All posts filed under: freedom

Clouds

Saturday, October 12, 2013
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
becoming / freedom / machine / metaphysics / noise / secret / variation

A sky englobes and illuminates a terraqueous sphere in the same way a biosphere recollects the scattered spirit of an earth. The sky breathes, soul of the world. Exposing nature and history to free and limitless dynamism, to an open field of differences distributed in depth. The outer limit of vision or terrestrial abstraction. The sky opens onto a virtual whole, exposing a cosmic membrane to continuous creation. How to begin with aerial roots? What […]

Invisible Writing

Sunday, June 8, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 6
alterity / desire / difference / freedom / imperceptible / language / metaphysics / nobility / outside / Politics

The outside, or Other, is accorded an incomparable eminence in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In his penetrating account, metaphysics desires an elsewhere. It persists within an alibi, in which we assert true life as absent. But then our idea of the other would seem to hinge upon the imperceptible — that is, upon an Other which is not other like the bread I eat, or the land in which I dwell. It is not […]

Explosions in the Sky

Wednesday, May 28, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
Leave a comment
ego / freedom / humanity / justice / other / peace / philosophy / Politics / truth / war

Common to both capitalism and democracy is competition as the basic principle of social organization. Politics in a purely competitive key has a majoritarian ring — it is monistic, totalizing, self-absorbed — whereas philosophy from the competitive perspective — and we may wonder whether there have yet been any others — are egologies. The complementary model, or sharing, has been more frequently preached than practiced. Yet it is the meaning of language: the demand for […]

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 […]

Being and Revolution

Tuesday, January 8, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
Leave a comment
critique / decision / determination / epoch / expression / freedom / history / illusion / Marx / metaphysics / networks / Politics / practice / production / religion / slavery / struggle / Thought

  The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. Karl Marx

Beyond Desire: Remarks on Nietzsche and Becoming

Monday, December 10, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comments 5
Anaxagoras / becoming / being / chaos / cosmos / desire / discourse / freedom / infinity / intensity / lacan / morality / morphology / Nietzsche / nous / ontology / phenomenology / psychology / Theory / Philosophy / unconscious

    Topos (biocosm)     In the beginning all things were mixed together; then came understanding and created order. Anaxagoras [1] What had to be accomplished in that chaotic pell-mell of primeval conditions, before all motion, so that the world as it now is might come to be, with its times of day and times of year, all conforming to law, with its manifold beauty and order, all without the addition of any new […]

Freedom and Becoming

Tuesday, October 16, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
Leave a comment
artaud / becoming / chance / change / freedom / hunger / necessity / power / religion / structure / Theory / Philosophy

Jacek Yerka, Port Artaud writes that there is a possibility in theater for the creation of a new freedom, under the light of a “strange sun, [with] an unusually bright light by which the difficult, even the impossible, suddenly appears to be our natural medium.” His unusual description points to the possibility for a radical transformation of psychic and social capability; it also points to the very real likelihood (though not certainty) that all such […]

Empiricism and Power

Tuesday, October 9, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
becoming / control / empirical / fascism / freedom / health / history / liberalism / power / Science / Mathematics / Technology / tradition / transhuman

The modern break with the authority of the past begins with critical history and the possibility of an empirical investigation into reality. A clinical eye belongs to the properly empirical, trans-historical observer — the one who is provocatively “unpersuaded” by traditional interpretations, metaphysical narratives of becoming, who is skeptical of all foundation myths. Through empirical investigation one discovers the curious historical double-articulation of religion and philosophy, i.e., spiritual or psychic forms and collective authority or […]

No Utopia

Wednesday, October 3, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
complexity / deviation / form / freedom / information / instinct / knowledge / origin / society / symmetry / utopia

It is characteristic of our age that we no longer remember how to feel utopia. To experience the absence of place, a break in the flow of time. But the utopian vision is not merely a smooth or well-organized space outside of history, beyond danger and death. It is also a powerful impulse, a primary affect of sociality. The aporetic flash of insight which is glimpsed in the symphonic vision of an actual utopia is […]

Death and the State

Monday, September 24, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
capital / creativity / death / dirt / freedom / hope / machine / production / spectacle / state / static / terror

Everything about the modern State is false: it is cold, mechanical and monstrous. And there is no hope for disruption: machinic production annihilates life. Capital is the calculated sacrifice of whatever is left of spiritual health: profit in exchange for humanity, slavery in exchange for inner value. The enslavement of free creativity is the only positive operation of capital. Without the knowledge of what it is to think adventurously, to journey abroad, to breathe freely, […]

Nietzsche and Basho: Freedom, Morality and Awareness

Wednesday, September 19, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
Basho / chaos / enlightenment / equilibrium / ethics / freedom / language / method / Nietzsche / unity / Zen

How very noble! One who finds awakening in the lightning-flash (Basho) It struck me lately that Nietzsche’s style is not entirely dissimilar to the strategy employed by the Zen koan. I’m thinking in particular of the haikus of Basho: short, aphoristic bursts of supersaturated feelings, pressurized information, aimed to awaken and reorient consciousness towards new directions. The author of the haiku plays a subtle game of exchanging masks. Each voice, whether of the dawn, the […]

‘A Doctrine for Specialists and Philosophers:’ Sartre’s Existential Universalism

Sunday, September 16, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comments 7
Christianity / existentialism / freedom / marxism / ontology / project / responsibility / Sartre / subjectivity / teleology / universal

In his Existentialism and Human Emotions published in 1947, Sartre notes that what existentialists have in common is the fact that “they believe that existence comes before essence—or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective” (3). Yet immediately after establishing this as his existentialist slogan, Sartre begins to argue that objects have essence because they were made according to a certain plan and because they serve a definite purpose. So the essence […]

The Slave and the God of Death

Friday, April 13, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
crisis / democracy / freedom / idealism / imperialism

It’s so easy to act like you forget and get out of answering a difficult question, isn’t it? Politics, of course, provides innumerable and colorful examples, because most of the lying in politics is lying by omission, intentional or not. Take, for instance, white house spokesperson Tony Donahue’s response today to a reporters question regarding whether the bombing of the Iraqi parliament which killed three Iraqi MPs represented a failure of current security operations: “The […]

Against Culture

Friday, March 30, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
culture / difference / freedom / love / name / non-life / other

The identity of the same is an equivocation, a place without place. The “I am” is an assertion of allegiance before it attains any sort of meaningful substance, and this allegiance to the same name in the face of the other is the second term of meaning, the same/other dyad being exceeded by their connectivity, which erases their separate identity– and resolves an irreducible separation by re-inscribing this self-difference already in the name of the […]

Reality (Emptiness, Humor, Freedom)

Saturday, March 17, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
Leave a comment
art / censorship / freedom / humor / resistance

We are all familiar with this comic turnabout in older cartoons: that absurd situation involving, usually, a rampant chase, or sometimes a backwards-treading showdown, which ends with the unfortunate victim running headlong (or deliberately pacing) into frightfully empty space. Suspended oblivious in mid-air off the edge of a cliff, the victim of this joke pantomimes the sprinter’s circular leg motions–and, of course, his forward velocity only stops once he has realized the ground is no […]