Dialogues (European Perspectives) Review

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Dialogues (European Perspectives) ReviewHere, Deleuze and Parnet give very illuminating and interesting form to many of the ideas that will later be expressed w/Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Excellently translated and insightful-- as though one were listening to Deleuze with an acquaintance speaking of the direction of his theory in the 80's. Highly recommended.Dialogues (European Perspectives) OverviewIn the most accessible and personal of his works, Deleuze examines -through a series of discussions with Claire Parnet -such revealing topics as his own philosophical background and development, the central themes of his work, and some of his relationships, in particular his long association with the philosopher Félix Guattari.--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Four Seminars (Studies in Continental Thought) Review

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Four Seminars (Studies in Continental Thought) ReviewFOUR SEMINARS seems rather fragmentary to me. The text was created by a few people who got together on a number of occasions. Things that are numbered have a lot of firsts on a single page, particularly on page 47, where the topology of being is imagined with three aspects:
Three terms which succeed one another and at the same time indicate three steps along the way of thinking: MEANING -- TRUTH -- PLACE . . .
First, truth. . . .
First, what does "meaning" signify? Meaning in BEING AND TIME is defined in terms of a project region, and projection is the accomplishment of Dasein, which means the ek-static instancy in the openness of being. By ek-sisting, Dasein includes meaning. The thinking that proceeds from BEING AND TIME, in that it gives up the word "meaning of being" in favor of "truth of being," henceforth emphasizes the openness of being itself, rather than the openness of Dasein in regard to this openness of being.
This signifies "the turn," in which thinking always more decisively turns to being as being.
The statements above are taken from 23 lines of text. I have omitted a Greek word for place and a German word for instancy. The ek- form of words pops up so frequently that I noticed a Greek instance on page 54:
What for Aristotle was a development [Auseinanderfolge] (the result of an emerging out of; ek-eis), becomes a succession [Aufeinanderfolge] (through the determination of the result as sequential) -- this due to the fact that the first idea is only an "occult quality," brought into disrepute by the Cartesians, though nevertheless rehabilitated in a certain sense by Leibniz.
This book does not have an index or translation of most Greek terms, but glossaries (pp. 113-118) of German-English and English-German correspondence allow those who are sure of a meaning in one language to check for which word this corresponds to in the other translation. The seminars in 1966, 1968, 1969, and 1973 took place in French, and the German translator, Curd Ochwadt, provides an Afterword with a poem by Martin Heidegger in German which is translated in a note on page 112. There is also an Afterword which appeared in COLLECTED EDITION, VOLUME 15 on Heidegger quoting Hegel's "A torn sock is better than a mended one" (p. 98). If this book did have an index, I'm sure it should contain:
Parmenides, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Marx, Pindar, and Descartes for pages 1-9.
Hegel, Holderlin, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Aristotle, Descartes, Luther, Galileo, William of Ockham, Husserl, Jean Beaufret, Kant, Heraclitus, Newton, Plato, Marx, Kant, Freud and Meister Eckhart for pages 10-34.
I spent a lot of time contemplating page 32, which contains such gems as:
This lived-body is something like the reach of the human body (last night, the moon was closer than the Louvre).
What "seeing" here means is in question, if one admits, despite a well-established French tradition, that cows never see trains pass by.
When Marx says, "Man produces himself, etc. . . . ," it means: "Man is a factory. Man produces himself as he produces his shoes." But what does "Production" mean for Hegel? By no means that man produces the Absolute. Production is the figure of reflection's accomplishment.
Truly complicated matters on September 6, 1969, include a list of seven questions by Roger Munier concerning technology that had been raised on September 11, 1966, a mere 35 years before a famous catastrophe in New York and at the Pentagon. Fifth question: "Will the rapid spreading of technological things not finally bring about an essential poverty, from which a turning around of the human to the truth of its essence becomes possible, even if by a detour of errancy?" (p. 45). Who knew?Four Seminars (Studies in Continental Thought) OverviewIn Four Seminars, Heidegger reviews the entire trajectory of his thoughtand offers unique perspectives on fundamental aspects of his work. First publishedin French in 1976, these seminars were translated into German with Heidegger'sapproval and reissued in 1986 as part of his Gesamtausgabe, volume 15. Topicsconsidered include the Greek understanding of presence, the ontological difference,the notion of system in German Idealism, the power of naming, the problem oftechnology, danger, and enowning. Heidegger's engagements with his philosophicalforebears -- Parmenides, Heraclitus, Kant, and Hegel -- continue in surprisingdialogues with his contemporaries -- Husserl, Marx, and Wittgenstein. Whileproviding important insights into how Heidegger conducted his lectures, theseseminars show him in his maturity reflecting back on his philosophical path. Animportant text for understanding contemporary philosophical debates, Four Seminarsprovides extraordinarily rich material for students and scholars ofHeidegger.

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French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States Review

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French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States ReviewI bought this for my mother based on the review, figuring if she didn't like it, I would. She is a highly educated person, but wasn't familiar with the topic, and I thought it would introduce her to some of the theory that I use, etc. and give her some kind of entry into my academic world.
No dice - she found that you have to already be familiar with the topic to get anything out of this. After reading it, I agree. I found it wholly fascinating, but can understand why someone else who is not in this environment would be lost. The writer makes many assumptions regarding the reader - it's NOT an introduction by any stretch of the imagination.
That being said, it's a good book.
French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States Overview"In such a difficult genre, full of traps and obstacles, French Theory is a success and a remarkable book in every respect: it is fair, balanced, and informed. I am sure this book will become the reference on both sides of the Atlantic." —Jacques Derrida

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a disparate group of radical French thinkers achieved an improbable level of influence and fame in the United States. Compared by at least one journalist to the British rock 'n' roll invasion, the arrival of works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari on American shores in the late 1970s and 1980s caused a sensation.

Outside the academy, "French theory" had a profound impact on the era's emerging identity politics while also becoming, in the 1980s, the target of right-wing propagandists. At the same time in academic departments across the country, their poststructuralist form of radical suspicion transformed disciplines from literature to anthropology to architecture. By the 1990s, French theory was woven deeply into America's cultural and intellectual fabric.

French Theory is the first comprehensive account of the American fortunes of these unlikely philosophical celebrities. François Cusset looks at why America proved to be such fertile ground for French theory, how such demanding writings could become so widely influential, and the peculiarly American readings of these works. Reveling in the gossipy history, Cusset also provides a lively exploration of the many provocative critical practices inspired by French theory. Ultimately, he dares to shine a bright light on the exultation of these thinkers to assess the relevance of critical theory to social and political activism today-showing, finally, how French theory has become inextricably bound with American life.

François Cusset, a writer and intellectual historian, teaches contemporary French thought in Paris at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques and at Columbia University's Reid Hall. His books include Queer Critics and La Décennie.

Jeff Fort is assistant professor of French at the University of California, Davis. He has translated works by Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, and Jean-Luc Nancy.


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Aminadab (French Modernist Library) Review

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Aminadab (French Modernist Library) ReviewThis book was exhausting. It demanded more than reading, and threw off more than sparks of realization. So one has to give way to its continual assault on sense making and find one's own way. As Blanchot's Thomas does in these melted pages, these riveting whirlpools of sentences and heaps of steaming, liquified words. How is it that such diffusion of image and even allegory can be so compelling? It is because every one of those sentences is uttered at the very extremities of the voices's words and one needs to go with them just to get to the next step. Frightful, and exhausting.
Jeff Fort's introduction is brief and pointed in giving the reader a foothold, And it is a good one, but insufficient, as Fort surely knows.
This is an allegory of writing the same way the Odyssey is a novel about a voyage. This is an epic assimilating myth and rousing a sense of a new realm of being. Thomas journeys through a sensibility that has a structure, dimensions, inhabitants, all of whom dissolve before him and dissolve him, bringing him to the darkness, finally, that absorbs all that would not live, leaving just that pure moment -- not of a novel, but of an act of living at the edge, while all that has been constructed, declared, sworn to, cleaned and inscribed utterly disappears. And one is left with raw, pure, coming to a singular life.
Blanchot was not yet at the point of writing the neutral, but he felt its work. His great teachers, Mallarme and Kafka resounded; his great friends, Levinas and Bataille gave words and thus shocks of transmission. The neuter was coming, the book was coming. And that book would be named, "Disappearance," a pure wandering as Fort helps us appreciate, in the fore-naming of "Aminadab."
What would come is that sparking and flecking (Blanchot later quotes from Beckett) where the darkness comes, as through a window into an inscription, as though cut with a diamond and foretold of the young girl and held in amorous embrace of the pure light Lucie, and accompanied by the companion who always hears the sounds of breaking into being, Dom. These are the characters of that great concrescence of the refusal to be obliterated, by law or anything else, and step into first what is singular, and then what can be written of it, for all to mark as they wander along their own paths.
Exhausting. And this is the only way. Blanchot is our host, our guide, the tenant to whom we turn our reading.Aminadab (French Modernist Library) OverviewThe world of Aminadab, Maurice Blanchot's second novel, is dark, bizarre, and fantastic. Reminiscent of Kafka's enclosed and allegorical spaces, Aminadab is both a reconstruction and a deconstruction of power, authority, and hierarchy. The novel opens when Thomas, upon seeing a woman gesture to him from a window of a large boarding house, enters the building and slowly becomes embroiled in its inscrutable workings.
Although Thomas is constantly reassured that he can leave the building, he seems to be separated forever from the world he has left behind. The story consists of Thomas's frustrated attempts to clarify his status as a resident in the building and his misguided interactions with the cast of sickly, depraved, or in some way deformed characters he meets, none of them ever quite what they seem to be. Aminadab, the man who according to legend guards the entrance to the building's underground spaces, is only one of the mysteries reified by the rumors circulating among the residents.Written in a prose that is classical and at times lyrical, Blanchot's novel functions as an allegory referring, above all, to the wandering and striving movement of writing itself.

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