Interesting and long discussion of this controversial report (but as Goldstone points out in the beginning, every one of his reports was controversial) on Bill Moyers’ Journal.

No, I’m not talking about Objectology, I’m talking about some newly translated Russian novels (h/t FT.com):

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
By Victor Pelevin
Trans by Andrew Bromfield

The Good Angel of Death
By Andrey Kurkov
Trans by Andrew Bromfield

One More Year
By Sana Krasikov

She Lover of Death
By Boris Akunin
Trans by Andrew Bromfield

Once again it has become fashionable to argue that Russian fiction is over, buried under the rubble of the former Soviet Union. Critics have decreed that no classic works of Russian literature have emerged in the past 18 years.

That may be true, but green shoots are now pushing through the fallen masonry. Four new Russian novels reveal flashes of fabulous writing, at times reminiscent of the wild imaginings of Mikhail Bulgakov, the dystopic visions of Yevgeny Zamyatin or the gentle humanity of Anton Chekhov. Russian literature has long ago left Socialist Realism panting behind – now it is striding out in the company of Capitalist Surrealism.

Sadness, yet he was 100 year old. Elliott Carter wins (he turns 101 in December). Somehow I don’t think I’m going to be rereading The Savage Mind any time soon…

I just got a hold of Gaye Tuchman’s Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University and came across this passage:

..the “audit society” enables “coercive accountability” carried out in the guise of transparency, trust and public service.  As an organizational order, the audit society is dedicated to encouraging organizations (including governments) and their members to measure their aspirations, fears, and accomplishments against the hopes, worries and activities of peers and competitors and to accept that those measurements have consequences.  It entails both forced and voluntary surveillance, as individuals and organizations audit themselves and subject themselves to audit by others.  Of course, to do so, they must make both their organizations and themselves audible.  That is, they must transform both their organizations and themselves into entities that can be defined, delineated and measured.  That transformation and coercive accountibility associated with both an audit society and its culture helps to constitute an accountability regime--a politics of surveillance, control and market management disguising itself as the value-neutral and scientific administration of individuals and organizations (12).

It’s like she’s been following me around at work.

Apparently not even being tenured and being supported by the faculty can help you keep your job in Idaho:

The Idaho State Journal reports Habib Sadid confirmed Friday that university president Arthur Vailas had terminated his employment.

In a statement, Vailas said his decision was in the best interests of the institution.

A university faculty appeals board determined a week ago there wasn’t enough evidence to fire Sadid, but Vailas was not obligated to follow that recommendation.

Sadid, who was suspended for what administrators say is unprofessional and insubordinate behavior, contends his history of speaking his mind about problems at the school led to the disciplinary action.

Idaho State officials argue free speech rights do not allow him to make slanderous statements.

I wonder what sort of “slanderous statements” he made? I wonder if this story is similar to the case of Butler University student who was threatened with a lawsuit and is not threatened with disciplinary action for criticizing upper administration? When does critique of policy become a reason to fire a tenured professor? I mean at least they found something on Ward Churchill before they fired him. Here it seems like the case where administration went against the recommendations of its own faculty – I’d like to know more details…

Here’s an earlier story from InsideHigherEd about Sadid – he sounds like your regular (even if highly irritable and outspoken) critic of administration – again, criticism of policies, however uncivil and impolite, serve as a ground of termination. I’m assuming he will sue, I’d like to see what comes out of it. My favorite part? This is done for the good of the university, president tells us.

During the morning life agenda setting meeting, Shahar mentioned this book to me and an accompanying review by Allen Wood:

Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy, Harvard UP, 2009, 399pp., $49.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780674035065.

Reviewed by Allen Wood, Stanford University

One sunny spring day nearly forty years ago, I was sitting in an open air café in Ithaca, New York, having coffee with Hans-Georg Gadamer. He was already over 70, and I was still in my twenties, having just published my first book on Kant. So our conversation, which consisted mainly of youth listening to the superior wisdom of age, centered on the current state of Kant scholarship. Gadamer said that the biggest single lacuna in Kant studies was the absence of a really good book on Kant’s Rechtslehre. It ought to be a book, he declared, that did not start out from Kantian ethics, but instead expounded Kant’s theory of human rights, law and politics authentically, solely on the ground of Kant’s concept of Recht: external freedom according to universal law. Gadamer told me I should write such a book — a recommendation I found flattering, but I also immediately (and silently) dismissed, partly because my principal interest in Kant was precisely in his ethics, but chiefly because I thought it could be done properly only by someone who had much more knowledge of law than I had, or ever intended to acquire. Since then I have read many good books on Kant’s legal and political philosophy, many by people I know and respect (one of them even based on a doctoral dissertation I supervised). Until now, however, I have never found the book Gadamer thought so badly needed to be written. But this book finally appears to be it.

The rest is here.

Looks like a good exegetical study of Kant’s Rechtslehre, although from Wood’s summary it’s hard to see how anything in this book is really new, i.e. how it goes beyond the simple presentation of Kant’s ideas (which is what Wood himself is, of course, well-known). I do want to read it though, especially since it seems to be paying attention to Kant’s progression from the discussion of the private right (property) to the public right. Before that book arrives, I wonder if there’s any interest in reading Hardt/Negri’s Commonwealth in any sort of organized way?

A new book out and a nice review article is accompanying it – looks very interesting:

Recensé : Gérard Lebrun, Kant sans kantisme, préfaces de Paul Clavier et Francis Wolff. Paris, Fayard, 2009, 341 p., 22 euros.

Gérard Lebrun n’a jamais autant publié que depuis sa mort, survenue en 1999. Les deux seuls livres qu’il fit paraître en français, ouvrages de référence, ont été réédités en 2003. Ils furent ainsi rendus à ceux qui, désireux de saisir la radicalité de l’intervention kantienne dans l’histoire de la métaphysique (Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, Armand Colin, 1970, rééd. Le Livre de Poche), ou la singularité du régime de discours hégélien (La Patience du concept, Paris, Gallimard, 1972, rééd. 2003), ne pouvaient faire l’économie, non pas seulement d’une lecture, mais bien d’une authentique méditation de ces livres qui ne quittent jamais totalement ceux qui les ont rencontrés. La rareté francophone de Lebrun ne s’explique pas seulement par le souci de perfection de quelqu’un qui écrivait en esthète, ni par cette intégrité qui interdit de publier pour ne rien dire. Il faut ajouter qu’il vécut longtemps au Brésil, où il jouit encore d’une aura particulière. C’est grâce à deux de ses anciens élèves, Paul Clavier et Francis Wolff, que le lecteur non lusophone a pu découvrir L’envers de la dialectique (Paris, Seuil, 2004), d’abord paru en portugais. C’est grâce à eux encore qu’il dispose désormais d’un recueil d’articles parus en français, en portugais, ou encore inédits, jalonnant 25 ans de travail (le plus ancien date de 1974, le plus récent de 1999) : Kant sans kantisme.

John comments on the issue of objectology and politics (I am going to combine both of his comments here):

Why should every philosophy be expected to address politics just because all philosophers are affected by politics? “Ontology is play-science for philosophers,” says the I.T. post in question, and I can’t help but agree. But I don’t see why “real” scientific work should be regarded with suspicion just because scientists don’t explicitly discuss in their scientific articles the political and economic factors that influence the trajectory of their work. To the contrary: I would be particularly suspicious of chemists or physicists who claimed that their scientific work and findings were influenced by their political position.

I think, though, that the objection is more direct than that: ontology is pointless, like alchemy; go make better use of your philosophical talents.

Although John is using the term “ontology” I think it’s clear that we are talking about a very peculiar kind of ontology, i.e. objectology. Here’s what I think, and it’s going to be fairly short: there’s a fundamental difference between understanding politics as what politicians do (elections, issues, platforms and so on) and politics as a simple structure of human coexistence (polis) – this is not a novel idea or a novel distinction. I think that John means politics as as an area of political activity done by or in some relation to politicians, I think most objections to objectology are not that its members are not politically active in this sense, but in a sense that the argument seems to suggest that a reconfiguring the relationship between humans and non-humans does not have any immediate political significance or is not in itself a political activity.

Now, I know that this whole angle has been presented before – demoting human beings from their ontological pedestal and making them equal with objects does not mean objectification or diminution of humans: humans are still cool, but the stones are as well. This change in human status does not carry political consequences, it is in itself a political move because it redefined the complex web of human-human and human-nonhuman interactions, it redesigns the polis, it’s pretty self-evident, I think, but let me illustrate my point:

Imagine that I (male) decided that having one wife is so old-school and hegemonic, that this monogamous oppression has lasted for too long and that I need to change something. So I bring a second wife home and I give my wife the following speech: Listen, it’s not that you are no longer my wife and that our relationship is in any way different, it’s just that I think this woman should be my wife as well, I’m not putting you down, I’m raising her up to a new status, now everyone can enjoy me as their husband, nothing changes, you see?

Of course this is not the argument of objectology per se, something does change and changes significantly, and these changes are political (but not only these, of course, there are other aspects of this change – for example, we can ask psychological questions such as “What kind of person would say that stones are better than human? What does it tell us about her state of mind?”) because they deal with humans. Again, it’s not as if we invent an ontology first and then political implications follow, the relationship is much more complex, but it is a relationship. So is objectology breeding apolitical nihilism? I don’t think so, but it does have a political dimension as any philosophical effort that attempts to reassess the role of humans.

As for “ontology as play-science of philosophers” I think it’s quite true: take just one example – a certain objectologist describes his future book as a work in which he develops “his ontology” – how can I say my ontology? It makes about as much sense as saying “I’m currently working on formulating my physics.” If one wants to do ontology and talk about how things are without any reference to human subject, then where does this “mine” perspective come from? Ontology is ontology is ontology. Certainly there are differences of scientific opinions in mathematics and physics, but there’s also a large overlap in the sense that these people are identified as mathematicians and physicists. If you are calling yourself an ontologist and yet you do not claim any universality (or even generality), how is it anything else but your own personal (human) opinion, even if it is about nonhuman objects?

Grandpa out – John?

I just stumbled across a blog, Trauma and Philosophy, maintained by Frank Seeburger, a philosopher at the U of Denver. It’s quite excellent and includes close readings and brief reactions to a wide range of literature related to trama including Lifton’s book on Nazi doctors, Felman and Laub’s book on trauma, musings on Heidegger, Henry and Nancy, and this is not even close to being exhaustive. Do check it out. Here’s Seeburger’s rationale:

Recently, my thinking and research has come to focus on the intersection of a number of concepts or figures/tropes of diverse provenance but sometimes surprising convergence: (1) ‘trauma,’ in the sense at issue–to cite a definitive example–in Freud and psychoanalysis; (2) ‘event,’ as that term comes to be deployed in the works of such continental European thinkers as Heidegger, Derrida, Badiou, and Žižek; (3) ‘truth,’ as used (some might say abused) within that same European philosophical tradition; (4) ’sovereignty,’ primarily in the political sense at issue in contemporary discussions centering around the recovery of the thought of Carl Schmitt–for example, and especially, in the works of Giorgio Agamben; (5) ‘representation,’ in both the political and the philosophical-literary senses—the ‘image’ of my title; and (6) ‘the political,’ in the sense of that term in which such recent continental European thinkers as Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe would distinguish between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’.”That nexus of concepts first began to come into focus in my thought in connection with a class I taught at the University of Denver in fall term of 2005. My work on those themes in conjunction with that class soon resulted in an article which has since been published online in The Electronic Book Review (“9/11 Never Happened, President Bush Wouldn’t Let It: Bob Dylan Replies to Henri Bergson”). Since that time, I have continued to work with the interconnections of the concepts involved. Then, in December of last year, I resumed, after a long gap, the practice of keeping a regular “philosophical journal,” more or less restricting my entries to recording my responses to what I was reading at the time in the relevant literature on trauma, a literature which I have been continuing to explore to the present.

Seeburger continues:

I have decided to devote this blog to sharing entries from that journal, beginning with the earliest one pertaining to trauma, which I wrote in February, 2008, and which is reproduced below. As I am able in the future, I will add further entries, until catching up to the present, after which I will continue to add any new entries as I happen to write them. At times, I may also preface an entry with further current reflections such as this one, when that seems appropriate. When it seemed necessary for the reader’s sake, I have provided additional information or explanation within brackets added to the original text of my entries.

There is something appropriate in having a definite delay between the date I originally wrote these episodic entries about trauma, and my decision now to make them available to others. After all, Freud has taught us well that it belongs to how trauma works—how it traumatizes—that there be a certain characteristic Nachträglichkeit or “belatedness” of traumatic impact, a sort of being out of temporal synch with itself, which manifests precisely in episodic recollections and insights that are somehow pushed beneath the surface of the traumatized mind by the traumatizing event itself, only to surface after a delay, sometimes of sizeable duration. Correspondingly, perhaps the most traumatically proper way to write of trauma is episodically and in fragments. Freud’s own writings on trauma surely fit that pattern, at any rate, which gives me a good precedent.

I hope that there is also something traumatically appropriate about dropping the reader suddenly down my entries mid-stream of their current, as it were, without attempting to fill in the thought and reading that led me to make those entries in the first place, or projecting an outline–like a bad fighter telegraphing his punches–of how my thinking has progressed since the date of the given entry. As many of those same entries will at times address, trauma itself has a way of dropping us down in the middle of what seems to be an ongoing story in which we are playing some part, but in which we find ourselves without access to the script, or any clear sense of the storyline.

Nina Power posts a short (and somewhat cryptic) note on what appears to be the same annoying tendencies in “contemporary philosophy” I’ve been complaining about – I’m expecting a series of irritating (and very very long) posts from objectologists on the topic of how no one really understands them and how what they’re doing is not what they are doing etc etc…

What happens, or what does not happen, should be what concerns us: philosophers sometimes pride themselves on their ignorance of world affairs, again like watered-down Heideggarians, no matter how hostile they think they are to him, pretending that all that history and politics stuff is so, like, ontic, we’re working on something much more important here.

I am waiting for Objectologist the Son to shoot out one of those “I feel betrayed and misunderstood” posts any second now.

Some reactions and comment on the post are here.