Theory Session Debrief

This past Friday Amy and I embarked on a journey to the University of Western Ontario’s Centre for Theory and Criticism, and despite the weather we arrived safely and had an excellent lunch with Peter Schwenger on campus where we talked about Vilem Flusser and Peter’s forthcoming At the Borders of Sleep. After lunch we sat in on Ben Woodard‘s seminar discussion group on Speculative Realism where we discussed Ian Hamilton Grant’s essay in The Speculative Turn. At 3:30 I presented “What is a Compendium?” which was met with a great response and several pointed and charitable questions and comments from the excellent MA and PHD students at the Centre. Afterwards I had an excellent discussion with Andrew Weiss about his writing on Derrida’s The Animal that Therefore I Am and a further discussion with a few others about the methodology of writing a sermon on the existentialism of the book of Job. Overall the discourse and conversation were incredible, including the feedback I received on the paper. The people were charitable and friendly to my theological convictions, and I felt able to speak freely in that space between the disciplines of theology, philosophy, and writing – a space where I intend to remain for the foreseeable future. There’s some great stuff going on at the

Machine

“And that — that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!”

Bernard Stiegler: The Ister

Lacan Quotation:

Gianni Vattimo Quotation

One more example of Straczynski’s Genius (via Katsulas)

An Example of Straczynski’s Genius

Nietzsche!

Or, to put metaphors aside and turn instead to an illustrative example: imagine a man seized and carried away by a vehement passion for a woman or for a great idea; how his world changes! Looking backward he feels he is blind, listening around him he hears what is unfamiliar as a dull, insignificant sound; and those things that he perceives at all he never before perceived in this way; so palpably near, colorful, resonant, illuminated, as though he were apprehending it with all his senses at once. All his valuations are changed and devalued; many things he can no longer value because he can scarcely feel them any more; he asks himself whether all this time he was merely duped by the words and opinions of others; he marvels that his memory turns inexhaustibly round and round in a circle and yet is still too weak and exhausted to make one single leap out of this circle.

Nietzsche

Marx Quotation:

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)

Bruno Latour (quotation)

Retrieved from: http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/latour/latouron.html

“We do not think. We do not have ideas… Rather, there is the action of writing, an action which involves working with inscriptions that have been extracted; an action that is practiced through talking to other people who likewise write, inscribe, talk, and live in similarly unusual places; an action that convinces or fails to convince with inscriptions which are made to speak, to write, and to be read…