"A desire redoubled is love. But redoubled love becomes delusion." Lacan
I've just finished After the Future by Franco "Bifo" Berardi, a text that I loved for its effortless prose and ability to convey theoretical ideas with a refreshing sense of clarity. Bifo is an expert on Guattari, and so his whole approach to the question of subjectivity is premised on a non-dialectical approach, one that …
Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism is Žižek's most serious, all encompassing, and might I add, most well-structured work to date. While it does not announce a methodology for ideology critique as The Submie Object of Ideology, it consists of a series of problematization's of every prior and current reader/reading of …
Continue reading "On Žižek’s “Less Than Nothing” and Determinate Negation in Google Ideas"
Last night I was happy to present on Lacan and Hegel for the Lutecium: a non-school of Psychoanalysis. My presentation addressed the way that Lacan responds to the master slave dialectic. I've been thrilled to work with this community of philosophers and analysts. You can watch the presentation here. It felt appropriate that I recently …
Continue reading "Video: Hegel and Lacan Seminar – Master and Slave"
When I studied a course on race and philosophy as a graduate student, I wrote on the way in which W.E.B. DuBois incorporated Hegel into his theory of double consciousness and Afro-subjectivity. The irony being that Hegel famously declared African people as lacking the ability to use reason, and thus their civilization was less superior …
Continue reading "The Open System: Jameson’s “The Hegel Variations”"
Hegel's idea of self-alienated spirit has much in common with the state of jahiliyya in Islam. It also has similarities to the Hindu state of "kali-yuga," a state of existence where all of the material world is chaotic, off balance with the spiritual and transcendental realms. This concept of self-alienated spirit is what Marx developed …
A review of Catherine Malabou's book The Future of Hegel. Focusing on plasticity and habit as the two central concepts to Hegel's speculative philosophy.
The strongest argument for a contemporary application of Hegel is Zizek’s Tarrying with the Negative. The treatment of the Logic of Essence within Tarrying with the Negative examines the evolution of “for-itself” to “in-itself,” extending from that, the relationship between an internal and an external that is always at odds, and how these theories of …
Continue reading "A Case for Dialectical Materialism? Zizek’s Tarrying with the Negative"
