event – Fractal Ontology

All posts filed under: event

Sorcery

Monday, March 5, 2012

Sorcery. What is the limit of what a noise can do? A certain noise means extinction for almost all regimes — not only of signs; it is an explosion of intensity or desire which renders the channel inert, background. Semiotosis. Sonority refusing to yield a signal: noise induces a traversal of infinite depths which bursts the strata into pieces, rupturing the semiotic-discursive chains. Noise is also a pure becoming, the becoming-sonorous of an incorporeal field of virtuality. […]

Occupy Theory!

Thursday, December 1, 2011

by Joseph Weissman

comments 2

becoming / event / interconnection / language / philosophy / Politics / self-organization / society

The 99% movement sweeping the globe is indeed something new under the sun. Little molecular revolutions, the occupations are rhizomes; in this clear revolt against neoliberal “realism” who does not see the spirit of sixty-eight, dormant for a long winter of four decades, awakening once more? Thinkers have not only the opportunity but in many ways a profound obligation to help focus and organize the will of the people, to help inspire and to amplify […]

Noises

Friday, March 20, 2009

by Joseph Weissman

comments 9

capitalism / concept / desire / difference / event / language / parasite / problem

Non-expression. Speaking is a donation of words; but in this donation is dramatized an idea of alterity, an uncanny and infinite Power mysteriously unleashed, and this by a seemingly peaceful sharing of signs. Is it possible? Ten thousand years of speaking, and still we are waiting for a sign. Problems. We owe to Deleuze the discovery that the difficulty of a problem is not simply the number of differential elements it assembles within […]

Transparency

Friday, December 19, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

comments 2

activity / alterity / birth / break / darkness / event / evolution / individuation / matter / network / neurosis / sexuality / speech / transformation / world

The world is hollow. In-itself anything is precisely nothing. A thing exists positively only in the precise sense that it exhibits certain forces, that it forms connections or disjunctions with other things, or assemblages of things, in such and such a way. Moreover, is it not necessary that at some point in the process of any machine, there is something that may and must become reduced to a generic and redundant unit? […]

Trajectory

Sunday, December 7, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

comments 7

consciousness / disaster / event / fantasy / intensity / power / recognition / wager

A series of imminent and necessary breakdowns are inherent to the production of desire: first, because desires connect up to an outside, with something which is always unrecognized, which is totally foreign; next, because desire is brought to turn upon itself, it is seduced into betrayal (by resentment, fear, hate, etc.); finally, because desires are always collective, but the individual makes these collective desire their own, digests and reintegrates them. In each case, there is […]

Phantasm

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

Leave a comment

actualization / event / future / moment

Why is every event a kind of plague, war, wound or death? Is this simply to say that there are more unfortunate than fortunate events? No, this is not the case since the question here is about the double structure of every event. With every event, there is indeed the present moment of its actualization, the moment in which the event is embodied in a state of affairs, an individual, or a person, the […]

Notes on Totality and Infinity

Sunday, June 15, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

comments 5

being / blanchot / ethics / event / exteriority / future / gleam / Hegel / history / infinity / judgment / levinas / peace / Politics / totality / vision

Does objectivity, whose harshness and universal power is revealed in war, provide the unique and primordial form in which Being, when it is distinguished from image, dream and subjective abstraction, imposes itself on consciousness? Is the apprehension of an object equivalent to the very moment in which the bonds with truth are woven? Levinas I will not say that the disaster is absolute; on the contrary, it disorients the absolute. It comes and goes, errant […]

Counter-mythology

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

comments 2

being / event / face / gift / infinity / lacan / language / levinas / logic / machine / silence / turbulence / violence

Responsibility is what first enables one to catch sight of and conceive of value. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being 123 Beyond the question of being and non-being, language is not the event — but rather a process of assembling unformed and unspecified elements, an abstract machinics which imagines new forms for itself by correlating the various distinct orders of reality with a plane of consistency in which a unified vision becomes possible — in short uncovering […]

Production, Division, Excess: Spinoza, Nietzsche and the Event

Monday, March 24, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

comments 4

counter-deity / Deleuze / ethics / event / infinity / light / materialism / music / Nietzsche / Plato / poetry / science / socrates / Spinoza / stoicism / theology / virus / void

The essential is never perceived in sheer multiplicity or in first impressions. Henri de Lubac In Nature there is nothing contingent; all things have been caused by the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way. Spinoza, Ethics The wise person is free in two ways which conform to the two poles of ethics: free in the first instance because one’s soul can attain to the interiority of […]

Affectivity, or What is an Event?

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

Leave a comment

affect / becoming / body / celerity / cosmos / double / event / freud / God / gravity / Interpretation / liberation / machine / model / outside / resonance

Events are volcanic. The event opens upon an outside, a beyond, a resonant and enigmatic depth. Events move the world, releasing free and untamed vibrations within and without us. They place being into relation with exteriority. But how does evental resonance work? When the new breaks free it is almost like it suddenly becomes “permitted” to us to learn to see all over again. Perhaps it would be better to say: we are allowed to […]

On the Origin of Duration

Friday, December 28, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

comment 1

becoming / bergson / break / depth / diachrony / divergence / event / experience / flow / fracture / intensity / invention / irreversibility / memory / phenomenology / rhythm / science / sensation / time / victor hugo

Caspar David Friedrich, Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (1824) On The Origin of Duration (Notes towards a “Genealogy” of Time) Time is invention, or it is nothing. Henri Bergson Time is a stutter, a clue, a signal from beyond which comes from within. The concept “temporality” breaks itself, already expresses divergence, it forever escapes our control. The flow of time outruns itself, it is always diachronous, bringing thought straight back to its origin, to […]

Notes on Logic of Sense: Preface, Series 1 and 2, Appendix 1 on Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

by Taylor Adkins

Leave a comment

becoming / Deleuze / event / image / internal resonance / Logic of Sense / metaphysical surface / paradoxes / Plato / sense / signal-sign system / simulacrum

Logic of Sense: Preface Here Deleuze begins by highlighting Carroll and the Stoics for their theory of events; he says that there is a marriage of language and the unconscious at work. Paradoxes imply that sense is a nonexisting entity (xiii). Deleuze claims that the Stoics formed a new image of thought [how can this be linked to Difference and Repetition wherein Deleuze claims that it’s imperative to move beyond a certain dogmatic image of […]

‘The Teacher of the Destruction of the Law:’ Introduction to Alain Badiou’s St. Paul

Friday, September 21, 2007

by Taylor Adkins

comment 1

anti-philosophy / atheism / badiou / Christianity / declaration / event / fidelity / Paul / universal politics

Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Badiou starts off his book with an interesting definition of the fable: A ‘fable’ is that part of a narrative that, so far as we are concerned, fails to touch on any Real, unless it be by virtue of that invisible and indirectly accessible residue sticking to every obvious imaginary (4). Thus Badiou asserts that Paul reduces the Christian narrative […]

Bakhtin’s Chronotopic Events: Notes on Novelistic Space-Time

Friday, September 21, 2007

by Taylor Adkins

comments 7

aesthetics / Bakhtin / chronotope / dialogic imagination / event / genre / literary theory / novel / other / space / time / Todorov

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: UTP, 1981. 84-258. I apologize ahead of time for the informality of this post, but “Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” is an incredible piece of theory, and it’s a shame that it’s size will prevent many readers from engaging with it fully. Thus the need for some hardcore notes. Bakhtin’s chronotope is all […]

Identity and Division

Sunday, August 26, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

comments 5

badiou / distinction / event / identity / void

Identity Project (Skull Lab), oil on old silkscreen frames (February / March 2006) What is the relation between experience and identity? Clearly, a purely logical account of identity cannot lay claim to our ‘experience’ of identity, only its most formal aspects. Even an ontological account of identity, identity as collection of experiences or even identity as a pure cognitive event, would again demonstrate only the tautological function of identity (for example, agent A is that […]

Theses on Sexuality and Sense

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

Leave a comment

event / interface / machine / Politics / sense / sex / violence

Propositions (1) Ontology is the geometry of assemblages, and logic the topology of evolving surfaces. (2) The face is the ultimate object of political violence, or counting. (3) Politics precedes being. Axiom I: The face is an abstract political machine. Proof: Faciality is the enigmatic source of radical freedom, the paradigmatic social assemblage. But in the face we also find the primary form of education, even of confidence — a critical power, and a critical […]