Philosophy Now Forum

"As Jameson observes in his seminal 1978 essay on psychoanalysis, 'Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan', what is problematical about psychoanalytic criticism is not its insistence on the on the presence of 'Oedipal' complexes, but rather its failure to pay attention to 'the transformational process...

In a footnote from Ian Buchanan's guide to Jameson, he describes how a public health campaign in 1990's Australia went horribly wrong when they put up grisly images of car wrecks on billboards in order to discourage unsafe driving practices. What resulted was a kind of romanticism among young men of...

“Why do so many people believe their lives are meaningless? According to the philosopher Iddo Landau in his book Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World (2017), the main obstacle is often the untenable ambition he calls perfectionism : ‘ According to this presupposition, meaningful lives must include ...

“In his novel Beware of Pity (1939), Stefan Zweig says, “It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one’s own existence.” To develop an argument for purpose based on feelings is dubious practice, since you could argue that anythi...

Dear Diary Moment 1/23/2022: Went, in my study point (yet again), through Joe Hughes’ section on Deleuze’s embrace of the univocity of Being. (Just can’t seem to back away from the hope of breaking through this particular creative hymen.) And while it didn’t give me quite the brain strain it did yes...

In terms of Deleuze’s understanding of “difference”, one of the main philosophers he takes issue with is Hegel. He mainly criticizes Hegel for offering a false movement (or expression of difference (in his dialectic that consists of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. And as I have posted before: If ...

"In short, it is a question of causing a little of Dionysus' blood to flow in the organic veins of Apollo. This effort has always permeated the world of representation." -from the conclusion of Gille Deleuze's Difference and Repetition It's like I've always said about Deleuze: the creative...

Here I get to what I most like to do on here as my process tends to straddle both the philosophical and the political: apply continental philosophy to a political issue. It just opens up what places I can post in. (And I would apologize to the admins of my philosophy board. I know they try to avoid ...

Delueze’s concern w/ common and good sense gets at its most obvious when you consider the abstract categories we tend to use when we try to define ourselves: poststructuralism as compared to postmodernism, continental as compared to analytic, art as compared to science, etc.,etc., etc…. With common ...

One of the most beautiful statements Deleuze ever made (and he was full of them (was in the A to Z interviews. He made the point that friendship is a matter of knowing the other’s madness, that unless they know your madness, they cannot be your friend. This is because friendship (much like we might ...

Dear Diary Moment 12/4/2021: I’ve recently come to realize that a real world example of Deleuze’s “image of thought” in Difference and Repetition are the trolls we tend to encounter on these boards. This particular conceptual model was meant to confront various false presuppositions we tend to accep...

Dear Diary Moment 11/25/2021: On this particular broach of Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition (original text I mean), I came across something that I hadn’t noticed before that I thought might have been a conscientious aesthetic move. I could be reading myself into this. But then hopefully some of...

Dear Diary Moment 11/19/2021: Reading Fredric Jameson's foreword to Layotard's The Postmodern Condition, something crystallized for me today as concerns the continental tradition that centers around its Marxist roots: that it has been haunted by a dialectic between French based radical self creation...

Dear Diary Moment 11/14/2021: Just started today on my second immersion in Levi R. Bryant’s Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence. And already it has proven a real walk down memory lane in that, it having been years since the first run, this imme...

Dear Diary Moment 11/11/2021: I have, throughout my process, pimped what I call the nihilistic perspective that recognizes that there is no solid criteria by which to judge action. And today, while reading the latest issue of Philosophy Now, I came up against the one argument that presents a legit c...