Immanent Domain

Down the Rabbit Hole

My partner Liz claims that you never forget your first Hamlet. I think the same thing is true with the first work of philosophy with which you fall in love. 

I was a late bloomer in this regard. I’d had a long flirtation with philosophy: a philosophy minor in college, a graduate English program saturated with Continental Philosophy, and so forth. But it wasn’t until I was a junior professor looking to carve out a little time for myself--a space to continue to grow and to think--that I found the book for me: Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, his book about (no kidding) Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland.

One day a week I’d ensconce myself at my favorite restaurant and dive in for as long as I could spare. That was almost fifteen years ago, and one story of the subsequent years is that I’ve seized on every opportunity to keep expanding that space. I’m grateful that I’ve been blessed with some lucky opportunities in this regard. But it was the prior space--the little assemblage of quiet, Deleuze, and a cappuccino--that gave me a clear sense of where I wanted to go with those opportunities.

So now that Tim Burton’s movie is out (so far we’ve seen it three times), I’ve found myself returning to the Logic of Sense. To borrow one of Alice’s favorite terms (but appropriately enough, in an opposite sense) the book is just as “provoking” as ever.

P.S. Derek Jacobi

Writing for the Hell of It

I've been reading Joshua Clover's 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About. In my (limited) experience, it's the best thing I've ever read about popular music. Clover is capable of summoning the grand sweep of political contradictions and historical change, but with a poet's ear for an apt phrase, and a poet's eye for the telling detail. 

I mean this literally; he's a published poet. I don't think this is coincidental to my enjoyment of the book. One of the sadder aspects of an advanced degree is the way it tends to kill off the pleasure of writing just as writing. Not in the service of some grand political purpose or martyrish personal struggle within the coils of vaguely sinister profession. Nope, just writing for the hell of it.

I have no idea of what Clover's composition process is like. But for me as a reader, I imagine traces of writing for its own sake. I could make all kinds of arguments about how that's a theoretical impossibility; but I don't think it's a psychological impossibility. To say that a distinction can be deconstructed is not to say the distinction is not important. (To the contrary, it's contingency, uncertainty, and instability is what makes it important.)

In any case, Clover's book has inspired me to get back to writing just for the hell of it.

If you like music, I'd encourage you to give it a gander, especially the central chapters on hip hop, rave culture, and grunge.

Pocket Pantheon

 I ’ve been enjoying Alain Badiou’s book of elegies, Pocket Pantheon, in which respect and contempt track and circle one another like mating hawks.  From his introduction:

Those who claim that the human animal is wicked simply want to tame it and turn it into a morose wage-earner or depressed consumer who helps capital to circulate. Given their ability to create eternal truths in various worlds, men have within them the angel that religions saw as their double. That is what philosophy, in the true sense of the word, has always taught us. Before that inner angel can manifest its presence, it must have a principle or maxim, and ultimately it is always the same, even though it can take a wide variety of forms.

Let us choose Mao’s: “Cast away illusions, prepare for struggle.” Hold to the truth, cast away illusions, and fight rather than surrender, whatever the circumstances. In my view, there is only one true philosophy, and the philosophies of the fourteen whose names find shelter in my little pantheon would not want anything more. (viii-ix)

Alain Badiou. Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy. Translated by David Macey. New York: Verso, 2009.

Keep Track of the Damned

Hey Kids!

Keep track of the damned with your very own Infernal Bookmark, complete with every circle of Dante's Hell. Download the acrobat file by clicking the link below.

[If you're reading this on Facebook, it's been kicked over from Warren's blog. Go to this URL to get to the entry & the acrobat file: http://www.immanentdomain.org/2009/06/keep-track-of-the-damned.html]

Download Dante inferno infernal bookmark

Beast-Headed

Thanks to some inspiration from K. Silem Mohammad, I reread the first chapter of The Open: Man & Animal by Giorgio Agamben this morning. Tasty clusters of words:

Theriomorphic: adjective, (esp. of a deity) having an animal form.

Archon: (usually used to refer to an Athenian magistrate) But also in late antiquity some variants of Gnosticism used the term Archon to refer to several servants of the Demiurge, the "creator god," that stood between the human race and a transcendent God that could only be reached through gnosis. In this context they have the role of the angels and demons of the Old Testament.

Decans: In order to give fuller interpretation to the Zodiac Signs, ancient astrologers subdivided each Sign into periods of approximately ten days. These divisions are known as the "decans" or "decantes" and cover modifications of individual traits, attributed to minor planetary influences, which temper or blend with the ruling influence of the period.

Theriocephaly (from Greek θηρίον therion ‘beast’ and κεφαλή kefalí ‘head’) is the condition or quality of having the head of an animal - commonly used to refer the depiction in art of humans (or deities) with animal heads.