LOL theo

belong 2 who?

What would Deleuze Say? What would Jesus Do?

Just returned to the office from a bruising fight with myself to control my impulse to fight with a famous feminist Deleuzian on campus giving a series of lectures.

She kept saying, "Well I don't know what Deleuze would say if he were here, but..." followed by explanations of why Deleuzian philosophy offers the best account of singularity, the event, the unpredictable...and surpasses Marxism and feminism..and structuralism because they are basically predictive processes...but listening to this mode of philosophizing makes me wonder...Uh...is that like asking, "What would Jesus do?" when we encounter moral dilemmas -- when we encounter philosophical problems, we say, "What would Deleuze say?"

It seems that Deleuze would say that he is for radical openness, being for art and against a plan. The most political question is, "What can a body do?" Hate on liberalism. Laugh at it actually...That's what a body can do...

What can Jesus' body do? That is the question!

Maybe the power of Deleuzian philosophy is that it produces such negative responses in me! Instead of a quiet afternoon in the office, I encounter this allegedly immanent mode of philosophizing whose pure positivity and refusal of critique leave me holding the ugly bag of negation, channeling the crotchety spirit of some old fashioned dialectician with bad knees, an assemblage of populist tics, laughable reservations, untimely, angry, debased, vengeful, confused, outraged by its contempt for "translatability" or even communicability, its arcana, its smug sense of overcoming critique AND science, its "pretend" erudition. Every single encounter with Deleuzians has evoked some of these emotions in me...passions actually, a passionate desire to fight what I have to admit, I feel is a kind of charlatanism and therein, I must in some way concede lies its power, which for me is entirely negative.

This Deleuzian relied on Deleuze's erudition to found his authority. He has allegedy read everything.

belatedly, more on the trouble with diversity...

Unable to keep up with The Valve in terms of topicality, I refer you to its discussion of Walter Benn Michaels' recent book, The Trouble with Diversity or How We Learned to Love Inequality which I read on the grueling r/t from Orange County to Philadelphia where we particpated in this event at Slought with Samuel Weber and Eduardo Cadava.

The event inspiring because of Sam's thinking about "Netwar, Networks and Narrative" from his book Targets of Opportunity which is in its own way, a critique of affirmative action hiring policies called "target of opportunity" policies that "targeted" minority candidates and created jobs for them out of diversity initiative funds.

No one at Slought was impolitic enough to mention this, but it does seem that Weber like Benn Michaels is asking to look again at what diversity means in the wake of its institutionalization.

Benn Michaels makes the argument that class is not a culture, and that cultural differences have usurped class differences as the only ones recognizable to institutions eager to congratulate themselves on the integrity of the meritocratic qualities.

Weber's argument is epistemological and has to do with targeting as a mode of thinking both the future and the other.

While the event was highly worthy, domestic air travel in economy class is pure masochism and makes me want to purchase every gadget in the Sky Mall catalogue in order to make me forget that I have been taken hostage.

an expansive view of the theory genius

is what I used to have...I used to think theory geniuses gave us more permission to think against routinization, but terrifyingly, theory genius itself has become a routine. One form of mentorship models theory genius to one's students, hoping that they will emulate one's singularity. I have become very skeptical of theory genius....routinization of theory genius actually leads to theory esoterica, which as we know is bad for thinking!

I still think of Derrida's lessons about archives, inscription, dynamism and borders with great admiration, but it's so hard to "apply" those concepts fruitfully without falling into imitation...I'm turned on by institutional history...which we could say, tries to put theory geniuses in their place!

Baudrillard has passed away, rumors that Lacoue-Labarthe has passed as well

For a very biased, but funny account of Baudrillard's work read this . But why do right-wing commentators discredit themselves by hating on the French?

For a more balanced, but not as funny appraisal, read this . A generation of thinkers is disappearing. It is time to re-evaluate the radicalism that their thought once represented. Baudrillard's as well as Foucault's anti-liberalism appeared late in their careers less like critique than the dramatic diagnosis of forms mestasticized biopower (for Foucault) and hyperreality (for Baudrillard) that nullified history as much as the society of the spectacle itself.

UC Irvine and Derrida: Le Monde reports on the non-affair

Le Monde reports that the "imbroglio" is a non-affair, and that both parties are negotiating in good faith to reach an agreement over the fate of the archives. There is mention of a dispute between Derrida and UCI over the treatment of a "young colleague": the details are not forthcoming and we are to assume that the affair is going to fade away. No one in these here parts is wiling to go on record about this matter: academics are notoriously defensive when asked to speak to the press outside of their function as experts. And the press has proven itself to be all too wiling to report the worst when it comes to anything "Derrida." On the other hand, the institutionalization of his body of work, which is inevitable will require an inquisitive and aggressive historian to assess these developments -- even as they are unfolding. This will require, like the fate of the Freud archives and Freudianism in general, some one who knows how to read.

As Peter Krapp has pointed out, Derrida was very interested in archives and the way in which they are very much dynamic places where the transmission of a body of thought is never a simple affair. The more important problems and questions are -- who is going to be interested in actually working in the archives, in taking on the challenge of writing about them?

Badiou vs. Balibar at Irvine

I left my feverish child with a babysitter to go hear the showdown...where over two hundred were gathered in an amphitheater to hear Badiou and Balibar hold forth on the concept of the universalism. Balibar offered a thoughtful critique of Badiou's privileging of Pauline egalitarianism: I must admit that I could not follow Badiou's arguments at all. God is dead he said at one point and so is the human of humanism...what we we will have however is the war of the dead against the dead. In my inability to follow his conceptualizations, I thought of the armies of the dead in the Lord of the Rings, and couldn't quite understand where this was all going or even where it came from. I heard that at UCLA, he talked about the hero and the need for heroism -- suffering.

In the words of Tina Turner, "We don't need another French philosopher": we need to pay a bit more attention to the enforced consensus with regard to perpetual mobilization that underwrites the false state of emergency promoted by the state.

By the way, rumour has it that since the University's case against the Derrida family was made public, the former has dropped its suit.