All posts filed under: Uncategorized

New Translation of Guattari’s Seminar “Drive, Black Hole”

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Drive, Black Hole 2/10/1980  Original Source: https://www.revue-chimeres.fr/IMG/pdf/810210.pdf Translated by Taylor Adkins 7/22/20  F : Freud’s first topographical theories were quite science-based, neurophysiological; then, along the way, these models become quasi-anthropomorphic; the second topographical theory—the ego that struggles with the id and the grimacing personage of the superego—is presented somewhat as a description that a madman might come up with. As for the Kleinian (and other) extensions concerning the bad mother, that kind of unconscious is […]

New Translation of F. Laruelle’s “Program” (A science for philosophy)

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F. Laruelle. “Programme.” La Décision philosophique 1 (1987): 5-43. Program translated by Taylor Adkins 7/2/20   A science for philosophy   Let’s suppose that we will formulate a project and that it will be necessary to exposit a program, this would be the manifesto: don’t do like philosophers, invent philosophy! Radically change its practice! Multiply its potentialities! Treat it experimentally as a whatever material! Is this possible? We are posing the problem otherwise: this is […]

New Translation of F. Laruelle’s “Prolegomanas to Any Future Science That Would Present Itself as Human”

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Prolegomenas to Any Future Science That Would Present Itself as Human Laruelle. “Prolégomènes à toute science future qui se présenterait comme humaine.” La Décision philosophique 7 (1989: 7-37). Translated by Taylor Adkins An alternative to the conflict between philosophy and the human sciences   For those who endeavor to lay the foundations for a science of man, two already explored paths immediately come to mind. A new metaphysical and political version of man, a version […]

New Translation of Laruelle’s “Toward a Science of Philosophical Decision”

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Toward a Science of Philosophical Decision   F. Laruelle. “Pour une science de la décision philosophique.” Editions Osiris (1987 : 25-40).   Translated by Taylor Adkins (6/16/20)   1. On Philosophy as Science’s Other   To introduce philosophy to science rather than science into philosophy: this task is already found to be posited with philosophy, which is its realization. It is therefore useless to posit it once again. To be a science by becoming one is […]

New Translation of F. Laruelle’s “The Science of Phenomena and the Critique of Phenomenological Decision”

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The Science of Phenomena and the Critique of Phenomenological Decision   F. Laruelle. “La Science des phénomenes et la critique de la décision phénoménologique.” Analecta Husserliana 34 (1991: 115-127). Translated by Taylor Adkins (6/15/20)  1. The Scientific Rectification of Phenomenology   Every science is “science of phenomena.” Yet how do we give a founded and rigorous content to the connection of science and phenomena as such, how do we articulate the one and the other […]

Translation of F. Laruelle’s “The Concept of an Ordinary Ethics or of an Ethics Founded in Man”

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ethics / Laruelle / non-philosophy / ordinary ethics / philosophy / philosophy of ethics / Uncategorized

The Concept of an Ordinary Ethics or of an Ethics Founded in Man F. Laruelle. “Le concept d’une éthique ordinaire ou fondée dans l’homme.” Rue Descartes 7 (1993: 70-82). Translated by Taylor Adkins (6/13/20)             Ordinary ethics: the formula is ambiguous and perhaps must be abandoned. It does not designate the morality inscribed in everydayness, supposedly that of man in opposition to a philosophical ethics. On the contrary, it is opposed to these two ethics […]

New Translation of Félix Guattari’s Seminar “Les Quatres Inconscients 13/01/1981”

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Original Source: https://www.revue-chimeres.fr/13-01-1981-Les-quatre-inconscients Translated by Taylor Adkins, 4/12/2020 Félix Guattari: I am always under a little pressure from M., who asks as frequently as possible for some examples. On the other hand, my concern would be to try to delve deeper into a certain number of theoretical themes. I will try to combine things: I will start with a whole gamut of categorization that I am proposing for assemblages; then I will read a previously […]

Translation of the Introduction to Véronique Bergen’s L’Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze

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Bergen, Véronique.  L’Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze. L’Harmattan: Paris, 2001, 7-14. translated by Taylor Adkins and Lindsay Lerman   Introduction In the declination of “what is called thinking?” and “what does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?[i]”, the reflexive return to the operation of thinking is straightaway to establish–among other things–sometimes the image of a tribunal whose conditioning method confines the regulated exercise of thought to the harmonious circle of subject and object (Kant), sometimes the […]

New Translation of François Laruelle’s Nietzsche contre Heidegger, Chapter 1

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fascism / French Translation / French Translations / heidegger / Laruelle / Nietzsche / Politics / Rebellion / revolution / translation / Uncategorized

Laruelle, François. Nietzsche contre Heidegger. Payot: Paris, 1977, p. 9-20. Translated by Taylor Adkins (For a paragraph-by-paragraph translator’s introduction and exegesis of the following text, go to this threadreaderapp readout)   1. THE TWO POLITICS OF NIETZSCHE 1. Thesis 1: Nietzsche is the revolutionary thinker who corresponds to the era of Imperialism in Capitalism, and more specifically to the era of Fascism in Imperialism. Thesis 2: Nietzsche is, in a double sense, the thinker of fascism; he […]

A New Manuscript by Katerina Kolozova on Non-Philosophical Metaphysics

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gender / Katerina Kolozova / Laruelle / Marx / metaphysics / non-philosophy / science / Uncategorized / wittgenstein

I am happy to announce that my friend Katerina Kolozova has kindly shared with me a chapter from a new book she is working on. Kolozova’s original and groundbreaking work transversalizes (among other things) the concerns of a (Laruellian) non-philosophical nature with those of a Marxian engagement along with an emphasis on subjectivity and gender studies. She is quite a prolific author, and some of her most recent works include Cut of the Real: Subjectivity […]

New Translation of François Laruelle’s “Homo ex Machina” (1980)

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Laruelle, François. “Homo ex Machina”, Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, vol. 170, no. 3, 1980, pp. 325-342. Translated by Taylor Adkins Homo ex Machina How One Becomes Machine-Man We ordinarily recognize a single machine-Man1 tradition. But there are two, perhaps three; they appear the moment when the grouping of the objects of knowledge and history of ideas to which philosophy is accustomed is substituted for another grouping, that of the eras of […]

Philo-fictions and Experimental Texts: Philosophy as Artistic “Whatever” Material

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art / experiment / Laruelle / non-philosophy / philosophy / text / textuality / Uncategorized

A few years ago, I took a graduate seminar on experimental texts at Emory University. Some of the work I have done during my studies I have put up on Fractal Ontology, but I never included this one. I will run you through the basics of the project. First, I wanted to showcase the “consumption” of philosophical texts that I have participated in over the course of my reading. This usually entails me, pen in […]

Celebrating Our 25th Podcast on theorytalk

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Katerina Kolozova / philosophy / podcast / Theory / Philosophy / theorytalk / Uncategorized

Hello everyone! I would like to extend an invitation to check out what Joe and I are doing over at our new theorytalk podcast. We just released our 25th podcast and show no signs at all of slowing down any time soon. For a more complete description, you can find Joe’s earlier post on theorytalk here at Fractal Ontology, and be sure to check out our Patreon page for even more information on what we’re […]

Notes on Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences”

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deconstruction / derrida / Levi-Strauss / Nietzsche / structuralism / Uncategorized

Derrida: “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” From Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978): 278-93. “We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things” (Montaigne). Derrida refers to the history of the concept of structure and an “event” in that history (it should be noted that in this opening paragraph, Derrida himself highlights the bracketing of the term event in quotation marks to […]

Constant’s Seductive Education, or Adolphe’s Astonishment (with translations)

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[Update: I have taken the liberty of translating, by my own limited and critically biased means, the French citations of Constant in this essay. I hope that this makes for a more enjoyable and comprehensible experience! :)]. Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe presents the reader with the guiding inspiration behind its genesis, which is that what is at stake here is a narrative that would feature only two main characters. In his preface to the third edition […]

To Read or Love as She Pleased: Dream-Reading ‘Dora’ through Dora’s Reading-Dream

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They do it in fear and trembling, with an uneasy look over their shoulder to see if some one may not be coming.—Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Touchstone: New York, 1997, p. 92. How are we to approach the singular genre of the case history that Freud develops early on in his psychoanalytic and writing career? This genre is all the more striking in his first case history Dora: An Analysis […]

Notes on ‘Introduction aux sciences génériques’

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The following are notes typed up fairly summarily and quickly from Laruelle’s Introduction aux sciences génériques [Introduction to the Generic Sciences], Paris: Editions Petra, 2008. Since this work hasn’t yet been translated, I have tried to stick closely to Laruelle’s verbiage. Any lack of clarity is definitely on my part. One thing not included in these notes is a little dig that Laruelle makes at Badiou and Deleuze (p. 21). Since I am mentioning it […]

Internetics and Conviviality

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So I thoroughly enjoyed reading through two books this weekend: Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum and Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. The first book focuses on the geographically grounded physicality of the internet and is quite fascinating insofar as it brings it back down into the mud of things in flesh and blood away from the heavenly […]

New Translation(s) of Laruelle on Univocal Press

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Over at Univocal Publishing there is a new translation of Laruelle’s essay on non-ethics available on their blog. Be sure to go over and check this out here: http://univocalpublishing.com/blog/108-the-concept-of-an-ordinary-ethics-or-ethics-founded-in-man. Hopefully this translation will help bring attention to the great work they are doing already. Be sure to check out the titles they have already published, and expect to see more Laruelle in the future (I’ll be publishing two of Laruelle’s translations with them next spring. […]

Odysseus, the Stranger-subject

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So Odysseus is telling the truth when he says he is nobody. This truth—told as a lie, functioning as a trick—allows him to escape, but Odysseus cannot stop there: he has to step over the line (hubris) and shout out his name to the Cyclops, he has to brag that the great Odysseus bested the Cyclops. What can we make of this? Precisely that Odysseus is not Odysseus until he says his name.

Animal

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The status of the animal raises a number of critical questions — for psychology, for political economy, but also for philosophy, gathering together the problem of the meaning of the animal as well as the question of the nature of the relationship between human beings and animals. We shall attempt to explore the problematic status of the animal through the investigation of the status of animals in antiquity. What might ancient beliefs in metempsychosis, and the ancient practices of […]

Three Hundred

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We would like to take a moment to celebrate a milestone: Fractal Ontology is now over four years old and boasts more than 300 posts. We’ve upgraded our theme to celebrate. We are hoping that it might also serve to make navigating through our archives a bit more accessible and pleasant. We would like to invite you to explore! We would also like to take this oppourtunity to express our heartfelt gratitude for those who […]

Simmel and Simondon: From the Ventures of Life to the Advent of Adventure

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I have added a strange note to the end of this post that…trails off at the end. When you see it, if you do, good reader, (ha, old conventions are funny), it will make sense that it does not make sense (to which, they replied, you mean the paper or the note?) What a wonderful audience. Anyway, this paper needs to be cleaned up immensely (as I specify later), so please be patient and suspend […]

‘Aversi sumus, perversi sumus’ : Augustine and the Eclipse of God

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The following is an essay that I composed for a class last semester on the cultivation of the self. It is a work in progress, and I have added idiosyncratic notes to the work in brackets–don’t mind them if they don’t make sense…In any case, the main inspiration behind this work is my ongoing engagement with F. Laruelle and the term vision-in-One–which I believe in some way can be traced back to Plotinus in some […]

New Post on Gabriel Catren’s Critique of Meillassoux via Speculative Physics

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Over at Stellar Cartographies there is a new post (called: Speculative realism, stamp collecting, and the question of Science) that goes into great detail about Gabriel Catren’s critique of Meillassoux on the basis of theoretical physics and quantum mechanics (lovingly dubbed by the former as “speculative physics”). The majority of the post (in reality almost already essay-length) focuses on Catren’s extensive essay that appeared in Collapse vol. 5 just recently. There are also at least […]

Machinic Unconscious Complete

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I just wanted to throw out there that I have finished the bulk of translating Guattari’s The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Now begins the revision stage of my project, and a few interpolations of quotes from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (I’m using the new Penguin editions, which are fabulous translations btw). I hope this excites some people (I know Joe has been impatient for this…). I, too, am pretty thrilled about this […]

On the Misery of the Unbeliever

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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

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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 […]

Outside

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alterity / awareness / being / difference / inequality / inhumanity / language / levinas / love / metaphysics / Politics / reason / truth / tyranny / Uncategorized / violence

The relation between me and the other commences in the inequality of terms, transcendent to one another, where alterity does not determine the other in a formal sense… It is produced in multiple singularities and not in a being exterior to this number who would count the multiples. The inequality is in this impossibility of the exterior point of view, which alone could abolish it. The relationship that is established–the relationship of teaching, of mastery, […]

Learning to Fly

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acceleration / anti-gravity / Bachelard / belief / brother / celerity / change / dream / dreams / feeling / flight / future / laughter / love / memory / reality / texture / Thought / transformation / truth / Uncategorized / world

Psychologists — and more especially philosophers — pay little attention to the play of miniature frequently introduced into fairy tales. In the eyes of the psychologist, the writer is merely amusing himself when he creates houses that can be set on a pea. But this is a basic absurdity that places the tale on a level with the merest fantasy. And fantasy precludes the writer from entering, really, into the domain of the fantastic. Indeed […]

The Voice of Silence

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1 = 0 / art / clarity / contradiction / courage / cruelty / daybreak / future / God / identity / nature / noise / parasite / science / signal / silence / Uncategorized

Flow. There are no words, only silence; no silences, only words. It’s not as bad as you think. It’s worse. There is no beginning which is not also an end. The fire rages on, infinitely. Beyond time. Above the waves. Can you hear them? Singing? So softly, like angels’ whispering secrets to us. In silence. A broken flaw in the scheme, the impossible number. Ten equals one million. One equals Zero. A flock of birds. […]