By finitude, Heidegger, like Derrida, Deleuze and Nietzsche, doesn’t mean we are hemmed in by cultural norms or our past. On the contrary, finitude is the eternal return of the different and the unique. It is not our past that produces our finitude, it is the utter individuality of our future. — Joshs
You can access a reality beyond a direct and immediate perception by looking at theories of a spectator’s or reader’s relation to a film, text, or artwork. Thus, Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy attempts to uncover the ‘unperceived’ in the perceived, to think that which is unthinkable. “The cinema does not have natural subjective perception as its model because the mobility of its centers and variability of its framings always lead to restoring vast a-centred and de-framed zones. One passes imperceptibly from perception to affective and re-active tendencies of actions” (Deleuze, Cinema 1, pg. 64). On the first level, we perceive isolated, separated things and objects. On the second, determinative one, there is an unfolding of a relational event. It takes up the pasts of different orders that include our habitual and acquired perceptions, inclinations, and desires and enacts the tendencies and potentials of the immediate future.Do we infer the unperceived existence of what we perceive from the nature of our experience? If so, how? If not, why not?
Can anyone point me in the right direction as I have no idea how to help her? — OwenB
Nietzsche didn’t speak of will to meaning but will to truth, a subset of will to power. His notion of power wasn’t some kind of concentrated energy possessed by certain individuals or institutions to be used for good or evil. He believed that all meaning is the effect of differential relations within a system of values. Each individual psyche is organized as such schemes, gestalts, matrices of inter-affecting vectors of drives competing with and altering each other. Social power works the same way, as differential forces flowing though and between persons in a culture, so that each of us in our practices reciprocally affect each other to form social systems and institutions shaped in certain ways, producing and changing the meanings that they have for us. — Joshs
Habermas insists that his theory breaks with Kantian philosophy of the subject. And, if we leave aside Habermas’s insistence on the primacy of implicit rationality, solidarity, and consensus, we should admit that he could successfully advance our understanding of contemporary social realities. In his conceptual framework, lifeworld has become an inexplicable and resourceful background and shared horizon of social agents; it is the store of knowledge and the source of symbolically mediated legitimate orders regulating a field of interpersonal relationships. ” Personality serves as a term for art for acquired competencies and renders subject capable of speech and action, to participate in processes of mutual understanding in each given context and to maintain his own identity in the shifting contexts of interaction. Individuals and groups are ‘members’ of a lifeworld only in a metaphorical sense” (‘The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity’, p 343). This conceptualization of the self is quite close to Deleuze and Guattari’s apprehension of a conscious individual as an assemblage of the mechanical, bodily, affective, perceptive, and cognitive capacities embedded within the socio-technical terrain. ‘The shifting contexts of interaction’ animate intersubjective events of communicative actions so that social actors exercise their cognitive, normative, and personal faculties. Further, each act of communicative practice sustains the universal structures of the lifeworld and the concrete forms of life. While the reproduction of lifeworld has become “less and less guaranteed by traditional and customary means, highly abstract ego-identities condition the risk-filled direction of the self’s identification.” (p 345)Well, I don’t think following Habermas’s Kantian modernist path is the answer. — Joshs
For Nietzsche the self is a community, divided within itself, made of competing drives. We dont decide to will what we will . We find ourselves willing. — Joshs
For Nietzsche the self is a community, divided within itself, made of competing drives. We dont decide to will what we will . We find ourselves willing. Will is equal parts determinism and freedom. The implication of this is that Nietzsche wasn’t advocating self-actualization, as if we can choose a path or value system and stay the course. We fall into these paths, and then fall out of them into other values. What we can do is choose not to deny or repress the fact that whatever we want and prefer will end up morphing in directions we can’t predict or control, and we just make things worse by embracing moral or empirical notions of truth that pretend that there are firm grounds ( objective scientific and ethical verities) to attach ourselves to. There is much more suffering attached to this way of thinking than there is to rejecting the idea of a self-determining ego and an objective worldly order in favor of
being receptive to the creative possibilities wrapped up within what we first encounter as the unpredictable, the painful and negative. — Joshs
I'm pretty much taking your word on Lacan here. I've read people influenced by him but never took that plunge. With that being said I'd say the natural and necessary desires would stand out in Lacan's theory of desire, which are re-occurring due to the nature of life but satisfiable. But I suspect that Lacan would take these facts of hunger and thirst and say that due to their reoccurrence they are never fully satisfied. Or, perhaps, just that we have reoccurring desires is enough to generate a ceaseless sense of incompleteness.
In which case I think it'd be safe to say that Lacan's desire runs orthogonally to Epicurean desire. If desire is never satisfiable, if there's is always a lack and a sense of incompleteness, then the Epicurean cure is a fraud. You'd be making the desire for desire itself a groundless desire which cannot be satisfied.
But this is where I think the appeal to nature -- even though it's fallacious! -- is actually a strength. Running along with the philosophy as I did with Sadomaoschistic desire: Surely if the goal is tranquility then building up desires about desire would result in anxiety if our desires about desire lead us to desire things which cannot be satisfied. But if you, instead, come to live with your own nature -- in this case a ceaseless sense of incompleteness due to the nature of desire as a lack -- you can come to see that it's just a little bit of pain, and that pain isn't all that bad to deal with after all. The pain will come again, and so will go away, and the pleasure will fade away, but will come about again. — Moliere
There is no one self, no one overarching desire, but a society of selves and a society of desires that manifest a relative ongoing thematic unity throughout its changes. Tyranny and power are not properties of individuals, they are manifestations of affects circulating though a culture , from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Subjects are produced by the way power circulates though a community. — Joshs
Deleuze’s Nietzschean-inspired model posits assemblages of desiring elements which produce what he calls a plane of consistency. This plane creates relational connections within the person , and a point of view or perspective, without any overarching synthesis. There is no one self, no one overarching desire, but a society of selves and a society of desires that manifest a relative ongoing thematic unity throughout its changes. — Joshs
Perverse desire belongs to the final category -- not groundless, and not necessary. Epicurus doesn't speak in terms of perversion, but I think this set of categories helps to clarify perversion and that his explanation thereafter -- where he speaks of people habituating themselves to luxury or treating evil as a good -- helps to describe perverted desire. It's technically perverted because there's nothing wrong with, say, sexual desire (I choose sexuality because it's something that should communicate. I believe this holds for other desires of the same category though). It is a natural desire. But it is possible to treat sexual desire as if it's necessary to satisfy, and to become anxious about satisfying sexual desire. To add something to the theory I'd say that sexual desire is such that it can either be satisfied in a simple manner -- which is what Epicurus advocates for in pursuing the tranquil life -- but it can also "run away" with itself. One can become attached not to the satisfaction of sexual desire but rather to its excitement and seek to deepen that excitement and become attached to a luxurious sexuality which is never satisfied (and, hence, would lead to a non-tranquil life, which is evil in Epicurean ethics). — Moliere
Being immersed in practices undertaking, how can one keep any basis for comparative evaluation or any means of applying normative criteria?
— Number2018
My point is that we do have criteria for each practice for the judgments we make about them (whether they are appropriate within what we identify as that thing). What is normative is our lives themselves Cavell says. And we can make explicit those criteria for, say, an excuse, an apology, what we would call “following a rule”, or pointing, walking (compared to running)… — Antony Nickles
there is no standard against which we would call most of our practices “accurate”. The “conditions for objectivity” have “not been lost”, they were imposed in the first place. The desire for that certainty creates the need for a theoretical solution to what is just the varied conclusions available or not under our ordinary criteria. — Antony Nickles
Thought is itself inextricably material and discursive in Barad’s sense of materiality as intra-action, thought is just one of infinitely many sites of material entanglement. — Joshs
That’s interesting, thanks. So you think that Deleuze is in closer accord with Butler on this matter than he is with Foucault? — Joshs
I know that Foucault’s approach is different from Butler’s. — Joshs
It is worth considering again the principal difference between Foucault and Butler. Butler writes:” I contravene Foucault in some respects. For if the Foucauldian wisdom seems to consist in the insight that regulatory power has certain broad historical characteristics and that it operates on gender as well as on other kinds of social and cultural norms, then it seems that gender is but the instance of a larger regulatory operation of power. I would argue against this subsumption of gender to regulatory power that the regulatory apparatus that governs gender is one that is itself gender specific. Gender requires and institutes its own distinctive regulatory and disciplinary regime.” (Butler, ‘Undoing gender,’ pg. 41) On another side, Foucault asserts that biopolitical norms do not primarily work to exclude and repress the deviating individuals; in contrast, they encompass the whole spectrum of practices, producing an account of what is normal and abnormal. ‘Power that comes from everywhere’ animates the discursive formation and the encompassing greed of intelligibility concerning gender. So, while Foucault’s project is based on ‘constitutive inclusion,’ Butler insists on the principle of ‘constitutive exclusion.’” Even when a form of recognition is allegedly extended to all the people, there remains an active premise that there is a vast region of those who remain unrecognizable.” (Butler, ‘Notes toward a performative theory of assembly,’ pg. 5) A disenfranchised group should find a way to claim effective all-embraced recognition. An open-ended hegemonic struggle should produce performative effects reconfiguring the general field of acceptability and identification. To a considerable extent, Butler’s approach expresses today’s dominating tendencies in the struggle for gender equality and identity politics. Yet, contradicting her premise of the importance of a precarious community, Butler underlines a crucial role of media globalization: “The performativity of gender presumes a field of appearance in which gender appears, and a scheme of recognizability with which gender shows up…The media does not merely report the scene of appearance; it constitutes the scene in a time and space that includes and exceeds its local instantiation…it depends on that mediation to take place as the event as it is” (‘Notes toward a performative theory of assembly,’ pg. 92) Here, Butler does not refer back to Foucault’s discursive formation of socially constructed shared pattern of thinking and behaving. Instead, she implicitly invokes the decisive role of the global digital medium. Accordingly, as Deleuze points out in ‘The Postscript of control society,’ we should discern the bits and flows of data that make up dividuals and data banks, always passing beneath the individual. The newest techniques of power permeate the patterns of desires, ideas, and imaginations that constitute our subjectivity and agency.The key notion I want to emphasize is that for Foucault socially constructed knowledge and values are not imposed on a community by an individual or group wielding power and desiring that the community act a certain way. Instead, they form an integrated pattern of understanding with its own internal ‘logic’ not imposed by anybody in particular, and not in top down fashion but disseminating itself through a culture from the bottom up , as a shared pattern of thinking and behaving. — Joshs
Foucault’s approach is quite different from Butler’s. For Foucault, gender is the effect of the ongoing transformations and intensification of supple forms of power. He argues that the nineteen-century “growth of perversions is not a moralizing theme that obsessed the scrupulous minds of the Victorians. It is the real product of the encroachment of a type of power (biopower) on the bodies and their pleasures.” (HS, 1; pg 48) Unlike Butler, Foucault asserts that biopolitical norms do not primarily work to exclude the deviating individuals; instead, they work on accounting for them as such to render them normal or abnormal.my view of gender is actually much closer to the social constructionist approaches to gender of authors like Butler and Foucault than your cultural perspective is. Like me, they view gender in terms of a constellation of shared patterns of behaviors that bind communities. — Joshs
It may not be practical for a community to make political decisions protecting the rights of individuals to behave in ways that that community considers to be the result of private whim or compulsion on the part of the individual, and does appear to belong to a larger pattern, constellation or theme of personality that all of us possess, each in their own way. In other words, if that community defines gender the way you do, as random, subjective whim, then that community cannot justify enacting new and special public protections for something considered to be a private choice like any other, — Joshs
1 ) I believe X.
2 ) Another person tries to show X implies Y.
3 ) I believe Y is bad.
4 ) I now defend not(X implies Y)
5 ) The other person tells me that I am defending Y by defending not(X implies Y).
6 ) I still believe Y is bad.
7 ) I now defend not( not(X implies Y) implies Y)
8 ) The other person now tells me I believe Y.
I don't believe any of this depends upon any of the contained statements being true. As in X, Y, X implies Y, and the perverse negations like not(X implies Y). I also don't trust that it's rightly construed as just a fallacy of inference. Why? It seems also to be about assigning inconsistent meanings to positions. Rather than just about defending a precisely articulated position incorrectly. In that regard I think cognitive dissonance plays a key role in that dynamic. And as a corollary, trying to point the fallacy out will appear as castigation. — fdrake
The motte-and-bailey fallacy occurs when someone advances a controversial claim—one that's difficult to defend—and when challenged retreats to an uncontroversial claim. The bold claim is the bailey, the safe claim the motte.
A: Trans women are not women. [bailey]
B: That's a transparently bigoted comment, functioning as it does to directly negate the gender identities of trans people and thereby deny their claims to equal treatment.
A: Look, all I'm saying is that biological sex cannot be changed and that women's rights need to be protected. And you call me a bigot! [motte]
[This example is inspired by YouTuber ContraPoints, who uses the idea to criticize J.K. Rowling and her supporters in this video, which is worth watching if you're interested in that particular issue.]
The idea was coined by Nicholas Shackel in The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology (PDF). — Jamal
@JoshsWhat would it mean to approach the past from the future? If the past extends infinitely can the road turn back? Can the long lane backward be the opposite of the long lane forward if they form a circle?
If all that will happen has happened before over and over what is the starting and end point of what happens?
Between the two roads is the gateway "this moment". But it is always this moment. This moment is neither the past or the future, and so in what sense is there a return? — Fooloso4
Is the contrast you are bringing out between what Moliere and I's shared position and what you're stating is that we're emphasising the poles of the "machinic engagement" rather than their reciprocity. As in, are you interpreting what we've both written as too focussed on individuals and societal processes as really independent entities, rather than ones which are conceptually distinct but mutually determining?
How does the social contract play into that? As a means by which individuals coordinated volitions become normatively binding? — fdrake
I wouldn't read your contrast, Numbers, as a contradiction. It can very well be that people create systems together which are impersonal and have a bizarre logic that constrains them. A bureaucracy, any workplace culture, a conflict dynamic in a relationship. The bizarre powers that guide people's relationships. — fdrake
the specifically productive relationships that have conscious people "collide within them" are characterised by a bizarre alien, self sustaining logic that the process of production generates and sustains. — fdrake
the individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their own collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them,
From the vantage of poststructuralist thinking, which deconstructs subjectivity, the problem of the alienated capitalist subject vanishes and in its place emerges a pluralism of strategies for ensuring that new openings or ‘lines of flight’ are created within discursive structures (economic, social, technological). — Joshs
No, it is not. The figures of Nietzsche’s Dionisius, Foucault’s Baudelaire, and Deleuze’s Proust and Kafka have not returned the identity of the same. On the contrary, their subject of return has been becoming. The author himself, a figure of a character, literary, conceptual, and aesthetic components of the work compose a singular multiplicity. The work and the producer have simultaneously become and effaced; they have acquired the temporary, fragile, self-sufficient modus of existence. “Eternal return affects only the new, what is produced under the condition of default and by intermediary of metamorphosis. However, it causes neither condition nor agent to return on the contrary it repudiates these and expels them with all its centrifugal force. It constitutes the autonomy of the product. It is repetition by excess which leaves nothing of the becoming-equal”. (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p 90).Mark the singularity of events. . . . Grasp their return. . . . Define their lacuna point, the moment they did not take place. (Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’). Through the figure of Baudelaire, Foucault re-affirms the reality of the Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic existence.
— Number2018
So then it is the eternal return of the same. — Joshs
I hypothesize that , of the many readings of Deleuze , you resonate with those that I find in writers like Massumi , Protevi and Delanda. — Joshs
I used to read Massumi’s books. He is interested in the problem of our autonomy and subjectivity that we deal with in this thread. But, as far as I know, he has not solved it yet.” The call to go beyond ideology is a call to attend to the novelty of the situation, and to find ways of conceptualizing the current mode of operation of the capitalist process, and the new kinds of spin-off effects it produces, that can grasp its novelty and complexity. How can a relational approach give us a new understanding of capitalism as a self-proliferating What are the new figures of that relation? Is the figuring still a question of personification? If so, is identification still at the basis of the figures of capital? What does it mean to ‘personify’ a derivative? A credit default swap?” (Massumi, ‘Politics of affect’, p 90)Do you agree with Protevi that this analysis of the ‘above’ into the political and the ‘below’ into the biological is compatible with Deleuze? — Joshs
↪Number2018
For Foucault, Baudelaire aspires to overcome "the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent' character of modernity and recapture 'something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.'…At the heart of the present is an instant of the intensive novelty. The newest replaces the new so that the endless repetition re-establishes the ongoing eternity.
— Number2018
This is Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same
— Joshs
This is Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same, which Heidegger depicted thusly:
“The "momentary" character of creation is the essence of actual, actuating eternity, which achieves its greatest breadth and keenest edge as the moment of eternity in the return of the same. The recoining of what becomes into being-will to power in its supreme configuration-is in its most profound essence something that occurs in the "glance of an eye" as eternal recurrence of the same. The will to power, as constitution of being, is as it is solely on the basis of the way to be which Nietzsche projects for being as a whole: Will to power, in its essence and according to its inner possibility, is eternal recurrence of the same.” — Joshs
↪Number2018
According to Heidegger, the Being of entities can only be grasped in the present through the awareness that something appearing 'here and now' has the temporal structure of a 'making present' of something. So, it is only through temporality the meaning of Being can become articulated. Yet, in our current environment, the totality of pre-calculated and pre-programmed situations precisely targets the moment of 'here and now'.
There is no more future; it has already arrived as an overwhelming aggregate of pre-formed retentions. There is no past because it is separated from individual memory and "settled" in the collective digitalized network. Only the present remains, that is, the continuing time of perception, in which the perceiver cannot distinguish himself from the perceived.
— Number2018
Is this from Baudrillard? Doesn’t sound like Deleuze. — Joshs
Undoubtedly, Heidegger's philosophy of time significantly supports your affirmation of an individual's capacities to maintain autonomy and adaptability. I would argue that phenomenology cannot provideas Heidegger argues, events always mater to us, are relevant and significant. This is because a pre-understanding operates to make the world familiar to us at some level. This pre-understanding is that frame , that totality of relevance, that makes the world
recognizable to us — Joshs
Our personal identities are concerned more with general psychological character and our social identities more with occupation, career, status etc.—not that these don’t overlap or aren’t located on the same spectrum, but that personal identity tends to reflect ideologies of “individuality” (which in so far as they remain within the social sphere [in so far as we are “sane”, i.e. recognizably social actors] are just more social narratives) and social identity tends towards ideologies of the collective. — Baden
I would argue that we always know implicitly what that overarching framework is that guides our motives and understandings, even if not at a level we can verbalize. We mustn’t confuse our inability to articulate in words the contrast poles of our core constructs with their being invisible or unconscious to us. — Joshs
all issues which have been banned in one way or another from discussion or dissemination on these platforms. None of which are anything to do with politeness or civility, racism, sexism or any other 'ism. They are to do with powerful people constraining the public discourse to promote their interests. — Isaac
What's happening on those platforms is that ideas about what is the case are being censored for no other reason that that they do not agree with what a particular group of people think is the case. — Isaac
Our self (our subjectivity) is one of the lines of our current assemblage.
— Number2018
But is Protevi’s reading doing justice to Deleuze? He argues that “a sophisticated approach to phenomenology does not see it as reducing experience to what appears to a subject but rather as proceeding from that appearance to an understanding of what must underlie it.
Taken that way, Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, which seeks the conditions of real rather than possible experience, lies at not nearly as far a remove from say, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body, as many have thought.”
When we look at the way that Protevi wants to rethink enactivist, embodied cognition, however , we find his brand of Deleuzianism to be merely a more reductionist form of embodied cognition. For instance , his understanding of Deleuzian affect incorporates cognitive and neuroscientific approaches like Lisa Barrett, Griffiths, Panksepp and LeDoux, and he associates the anthropological work of James Scott with Deleuzian thought. I see these approaches as not particularly compatible with Deleuze. — Joshs
Deleuze's(1994) concept of intensive magnitude succeeds in deconstructing the quantity-quality binary by establishing a ‘ground' (as metamorphosis) in difference that is neither qualitative nor quantitative, and thus a basis of number that does not measure.
“Let us take seriously the famous question: is there a difference in kind, or of degree, between differences of degree and differences in kind? Neither.” “In its own nature, difference is no more qualitative than extensive” — Joshs
“A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows). ... An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.” (Ibid, p.8) — Joshs
time consciousness, the fact that every moment of experience is a synthesis of retention, presentation and protention. This means that the now is a blend of expectation and memory. Phenomenology can’t capture any content that is immediately present. To retain a momentary content is to reflect back on it, thereby changing what it was. No particular content repeats its sense identically.
This means that what we experience in its uniqueness is ineffable to us as well as to others, in the sense that it doesnt hold still long enough for us to repeat its essence, duplicate it, record it , reflect on it, tell ourselves about it. This does’t mean that we can’t communicate our experiences to ourselves , only that in doing so what we are communicating is something similar rather than identical to what we experience in it’s never-to-be repeated immediacy. So self-reflection is as imperfect as communication with others. The phenomenological method reveals to us the structural patterns that intentional synthesis consists in, such as the constitution of higher level phenomena like persisting spatial objects out of the changing flow of perceptual data.
In short, the content-in-itself of the contingent , relative, ineffable ‘now’ is not useful or meaningful via its role in the formal , communicable aspects of experience . — Joshs
Rather than starting from symbolic structures of power that must be resisted, Deleuze begins from change, becoming and resistance.
As Dan Smith writes:
“If resistance becomes a question in Foucault, it is because he begins with the question of knowledge (what is articulable and what is visible), finds the conditions of knowledge in power, but then has to ask about the ways one can resist power, even if resistance is primary in relation to power. It is Foucault’s starting point in constituted knowledges that leads him to pose the problem of resistance.
Deleuze’s ontology, by contrast, operates in an almost exactly inverse manner. Put crudely, if one begins with a status quo – knowledge or the symbolic – one must look for a break or rupture in the status quo to account for change. Deleuze instead begins with change, with becoming, with events. ” — Joshs
“Since the beginning, all of his books (but first of all Nietzsche, Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense) have been for me not only, of course, provocations to think, but, each time, the unsettling, very unsettling experience – so unsettling – of a proximity or a near total affinity in the “theses” – if one may say this – through too evident distances in what I would call, for want of anything better, “gesture,” “strategy,” “manner”: of writing, of speaking, perhaps of reading. As regards the “theses” (but the word doesn’t fit) and particularly the thesis concerning a difference that is not reducible to dialectical opposition, a difference “more profound” than a contradiction (Difference and Repetition), a difference in the joyfully repeated affirmation (“yes, yes”), the taking into account of the simulacrum, Deleuze remains no doubt, despite so many dissimilarities, the one to whom I have always considered myself closest among all of this “generation.” I never felt the slightest “objection” arise in me, not even a virtual one, against any of his discourse, even if I did on occasion happen to grumble against this or that proposition in Anti-Oedipus…” — Joshs
irreducible gesture of difference has proximities to Derridean differance — Joshs
In what way Deleuze was close to Derrida's approach? Could you relate Derrida's perspective on power to your quote from 'Desire and Pleasure'?
— Number2018 — Joshs
I think Deleuze was closer to Derrida’s approach to the relation between strategies of power than he was to Foucault’s. — Joshs
it is important to remember that the ‘social’ here refers to the exposure to absolute alterity that temporal repetition implies. Such alterity can be the voice of another or one’s own outer or inner voice, the written words of another or my exposure to the perceptual features of my room — Joshs
What would allow two orders to be heterogeneous to each other, other than some structural unity or center within each , opposing one to the other? Doesn’t this invoke the problem of the condition of possibility of formal structures? We would have to recognize the heterogeneity that already inhabits an ‘order’ and keeps
it from being closed within itself and simply opposed to another order. — Joshs
How can the singularity become ungraspable, but recognizable?“…there is singularity but it does not collect itself, it "consists" in not collecting itself. Perhaps you will say that there is a way of not collecting oneself that is consistently recognizable, what used to be called a `style' “(Derrida 1995, p.354) — Joshs
Here, you consider a social engagement as an immanent cause of ‘my sense of my own identity’. How is that compatible with Derrida’s placing ‘what absolutely is not’ at the center of our temporality and the constitution of our being? “It is because of differance that the movement of signification is related to something other than itself, what absolutely is not… must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself; thereby also along with the present, everything that is thought, every being, and singular substance or the subject”. (Derrida, ‘Margins of philosophy’, p 13). Shouldn’t we substitute Derrida’s interval of an absolute absence, for example, with Simondon’s notion of the transindividual? “The transindividual is the unity of two relations, a relation interior to the individual (defining its psyche) and a relation exterior to the individual (defining the collective), a relation of relations” (Combes, ‘Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual’, p 26). The interval, an abyss of what absolutely is not could be transformed into the relation between the two heterogenetic orders. It could become possible to avoid the epistemological aporia while saving Derrida’s exposure to the unendurable loss of meaning.My sense of my own identity is relentlessly, but subtly, formed and reformed through direct and indirect social engagement, — Joshs
We are affected by our sociopath-cultural situation as filtered and interpreted through our situated bodily organization of perception. The word red has as many senses as there are shared purposes and uses, but those purposes are always only partially shared, due to the fact that we are all situated differently within the ‘same’ culture. The meanings of words are negotiated , not introjected from culture to individual. — Joshs
redness is the product of a complex constructive activity of perception, rather than some irreducible primitive sensation. — Joshs
Language is embodied, — Joshs
Derrida’s notion of deconstruction is not a method but a way of understanding the basis of all methods. And it not an algorithm but a way of understanding how all algorithms deconstruct themselves. — Joshs
The structure of temporality is the basis of all methods , in that it throws us into a world that is already intelligible to us in some way. This familiarity with the world is the basis of method. — Joshs