4 notes on class, fate and cruel optimism I. I turn on the TV and see a wealthy YouTuber interviewing a Millennial in her early 30s without kids on how to choose the best tiny home to buy with a $35,000 maximum budget. The host of the show is also the real estate agent and … Continue reading the aesthetic is proletarianized
Study Group on the Lumpenproletariat Today
Our study groups will continue with a timely public seminar with scholar and author Clyde Barrow on the class composition of Trumpism and understanding Marx’s concept of the lumpenproletariat. Barrow’s latest book, The Dangerous Class: The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat brings analytical coherence to the concept of the lumpenproletariat, revealing it to be an inherent … Continue reading Study Group on the Lumpenproletariat Today
Socialists Think: Study Group on the Thought of Sylvain Lazarus
Readers may remember my references to the thought of Sylvain Lazarus over the years, including my piece on his Anthropology of the Name. I'm pleased to invite you to join me for a reading circle on Lazarus's thought starting on May 9th and concluding with a plenary event on May 30th featuring different papers on … Continue reading Socialists Think: Study Group on the Thought of Sylvain Lazarus
Is the Stock Market a “Camp”? Towards a Cosmic Politics
Arne De Boever's book Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis is not providing a new psychoanalytic analysis of psychosis, which I immediately thought it might offer. But it is an important contribution to what is now a steadily growing sub-literature within contemporary philosophy and theory on the topic of the market and finance. … Continue reading Is the Stock Market a “Camp”? Towards a Cosmic Politics
Philosophy in Saturated Times
Frank Ruda's For Badiou: Idealism Without Idealism probes the question that has driven a number of interventions into Badiou's thought: what is the role of philosophy in non-evental or saturated times? Saturation is a state of atonality, a state in which the exception is not made actual. Saturation implies the end of a process or procedure of … Continue reading Philosophy in Saturated Times
Confessions of a Mystical Freudian
Of all the different directions Freudian-Marxism took during the twentieth century, Norman O. Brown, the American philosopher, stands out as presenting a particularly compelling version. The first thing to note about Brown is that his project is distinctively American. His thought falls in line with the transcendentalists and with a certain strand of American idealism. He is widely influenced … Continue reading Confessions of a Mystical Freudian
Is All Identity a Social Construct? Towards a Political Taxonomy of Rachel Dolezal
The #RachelDolezal story has sent social media into a tailspin. The details of the story are covered well in this original article from the local Spokane, WA newspaper where Rachel is based. We learn that Rachel Dolezal, a black woman artist and activist, married to a black man with adopted black babies and leader of an NAACP chapter … Continue reading Is All Identity a Social Construct? Towards a Political Taxonomy of Rachel Dolezal
The Crowd and the Collective: Some Speculative Points
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud says that “each individual taken independently is a constitutive part of different crowds." I understand this in two ways: the individual is a part of different crowds in the abstract sense that the crowd is a part of the subjective process in some way. The … Continue reading The Crowd and the Collective: Some Speculative Points
An Interview with Dr. Daniel Tutt about his GCAS Series, “Badiou & Philosophy”
Here is an interview with the Global Center for Advanced Studies.
GCAS Interview with Daniel Tutt on Badiou and Philosophy–To register and study with Alain Badiou & Daniel Tutt please follow this link: https://globalcenterforadvancedstudies.org/gcas-badiou-and-philosophy-series/
Daniel Tutt, PhD
January 11, 2015
Q: What is your relationship with Alain Badiou?
Daniel Tutt: I am a student of Alain Badiou. After attending a couple of his seminars at the European Graduate School, I asked if he would advise my dissertation and he agreed. During the process of working on my dissertation, which looked at the question of community and subjectivity in contemporary thought, I put together the idea of making a film about philosophy, inspired largely by Badiou’s thought. Film is a really long and often-brutal process of discovery, and this film is still ongoing, but Badiou agreed early on to be interviewed for the film. This film is looking at what philosophers have to say about the return of massive social struggles…
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The Queen Mob’s Teahouse
My first post as a blogger for the new webzine Queen Mob's Teahouse is here. I wrote about the affect of shame in Lacan. This is a fun and creative collective for poets and writers of all different stripes. The brainchild of Berfrois, another website I have written for over the years.
Millennial Narcissism as a Problem of Social Recognition
The Other, for Whitman was a wholly (holy) Other to oneself. To embrace this wholly Other other was the highest ethical act of self-love. While the faint torch of Whitman's gestalt love for the All is carried forward by obscurantist New Age spiritualists, millennials are certainly faced with the challenge of narcissism - but not as a choice they take onto themselves. Rather, millennial narcissism shows signs of revolt against a mode of subjectivity that is imposed upon them.
Becoming Noble: Time and Affect in the American Autumn and the Arab Spring
John Protevi's recent essay in The Contemporary Condition on the role of affect in the Occupy Wall Street protests got me thinking about some musings I had over the role of time and pace in the Arab Spring. I'd like to suggest that of all that is made of the interconnections, and there are potentially … Continue reading Becoming Noble: Time and Affect in the American Autumn and the Arab Spring
The #Occupy Movement and Gramsci
As we enter the second or third week of the #Occupy movement, I'm beginning to sense that the momentum is no longer an issue. The movement seems to have gotten past the hump of legitimacy and we're now into a bona fide new wave of social protest. At this point, the movement has already succeeded, … Continue reading The #Occupy Movement and Gramsci
Anything is Possible? Lacan, Meillaisoux and the Ancestral
A big part of Quentin Meillaisoux's philosophy is based on the question of science and its capacity to think the ancestral. Correlationism (post Kantian support for an inherent nothingness to objects) is unable to cope, according to Meillaisoux with ancestral statements, or events that are older than any consciousness. Ancestrality refers to a world prior … Continue reading Anything is Possible? Lacan, Meillaisoux and the Ancestral
Towards an Ethics of Precariousness
Judith Butler is a Jewish philosopher working on an ethics of precariousness that goes back to the original project of Marx, at least as she described it to me after her lecture. While I had encountered Zizek on this precise topic of ethics a few months ago at the University of Penn lecture series, I … Continue reading Towards an Ethics of Precariousness
Poetic Art and the Lacanian Real
The open lecture last night at EGS by Alenka Zupancic stirred up quite a lot of fruitful debate and dialogue. The lecture looked at art and its relation to the real through a commentary on Schiller's essay, On the Employment of The Chorus in Tragedy. The lecture really felt as a philosophy in practice with … Continue reading Poetic Art and the Lacanian Real
What is an Apparatus?
What is an Apparatus? is perhaps the most important essay on Foucault I have read. More than an essay on an esoteric concept from the philosopher of biopower, Agamben’s essay lays out the basis for subjectivity, and how one performs a desubjectifcation. He begins by tracing the genealogy of Foucault’s use of the term apparatus, … Continue reading What is an Apparatus?
Object Petit a and the Left
In Zizek's Tarrying with the Negative, he compares how the American protestant "if it suffers it must be good" attitude to how popular culture has made Mohamed Ali into the "Greatest." Zizek points out that this designation did not come from Ali's toiling in the ring for 25 years, in fact Ali was only the … Continue reading Object Petit a and the Left
Notes on Heidegger’s books on Nietzsche
- In Heidegger's two books on Nietzsche, he is seeking to answer the way in which being as a whole is. The general force of the world is ever-present and yields the closing of the world and of its becoming. The finitude of becoming, the advance and progress of cosmic occurrence into infinity is impossible- … Continue reading Notes on Heidegger’s books on Nietzsche