree
I Unlike what Deleuze (1990, pp. 253-66) claims, it is not Plato but Aristotle (in An. Pr., I, 27) who reduces the individual to typological classification (this is an individual mango tree, mango trees belong in the mangifera genus, which are part of the anacardiaceæ family [fig. 1], etc.), which means that, from Aristotle’s standpoint,…
On Concepts
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,…
“We Fight Because We Die” (III): Extra-Modern War and Its Moral Supplement
(N.B. This entry follows from the previous one, titled: “An Existentialist Approach to Extra-Modern War”) Pierre Clastres states that “primitive societies […] invest themselves totally in their religious and ritual life, which unfolds as a continuously repeated affirmation of the communal Self,” and hence that “[e]ach ceremony is a new opportunity to remember that if…
“We Fight Because We Die” (II): An Existentialist Approach to Extra-Modern War
(N.B. This entry complements the previous one, titled “We Fight Because We Die” (I): On Extra-Modern War as a Question of Social Logic.”) We die. It can hardly be minimised. Thus the common ancient-Greek terms for men: θνητοί, “mortals.” During the opening seconds of Robert Gardner’s beautiful ethnographic film, Dead Birds (1964), the camera follows…
“We Fight Because We Die” (I): On Extra-Modern War as a Question of Social Logic
In Chapter 11 of Archeology of Violence, subtitled “War in Primitive Societies” – the term “primitive” has different connotations in French than it has in English: it means something like “original” or “primordial” in the Rousseauian sense, which is overtly non-evolutionist – Pierre Clastres begins by tracing a sharp contrast between two phenomena, namely, the…
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…