Derrida biography coming out in November

Looks interesting – I should like to read it even though I have not touched a Derrida book since 2009 when I finished my dissertation.

UPDATE: In related news, Gary Banham starts a “Derrida Blog” here.

The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins

The documentary (by Geoff Bowie) about Peter Watkins’s La Commune available online for free:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

New Michel Henry Translation: On Kandinsky

Description 

 

Michel Henry was one of the leading French philosophers of the twentieth century. His numerous works of philosophy are all organized around the theme of life. In contrast to the scientific understanding of life as a biological process, Henry’s philosophy develops a conception of life as an immediate feeling of one’s own living.

Seeing the Invisible marks Henry’s most sustained engagement in the field of aesthetics. Through an analysis of the life and works of Wassily Kandinsky, Henry uncovers the philosophical significance of Kandinsky’s revolution in painting: that abstract art reveals the invisible essence of life. Henry shows that Kandinsky separates color and line from the constraints of visible form and, in so doing, conveys the invisible intensity of life. More than just a study of art history, this book presents Kandinsky as an artist who is engaged in the project of painting the invisible and thus offers invaluable methodological clues for Henry’s own phenomenology of the invisible.

More information here.

• Imprint: Continuum
• Pub. date: 15 Jun 2009
• ISBN: 9781847064479
  
• 160 Pages, paperback $21.95

La Jetée (1962) and Lost Anyone?

All of that confusing time-traveling and brain-exploding on Lost has made me think of this classic: it’s only about half an hour long, only still photographs and a voice-over – someone has to write about the connection, don’t you think?

Michel Henry Translations

Over at However Fallible there are a number of excellent translations of a number of texts by Michel Henry.

Art and the Phenomenology of Life (88Kb)
The Living Body (73Kb)
Kandinsky and the Meaning of the Work of Art (60Kb)
What is Meant by the Word “Life?” (57Kb)
What Science Doesn’t Know (40Kb)

New Face of French Intellectualism

At least according to the Independent: 

Everyone knows what a world-renowned, French intellectual looks like. There is the older sort, now rare, who has a squint and smokes cigarettes and haunts the cafés of the Paris Left Bank. There is the newer kind, who has flowing hair and an open-necked shirt and haunts television studios.

 

Wrong and wrong again. The new face of the world-leading French intellectual is a brisk 36-year-old woman with the pleasant but no-nonsense look of a primary school teacher, who climbs mountains in her spare time.

She is Esther Duflo and was recently named one of the 100 most influential thinkers in the world (she came 91st). She begins a season of lectures this week at the Collège de France, the Everest of French intellectual life: a kind of PhD-level OU with no students and free lectures for all.

Mme Duflo is the youngest woman ever to be asked to lecture at this prestigious, 500-year-old institution at the heart of the Left Bank. Her introductory talk was the hottest (free) ticket in town. Several hundred people, including the former prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, arrived too late and were locked out.

Read the rest.

Some Lacan Translations

Jack Stone has translated a number of brief papers by Jacques Lacan and has posted them here. Of some interest are Lacan’s Conferences and Conversations at North American Universities from the mid 70s..

• Conversation with Yale Students, 11/24/75.
• Kanzer Seminar, Yale University, 11/24/75.
• Yale University, Law School Auditorium, 11/25/75.
• Columbia University Auditorium, School of International Affairs, 12/01/75.
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 12/02/75.

Lots more on Stone’s website.

Jacques-Alain Miller on Sarah Palin

From the Lacanian Ink website, here’s Jacques-Alain Miller (for what it’s worth) discussing Sarah Palin, castration and a new race of political women:

The choice of Sarah Palin is a sign of the times. In politics, the feminine enunciation is hence called to dominate. But be careful! It’s no longer about women who play elbows, modeling themselves on the men. We are entering an era of postfeminist women, women who, without bargaining, are ready to kill the political men. The transition was perfectly visible during Hillary’s campaign: she began playing the commander in chief and, since that didn’t work, what did she do? She sent a subliminal message, one that said something like: “Obama? He’s got nothing in the pants.” And she immediately took it back, but it was too late. Sarah Palin is not only picking up where she left off but, being younger by fifteen years, she is otherwise ferocious, slinging feminine sarcasm like a natural; she overtly castrates her male adversaries (and with such frank jubilation!) and their only recourse is to remain silent: they have no idea how to attack a woman who uses her femininity to ridicule them and reduce them to impotence. For the moment, a woman who plays the “castration” card is invincible.

Neutralization of Cerebrality: What Is Psychic Event?

Second part of Malabou’s Les Nouveaux blessés is called La neutralisation de la cérébralité (Neutralization of Cerebrality) and consists of four chapters:

chapter 5: Qu’est-ce qu’un événement psychique?

chapter 6: La “théorie de la libido” et l’altérité du sexuel à lui-même: névrose traumatique et névrose de guerre en question.

chapter 7: La séparation, la mort, la chose: Freud, Lacan et la rencontre manquée.

chapter 8: Objection de la neurologie: “réhabiliter l’événement”.

This part of the book opens with a discussion of the theme that has already been mentioned in the first part, namely, the problem of articulating a position concerning the nature of the “psychic event” using both the resources of psychoanalysis and neuroscience.

Meillassoux, Contingency, and Kantian Catastrophes

By the end of Chapter Three of Meillassoux’s After Finitude we are left with a rendering of the world reminiscent of Monadology, expect with some rather big differences.  Meillassoux has described a world of chaos wherein each entity is at once self-contained, completely contingent and not connected to any one thing or another vis a vis a principle of reason etc.  Naturally, this leads to a chapter long consideration of Hume, but Meillassoux insists “one unavoidable consequence of the principle of factiality is that it asserts the actual contingency of the laws of nature” (83).   In the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume writes:

We have said that all arguments concerning existence are founded on the relation of cause and effect; that our knowledge of that relation is derived entirely from experience; and that all our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past. To endeavour, therefore, the proof of this last supposition by probable arguments, or arguments regarding existence, must be evidently going in a circle, and taking that for granted, which is the very point in question.

…It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance…Let the course of things be allowed hitherto ever so regular; that alone, without some new argument or inference, proves not that, for the future, it will continue so.