(10:31 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

CFP: Augustine, Our Contemporary

The Polygraph Editorial Collective invites papers on any aspect of St. Augustine of Hippo's work—on Augustinian concepts; interventions in the history of Augustinian exegesis (or in the exegesis of Augustine's considerable body of work); non-modern, pre-modern, and modern determinations of his thought which inform our own contemporary preoccupations or occlusions; or the assessment of his importance to current theologico-political controversies. Augustine's import to intellectual history has yet to enter the emergent conversation on "political theology" or the phenomenology of religion in any substantial way—a particularly striking absence given the scope of writing by and on Augustine shaping numerous philosophical and theological archives as well as the recent interest in religion (and Paul in particular) across a number of disciplines. Important works on Augustine are integral to numerous contemporary debates on grace, law, the Word, the messiah/messianism, sovereignty, belief, and secularism.

Encounters with Augustine enable new or renewed meditations on love, translation and historicity; projects of autobiography and subjectivity in the afterlives of the Confessions; epistemologies of memory and origin, where Augustinian determinations of conversion or original sin complicate our readings of events and iteration; theories of temporality; or diagrams and negotiations of religion and the secular state after Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit or Marx's Capital, in their confrontations with the City of God. Given the rich history of Augustinian reading, our task remains one of retrieval as well as reappropriation. What are the resources of love in and after Augustine? What are the demands of grace? Who are Augustine's interlocutors and what are their terms, from the Pelagians, the Donatists, and the Manicheans to Heidegger, Derrida, Arendt, Vattimo, Lyotard, Wittgenstein, and Agamben? What has been done with Augustine, in or against his name? What does it mark? What is the import of a theology of grace to philosophy? To ethics? To feminism? To race? To political economy? Moreover, what is the status of the City of God, given attendant religious controversies and our contemporary "secular" occasion?

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(12:15 AM) | Amish Lovelock:

Revolution of World-View in the 21st Century

Yasushi Yamanouchi (1933-, on the left in the picture) is a sociologist and philosopher and currently retired Professor Emeritus at Tokyo’s University of Foreign Studies. The following is a loose translation of November’s Shiso no kotoba (Words of Thought), a short guest editorial written each month by a different prominent thinker or academic for one of Japan’s oldest philosophy journals, Iwanami Publisher’s Shiso (Thought). I say “loose” because there are some quotes from Weber in the original which I couldn’t verify in English, and some of the Marx stuff I had to improvise. But hopefully you’ll get the gist.

Yamanouchi was a student of one of the founder’s of postwar Japanese social science, the Weberian economic historian, Hisao Otsuka at Tokyo University. Much of what he is writing here in the editorial is based on a critical engagement with the way in which both Weber (modernization theory/Otsuka) and Marx (the “Althusserian” reception of Kazumi Utsumi and Wataru Hiromatsu) have been studied and debated in Japan, which might make it a bit unclear. Basically, Yamanouchi is a Marxist environmentalist at heart, having got there through Maoism in the late 60s/70s. In his Gaze of the Suffering – Reviving the Early Marx, a lot of which is a close-reading, written mostly in the 1970s, of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts , and which he mentions in the editorial, he also engages Hardt & Negri on their accommodation with modern technology and praises Paulo Virno for not, well lets say, ruling the trees out of the question. His recent work includes, translations of Karl Lowith, Nietzsche and Weber (1993), The Contemporary Phases of System Society (1996), and a collection of roundtable talks A Re-Enchanting World – Total War, Empire, Globalization (2004). All in all he is a very nice elderly man who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting on a couple of occasions and while not being at all “political” enough for me, always provokes debate and provides a wealth of food for thought. Not bad for a man in his seventies.

I’d be interested to hear what people think of this and of whether there is anyone doing similar things in English?

Revolution of World-View in the 21st Century

Yasushi Yamanouchi

At the time that I wrote my Introduction to Max Weber in 1997 I was playing with the idea of writing a further short paperback text, as an extension of that work, entitled Revolution of World-View in the 21st Century. Contrary to the orthodox understanding of Max Weber’s oeuvre, there are moments in which Weber is in complete sympathy with Nietzsche’s fundamental critique of European modernity. Nietzsche read the “ressentiment” of the persecuted slave, within the historical context of the emergence of Christianity. The introduction to Weber’s late work, Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion, was an attempt to criticize Nietzsche’s theory of “ressentiment.” However, in spite of this, Weber did not try to evade Nietzsche’s fundamental critique of European modernity as being just simply meaningless. The “stoic ethos of occupational labor” born from European religious reformation – it is this initial principle, a factor which encourages the social order to become mechanical apparatus – this was the critical magma in which the fundamentals of Weber’s thought are located. Weber’s Sociology of Religion contained the following radical insight: looking back to the European religious reformation, Weber claimed that the “ethical foundations” that were formed from it must be relativized. His theory of a “Revolution of World-view,” born from an engagement with Nietzsche, was the crystallization of this radicality.

But what of Karl Marx, who is so often discussed in opposition to Weber? Again, with Marx too, I had thought there was a problem which the generally accepted orthodox understanding of Marx’s work had overlooked. I thought so because in the Third Manuscript of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx’s stance emerges as one attempting to both inherit and pass on Feuerbach’s notion of the leidendes-Wesen – suffering human existence. According to this Feuerbachian moment in Marx, humanity must not be conceived one-sidedly as a comprehensively active being but rather as a passive being, or, in other words, humanity must become self-conscious of itself as a being bearing suffering (Leiden). Not only through the active engagement with the object, but with and including interaction with nature as the original foundation which makes human labor possible. “All the organs of man” would work in cooperation through “seeing, listening, tasting, feeling, thinking, intuiting, sensing, desiring, acting, loving” – sensual objective passivity – man would become a living, real, sensuous, objective organ – this was the Third Manuscript’s image of future society.

After the 1845 Thesis on Feuerbach this view of humanity as leidendes-Wesen appears to have erased itself in Marx’s later work. However, in the opening of the Critique of the Gotha Program of 1875, Marx begins a full-frontal critique of the United Workers Party of Germany reversing their claim that “Labor is the source of wealth and all culture... the proceeds of labor belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society” writing that “Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor.” The claim that “labor has creative power over and above the restrictions of nature” cannot be the thought of a socialist. This kind of claim is the prejudice bias of the bourgeois classes privately dictating the objective conditions of labor. Here we find “another Marx,” different in tone from the Marx often represented by Capital.

This Nietzschian moment in Weber and this “other Marx” hidden behind his official face – it is through a re-discovery of these forgotten philosophical moments that I had hoped to engage the theme of “Revolution of World-View in the 21st Century.” In a sense, this has been the assignment I had set myself since the late 1970s. However, my engagement with this assignment had been at a standstill until late 2004. It was in 2004 that my Gaze of the Suffering – Reviving the Early Marx was published. It was while completing the finishing touches to that work that I came across an unexpected new theme. This happened when I realized for the first time that Martin Heidegger, in his 1947 Letter on Humanism, had quoted Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and highly praised its theory of alienation. In the letter, Heidegger says the following: that what Marx understood in humanity’s alienation was to “recognize an essential and meaningful sense as man’s alienation goes back to the homelessness of modern man... Marx enters into an essential dimension of history as he discovers this alienation, for that reason the Marxist view of history is superior to other history.” Accordingly, Heidegger, citing both Husserl and Sartre, claims that both fail to “recognize the essentiality of what is historical about be[-ing]” and that “neither phenomenology nor Existentialism enter into that very dimension within which a productive discussion with Marxism would for the first time become possible.” There is no doubt that here Heidegger had recognized the “other Marx.” The Letter on Humanism is probably the only place which Heidegger recorded his sympathy for Marx. But even so, should this rare resonance continue to be overlooked?

Today the so-called “Heidegger Controversy” is becoming a thing of the past and in its place a new current, what one would want to call a “Heidegger Revival,” is emerging, especially in the English-speaking world. Much of this work explores the fundamental – what Heidegger would have called “metaphysical” - rearrangement of modern philosophy in relation to environmental crisis. Surely in the 21st Century, the ongoing theme of “Marx and Weber,” including its connection with Heidegger, will have to be discussed in an all-embracing comprehensive manner. The “Revolution in 21st Century World-View” is already on the start line.

Japanese original at: http://www.iwanami.co.jp/shiso/index.html

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(Amish Lovelock has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(12:12 AM) | Anthony Paul Smith:

Report on Stengers Lecture at Middlesex.

Isabelle Stengers seated, from the side.

First, I want to begin by thanking everyone who donated money to help me get down to see Isabelle Stengers speak at Middlesex. It was worth it, even though, as you'll see, the talk was not exactly path breaking, but these events are always more about getting a bunch of people together anyway.

"Thinking with Deleuze and Whitehead: A Double Test"

Stengers began the talk by saying that when reading Deleuze and Whitehead one must resist the temptation to compare them. Whether or not her own paper actually resisted in this way is up for debate. In a phrase that seemed to grate on Ms. it's nerves Stengers wanted us to think of Deleuze and Whitehead as two witches' rides passing. I think this is a reference to The Fixer where reading Spinoza is described as taking a witches ride and, if this is the case, she could have made the point that more clearly. Stengers appears to want to leave room for something like God, much to the chagrin of the Middlesex crew, and this witches comment seemed to confuse them more than anything.

What was interesting was her insistence on the epochal situating of thinkers. Deleuze and Whitehead are dealing with their own problems in their own times and thus they constitute two very different philosophies. The lineage of problems for philosophy has gone from error to illusion to, in Deleuze and Whitehead's time, bêtise. In English bêtise is something like stupidity or foolishness, but is also connected to the idea of "beastliness". It was this bêtise that Deleuze was responding to with his philosophy, even if he responds to it by calling for a "becoming-animal".

I've not read Whitehead yet, and so most of what Stengers had to say about him didn't mean much to me. She did keep banging on about some conception he has against the bifurcation of Nature, where we shouldn't separate the beauty of the sunset from the way science understands a sunset to be composed (electrons, light waves, etc.). The two are the same (essentially? linguistically? culturally?), which comes to a statement she made in an earlier session that there is no difference between the neutrino and the Virgin Mary. In Whitehead there is a concept of God, though to me this just seems to mean that God is a name for the experience of process that remains unnameable within reason, and Stengers seemed to really like this. I do find this to be an interesting concept coming from a philosopher of science who remains in the actual practice of science, but the concept was undetermined in her lecture. I'm currently translating a short piece she wrote on Gaia that may help to bear it out, but again this is no God of the religions (or, perhaps, it is the same God prior to determination, a determination I'm drawn to force?) Again, this really seemed to bother many of the Middlesex crew. During the Q&A Peter Osborne seemed to become increasingly upset as Stengers refused to 'admit' that God was no answer. I believe his statement was something like, "If God is the answer, then you're asking the wrong question."

He'll push you into the bushes and lead you astray to the restuarant.

The Social Aspect of Talks

Part of the reason I wanted to attend this lecture was to meet some people whose work I've been reading: Peter Hallward, whose recent polemic against Deleuze I reviewed for Angelaki, and Daniel Smith, as well as Eric Alliez, whose book I had hoped to translate but failed to do so. A year ago I entertained thoughts of applying to Middlesex, as it seems to me that the most exciting kind of Continental philosophy is now coming out of Britain (though that may be unfair). And, indeed, the department seems to be really strong. Though I was really resistant to Hallward's book he is really a pleasure to speak with. Very insightful and open without being wishy-washy and not at all pedantic. It was nice to meet up with Daniel Smith again and I'm hoping to have him come down to Nottingham for a talk, even though I may be the only student interested in Deleuze in my program.

It was also really good to see Ms. it as well. I don't think she really enjoyed the lecture and I was shocked to see the shit she has to put up with, but she was incredible gracious as a host and really fun even as the night grated on. We had a bit of trouble getting home since the tube shut down earlier than expected, so after an hour or so on the night bus and dealing with an asshole cabbie who tried to rip us off, we made it to her humble lego-like abode. Also was able to meet Alberto Toscano, which I was a bit nervous about to be completely honest. I've read a bit of his stuff and he's obviously quite learned, but in person he is really down to earth. In the words of Philip, I think he's going to go far and may be someone to watch.

Books for Buying

There was a great sale on Verso titles at Judd's Books (near the British Library). So I picked up a few, the first such purchase in a really long time. With the 10% discount for students I think I spent about $45 on brand new books. I have to say, buying things feels good.

I realized some things on this trip as well. Talking with Ms. it I realized that I need to start writing and working out some actual philosophy. In discussions with her and Peter Hallward I realized that, though I have some rough ideas of where I want to go, I have to argumentative support. I've yet to work out any kind of idea with clarity. I also realized that I need stop being the timid teenager regarding my own work. I really would like to do some translation, but I've been too afraid to admit my inadequacies and ask for help when I need it leading to no actual translation and my own skills remaining undeveloped. I know this is in part to feelings of inadequacy, but it's also incredibly lame and it's time to get over it.

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(Anthony Paul Smith has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Sunday, November 12, 2006

(12:27 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Advanced Procrastinatory Strategies

via Ben Wolfson, I find this insightful essay that partly describes my strategies.

For instance, yesterday, during a period of time I had mentally blocked out for finishing my paper on Zizek's Paul, I read over 100 pages of David Harvey and started Deleuze & Guattari's What is Philosophy? -- both necessary tasks, which additionally needed to be done before the paper in question. Yet somehow they became ways of procrastinating.

Even better, yesterday I graded a single (redone) paper and e-mailed the student to tell her her grade, because I knew she was working on the next paper, due Tuesday, and would want to know if she had been on the right track. A caring, considerate thing to do -- also a great way to procrastinate!

Today I have looked up the courses available during the Winter and Spring quarters at the Div School, as well as checking on what Eric Santner is teaching; written to a professor to ask about a directed study that I have scheduled for him on my program of study; and inquired about the status of two publications of mine that have been delayed. (The last one is an especially important gesture of goodwill, as it will allow the recipients an opportunity to procrastinate by responding to me, if they so choose.)

I currently have 3.5 pages left to go on this stupid paper, which I have been planning to do "this coming weekend" for approximately four months. Hopefully I'll be done in time for Family Guy.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Saturday, November 11, 2006

(7:09 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Weblog at the AAR

Who among the great throng of Webloggians is attending the AAR/SBL this year? Feel free to say so in comments, and also to advertise any papers you are giving, etc.

One potential nodal point for us could be the unofficial "The Weblog panel," officially a panel on Theology and the Political, which is taking place on Monday from 4-6:30. Panelists are Dan Barber, Josh Davis, and Adam Kotsko, with Graham Ward and Conor Cunningham responding and Nate Kerr presiding.

The "Weblog" aspect of this stems from the fact that the panelists and presider have at one time or another left comments and/or written posts on this blog and that the initial impetus was a post I wrote asking if people wanted to do a panel -- by my conservative estimate, 93% of the work of planning this, including the crucial matter of actually coming up with the topic, was done by Nate Kerr.

I also am giving a paper entitled "Politics and Perversion: Situating Žižek’s Paul" in a session on Tuesday from 9-12 in which Brad Johnson will also be a participant. Additionally, a panel discussion of Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul by Theodore W. Jennings, Jr. (my advisor) will take place on Monday from 1-3:30; Brad Johnson will be among the panelists.

Also, keep in mind Brad's advice that you should foster certain indulgences on my part. If followed, it will go a long way toward helping me to meet my budget projections, which are predicated on spending absolutely no money aside from airfare. In short: don't be afraid to spend money on me! I assure you that I'll be very funny and will reveal embarrassing personal information (beyond what you already get on the blog -- so you can imagine it's pretty good).

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(12:02 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Bérubé Event: An Oblique Offering

The Valve is having an event on Michael Bérubé's book What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? My contribution will be minimal; in fact, it will, sadly, address only one paragraph in Bérubé's very interesting and readable work, the whole of which I commend to everyone.

Turn with me, if you will, to page 133 of What's Liberal? There we find the following:

Even America's elite conservatives know this [namely that the US university system is the best in the world]. They may talk a good game about liberal indoctrination here and leftist domination there, but when it comes time to send their own kids to college, do you imagine for a moment that they're looking over the brochures for Olivet Nazarene University....?

As many readers know, Olivet Nazarene University is my alma mater and that of several regular commenters here; my co-blogger Anthony Paul Smith also went there for two years, though he had the good sense to transfer to and graduate from DePaul University. Hence I took this reference as a "shout-out" to The Weblog, primarily since I have no idea what else could've motivated it, unless Bérubé is a huge Chicago Bears fan. In point of fact, at least one of "America's elite conservatives" did look over the brochures for Olivet Nazarene University -- Dr. James Dobson's son went to Olivet, and there are all manner of amusing and vicious rumors about that upstanding young man for those who are interested. This may be an exceptional situation: Dr. Dobson himself is Nazarene and is in fact the holder of an honorary doctorate from Olivet (I was playing in the band on the excruciating occasion of its conferral); I feel like he also went to Olivet in his youth, but can't confirm that presently.

In any case, the reference to Olivet has the clear implication that an education at Olivet is inferior to that at a mainstream institution. Much as I hate to defend Olivet, I don't think that is necessarily the case. First of all, a motivated student will be able to get a good education anywhere, even if the options as regards subject matter will be somewhat constricted. In terms of vocational-oriented programs, Olivet does very well -- their nursing and education programs have strong reputations, their social work program qualifies graduates to skip directly to the second year of an MSW program, and engineering graduates seem to have a high rate of job placement. In terms of more "pure" academic programs, Olivet until recently had a very high rate of placement in graduate programs in theology, not only at seminaries but at reputable institutions such as Vanderbilt or University of Virginia. (Sadly, they have since decided to revamp the religion program into a more practically-oriented vocational program for aspiring ministers in the Church of the Nazarene.)

More to the point, however, is the program to which I devoted my undergraduate career: English literature. Bérubé's accounts of classroom discussions and dynamics were actually not completely foreign to me. Although the balance at Olivet would obviously tip more toward the conservative side, there were still many students who leaned liberal and were only at Olivet due to their parents' insistence (usually in the form of refusing to offer financial support if they chose to attend any other university). Additionally, there were many who came to Olivet as conservatives and were convinced to become more liberal, simply due to the process of education itself. This may have been especially the case in the English department, as the faculty was made up almost entirely of women, and obviously highly educated women are going to have less incentive to identify strongly with the ethos of a conservative religious institution that still, when I was there, regarded the "MRS degree" as a primary goal for women students.

The course offerings in literature were necessarily not as broad at Olivet as at the University of Pennsylvania, but it offered a solid enough grounding for those who wished to go on to graduate school -- I did not ultimately end up entering an English graduate program, but I was accepted to some, and I know of several of my fellow students who are pursuing graduate study in English. The general drift was toward traditional topics: surveys in British, American, and world literature, seminars on Shakespeare and the novel. But there were also seminars on literary theory and on multi-ethnic and Third World literatures, which generated the same types of classroom dynamics as Bérubé describes -- even in a very conservative environment, there is likely to be only one student who both objects in principle to the "controversial" or "political" material being assigned and decides he is entitled to dominate the discussion, and it really only takes one to completely hijack the class.

Interestingly, in most of the upper-level seminars, this dynamic didn't arise simply because the majority of students were women; the obnoxious student was usually me, and usually because I was frustrated that my fellow students didn't seem to be reading as carefully or participating as enthusiastically in discussion as they should be (i.e., my fellow students were undergraduates). In the area of diversity, my experience was definitely lacking, though I am now making up for it at the seminary. Part of the problem was that the Church of the Nazarene is a majority-white denomination. Most of the African-American students had been recruited to play on the football team, and there was very pronounced de facto segregation -- there was one dorm that was unofficially designated for the black football players, and they tended to sit together in a certain area of the cafeteria. I don't know for sure what majors, if any, the African-American students tended to gravitate toward, but in any case it wasn't English. Beyond that, the main source of ethnic diversity was a handful of international students, who seemed to be either religion or business majors.

All that being said, I am basically satisfied with the education that I received at Olivet, and at least in the English department, I think that any motivated student will receive an education that they will have found to be worth their time. People who are specifically looki