All posts filed under: war machine

Difference, Primacy and Peace: Deleuze and Levinas

Saturday, May 24, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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courage / death / Deleuze / dialogue / filiality / identity / levinas / metaphysics / ontology / peace / Politics / state / technology / violence / war machine

Preface It is perhaps time to see in hypocrisy not only a base contingent defect of man, but the underlying rending of a world attached to both the philosophers and the prophets. Levinas, Totality and Infinity 24 I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric; it expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature. The question asked by a character in Sartre’s play Morts […]

Nietzsche and the Capture and Domestication of Peoples

Wednesday, November 14, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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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 […]

The Future of Information

Tuesday, November 13, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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art / counter-symmetry / creativity / culture / difference / divinity / enlightenment / equilibrium / history / image / information / life / nature / noise / probability / revolution / Science / Mathematics / Technology / separation / symmetry / war machine

In reality, goals are absent. Nietzsche Rivalry is only a spectacle; it is the state of appearance. Equilibrium is phenomenal, and the distance is real. The law of opposition belongs to phenomenology; the law of irreversibility or of falling downstream is real. Behind all representation. Michel Serres A Genealogy of Modern Science Science appears to begin with the Greeks: somehow, somewhere, a resentful pre-scientific impulse begins to criticize the unity of life and culture. Some […]

What Can We Create?

Friday, September 28, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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chaos / dialectic / dialogue / difference / family / God / multiplicity / nomad / Politics / state / time / war machine

If there were an exact center to the current political impasse, the short circuit of process, it would be this fact: that free discourse first demands a difference. It could be said that truth is always in conflict with destiny. An illegality, more universal than the universe, breaking the symmetry spontaneously and opening the way onto a new reality. In other words, beyond non-identity, there is yet a non-equality which goes deeper than a face-to-face […]

The Hero and the Kingly Function: Starkadr in Dumezil’s Stakes of the Warrior

Monday, September 3, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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Anti-Oedipus / Dumezil / epic / incest / kingly function / mythology / sovereignty / war machine

There are two versions of the story of Starkadr (Starcatherus), one Latin, the other Old Icelandic. Starkadr is forced into a precarious position, caught between Odin and Thor. Here I will follow the Icelandic tale for concision, only referring to the Latin to offset some details. In the Icelandic tale there are two Starkadrs—the hero’s grandfather is of the same name. The first Starkadr is a powerful giant and is slain by Thor because the […]