Harman, Withdrawal, and Vacuum Packed Objects: My Gratitude
from Larval Subjects May 30, 2012
It’s funny how very random and short encounters can
have such a decisive impact on you. Harman completely changed my thought
and direction. You could say that I got my ass handed to me, though in a
very generous and friendly way. He made crushing arguments against my
relationism from which I’ll never recover, he directed me to compelling defenses
of realism such as Bhaskar’s Realist Theory of Science (a
completely decisive book for me), he introduced me to Latour, and he forced me
to completely rethink my social constructivism and linguistic idealism.
Harman created work for me or the necessity of a complete
revision of my thought… Harman and I might not see eye to eye on a number of
points, but these are the points where he fundamentally transformed my way of
thinking about the world and being. [Levi does in fact a better job than anyone
of carrying out real debate in the blogosophere rather than in more traditional
academic media. on
Bryant’s philosophy from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek
(Graham Harman)]
Larval Subjects March 12, 2007 Scattered
Thoughts on Dialectical Reason Posted by larvalsubjects 7:20 PM, April 27, 2009 9:24 AM 8:05 AM
For me, Hegel’s Science of Logic has
always been the great white whale, Ulysses, or Finnegans
Wake of philosophy… Anyone who musters the will to read the Science
of Logic with open eyes, free of the invectives that have been
levelled against Hegel by figures such as Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida, will be
deeply rewarded with the conceptual clarity he brings to the table and the
various conflicts that he unfolds and which repeat again and again in a variety
of different structures of thought. Despite its Joycean prose, it is a work
worth studying carefully and returning to again and again as an endless source
of ideas.
Ross
Wolfe Says: May 21, 2011 at 9:00 pm Levi, I could see you making a case for a
“catastrophic betrayal” of Marxist materialism for Fromm, Marcuse, Habermas,
and the late (1970s) Horkheimer, but not for Adorno, the early Horkheimer, or
Lowenthal. And certainly not Pollock. The main inspirations for their work,
Georg, Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin were all
staunch Marxists, as well. It’s with the French that Marxism gets dicey, with
Althusser and Balibar and so on. Badiou is a Maoist; I think that speaks for
itself. I would still say that Henri Lefebvre is salvageable. With all of these
thinkers, far from assimilating Marx to bourgeois thought, their work was a
relentless critique of bourgeois ideology from beginning to end.
larvalsubjects Says:
May 21, 2011 at 10:02 pm I see figures like Adorno as betrayals of
Marx because they turn away from Marx’s materialism and return to idealism.
What is it that Adorno is constantly analyzing? Ideology or cultural content.
larvalsubjects Says:
May 21, 2011 at 10:51 pm The moment I hear terms like “vitalism” I
hear evocations of spooky immaterial life-forces for which there’s no need or
evidence whatsoever. I take it that Bennett is talking about things we’re all
accustomed to by now under the title of “self-organization”, “emergence”, etc.
I’d prefer to just talk about these things rather than drawing on the
discredited tradition of vitalism. I’m even more hostile to panpsychism.
Comment on My words will remain imprinted on your soul by
Sandeep from Comments for IYSATM by Sandeep
> Thankfully,
Derrida seems to be on a welcome pitch here instead of being derided.
Yes, and for that I must thank Harold Coward for his
book which magically decrypts Derrida’s elliptical prose. As you yourself
replied to someone: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do,
sir? – John Maynard Keynes”
> That
would lead one to Chomsky and Chalmers, however.
I haven’t gotten that far yet. Hopefully, in the
near future.
Permanent
Link 10:15 PM The tension between Hegel and Nietzsche, or
that between historicism and individual will is a constant and living dialog in
Sri Aurobindo and it is this dialog which he is directing us towards.
Unfortunately, humankind finds it more convenient to rest in belief systems
which they can adulate and have no need to emulate. DB Re: 100 Years of
Sri Aurobindo on Evolution: The Illusion of Human Progress and the Ideal of
Human Unity (part 5 of 6) by Debashish on Fri 03 Apr 2009 12:19 PM PDT
In my college days I was a great admirer of Hegel,
whom I regarded as the greatest philosopher that had ever lived... The
influence of Hegel, however, did not last long... I refer, in the first place,
to the great sage of Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo, with whose philosophy I first
became acquainted in the winter of 1939-40, when his great work The
Life divine, which had already appeared in the pages of the “Arya,” was
published in a revised and greatly enlarged form. I regret very much that I had
not read this great work when it appeared in the pages of the “Arya,” for if I
had done so, it would have saved me a number of years of philosophical
wanderings in search of a standpoint. S.K.Maitra Emerging
Theory of Values 11:34 PM 12:30 PM 3:53 PM]
Comment on ‘Sri Aurobindo: His Political Life and Activities’—A
Review by Dr. Larry Seidlitz. by RY Deshpande from Comments for Overman Foundation by RY Deshpande
The reviewer should have highlighted the differences
between this book and The Lives of Sri Aurobindo authored by a ‘historian’ and
published by an academic institution, Columbia University Press. That would
have put things in a better perspective. Lack of such a comparative study makes
all these efforts goody-goody and perhaps not of much consequence in terms of the
real contents of the works. Sorry, but this is which should not be glossed over.
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