Archives mensuelles : juin 2017

Many people read Sloterdijk’s SPHERES trilogy too literal-mindedly and concretistically, whereas I can only make it work for me by reading it metaphorically and imaginatively, by way of the imaginal vision advocated by the post-Jungian analyst James Hillman. Such reductionist … Lire la suite →

In this review I consider the contradiction between Bryant’s desire to inherit and carry further certain progressive post-structuralist themes and his allegiance to the regressive schemas of object-oriented ontology.

Gilles Deleuze talks about style as a form of creative stuttering, a means of speaking one’s mother tongue as if it were a foreign language, a way of being bilingual in a single language. Alan Moore writes: The deployment of … Lire la suite →

Objects in Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology occupy a middle ground between undermining (intelligibility in terms of atomic components, the scientific prejudice) and overmining (intelligibility in terms of subsuming ensembles of qualities and relations, the humanistic prejudice). objects cannot be reduced … Lire la suite →

Laruelle’s project is to « quantize » Marxism. Yet his account of just what he means by the quantum thought is situated at such a high level of abstraction and of vagueness that he might just as well have projected to « magick » … Lire la suite →

INTRODUCTION TO NON-MARXISM is a very interesting work of transition, published in French in 2000, and well worth reading in the contemporary context of thought trying to break free from the inherited limitations that prevent it from engaging realistically with … Lire la suite →

Initialement publié sur HONG KONG REVIEW OF BOOKS 香港書評 :
Terence Blake discusses OOO and convergent and divergent readings of an important new book on speculative realism and literature. FALLIBLE DIVERGENCES: literary theory after speculative realism Grant Hamilton, The World of Failing Machines (Zero…

I first read Feyerabend in the early seventies but his philosophy was frowned on by the scientistic philosophy department I was studying in, which was dominated first by the analytic philosophers and then by the Althusserians. Towards the end of … Lire la suite →

Feyerabend discussed what I have called his « heuristic meta-attitude » toward the diverse rational methods, rules, criteria, and structures in a number of places, under the name of the « way of the scientist » to distinguish it from the « way of the … Lire la suite →

A few remarks on Massimo Pigliucci’s contribution to the discussion of Feyerabend’s pluralism. I agree with many of Pigliucci’s ideas but I wish to indicate a few points where I differ. Feyerabend was not « anti-rationalist », he was against scientistic methodological … Lire la suite →