« Posts under reviews

How to be Alone

June 24, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

How to Be AloneHow to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Looking at the other views on here, I’m not quite alone in my feelings about Mr Franzen.

He’s obvious an intelligent author. I enjoyed much of his structure, as he starts with a conceit, an image, a displacement, an opening — wraps around it through history, thoughts, observations that twist back on themselves and then returns to that conceit with a gusto that shakes the room… armed with the negation of the displacement he starts with, he ends up closing that displacement with itself, completing essay.

THAT much, this structure, is good.

Good writing. But some of his values, some of his unwillingness to change… his young-old fashionedness… all of this bespeaks of alienation. The writer who wants to be alone. The literary minded intellectual who can’t fathom what people are doing these days. That much, is a bit off putting. For someone who thinks original thoughts, how can he also live so unoriginally?

The only thought I could come up with is that he simply lives his life out of habit. All of his ingenuity, creativity… it’s reserved for the page. It’s reserved for his writing.

I honestly have not read any of his stories. This is my introduction to him. While his research and internal thoughts are interesting, thoughts internal to the essays — and well worth considering — his final closing and opening thoughts aren’t interesting. The puzzles he poses are of interest, because we share a common world, but that’s all. His alienation matches my alienation.

To put it another way, I’d have a beer with him, drink a few drinks and share a chuckle. But that’s all. He’d get invited to the big party where I invite everyone. But I wouldn’t have him over for an intimate dinner party… except as a foil.

View all my reviews

X-Men: X-Tinction Agenda

June 24, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

X-Men: X-Tinction AgendaX-Men: X-Tinction Agenda by Chris Claremont
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Of all the comics that really got me into comics besides Batman, was X-men. The city library had a few comics, for some reason, that were ripped, in bins that you could check out. They didn’t have all of them, but they did have parts of this Saga. With the rich backstory, told in brief, and Jim Lee’s fabulous penciling, many of the panes in these pages burned into my memory as the epitome of action, drama and visual storytelling.

I’m happy to re-read this set of comics, from beginning to end.

The story is compelling. This time, a sovereign nation built on the backs of mind-controlled mutants seeks to protect its “property” this time enveloping members of the X-men. Controlled by the mastermind evil Cameron Hodge, who hates with his last breath, who made a deal with a demon that he could never die, and then at the center of a super-cybernetic suit, the X-men seem to have met their match.

Of course, as a comic series, the story must go on! And the last issue was unsatisfying to me, wrapping things up neatly. The bad guys of course, are so bad, they cannot cohere their values to work together. The good guys, of course, despite differences are able to work together and achieve unity. That’s the main difference between them. In fact, these good guys are so good, they seek unity in all sentient beings, including mutants and humans… eventually turning members of the bad guys over to their side.

Considering the political implications of “what is human” and this nation’s human rights violations, the story wraps up too quickly once the action sequence is done. The President in chains, and bad guys turned good all getting their just reward (the other main bad guy loses his life in stopping the real main bad guy)… the ending really soured for me what I recall being a rich tapestry of character and political questioning.

Despite twisting the characters for good at the end, all in all though, quite good, as most of the time, re-reading old comic sagas never turn out well. I enjoyed much of the early artistry and story telling best of all. The ending’s main failing was that it turned generic at the end, as very apparently the story “blew its load” and then quickly turned around to fall asleep.

View all my reviews

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

June 24, 2014 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical MaterialismLess Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What is “less than nothing” is what is lost in order to maintain the relationship between subject and object. This nothing sustains the dialectic, but it’s also the ground that is synthesized in Hegel’s dialectical project. But really, this nothing is also the “form” by which phenomenon is understood. That is to say, coming from Kant, understanding or the law of desire is the pure nothingness that imposes the order we see in the chaotic world.

It’s actually pretty simple. The universal, the a priori, is the emptiness that is lost in understanding the Real. This is because we can’t apprehend understanding directly; we can only see it through the empirical world. The closest we get to understanding itself, so to speak, is the petit object a, the pure signifier that is its own lack necessarily: without this particle of necessary being we wouldn’t be able to see being in the world at all. As Zizek says, for Heidigger, we wouldn’t have Sein without Das Sein.

Zizek goes to great lengths to demonstrate the post-structural condition: that how we read comes before what we read. Borrowing from Karen Barad, we can separate how we read from what we read, because we can use how we read to discover what we read — or we can use what we read to discover how we read – but we cannot discover their entanglement, that is the border between the two. To paraphrase him, in order to find out how the two go together, we need to realign the objects so that we, the viewing apparatus and the object in question, are tested against a third thing…which is impossible. There is no third point of view, in the theory of relativity. Results always come from the position of the viewing apparatus, as it cannot be outside itself. Philosophically, there’s no third view either. We may try to step out of this understanding, out of the metaphysician’s realm, but all attempts to determine the root of discourse find themselves mired in the failure to fully explain the framing of that discourse. To put it another way, Zizek notes that antiphilosophy is at the heart of philosophy. With each failure to explain antiphilosophy, we get more philosophy. With this line of reasoning, Zizek, as usual, goes through a huge nest of thinkers to demonstrate how their different philosophies circumambulate various centers of discourse:

The basic motif of antiphilosophy is the assertion of a pure presence (the Real Life of society for Marx, Existence for Kierkegaard, Will for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, etc.) irreducible to and excessive with regard to the network of philosophical concepts or representations. [. . .] The great theme of post-Hegelian antiphilosophy is the excess of the pre-conceptual productivity of Presence over its representation: representation is reduced to the “mirror of representation,” which reflects in a distorted way its productive ground (841).

Of course, Zizek wants to say that Hegel was the first to reach this irreducible ground, as the synthesis of consciousness – and he traces this through a variety of manners that is both entertaining and enlightening. But Barad’s point remains; whatever language Zizek adopts, we see the mysterious Presence continually being shuffled from point to point, which reduces all discourse to a manner of tautology:

The mistake resides in the fact that the limit pertaining to the form itself (to the categories used) is misperceived as a contingent empirical limitation. In the case of cognitivism: it is not that we already have the categorical apparatus necessary to explain consciousness (neuronal process, etc), and our failure to have yet done so pertains only to the empirical limitation of our knowing the relevant facts about the brain; the true limitation lies in the very form of our knowledge, in the very categorical apparatus we are using. In other words, the gap between the form of knowledge and its empirical limitation is inscribed in this form itself (284).

So while we understand the mysterious Real though our a priori categories, these categories give us an incomplete view. In order to mirror ourselves with the exterior, to be “appropriate” to reality, we create a standing social order, a consistency within discourses (or many discourses themselves) each of which approach the mystery of the world from another angle. These discourses are always defractions, which are in themselves incomplete, hinging on one another but only shuffling pure Presence about. Spoken through Fichte: this absence can be expressed as antoss, or as Lacan liked to say about the Self: “I think where I am not.” This can be unpacked to mean that the self is simply what mediates itself. In this way, Hegel remains for Zizek the genius that first notices how what we read is how we read:

In this sense, it is meaningless to call Hegel’s philosophy “absolute idealism”: his point is precisely that there is no need for a Third element, the medium or Ground beyond subject and object-substance. We start with objectivity, and the subject is nothing but the self-meditation of objectivity (144, original italics).

Unpacking this thought, lets realize that not only is the self “less than nothing” but “less than nothing” is also the pure Presence mediating the discourse itself. We get the symbolic reality through the loss of pure Presence. Its lack allows us to read through it to get discursive reality as a full blown immersive social environment of culture.

I rather enjoyed this lengthy and inspired book. To be brief, Zizek does philosophy to hide the fact that philosophy no longer works, that in Heidegger’s language, philosophy has been suspended while capitalism contemplates itself. In this sense, capitalism tries to say what reason cannot (in this sense, capitalism occupies the same position as Art for Kant, that of a second nature). No wonder then that Zizek says philosophy stopped with Hegel, that the many guises of Hegel are in fact not-Hegel or a stunted Hegel so that we can continue on with postmodernism, with the avant garde, because we haven’t learned Hegel yet… so we hide him away while we continue on in endless jouissance. So to cut to the chase:

In every discourse, in every sense-making, we either sacrifice completeness or we sacrifice contingency. Master discourses (like that of Gods) generally sacrifice contingency to create completeness, to wrap us in universals, to guarantee the universe be stable for us to live in. But in all of these cases (and you can go on ad infinitum), you will end up asking, why is there necessity? As in is there a “necessity particle” that makes existence be (as existence itself is without cause)? Why are things even necessary? Is there pure being somewhere? Zizek’s answer is to locate the split of symbolic reality (necessity) and the Real together within the subject, that only through a split subject do we get contingency as the only necessity. Our ability to understand is then only supplemented through both Reason and an encounter with the Real that stands in to verify the completeness of discursive truth. For Zizek the subject’s being split is another way of saying that necessary to subjectivity is the provision of what needs to be included within its view, of what cannot be compromised. Zizek provides the example where some Christians replied to Darwinism by insisting that the world was 4,000 years old, that fossils were placed in the Earth to test faith. Zizek doesn’t believe this to be true but he cites this example to show that the “grain of truth” in the Christian example is their

impossible-Real objectal counter-part which never positively existed in reality – it emerges through its loss, it is directly created as a fossil. [T]he exclusion of this object is consistitutive of the appearance of reality: since reality (not the Real) is correlative to the subject, it can only constitute itself through the withdrawal from it of the object which “is” the subject [. . .] What breaks up the self-closure of transcendental correlation is thus not the transcendent reality that eludes the subject’s grasp, but the inaccessibility of the object that “is” the subject itself. This is the true “fossil,” the bone that is the spirit, to paraphrase Hegel, and this object is not simply the full objective reality of the subject [. . .] but the non-corporeal, fantasmatic lamella. (645).

This is another way of encountering the symbolic Real, the meaningless floating signifier that would guarantee completeness, that is the subject in its actualization. Be this ontology, money, or joy, fear, anxiety, love, mana or luck, such signifiers often allow discourse to hinge on these terms in order for that discourse to continue to be relevant, a kind of antiphilosophy in the heart of philosophy or antilaw at the heart of law. Zizek writes

Every signifying field thus has to be “sutured” by a supplementary zero-signifier, a “zero symbolic value, that is, a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains.” This signifier is “a symbol in its pure state”: lacking any determinate meaning, it stands for the presence of meaning and such in contrast to its absence, in a further dialectical twist, the mode of appearance of this supplementary signifier which stands for meaning as such is non-sense [. . .]. Notions like mana thus “represent nothing more or less that floating signifier which is the disability of all finite thought. (585, original italics).

So is there any way to get out? The only meaningful answer is no, as to escape pure Presence is to fall into non-sense, or at least a difference sense that is non-sense from where we current are. Even attempt to transgress the limits of the law end up invoking the law in its transgressed form, simply because those forms are how we understand. This is how the Real becomes mirrored within the symbolic as the pure form of the symbolic. The symbolic Real, which is what Zizek would call meaningless encodings necessary to moor our consistency (our discourse, so to speak), operates through the contingencies qua Real, a maneuver of the subject to mediate itself and actualize.

At this point, to recognize a new thing, like a new world order, or a solution from our capitalist dilemma, means coming to new coordinates, a new phenomenon, a new axis. Zizek locates this between drive and reason, to have the two come together. You can read this like the unification of money with language, but he leaves it open, because after all, these are metaphysical terms. Directly speaking, such terms are always beyond our understanding, lacking substance, even as they are always within the area delineated by our pure understanding, but completely impotent to interrupt our world and realign it. All we need is the right content to come along, the right void to allow us to rename it, and recognize it as the new event, in the language of Nietzsche, “the eternal return.” With that, we could have a new epoch, a new pure Presence emerging from nothingness itself, and that new Presence would be a new world order, a new symbolic Real to realign our world, to remake our world. Compared to anything in or current state it would be more than anything, a new nothing from which there would never be any possibility of return as we would irreparably be someone else.

View all my reviews

Thinking in Systems: A Primer

June 14, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Thinking in Systems: A PrimerThinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the most fundamental ideas we have about the world is the role of causality. In the most basic sense, this takes the form of IF…THEN. Although there are variations of that, in philosophy this is called the Principle of Sufficient Reason, only takes the crudest linear binary approach of yes and no. Given the fuzziness of real life, we can start to understand the world as a series of feedback loops. The way something changes changes not just what it is, but ultimately changes itself in ways that are not always linear.

This small book approaches re-thinking these kinds of relationships. Although Meadow speaks often of simple models to illustrate the principles of a systems approach, Meadow is quick to emphasize how a systems approach necessarily destroys traditional limits of what we conceive of as being the rational boundaries of a given set of relationships. That is to say, to understand one area of life, we can’t stick to academic boundaries, defined around a set of parameters. Real life doesn’t operate through a series of vacuums. Our understandings are often presented to us, taught to us with built in limitations, so that we can grasp principle relationships in isolation… but a deeper understand always necessitates retooling where our understanding stops, how far we are willing to trace our assumptions.

A huge takeaway from this book is that how we conceive of something, what we think our goals are, necessarily limits and changes how we are able to interact in the world. For instance, if we find ourselves following rules in letter, not in spirit, then our assumed goals (meant to be streamlined by rules) aren’t really our goals. In the same vein, considering how we model reality influences how we make decisions, our attempts to reduce reality into a set of knowable standards often leads us to only think in terms of what we can talk about, instead of being open to redefining what we can talk about in order to make our models reflect how the world really operates. As already mentioned, often the world works in feedback loops, not in terms of strict causation… after all, what happens to the consequent (the THEN part) after the antecedent (the IF part)? Things have changed imperceptibly… the THEN part doesn’t really just disappear or fall off the edge of reality… and our models need to account for it. Likewise, classical economics tends to think only in terms of objective (read quantifiable) utility… ignoring real values like happiness and trust. Meadows shows us again and again, that many of the big world problems stem from our inability to really consider what our goals should be, our unwillingness to be open to complexity we are uncomfortable with (such as intangibles like trust, even though since intangibles do influence how people behave) and how we think the world really works…

One of the great pleasures of reading this book is seeing the far range of application a systems approach can take us. As a note, Joseph Stiglitz’s recent economic proposal takes a systems approach to re-thinking how we measure GDP and assess our economic and lifeworld goals, which is a start, even though in some sense, we don’t yet have the means to assess what we find to be primary goals, for example, how can we assess happiness?

I will definitely read more books about systems and system approaches.

View all my reviews

Belief or Nonbelief?

June 14, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Belief or Nonbelief?Belief or Nonbelief? by Umberto Eco
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This short book follows the formula of a dialogue between the now secular (once Catholic) Umberto Eco and the Catholic Cardinal Carlo Martini. It it, they ask and answer each other questions dealing with believers and non-believers. The two gentlemen are gentlemen, ever clear, honest and respectful in how they speak to one another and express their views.

One of the greatest flaws people often have in dialogue with others of differing values is that they don’t have a framework in which to approach another in a way that is both respectful and satisfies curiosity. What these two have done is find a way to do so, exactly that… but not in a way that asks mundane questions, but to dive deeply into the differences between them such as, “what framework do non-believers have to justify ethics?” and “what is the role of women in Catholicism?”

In their honesty they are able to reach into the deepest recesses of what makes us all human, to find common ground that despite the (non)religiosity of many of us, we do have things to talk about: to learn from each other and come to understanding that we are among one another.

Difference doesn’t need to be destroyed. In fact, it should be cherished, as each of us explore our lives in our own way, and come hopefully, through honesty and bravery, to better understandings about who we are and how we should be.

View all my reviews

Satan Burger

June 14, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Satan BurgerSatan Burger by Carlton Mellick III
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am a fan of Carlton Mellick III. In some ways, this wasn’t the most ambitious of Mellick’s novels that I have read but in some ways, it became the most meaningful, and most dramatic.

This book started off what seemed excruciatingly slow, as it had many scattered components, Mellick was able to bring to together in a period of about 20 pages near the end…to speed through to the final conclusion, in which we see that even in nihilism, we have humanity.

Satan Burger tells the story of a few chosen punks, misfits in the skeletal remains of a capitalism gone awry, a capitalism that is comatose; when people are no longer people: when lifestyle choices override understanding, community, humanity and idealism. In the midst of this existential crisis was had become only one sustained boredom, it seems that we don’t care anymore, about who we are, what we are doing and what we love. And yet, we find out that when the last moments of the apocalypse are upon us, when we have the freedom to really just do whatever we want (because the symbolic order has deteriorated to never be resurrected), we discover that we do in fact care, we do love, and we do want a better future.

The seemingly cowardly narrator, Leaf, who floats around in the human refuse of post-capitalism, post-meaning, post-struggle, comes on his own, realizing that we do have a choice, that God, through not caring about humanity, has a given him a choice. Save himself, save humanity or risk eternal zombification to save his friend.

In a way, Mellick is writing about the tail end of Gen-X, which fell from the dreams of a capitalist utopia of endless party, success and validation, to find a banal lifeworld devoid of joy… in which, in Zizek’s words, “Enjoy!” was the superego command of the day. What was left after Enjoy! is where this novel starts, in a nihilistic world: post-jaded, post-ambition and post-beauty, where even being offended took too much effort. We gave ourselves up, to get the dream, and in the end, found only endless repetition of the same boring mosh. But I guess once you’ve seen the party (and as a result, the endless parties that follow ad infinitum), there’s nowhere left to go but down…. and once you’ve done that, strangely enough, as Mellick shows us, there’s nowhere to go but up.

To quote Richard Farina’s post-hippie work, where dreams die to leave their ghosts to haunt us again: “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me”

And though the first sections of the book seem overwrought with strange tendrils that lead nowhere, Mellick shows us best in the last pages, that there is something to the end, even when words abandon us. Well worth the read.

View all my reviews

A Mathematician Plays The Stock Market

June 11, 2014 / posted in Business, dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

A Mathematician Plays The Stock MarketA Mathematician Plays The Stock Market by John Allen Paulos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What’s really interesting about other people’s reviews of this book is that they seem to expect a book on the stock market from a mathematician to be somehow be based in finance.

There are plenty of books on the stock market out there… that do so from a finance point of view.

This book is pretty brilliant although at first glance, it appears to be pretty straight forward… you think a mathematician would use his knowledge about math to somehow find some brilliant trick about the stock market. But that’s not how this plays out.

Math is a game of numbers. It’s a field of study that looks at patterns. But ultimately the numbers are a measurement, some kind of metric. What’s faulty about using the stock market from a pure numbers point of view is that the numbers in stock prices need to measure the a consistent value for any math relation to work. What I mean is simply that stock prices are based on what people do in terms of trading volume of a stock. Abstract all you like, but the immediate particular reason why anyone does what they do with stock is anyone’s guess.

We can assume that a change in stock prices has to do with an anecdote on the news about a company, or something happening somewhere related to a company. But that’s not always true. Sometimes things happen for seemingly no reason. Much of this, Paulos tries to explain has as much to do with how people perceive the market as much as it has to do with actual values. The later chapters are particularly brilliant on this account. The earlier chapters which seemed to promise this or that mathematical model, or this or that economic model… don’t pan out because as Paulos convincingly tells us, any model that we use to predict the stock market can be outdated unless the model itself anticipates how others will use it, made predictions and how those predictions will affect the market. In other words, any stock market model needs to also be self reflexive in how it’s applied — not just when it’s applied.

Paulo makes some pretty complex abstractions to do this; for instance, applying how the “Efficient Market Hypothesis” is either always correct (when people believe it to be wrong, thus playing the stock market off of information in the news, or about a company’s state) or it is always incorrect (when other people believe the information on the news is invalid as the stock prices already reflect the current value of the stock)… that is to say that particular hypothesis doesn’t work as it should because it takes for its model an absolute system of values based on how other people act. People don’t do things as mechanisms do; people evaluate based off of what they believe others will do as well.

This twist of self reflexivity makes it particularly difficult to formulate any theory that is both consistent (non-contradictory) and complete… in essence, we need to formulate a model that can predict how its predictions are taken into account and then provide us with “a few steps ahead” so that profit can be captured. That would be a pretty sophisticated theory; and in fact be impossible because that theory could only work in the case of the one individual who has it. By definition the same theory could not with all the other individuals who also have it, otherwise there would be no profit!

So a quick conclusion is that the market can at times reflect real values, but often it doesn’t because there’s too much white noise as meanings, theories, trends and news all impact the same metric. So how can we make any consistent model on the stock market if all this information flies under the same metric as the very metric a stock price is supposed to represent?

This is all of course, extracted from the book. What I found really interesting, if one read between the lines from the get go, was that one can always take the meaning of a stock’s movement anyway one likes. That is to say, we have an abundance of narratives that can fit the model of “what really happens”. We simply pick the one we like the best, and go forth as if that were true. As Paulo points out, even through random chance a few individuals are bound to hit it big. And once people notice that, they will follow that person’s movements, ensuring that they will always be right.

Thus, the modeling of stocks, properly considered, must also model how we think as well. But that’s nothing new. Paulo is of course, writing this book as a lament of his own failed investments…and in the process of doing so, he’s also somewhat justifying the bubble bursting was inevitable, a kind of normal market behavior. But he’s correct; the uncertainty in the stock market is not just an uncertainty as to what the price means, but similarly that its certainty is also a reflection of what we all would also believe it to mean.

All in all, I found the book to be really entertaining and interesting. I would have liked a little more direction midway through the book… with each theory or direction Paulo brought up, he quickly shot it down at the end of the chapter. Of course, he was setting this bed of failed theories for the self reflexive analysises… but I didn’t see it coming. So it felt much like wandering, and that’s not a good way to treat your reader as it throws your reader out of the process of reading.

View all my reviews

Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties

June 11, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the FacultiesKant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Deleuze is perhaps the best reader of texts that I know of. In this short work, he presents the immanent critique hidden within Kant’s philosophical product.

In doing so, Deleuze shows both how Kant is not a rationalist or an empiricist, and how Kant is the anti-philosopher. Although Kant today is considered to be the epitome of modern philosophers, at that time Kant sought to break through the limits of Descartes’ subjectivity to achieve a deeper understanding of the human condition one not founded on false or speculative reasoning.

As Deleuze points out, Kant’s methodology works in this way by highlighting the structural points of inflection within his philosophy. These structural features exist immanent within each of the conditions Kant outlines within empirical reason — ultimately to exist as a faculty that stands on its own. In other words, Kant notices what is the same within each relation despite empirical difference. Each of the three domains of experience (feeling, desiring and knowing) balance out the others to provide the higher immanent vehicles that together legislate human balance (judgement, understanding and reason). As Kant analyzes types of experiences encountered within empirical reason, Deleuze shows how Kant points to the suprasensible as the beyond that grounds Kant’s philosophy (and humanity) as being that is both good and moral in the face of Law immanent within transcendental reasoning.

What makes Kant so difficult to approach is his rejection of speculative reason. Bad philosophy has a habit of legislating positions as filters for experience, using a top-down approach to the field of experience. Kant sticks strictly to the thinnest difference within each domain, using the form of language to describe immanent relations of their predicates within itself… in a sense noting the universal form inherent within each field as the criteria for what a faculty is, what is an immanent vehicle within human processing. In other words, Kant finds the universal arising within our navigation and arrangement of phenomena as a spontaneous law grounded within our consciousness, what is the same no matter what, and how those samenesses inter-relate.

The point of all this is to show the reason for reason, to show how the structure of reason itself from the immanent faculties that operate as transcendental reason becomes its own reason, the accord of which reveals for us our place in the world. We are made to be reasonable, and our reasonableness itself is what provides the grounds for our existence, and the meaning of our existence, which Kant insists is the natural product of our natural and good synthesis with nature… not for the goal of fulfilling instinct/nature but for incorporating the beyond, a limit we ourselves cannot understand:

When imagination is confronted with its limit by something which goes beyond it in all respects it goes beyond its own limit itself, admittedly in a negative fashion, by representing to itself the inaccessibility of the rational Idea, and by making this very inaccessibility something which is present in sensible nature.

For through the imagination, no doubt, finds nothing beyond the sensible world to which it can lay hold, still this thrusting aside of the sensible barriers gives it a feeling of being unbounded; and that removal is thus a presentation of the infinite. As such it can never be anything more than a negative presentation – but still it expands the soul.

Deleuze does all this in this breathtakingly short book. Deleuze places Kantian desire as the organizing feature, in the synthesis of feeling, rationality and understanding within the free ‘accord’ of the faculties and how pure relation forms the immanent critique of human experience; bringing to light the clear synthesis of the transcendental method and the three faculties… and in this sense, conjoins with Deleuze’s own readings of philosophers, as Deleuze can rightly be said to be a philosopher who only practices immanent critiques.

The only thought I have; what I wished Deleuze focused on as well, was Kant’s question of freedom. Towards the end of his life, Kant had an answer, an undesirable answer to how our freedom comes about, one which tortured him in his last days. This issue, was not brought up. But perhaps this was because Kant never wrote a specific work to outline this issue.

View all my reviews

Never Again! – Pamphlet

June 11, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Never Again! - PamphletNever Again! – Pamphlet by Edward Carpenter
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Edward Carpenter makes an appeal post-World War I about the selflessness of the common man, who died for the interests of the ruling class. He cites the advances of civilization, moral and technological — as insufficient to rectify all the destruction and loss of humanity in World War I. In fact, these advances were used to further the destruction of humans.

Despite his impassioned plea, Carpenter is short on analysis and answers though. While he compares nationalism and national interests to the interests of humankind, he finds the latter insufficient to bridge the former.

All in all, this pamphlet is only meant to bring awareness to people the insensible destruction and loss of life on both sides… although Carpenter finds the German aristocracy to be to blame. Carpenter stops short of proposing any kind of constructive political change.

View all my reviews

The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson

June 11, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (American Presidency)The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson by Kendrick A. Clements
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What makes this time period so interesting to me is that it happens during a threshold is that America’s coming of age was happening just now. The nation had done much of the basic industrialization and infrastructure investments, and it had experienced both the boom of industry with its horrors of industry. The result was, much of the population was facing a question as to how the worker and the industrial capitalists would get along? What would be the role of the government, of laws, of self determination? What was to be the sense of how labor was to be arranged in America? And then, along comes one of the most intellectual (and therefore idealistic) presidents, ready to reshape America for the benefit of the common man, worker and farmer — he comes ready on the cusp to provide a gradual outlet for prosperity and change, instead of pure exploitation — and then, when he is just getting warmed up, world war breaks out and interrupts his steady mission to use the government as a mere regulatory instrument.. for the betterment of the common man’s condition.

Whether Wilson’s ideals would have worked in keeping America prosperity going remains a mystery, as World War I interrupted. What WWI provided further was an opportunity for Wilson to enact his ideals of freedom, prosperity, democracy, this time on the world stage in the form of International Law, Treaties and the League of Nations. But this too was interrupted by Wilson’s health problems, first relating to getting the Treaty Signed, then getting the American Congress to support that treaty. Ultimately this last stage of stress proved too much. He collapsed amid the strain and had a stroke.

The stroke had a strangely ironic effect on Wilson. As Clement tells it, the stroke destroyed his psychological capacity to split details and make concessions — do what he did best before the War, to create bipartisanship, and alliances — so that he became a parody of himself. Far too stubborn to compromise, unable to follow complex thought, but still liberal, progressive in his ideals. Being uncompromising, he fits the form of being radical and thus loses the very things he worked so hard to gain.

To me this presidency is about an intelligent, caring man who tried to put what he thought were the highest ideals of humanity in action inscribed in the law, first, at the national level, then at the international level. But this isn’t the entire story.

Wilson only really recognized the subjectivities of people like him. White, educated. He did seem to believe that everyone could strive for the best. But because of this color-blind-ness he also did not recognize the differences in perception, opinion and institutional racism that skewed the lifeworld of other peoples. This is where Wilson strangely fails, in protecting the rights of American-Americans and keeping with the interests of Latin America, as he always took a heavy hand… as he thought what was not only best for himself but for everyone. Note, one of his major flaws is being too controlling, not clearly delegating responsibility…

If anything, this is a good example of how certain ideals and worldviews make well intentioned people blind, unable to comprehend what they are doing, or how life could be different for others. Indeed, Clements takes pain to show that Wilson was not open to criticism once his decisions were made. Wilson was stubborn, idealistic and incredibly uncritical of his own attitudes. Wilson may have been very intelligent, very well intentioned but he was also unable to see anyone else’s point of view, nor was he apt to change his own core views.

In this strange way, where he got so close to achieving his humanistic ideals, he was also thwarted from those ideals by the very from that got him so close. Because of the infinity spelled out in actualizing your will, this infinity makes Wilson a tragic figure… since heros only achieve infinite positive life for all in fairy tails. In this tragic story, Wilson’s body was unable to bear the stress his mind saw so clearly as important to becoming. In this sense, Wilson also failed to be self aware/self critical of how he treated his physical person. Does that make him a fool? Or a hero?

Either way, his personal agenda aside, perhaps because of his stroke, Wilson was unable to dismantle the war machine his administration put together for WWI. This war machine didn’t create an “unholy coalition” where business and government work together exclusively to make profit, but he did put regulating bodies in place that were there to help small businesses/farmers but in the end only enforced the will of larger business on regulating the market place to their advantage. Much of the programs first started by Wilson to help further his ideals ended up setting the stage for their retardation by big business.

In a way, while very competent for his job, Wilson perhaps proved too ambitious for his own good. He over extended himself, and he didn’t allow for enough self criticism in what/how he did what he did… took on too much for himself, as he thought he knew best (even best for other races) and finally, Wilson instead he relied on blind faith that those values he followed were self-justifying.

Hero or fool? Either way, really fascinating.

View all my reviews

« Older PostsNewer Posts »