DELEUZE, BLADE RUNNER 2049, LOVECRAFT, OOO, DIGITAL PHILOSOPHY: some papers in Continental Philosophy

1) NOTES ON THE INCIPIT TO ANTI-OEDIPUS

ANTI-OEDIPUS is a transitional work, owing much in language and thought to the problematics it is trying to break from. The aim is to no longer think about our lives in psychoanalytical terms, but in « machinic », “uncertain, improbable” terms. This uncertain, improbable, or imaginative language is what Deleuze and Guattari are searching for in ANTI-OEDIPUS.

2) LOVECRAFT NOETIC DREAMER: from horrorism to cosmicism

This text argues against the analyses of those writers and thinkers who seek to establish a demarcation in Lovecraft between the works of pure horror and those belonging to the dream cycle. The same noetic estrangement underlies both, and the arbitrary privileging of the horror over the dream excludes Lovecraft’s unitary vision of such estrangement or weirdness. This unitary perspective on horror and the dream can be elaborated in terms of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the noetic estrangement manifested in science-fiction and Bernard Stiegler’s similar concept of the dream.

3) REVIEW OF BLADE RUNNER 2049: on the ontology of replication

Can a copy be as good as, or even better than, the original? If not a copy, then a creative repetition? Can the successor species to humanity, or the sequel to a film, have a soul? I greatly enjoyed BLADE RUNNER 2049 but I do not share the opinion that it somehow « surpasses » the original film. My impression is that the new film is a pedagogical sequel. It is much more explicit about some of the issues raised by the first film, and even about its enigmas, which are no longer simply suggested but explicitly discussed.

4) TWENTY TRAITS OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

What are the characteristic features of contemporary Continental philosophy that give it its distinctive style of rationality? A year ago in response to Noam Chomsky’s demagogic and tendentious dismissal of Slavoj Zizek as “irrational”, and also in response to the publication of Zizek’s book LESS THAN NOTHING, I set out in a series of blog posts sixteen traits typical of the style of rationality of Continental philosophy that Zizek’s book exemplifies, from even a cursory scanning of its first pages. In this text I first list the original set of sixteen traits, now augmented to twenty, and then proceed to explicate them in the context of the controversy between Zizek and Chomsky over the sense and utility of Continental Philosophy.

5) BEST INTRODUCTION TO OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY some advice and references

This text gives advice to those who wish to get acquainted with the principle ideas of Object-Oriented Ontology but who do not know where to start nor how to evaluate its claims.

6) LIVED DIGITAL PHILOSOPHY: an experiment in pluralism

The ontological and existential underpinnings of the blog AGENT SWARM are described in their generality. Deleuze, Badiou, Stiegler, and Latour are shown to belong to the same movement of immanentising Plato. Objectarians (OOO) and Unitarians (Laruelle’s (non-)philosophy of the One) are shown to be its waste products.