Author: Taylor Adkins

On the Misery of the Unbeliever

Sunday, November 23, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 8
Uncategorized

The Bhagavad Gita, like any text or doctrine rigorously indebted to the religious genre of literature, presents the (post)modern or skeptical reader with all the things that Krishna attributes to “cynical people:” perhaps nothing but misery or frustration (83.3). In the same sense, it is an awesome text due to its absoluteness. The word “metaphysics” in philosophy has recently come to designate a form of thought which perpetuates the belief in the necessary or absolute […]

Pre-eminence and the Status of Politics

Thursday, November 20, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comment 1
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“…all superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad—and this indeed applies to innovators in every domain and not only in the domain of priestly and political dogma…” (Daybreak, 14). In contrast to some of the shrewder commentary on Nietzsche’s politically charged philosophy, I […]

The Transformation of Psychoanalysis

Thursday, November 13, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comment 1
guattari / machine / machinic unconscious / ontology / Politics

From the back cover of Guattari’s L’Inconscient machinique (1979): The transformation of psychoanalysis into an essential component of the social order does not justify the renunciation of every analysis of the unconscious; no more than the deadends of revolutionary movements imply the generalized desertion of politics. Finishing with the tyranny of the cogito, accepting that material, biological, social assemblages are capable of “engineering” (machiner) their own kind and creating heterogenous complex universes: such are the conditions […]

New wikipage devoted to Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Sunday, November 2, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comment 1
capitalism and schizophrenia / Deleuze / guattari

Today I’ve just found out that an entire wikipage has been devoted to the works of Deleuze and Guattari here. The site is still in construction, but they have already amassed at least several dozens definition “attempts” (since these are left open for others to add/change, etc.). What I found so interesting about the page was the ability to join the site and add your own bit of commentary, engaging in an intriguing chorus of […]

Family contra the State: Problematizing Aristotle and Confucius

Thursday, October 9, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 3
Aristotle / ontology / Politics

“..for the relationship between people and government is the most pervasive ideal relationship upon which commerce between teacher and pupil, lord and servants, father and family, general and soldier, master and apprentice have unconsciously been modeled.”—Friedrich Nietzsche.  For centuries, the history of philosophy has explored the general opposition set up between Occidental and Oriental philosophy, especially concerning their respective “origins.” Generally speaking, it has been assumed that Western and Eastern philosophies differ over the metaphysical […]

New Lautman Translation “Mathematics and Reality” over at Stellar Cartographies

Tuesday, October 7, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
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Lautman / mathematics / stellar cartographies

Stellar Cartographies has contributed a much-needed translation of one of Albert Lautman’s essays on mathematical reality. Notable themes include Russel, Wittgenstein, Carnap, the Vienna School, Hilbert, philosophy of science, axiomatics, hypercomplex numbers and, you betcha, mathematical reality. Be sure to check this out along with his other translations of Badiou’s logic courses.

Friendship and the State

Monday, September 29, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 6
Aristotle / friendship / justice / Politics

 In chapter 9 of book III of the Politics, Aristotle discusses the general relation between justice and the state. In the course of examining the relation of equality and inequality, Aristotle proposes that the state “exists for the sake of a good life, and not the sake of life only” (1279b31-32). Notice that the good is already predicated of the state in this statement, and it is because of this bias that Aristotle will conclude: […]

Ontology and Science

Tuesday, September 16, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 4
being / heidegger / ontology / science

We could say that Heidegger’s introduction to Being and Time is rigorous and formalized to the extreme, like any other great (self-satisfied) German philosopher. Yet Heidegger also denounces any smack of self-satisfaction that would creep up in a philosophico-ontological investigation. What I want to do here in this short essay is to illuminate how Heidegger formulates the question of Being through Dasein, what this has to do with the ontological tradition and its destruction, and […]

On Recognition, or Why Dogs Make Great Philosophers

Thursday, August 28, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 2
justice / Plato / Politics / sameness / the Republic

There are various moments in the Republic, especially in book II which we will focus on here, where justice is elusively illustrated according to those to whom justice is attributed, i.e. proceeding from types which partake in or lay claim to justice and showing by example not only the essence of justice but how it is in itself good. Now, obviously all of this is evident from the text and does not require repeating except […]

Speculative Heresy: a New Collective Blog on Laruelle and Speculative Realism

Sunday, July 6, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comment 1
heresy / Laruelle / non-philosophy / philosophy / science / speculative realism

In just the past few days, Nick from Accursed Share, Ben from Naught Thought and I have created a new joint blog gathering together translations, book reviews, commentary, reading discussions, etc. on Laruelle, speculative realism and non-philosophy called Speculative Heresy. We conceive it to be an open discussion and collection of different perspectives on this new and still slightly obscure discipline. Generally conceived, non-philosophy is opposed to revolution which is much too often the mode […]

Badiou on Logic

Saturday, July 5, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 3
badiou / godel / logic / mathematics / metamathematics / ontology

Stellar cartographies has translated two different selections of course notes from Badiou’s lectures circa 1980-82 here and here. This translation is short, but extremely concise, so there’s a lot of material to absorb. In particular, the notes help to explain Godel’s achievement and his theorem and offers good insight into Badiou’s own mathematico-ontological project. Definitely check it out for a quick read on a slightly neglected aspect of this philosopher’s expanding corpus. Also be sure […]

(Non-)Epistemology and Ontology: Three more definitions from Laruelle’s Dictionnaire

Thursday, July 3, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 3
Aesthetic / axiom / badiou / epistemology / form / Laruelle / legitimacy / matter / non-philosophy / ontology / science / transcendental

Laruelle, Francois. Dictionnaire de la non-philosophie. Paris, Kime, 1998. Original translation by Taylor Adkins. Non-epistemology Unified theory of science and philosophy that takes for its object and material the discourse which lays claim to a particular mixture of science and philosophy: epistemology. Philosophy recognizes epistemology in two ways which are not always exclusive. It can treat it as a continuation of traditional philosophy of science, crystallized around the Kantian question of the possibility of science, […]

A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter Eight: Lines and Segmentarity

Sunday, June 1, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 4
A Thousand Plateaus / body without organs / BwO / Deleuze and Guattari / deterritorialization / line / line of flight / micropolitics / molarity / molecularity / plane of consistency / segmentarity

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Although Deleuze and Guattari consistently use the line of flight as a concept along with the distinctions between molecularity and molarity throughout the earlier chapters of the book, plateau 8 on the three novellas is the first time that we see the distinctions being formalized. Earlier in plateau 3 on the geology of morals (I say earlier provisionally […]

Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Pragmatics

Monday, May 5, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 4
A Thousand Plateaus / abstract machine / abstraction / assemblages / guattari / machinic unconscious / pragmatics / redundancy / rhizome / Schizoanalysis

Until Marxism, capitalist political economy has also pretended for a long time to pass as the general grammar of all economy, but linguistics still has not found its Marx and Engels who would reset it on its feet. –Guattari, L’Inconscient Machinique, p.30 fn. 14. The sign is a position of desire; but the first sings are the territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies. And if one wants to call this inscription in naked […]

From a Melancholy Science to a Negative Diale(c)t(h)ics

Friday, May 2, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 2
actualization / Adorno / Aristotle / contradiction / freedom / freud / identity / image of thought / Minima Moralia / minor ethics / Negative Dialectics / Negativity / Normativity / psychoanalysis

Everyone will agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality. Emmanuel Levinas—Totality and Infinity It is a question of attaining this will that the event creates in us…It is a question of becoming a citizen of the world—Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense [1] From a Melancholy Science towards a Negative Diale(c)t(h)ics Adorno’s ethics is a “melancholy science” because it has grown weary of the subject. In […]

Normal-neurotic Health in Adorno’s Minima Moralia

Wednesday, April 16, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
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As the projected science of the subject, psychoanalysis positioned itself at the turn of the 20th century both as a liberating investigation of the sources of repression and as a reinforcement of those very sources of domination. Adorno devotes at least 5 of his aphorisms in the first part of Minima Moralia to questions specifically addressing the psychoanalytical promotion of a certain type of sickness all the more difficult to uproot and identify because it […]

Flattening Multiplicity: Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizome

Monday, April 7, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 4
actualization

Taylor Adkins Deleuze and Guattari—Plateau 1 7 April 2008 In their first plateau, Deleuze and Guattari focus on the concept of the rhizome. In establishing a difference between the arborescent image of thought and the rhizomatic, Deleuze and Guattari claim that the rhizome is an anti-genealogy (11) while at the same time arguing that it is the tree which imposes its genealogy: “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, […]

Lacan and the Formula of the “Purloined Letter”

Thursday, February 21, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 4
formula / lacan / Poe / psychoanalysis / Purloined Letter / repetition / signifier / structuralism / subject

Now, it seems more and more clear to us that this subject who speaks is beyond the ego…It’s also the question…to what extent does the symbolic relation, the relation of language, retain its value beyond the subject, in as much as it may be characterized as centred in an ego –by an ego, for an alter-ego? –Jacques Lacan, “Odd or even? Beyond intersubjectivity,”The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II p. 175, 177. In his second […]

The Distance of the Gods : A Note on Aristotle and Friendship

Tuesday, January 29, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
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Aristotle / distance / equality / ethics / friendship / Greek philosophy

In one of the more singular passages of the Nicomachean Ethics (Book VIII, Chapter 7), Aristotle makes several claims about the nature of friendship.  One of these claims is that friendship arises out of (or, we shall say, strives for) equality. Similarly, friendship has a reciprocal nature insofar as the more useful or better of the friends (a father in relation to his son) deserves more love and thus owes less, so to speak. It […]

Nietzsche, Corruption, Exhaustion

Saturday, December 8, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comments 3
corruption / culture / enlightenment / exhaustion / free spirit / Gay Science / individuality / Nietzsche / progress / religion / superstition / war

In book I, section 23 of Gay Science, Nietzsche deploys a theory concerning the rise of the individual in relation to the signs of corruption in a society. This corruption signifies for Nietzsche the development and culmination of superstition in a culture. Superstition in this text is equated with the “second-order free spirit.” Unlike the religious advocate, the superstitious is always more of a person, meaning that the appearance of this attribute is the development […]

Event and Decision at Claremont Graduate University

Friday, December 7, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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badiou / Claremont / conference / Deleuze / ontology / Politics / Whitehead

Joe and I arrived in California on Wednesday for the conference on Badiou, Deleuze, and Whitehead concerning ontology and politics. On Thursday, Justin Clemens and Oliver Feltham (both translators of Badiou) gave a wonderful paper on a rapprochement between Deleuze and Badiou (focusing on the Logic of Sense and Being and Event–seemingly a strange synthesis at first). One of the juicier comparisons was made when Justin reminded us that Deleuze’s nonsense–that which says its own […]

The Will to Virtue and the Morality of Capture

Wednesday, December 5, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comment 1
capture / Christianity / domestication / herd morality / individual / Manu / morality / Nietzsche / power / virtue / war / Zarathustra

    “Neither Manu, nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral” (Twilight, 505). Nietzsche despises the improvers of mankind because they have typically been priests, otherwise known as […]

New Archive Page Added with PDFs!

Friday, November 30, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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Uncategorized

The archive page has recently been added. This page resolves three (minor) problems: it provides another medium for easier reading; it allows for Joe and I to fully differentiate our original posts; and it brings all the posts on one page and makes them permanently and easily accessible. Every post (other than the notes and translations) that appears on the main site will subsequently find its way to the archives in PDF formatting. Both Joe […]

Nietzsche, Pity and Virtue: From the Superfluous to the Exceptional

Thursday, November 29, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comments 2
Antichrist / breeding / Christianity / corruption / exception / individual / kant / morality / Nietzsche / overman / pity / power / species / Spinoza / suffering / superfluous / values / virtue

The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance (The Antichrist, 570). In the opening sections of The Antichrist, Nietzsche raises the question of what type of man shall be bred, continuing a line of thought developed in Twilight of the Idols in relation to the Laws of Manu. In former times, Nietzsche argues, the exceptional human was a fortunate accident; […]

Translations and Schema Upgraded: Now with PDFs

Thursday, November 29, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comments 3
French Translations / Laruelle / notes / schema / Simondon

I have recently added links to the translations and the schema page to PDF files for those that are interested. I would imagine that this would be a much more useful way to orient this resource towards a wider public, or simply to ease the work of having to read text online. I still have yet to fully introduce the translations or the notes that we have on this site. I hope this can become […]

A Short List of Gilbert Simondon’s Vocabulary

Wednesday, November 28, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comments 17
affectivity / allagmatic / becoming / Disparation / emotivity / ensemble / form / hylemorphism / individualization / individuation / information / metastability / milieu / model / modularity / ontogenesis / potential / preindividual / signal / signification / Simondon / subject / system / Transduction / transindividual

1. Affectivity -This term designates a relation between an individualized being and the pre-individual milieu; it is thus heterogeneous to individualized reality. This is why Simondon claims that affectivity, more than perception, indicates a spirituality that is greater than the individualized being (the Sublime) because perception is merely the functions of the structures interior to this being (L’Individuation psychique et collective, p. 108–hereafter cited as IPC). Simondon writes that affectivity is the ground of emotion, […]

Nietzsche and the Capture and Domestication of Peoples

Wednesday, November 14, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comment 1
apparatus of capture / culture / custom / decay / democracy / genealogy / image of thought / individual / instrumentality / Nietzsche / nomad / overman / Politics / power / religion / society / sovereignty / state / unground / universal / universal politics / utopia / war / war machine / warrior / Zarathustra

  “You shall obey—someone and for a long time: else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself”—this appears to me to be the moral imperative of nature which, to be sure, is neither “categorical” as the old Kant would have it (hence the “else”) nor addressed to the individual (what do individuals matter to her?), but to peoples, races, ages, classes—but above all to the whole human animal, to man (Beyond Good […]

Translation from Gilles Deleuze’s Ontology: Véronique Bergen on the Syntheses of the Unconscious in Difference and Repetition

Monday, November 5, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comments 2
Deleuze / Difference and Repetition / differenciation / Eros / French Translation / habit / memory / ontology / Psyche / syntheses of the unconscious / Thanatos / unconscious / Untranslated Theory / virtual

The following is an excerpt on the syntheses of the unconscious in Difference and Repetition from Véronique Bergen’s L’Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. 325-327. Original translation by Taylor Adkins on 11/05/07. The three syntheses of the unconscious in the times developed in Difference and Repetition, the three “beyonds of the pleasure principle”[1] organizing bio-psychic life “correspond to figures of repetition, which appear in the work of a great novelist: the binding, the ever […]

Translation: Véronique Bergen’s Diagram of the Evolution of Deleuzian Concepts

Monday, November 5, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comments 2
A Thousand Plateaus / abstract machine / concept / Deleuze / diagram / Difference and Repetition / French Translation / Logic of Sense / ontology / Véronique Bergen

The following is a translation of a section containing a table of the evolutions of the names of the transcendental field and the operators of differenciating liaisons from L’Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze, Véronique Bergen. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. 545-549. Original translation by Taylor Adkins 11/05/07.

Translation: Michel Serres and the Mathematization of Empiricism

Sunday, November 4, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comment 1
empiricism / entropy / error / French Translation / Hermes / information / information theory / mathematics / negentropy / philosophy of science / sensation / Serres / Untranslated Theory

The following is a translation of Michel Serres’s essay “Mathematization of Empiricism.” from Hermes II: L’Interférence. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972. 195-200. Original translation by Taylor Adkins 11/03/07. The law known as Fechner-Weber’s law can be written S = K log I, and read: sensation grows like the logarithm of the stimulus[1]. The definition of Information, in the contemporary sense, can be written I = K log P, and read: information grows like the logarithm […]

Translation: Two Entries from Francois Zourabichvili’s book on Deleuze’s Vocabulary: Univocity and Pre-Individual Singularities

Saturday, November 3, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comments 8
A Thousand Plateaus / definitions / Deleuze / difference / Difference and Repetition / French Translation / intensity / Logic of Sense / nomadic distribution / ontology / pre-individual / singularities / Theory / Philosophy / transcendental field / univocity / Untranslated Theory / Zourabichvili

The following are two entries from Francois Zourabichvili’s book La vocabulaire de Deleuze. Paris: Ellipses, 2003. Original Translation by Taylor Adkins 11/03/07. Pre-individual Singularities * We cannot accept the alternative which thoroughly compromises psychology, cosmology, and theology: either singularities already comprised in individuals and persons, or the undifferentiated abyss. Only when the world, teeming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singularities, opens up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental […]

Blogosphere Kinships: Activity at Massthink

Friday, November 2, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comments 2
Arthur Danto / Darwinism / Deleuze / Deleuze and Guattari / evolution / hylomorph / identity / Manuel DeLanda / massthink / Nietzsche / philosophy blog / Theory / Philosophy / Uncategorized

I’ve been visiting the massthink blog (populated by Ryan and Aless) for a couple of months now, but, as a bad reader, I failed to leave comments. I was thrilled not only with the content, but more so with the way in which these two have organized their site. I was inspired to see their text page (which encouraged me to put up the bibliography, still under construction) and by the way in which they […]

Translation of Vision-in-One: Additional Definition to Laruelle’s Dictionary of Non-Philosophy

Wednesday, October 31, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comments 3
axiomatics / badiou / Deleuze / determination / French Translation / immanence / Laruelle / non-philosophy / the count / the multiple / the One / the Real / Theory / Philosophy / Untranslated Theory / vision-in-one

The following is an entry from Francois Laruelle’s Dictionnaire de la non-philosophie. Paris: Editions Kimé, 1998. Original translation by Sid Littlefield, 10/31/07. Vision-in-One (One, One-in-One, Real) Primary concept of non-philosophy, equivalent with “One-in-One” or the “Real.” What determines the theory of in-the-last-instance and the pragmatics of the Thought-World (“philosophy”). The vision-in-one is radically immanent and universal; it is the given-without-givenness of the givenness of the Thought-World. Philosophy is the desire and oppression of the One, […]

Zarathustra and Genealogy: Where the State Ceases…

Wednesday, October 31, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comment 1
apparatus of capture / genealogy / Nietzsche / nihilism / nomads / overman / Politics / state / warrior / will to power / Zarathustra

In Book 1 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, there is a speech on the state (“Of the New Idol”) that is surrounded by a speech on war and the warrior prior to it and also a speech “On the Flies of the Marketplace” following it. All three speeches in a way need to be read together (not only in order but also juxtaposed in other ways) to be fully understood. Having said that, I want to […]