Those who came before us are quickly disappearing and a void is appearing. It’s important to keep certain orientations and trajectories of thought alive.
March 7, 2007
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March 7, 2007
Those who came before us are quickly disappearing and a void is appearing. It’s important to keep certain orientations and trajectories of thought alive.
November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am
Kenneth, Sure, but I think everything comes down to a difference in how singularity and event are handled by Derrida versus someone like Badiou.
K, I’m not sure what gives you that impression. The man’s been a bit of a machine lately. Your question strikes me as aporetic to say the least: If the names are genuinely new then they haven’t been heard. If they’ve been heard then they aren’t genuinely new.
I find this discussion interesting in that it seems to have degenerated into a celebrity round-up. In my original post, I spoke of the importance of keeping certain orientations and trajectories of thought alive. This was not a question of names or celebrity, but of a certain relation to work that everyone can take up and continue in their own work. In other words, a subtext of Chris’s question and of subsequent responses, seems to be the question “who will come in direct thought now.” I take it that Chris himself doesn’t have a dog in this discussion but is merely curious. To me, however, the far more interesting question is that what it means to be self-directing.
March 7, 2007 at 1:52 pm
[…] Dies Simulacrummy. Farewell, Jean Baudrillard! I loved… Baudrillard’s passing Baudrillard Is Dead losing another “abstruse” french theorist Jean is dead 15/40 Encountering the Real Jean […]
March 7, 2007 at 4:36 pm
I agree that it’s important to keep certain orientations and trajectories in mind — I’m not sure about alive, what with the reification that comes with treating them as living being — but I wonder, what’s being done right now to do so. That is, since the critiques of post-structuralism that started in the late 70s and continue through the 80s (in the work of Lyotard and Dews, for example), where have things gone? What are the major philosophical or theoretical objectives now? Who is taking up the baton, and where are they going? I’d be interested in hearing what the “theory” folk have to say about the current state of the art, and potential directions for the future, now that the old guard is dying.
March 7, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Ahem, look around a bit Chris.
March 7, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Hah… I suppose I was asking a broader question. While I respect the potential of academic/intellectual blogs, I was more interested in the more scholarly literature, where the potential for influence and discussion is greater. I was wondering who, out there, is writing interesting original work, and what directions they’re taking. My sense, which is admittedly based on limited information, is that there’s a great deal of keeping “certain orientations and trajectories alive,” but little moving forward,or the building of new orientations and trajectories that respect or incorporate those being kept alive. I was asking, I suppose, for some direction in finding the people who are moving forward and building new orientations and trajectories.
March 7, 2007 at 8:57 pm
I wasn’t referring to blogs. History has, after all, continued since the eighties. There’s the work of Zizek, Negri and Hardt, Badiou, Ranciere, Laclau, Delanda, Massumi, and a whole host of others. Preserving an orientation of thought does not consist in continuing a particular form of inquiry in exactly the same form, but is rather a question pertaining to the spirit of a particular type of inquiry, critique, and analysis. The figures I cite, of course, are not followers of Baudrillard. Many of them are even critics of his work. Rather, they preserve a certain orientation that emerged in French theory that emphasized the dimension of the social, the semiotic, questions of power and communication.
March 7, 2007 at 10:08 pm
This year Zizek turns 68, Negri 74, Badiou 70, Ranciere 67 … DeLanda and Hardt are still relatively young, but the question is a fair one. Quentin Meillassoux is sometimes mentioned as a rising star. His ‘Apres la finitude’ is a very interesting book.
March 7, 2007 at 11:56 pm
I’ll add to the list: Kittler, Stiegler, Haraway, (Mark) Poster, Shaviro, Kearney, (Michael) Warner.
March 7, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Oh, duh, and Agamben.
March 8, 2007 at 2:25 am
Chris, why is it reifying to treat the thoughts of the biologically dead as living?
15 years ago, a lot of people would have thought that Baudrillard had presented a theory of the Spectacle infinitely more sophisticated than Debord’s. That seems to have changed now, with the likes of Agamben finding in the latter the seeds of a far more ambitious political ontology than Baudrillard was able to offer.
And the Benjamin of the Arcades Project is surely a ‘rising star’ at the moment (certainly in comparison to the likes of Zizek).
The real reification is in seeing an ageing philosopher and saying, ‘Oh no, only ten more years of thought left!’
March 8, 2007 at 2:50 am
Oh, and if you insist on Habeas Corpus, I’d add Werner Hamacher to the list.
March 8, 2007 at 6:08 am
Perhaps I am wrong, but there was nothing in the original question to suggest that thought dies with the thinker. With so many well-known figures going to the grave (Jean-Pierre Vernant and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe both dies in January) it’s perfectly normal to ask “who, out there, is writing interesting original work’ that could compare in quality and, potentially, have the same impact. My own opinion is that Mark Poster et al. don’t fit the bill. Agamben, while alive, is also ‘no longer young’ and his ideas have already had an influence. The situation is not without parallel to the passing of the generation of the great modernist writers. It was perfectly legitimate to ask if the new writers who came after them were producing works of the same quality.
So it is perfectly fine to point to the new influence of an old work. This happens all the time (Hegel, anyone?). But I mentioned Meillassoux because his notion of the “arche-fossil” may turn out to be a very influential concept. The forthcoming issue of “Collapse” has pieces by and about Meillassoux.
March 8, 2007 at 6:35 am
By the same token, citing the old cliche, philosophy and perhaps theory more generally, is, with few exceptions, an old man’s art. Consequently I don’t know that citing age is really a persuasive argument here. Kant published the first Critique when he was what, in his sixties? Lacan began his seminar during his late forties, early fifties. With all due respect to Chris, I took his comment as being premised on being outside the world of philosophy and theory. Chris is a cognitive scientist. When I read his question, I took him to be suggesting something like there had been no developments in theory since the late 70’s or 80’s. I don’t intend this observation as an insult and hope that Chris will take no offense. This is even an occupational hazard in philosophy itself. For instance, it’s not unusual to encounter folk from predominantly Anglo-American departments who are unaware that anything has occured in Continental philosophy since Sartre and Heidegger.
I think the work of Badiou, Ranciere, and Zizek is quite distinct from the field of thought generally referred to as “post-structuralism”, though certainly in dialogue with it in a critical way. Despite his age, it’s difficult not to characterize, I think, Badiou as not belonging to a different generation of thinkers. Being and Event was released in 1988 and he just released Logiques des mondes in 2006. Regardless of what one thinks of it, his thought is strikingly different than anything that might be described as “postmodern”. It hadn’t even occured to me to consider age as being a way of periodizing or responding to such questions. Rather, a more valid approach to periodization would, I think, focus on themes of research and topics of dispute.
To my thinking, Badiou, Agamben, Zizek, and Ranciere are all united in thematizing what I would refer to as “logics of exception”. Where, for instance, Derridean thought demonstrated how “the conditions for the possibility of a system are also its conditions of impossibility”, these thinkers all thematize the exception as the very site of truth itself in one way or another. This, of course, doesn’t mean that they agree. For instance, the so-called “post-structuralists” could be thought as forming an episteme around the theme of difference, where Derrida explored textual difference, Foucault historical difference, Deleuze a metaphysics of difference, Irigaray sexual difference, and so on. Clearly these thinkers have very different ideas about difference and are often at odds with one another. Yet there is a theme that defines the field of thought. Baudrillard likes to explore the nuts and bolts of the “semiosphere”. These thinkers focus instead on that which can’t be counted or situated in terms of that sphere.
Bruce Fink nicely describes Lacan’s particular brand of thought as a “Goedelian structuralism” in The Lacanian Subject. As Fink puts it,
And then much later:
This description would work equally well for this set of thinkers. The shared focus is on that anomalous point where a “redefinition of the rules” becomes possible or something new can emerge by virtue of it not being definable with the existing semiotic system.
March 8, 2007 at 8:21 am
I agree that the chronological age of the thinker is not the significant point (among other things, it’s simply not historically that unusual for someone to spend a long period sidelined, only to find their work suddenly resonating…). And I also agree that there is a risk of perceiving specialisations other than one’s own as frozen in time, comparing the current thinking in one’s own field, to older work in another.
It’s still an interesting question, though, in a self-reflexive way, the issue of what comes next. Not as expression of scepticism or cynicism about what will happen, or about whether it will be up to the standards of what came before – just as an attempt to think through what the emerging focus might become (one would expect traces in how we currently react to the sorts of thinkers who have been listed above…). In this sense, strangely, the blogospheric discussion, as well as conversations happening in classrooms, conferences and such, may not be a terrible object of reflection on the parameters of what might emerge…
March 8, 2007 at 10:38 am
Sinthome, couldn’t we think of the ‘void’ you mentioned in your original post as something like the ‘anomalous point where a “redefinition of the rules” becomes possible’, and not just a vacuum to be filled by a ‘new’ generation?
The Difference v. Exception opposition you suggest is probably the best shorthand guide to the shift that’s happening now. But I think one of the most interesting characteristics of the second grouping (Ranciere, Badiou, Agamben, Zizek) is precisely their lack of a generational identity.
Think of the generation that’s gone now: Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Baudrillard…. Despite their pretty estimable differences, they all managed to get lumped together as poststructuralist, a term that quickly became virtually synonymous with postmodernist, thus allowing a further identification with a whole ‘cultural logic’. In a way, this was disastrous, in the sense that it invited the kind of nonsensical syncretism those of us in literary theory still have to deal with (see for instance Homi Bhabha’s pomo potluck). And yet, it seemed to make a lot of sense at the time, and it kind of still does. And maybe it’s this very strong sense of a generational identity that leads so many to think that not much has happened since the early eighties. Sure, Agamben and Badiou might be interesting thinkers, but where’s their cultural logic? (Of course, this might well be premature, and I concede that Zizek is working feverishly to construct his own private cultural logic).
I’m suggesting that what defines this ‘new generation’ – I think we’ve agreed that age is irrelevant here – is its namelessness, its strangely indefinite identity. And this might be the best thing about it, and something we might want to hold onto, instead of just asking ‘What’s next?’ or ‘What does our generation have to say?’ (Does anyone still believe in generations? Really?)
There’s a beautiful passage in Agamben’s Idea of Prose that seems appropriate as this void appears:
“The most hypocritical aspect of the lie implicit in the concept of decadence is the pedantry with which – at the very moment complaints are being made about mediocrity and decline, and predictions made about the coming end – each generation tallies its new talent and catalogues its new forms and epochal tendencies in art and thought. What gets lost in this petty calculation, often done in bad faith, is precisely the one incomparable claim to nobility our own era might legitimately make in regard to the past: that of no longer wanting to be an historical epoch. If one feature of our sensibilities deserves to survive, it is just this sense of impatience and almost nausea we feel when faced with the prospect of everything simply beginning all over again, even if for the best.”
March 8, 2007 at 11:04 am
cg – The passage you quote makes me wonder how many previous “epochs” wanted to be epochs… Certainly there have been movements that had this self-understanding of their significance, of course, but not all groups of thinkers in whom we can now sense a common set of motivating concerns would have thought of themselves in this way… I think perhaps two things might be usefully distinguished:
First the notion that, when we try to communicate with one another – when we draw inspiration from one another, when we share ideas, when we argue or seek to persuade – we have impacts on one another; we leave traces; we deflect one another’s trajectories. These consequences connect us – not by forming us into any lockstep identity, but by placing us into relationships nevertheless.
Second the notion (and I’m sympathetic to this) that a significant and meaningful dimension of contemporary thought, particularly politically motivated thought, might involve a contestation over and a desire to break with a certain pattern of history – if we see articulating history into “epochs” as signifying some linear or developmental historical trajectory, then, yes, we could seek to break with that.
If instead, though, we’re speaking more in terms of a distinctive thematisation of the problems that confront us, I’m not sure this could be overcome, as I would take it as a consequence of our being in relationships, creatively improvising around the impacts we have on one another… Examining these relationships, reflecting on them, trying to get a feel for the ways in which they are shaping us, would, to me, seem to be a means of reaching for a kind of self-reflexivity that expresses, rather than stands in tension with, impatience with the prospect of everything beginning all over again…
Toddler attack underway at the moment – apologies if this is a bit compressed…
March 8, 2007 at 12:59 pm
I’m not sure, especially with Derrida and Baudrillard, that the split between those thematizing “difference” and those thematizing the “exception,” actually holds up. Both devoted a lot of writing to questions of the event and its singular status, and it was this singularity that particularly interested them. I’m not sure, from what you’ve said thus far, that we can really maintain a clear division between the interest in the singular and the interest in the exception, even if the terminology denotes slightly different lineages.
March 8, 2007 at 1:49 pm
I’m a bit mystified. I never meant to suggest that chronological age was in any way a consideration of importance. Badiou has just published a major work; however, his age makes you think that there won’t be another one in a decade’s time. My interpretation of the original question was along these lines: not that there has been no new work, but that the people producing it will not be around for that much longer. Are there new names? I mentioned one that I think will be better known. There must be others.
March 8, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Kenneth, Sure, but I think everything comes down to a difference in how singularity and event are handled by Derrida versus someone like Badiou.
K, I’m not sure what gives you that impression. The man’s been a bit of a machine lately. Your question strikes me as aporetic to say the least: If the names are genuinely new then they haven’t been heard. If they’ve been heard then they aren’t genuinely new.
I find this discussion interesting in that it seems to have degenerated into a celebrity round-up. In my original post, I spoke of the importance of keeping certain orientations and trajectories of thought alive. This was not a question of names or celebrity, but of a certain relation to work that everyone can take up and continue in their own work. In other words, a subtext of Chris’s question and of subsequent responses, seems to be the question “who will come in direct thought now.” I take it that Chris himself doesn’t have a dog in this discussion but is merely curious. To me, however, the far more interesting question is that what it means to be self-directing. l
March 8, 2007 at 3:03 pm
A machine lately, yes, but he himself has pointed out that he and Zizek ‘are no longer young’ and look to pass on the baton to others. Meillassoux, as it happens, is a former student of Badiou’s and qualifies very well as someone taking up an ‘orientation in thought’. As for the ‘new names’ … I was not using this in a technical sense. A name is normally considered ‘new’ if it has not been much bandied about. Badiou was a new name to me, for example, when I found it in ‘What is Philosophy?’ and was moved to search out his books. Now perhaps Meillassoux will sound interesting to others.
Apologies for having expressed myself so badly.
March 8, 2007 at 6:16 pm
For the record, Zizek will turn 58 not 68 on March 21st.
Still young by most standards, although the general point is taken.
March 8, 2007 at 6:56 pm
Although I suppose this further contributes to the celebrity round-up that Sinthome identifies, here’s a short list of younger thinkers whose work Sinthome (or others) have spoken of enthusiastically on this blog in recent months: Alberto Toscano, Peter Hallward. Miguel de Beistegui, Adrian Johnston, Daniel W. Smith, and Christian Kerslake. And I would, of course, add Sinthome and Jodi Dean.
March 8, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Of course, I did not mean to suggest that Jodi’s work has not been
discussed with enthusiasm on this site!