For the Philosophy of Technology & Organic Being seminar we read Byung-Chul Han and Bernard Stiegler, both who engage Deleuze on the point of societies of control (beyond discipline) through technology.
I added a few things to read for January term/winter break as we were caught up and had a few weeks to include original material that I thought I had to cut for the sake of time. As it turns out, we do have the time to include it, thus the updated syllabus.
The material now included comprises a small little section
of its own which I call "Relational Being" (this in addition to the
first part called "Organic Being" and the, now, third part, called "Technological
Being"). It is more a less a transition from the tale end of part one's
discussion of desire and need or libidinal drive in organisms and then Deleuze's
notion of "desiring machines" to the idea of organisms-as-machines or
cybernetics and the union of organism and machine via technical objects.
We begin Part Two, "Relational Being" with Simondon's On the Existence of Technical Objects and newishly translated essay "Technical Mentality." From there we read a few small pieces of Byung-Chul Han's In the Swarm and The Burnout Society to make the transition into part three, "Technological Being" where we go over how technological being affects organic being when (cybernetic, or otherwise) modal entanglement and unions occur as they have in the 21st-century.
Part Three, "Technological Being," closes with some of Bernard Stiegler's Nanjing Lectures and selections from Technics and Time vol. 1, Jason Reza Jorjani's concept of "Prometheism" in Chapter 1 of his book Prometheism, and finally Ernst Junger's Promethean call to heroically march forward into the cosmic technological unknown in his essay "At the Wall of Time" (1959) and The Worker (1932).
The link to the updated Syllabus is HERE. As a side note I plan to begin posting on my YouTube channel recordings of the seminars once January term is over (this way I'll have gone through at least half of the material before posting it). I'll probably discuss it as a long-form series on my weekly Sunday night YouTube live-stream on as well.
Political correctness is spreading to thought itself and deep into history. In this connection, the hatred for old white men is now concentrated on old wise men. This is surely the most extreme form of cultural revolution since Mao. Steadfast, the guardians of virtue replace thinking with intolerance and self-righteousness. The victim status renders with its pathos of indignation any argumentation superfluous.
As though the past were still unfinished, history is being rewritten. Children’s books are being expurgated or censored; a gender-sensitive Bible frees God of the stain of being a father; streets are being renamed, holidays corrected, and statues toppled.The fact that it is now Kant, philosopher of the Enlightenment, who has fallen victim to the tribunalizers, should make it clear to everyone that the fate of occidental rationalism is at stake here. One can put Kant up “to debate,” without reading him. For reading Kant is very exacting—and this is something that even with the best of intentions can be avoided. After all, the tribunalization of the past has an important alleviating effect. A label is stuck to a great mind, and one no longer needs to deal with him. “Putting up for debate” replaces studying.
Updated Syllabus can be found in the course folder HERE, along with most of the readings/texts required for the class. I'm planning to post the lectures on my YouTube channel if I can realistically be consistent in recording them.
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| View from driver's seat while traveling from Dubuque, Iowa to Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, Fall 2011. Internet thugs thought that they had killed me - but some "objects" never die. |
I haven't spoken to Quentin since 2014 (see HERE) when we were attempting to bring him over for our Philadelphia Summer School in Continental Philosophy, which resulted for me a chapter in THIS book (also much thanks is due to one Ray Brassier for making much of that and several opportunities possible). You can hear my opening remarks from that summer school HERE. John Caputo wound up graciously delivering the seminars, which you can download HERE. He discusses Meillassoux quite abit and in depth.
Perusing through After Nature blog one finds many, may posts covering Meillassoux. Some of which will appear in the (hopefully, one day) forthcoming Speculative Naturalism edited and polished into essays. This year I have a book review and two chapters in edited books to finish first though - so Speculative Naturalism keeps getting pushed back, and has been for at least three years now. In any case, you might find some of the following interesting, followed by some interesting quotes.
Some quotes:
"The authentic tradition of immanence resides in the Platonic divine, and in the gods of Spinoza and Hegel, not in the 'philosophical atheism' of Heidegger."
- Quentin Meillassoux - The Divine Inexistence
"The most underrated thinkers in the history of philosophy are Reinhold, Jacobi, Maimon: the German thinkers who formed the junction between Kant and Fichte. With these philosophers, we draw close to the edge of what would soon become the volcano of German Idealism. It is a volcano that would not have been able to erupt without them, even though Schelling and Hegel esteemed them lightly."
- Quentin Meillassoux
"Speculative realism is an appellation designating in itself nothing important but with which I have become associated. It does not quite correspond to my enterprise since it also comprises the option that I seek to counter."
- Quentin Meillassoux
"Tragic Wave." Here's the band, Drab Majesty with "Too Soon," from the "Demonstration" LP. First some Wikipedia though. Link's below the embedded video.
From Wikipedia:
