Apparently I have offended someone who feels that I have used other people’s ideas, i.e. his own, without citing them, although I am a little perplexed as to what passages on my blog he has in mind.
My blogging style is highly allusive, and that allows great concision, but it may be felt to be problematic in other ways, more particularly in terms of proper citational practices.
A blog is different in style from an academic article or a book, and when I assemble my posts into an article I put in the p’s and q’s and dot the i’s as far as I am able. Even so, I am trying to author and publish « quality » blogging, and certainly wish to appropriately acknowledge my influences and sources.
I myself have been plagiarised (in academic papers and at least one book), and I wish to remain vigilant in my own practice.
As my readers may know, I live in France and my reading in contemporary philosophy is mainly in French (Latour, Badiou, Laruelle, Stiegler, and others). I also follow what is podcast or published on youtube of the various French philosophers I read.
In particular, I have listened to every seminar of Bernard Stiegler’s on pharmakon.fr for the last 10 years. I mention Stiegler because I have often wanted to recommend his more recent work (on algorithmic governmentality and the de-noetisation of desire) to people working in media studies, more especially from a Zizekian standpoint, as being potentially useful to read for their diverse research projects.
A problem in the reception of my recent posts on TENET (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) has arisen, in that their theoretical apparatus and terminology has seemed to be derivative in the eyes of certain micro-bloggers of a Zizekian ilk.
I wrote these five posts on TENET as an extension of my ongoing review of SEX AND THE FAILED ABSOLUTE (most recent entry here). I have previously reviewed other of his books, including DISPARITIES and INCONTINENCE OF THE VOID.
My initial training was in the philosophy of science, so I have concentrated a lot on this aspect of Zizek’s work. Further, Bernard Stiegler in his seminars and in his latest books (some still untranslated) talks about algorithmic production of entropy versus the need to produce negentropy and a Neganthropocene/Negentropocene (his terms). So TENET seemed to me to be an ideal occasion to explore the possible convergence of these two problematics.
I must add that I actually physically attended Deleuze’s seminars on the cinema, and I retain from that experience an abiding interest in the time-image and its more popular literalisations. So this makes explicit where I am coming from in my blog posts, if that is any help to understand their underpinnings.
As I understand it one particular micro-blogger is using the uninterpreted results of academia.edu’s algorithm to suggest a possible « influence » of his texts on my work. He is able to show, thanks to this algorithm, that I have consulted and-or downloaded a dozen of his texts. He does not consider the « magpie effect » of such platforms, nor my publication history, nor even other signs of my reading. The actuality of this purported influence thus remains to be demonstrated.
My actual blogging shows my real influences, including many works by Zizek, some of which I have explicated in depth. As I have explained, my texts on TENET derive from an interest in Stiegler and in science fiction as contributing to the plurality of the time image.
An early example of my interest in anamnesis, negentropy, noesis and bifurcations (all of which enter into my account of TENET) dating from 2016 can be found here: https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/…/the-house…/.
A similar contemporaneous assemblage of concepts is mobilised in my paper on Deleuze and Dune, delivered in 2013 (in French): https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/…/deleuze-et-dune…/.
Another influence was my cinematic experience as a science fiction fan enamoured of philosophy. For example, I saw BLADE RUNNER in Paris, in 1982 and liked it very much. This was during the period when I was attending Deleuze’s seminars on the cinema (another enormous influence on my thinking). I have evolved intellectually a lot since then, but it’s not a bad start..
The greatest recent influences on my thinking on science fiction and philosophy have been Jean-Clet Martin’s LOGIQUE DE LA SCIENCE FICTION (which argues that the logic underlying sf as a genre is the logic of Hegel’s SCIENCE OF LOGIC), François Laruelle’s TETRALOGOS (which argues that philosophy’s logic is one of a genericised science fiction), Alain Badiou’s IMMANENCE DES VERITES (which argues that algorithmic logical processes cover over infinities of higher magnitude in the finitising logics of ideology), all of which have been reviewed on my blog, and I would add Bernard Stiegler’s BIFURQUER (which describes algorithmic governmentality and the digital de-noetisation of desire).
Each of these books have greatly influenced me, they are major works by outstanding philosophers, in whom I have maintained a long-term interest and I have done my best to give back as much as I can to these thinkers to whom I owe so much.
My one regret is that I have not written as much on, or with, Stiegler’s thought as with the others, and my texts on TENET were in part an attempt to redress that lack.
I am grateful to the occasion for this post, as it has given me a chance to come out on some things that have remained perhaps too implicit on my blog.
AGENT SWARM 