many, many wolves

(post-)grothendieckian mathematics, weird realisms, material ethnographies, gross misreadings of badiou, misapplications of deleuze and guattari. a feeble attempt at love under Empire.

[mynameismynamepod]

Michael O’Rourke is capitalizing on the presence of three Laruelle translators being in Europe around the same time and has organized a series of seminars. The information for that is below, but we do need your help to make this happen. Our budget, which only includes the cost of travel for the...

[manymanywolves]

the stellar matheme isn't quite what badiou proposed 

[manymanywolves]

From "Reactivating the Social Body in Insurrectionary Times"

Hugill/Thornburn: If imagination is the critical site of struggle, as you’ve suggested, then has it become less important for oppositional groups to fight battles in actual physical space? Has holding city squares or disturbing the ordered functioning of various financial districts became on obsolete or merely symbolic tactical approach or can it still be productively disruptive?

Bifo: I don’t think that we will be able to win a fight against financial capitalism by demonstrating in the street. Destroying banks isn’t useful if we are seeking emancipation from financial dictatorship. Financial power does not exist in the banks; it is embedded in software, in the techno-linguistic automatisms that govern daily life and the psychic automatisms of consumerism, competition and fear. Nevertheless we are in the midst of a process – a movement – that will deploy itself over the course of the next decade, maybe longer, and we have to start from where we are and what we know. What we have today is the memory of past forms that our movements have taken, including occupations, strikes and demonstrations, both peaceful and violent. All of these are part of the legacy of 20th century social movements. Recently, we have tried to resurrect some of these old forms of struggle – these old forms of expression – but this hasn’t worked particularly well. Established forms of peaceful demonstration have absolutely no possibility of changing the politics of financial capitalism. They don’t work when democracy is dead – and it is totally dead, the European experience is demonstrating that clearly. But on the other hand, violent riots or bank bombings are also useless because they don’t challenge the sites of real power. Real power is in the cybersphere, in the algorithms of financial control, in the quantitative analyses that undergird trading, and so on.

[manymanywolves]

Deleuze was—I lost my best friend last month, because Deleuze was my best friend. I admired him. I loved him. When we were young we were very separate. Together we invented the term amis de vieillesse. You know the expression amis de jeunesse? We were not amis de jeunesse. We became amis de vieillesse. And why? Because we are a little bit brothers. I think that Deleuze is a geographer, and I am too a geographer. We are not historians. I think for instance that Deleuze's philosophy is full of fluxes. And what fluxes? Prepositions in my case! I have a chapter in my book about prepositions. Prepositions are the algebra of fluxes. I don't think he committed suicide. It was impossible to breathe—he opened the window and…

Michel Serres, in a 1995 interview with Hari Kunzru

[manymanywolves]

After the reading of philosophical texts (Derrida), of Marxist texts on history (Althusser), of Freud (Lacan), and then of the Human Sciences (Foucault), the interpretation of great mathematical texts is invited to take up the baton. It is decidedly the case that here, philosophy (and in particular, French philosophy) falls back into its habitual, pusillanimous mistakes, refusing to experiment with philosophy itself in its being, rather than just its objects, languages, and intra-philosophical becomings. This philosophical immobilization by way of history (as obligatory as ever, if often denied) is consummated, paradoxically, in a philosophy 'without history' (Althusser and Badiou). A philosophy that ends up as a lazy queen, who hitches her carriage up to a pack of scientists, and can only get going by riding in the wake of the history of sciences.

François Laruelle, Anti-Badiou: On the Introduction of Maoism into Philosophy (p. ix). 

[manymanywolves]

On Taking (Someone's) Place: Mallarmé, Abraham, and the Locus Tremendum

We begin from a question that cannot help but be more than one. To wit: From what place does trembling originate? Better yet, under what conditions does trembling take place? Or, equivalently, what does trembling take the placeof?

A new blog post on Kierkegaard, Derrida, and Mallarmé!

[manymanywolves]

There was Earth in them, and they dug. They dug and they dug, and so their Day went by, and their Night. And they did not praise God, who, so they heard, wanted all this, who, so they heard, knew of all this. They dug and they heard nothing more; did not grow wise, invented no Song, thought up for themselves no Language. They dug. There came a Silence, there came a Storm, There came every Ocean. I dig, you dig, and it digs, the Worm, and the Singing, there, says: They dig. O someone, o none, o no one, o you: Where did it lead to, that nowhere-leading? O you dig and I dig, and I dig towards you, and on our finger awakens the Ring.

Paul Celan, "There was Earth in them." From Die Niemandsrose (1963). 

[rhizombie]

This is terrible terrible news. His work was a breath of fresh air—I always felt he was someone who best understood “affirmation” in the Nietzschean/Spinozist/Deleuzian vein and the political stakes of critical theory. I am forever indebted to him for pushing the boundaries of my thinking and scholarship. 

[manymanywolves]

Tragic news.

[manymanywolves]

C'est en cherchant une représentation d'un indéterminisme inhérent au temps de l'histoire que je suis tombé sur cette mathématique des ensembles de directions contingentes. Il ne s'agissait pas d'appliquer une théorie existante, d'ailleurs totalement désincarnée à l'époque, et qui ne faisait que prolonger la théorie du contrôle. De manière paradoxale, l'acceptation de l'ignorance du futur et l'évitement de la structuration du temps par des probabilités s'avèrent fructueux dans le domaine des sciences humaines, mais aussi naturelles, en leur permettant de respecter la diversité et l'imprévisibilité des comportements.

Noël Bonneuil, "Viabilité, Probabilités, Induction," in Tracés 24 (p. 74).  

[manymanywolves]

If we look through the aperture which we have opened up onto the absolute, what we see there is a rather menacing power—something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, fi only for an interval of disquieting calm. We see an omnipotence equal to that of the Cartesian God, and capable of anything, even the inconceivable; but an omnipotence that has become autonomous, without norms, blind, devoid of the other divine perfections, a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thoughts about the veracity of its distinct ideas. We see something akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying, without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity, even a god, even God.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (p. 64). 

[manymanywolves]

The conceptual passage, if one may say so, in this argumentation between the extension of the body (which is easy for common sense to apprehend, which is an essential attribute of the corporeal substance for Descartes and the eidetic component of any material thing and any transcendent and tangible res for Husserl) and the extension of the psyche or thinking (which is a paradoxical extension resisting intuition, perception, and consciousness) is what exceeds any measure in them both—and therefore exceeds common measure. That is their common in commensurability. This incommensurability—as incommensurability of extension, as incommensurability between two ways of being extended, two spaces or two spacings—goes through a thinking of place [lieu], as a place or locus that is reduced neither to objective extension nor to objective space. This place must be spacing before it is space; it must open an opening, as it were, an interval, which is to say an apparently incorporeal, though not intelligible, extension—thus neither sensible nor intelligible.

Jacques Derrida, On Touching (p. 24).

[manymanywolves]

HI

[manymanywolves]

steve reich's 'octet', performed by ensemble modern (1997/2002) 

[manymanywolves]

Crowned out, spewed out into night. Under what stars! So much grey-beaten heart-hammer silver. And Berenice's head of hair, here too. - I plaited, I unplaited, I plait, unplait. I plait. Blue chasm, into you I drive the gold. Bringing that too wasted on whores and harlots I go and go. To you, beloved. And with curses and prayer. And with each of the cudgels whirring over me: they too fused into one, they too phallically bunched towards you, both sheaf and word. With names, watered by every exile. With names and seeds, with names dipped into all the calyxes that are full of your regal blood, man, – into all the calyxes of the great ghetto-rose, from which you look at us, immortal with so many deaths died on morning errands. (And we sang the Warshawyanka with lips grown reedy, Petrarca. Into tundra-ears, Petrarca.) And an earth rises up; ours, this one. And we'll send none of our people down to you, Babel.

Paul Celan, 'Crowned Out...', from Die Niemandsrose (1963)

[manymanywolves]

Etched away from the ray-shot wind of your language the garish talk of rubbed– off experience – the hundred– tongued pseudo- poem, the noem. Whirled clear, free your way through the human– shaped snow, the penitents' snow, to the hospitable glacier rooms and tables. Deep in time's crevasse by the alveolate ice waits, a crystal of breath, your irreversible witness.

Paul Celan, 'Etched Away From', from Atemwende (1967)

[manymanywolves]

You of the same mind, moor-wandering near one: more-than- death- sized we lie together, the time- less one teems under our breathing eyelids, the pair of blackbirds hangs beside us, under our whitely drifting companions up there, our meta- stases.

Paul Celan, 'Largo', from Schneepart (1971)

[manymanywolves]

In my own experience, I saw how, at the end of the sixties, the nouveaux philosophes, with André Glucksmann at their helm, concocted an intellectual apparatus destined to legitimate the brutal reactionary reversal which followed the red sequence that had begun in the middle of the sixties, a sequence whose name in China was 'Cultural Revolution', in the USA refusal of the Vietnam war, and in France 'May 68'. Of course, there was nothing new about the general form of the reactive constructions purveyed by the nouveaux philosophes. It amounted to saying that the true political contradiction is not the one that opposes revolution to the imperialist order, but democracy to dictatorship (totalitarianism). This is what American ideologues have been proclaiming loud and clear for at least thirty years. But the intellectual ambience, the style of the arguments, the humanitarian pathos, the inclusion of democratic moralism into a philosophical genealogy—all of this was the contemporary of the leftism at the time, all of this was new. In a nutshell, only erstwhile Maoists, like Glucksmann and the nouveaux philosophes, could dress up this old pirate's flag in the gaudy colors of the day. But this innovative tint was aimed at fatally weakening the Maoist episode, at extinguishing its lights, at serving, in the name of democracy and human rights, a counter-revolutionary restoration, an unbridled capitalism, and, finally, the brutal hegemony of the USA. Which is to say that there aren't just reactionary novelties, but also a subjective form appropriate to producing the consequences of such novelty. It is not in the least irrelevant to note that, almost thirty years after the irruption of the nouvelle philosophie, Glucksmann has rushed to defend the invasion of Iraq by Bush's troops in singularly violent terms: in order to deny its creative virtue, he must daily nourish journalism with new sophisms.

Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds (pp. 54-5).