Deleuze, France, History

The Drama of Revolution

How revolutionary are revolutions? Are they accelerated historical developments? Or are they merely dramatic and shocking moments that somehow capture a moment, and lend themselves to compelling narrative? Having just finished Simon Schama’s monumental Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, I’ve been thinking a lot about how genuinely revolutionary revolutions are, so to speak. Schama himself is sceptical on how much the Revolution changed, and excoriating when it comes to the needlessness of the violence that surrounded the fall of the monarchy in France. While there was a disempowering of the clergy, and some transfer of wealth in that sense, little else really changed in France, in terms of social order and loci of control. While at the time the book was seen as a revisionist work, I am persuaded by his arguments that the required social reforms were underway well in advance of the Revolution, and that the subsequent reversion to traditional power structures further emphasised its vapid core. The General Will, as the wags had it, was ultimately replaced by the General’s Will, as the shadow of Napoleon loomed large over the epilogue.

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Deleuze, Henri Bergson, John Moriarty, Simone Weil, Spinoza

The Mysticism and Ecological Sensibility of John Moriarty

John Moriarty, the Irish philosopher and mystic, was as detached from the physical world as a philosopher can be. He chose to live remotely; that is, outside of the city, though he had travelled some as a younger man. In later life, he returned to his roots in Kerry, where he was buried – near Muckross – in 2007. In reading and studying Moriarty recently, I was struck by how familiar his work seemed to be, and how it danced across the gamut of modern western philosophy and philosophers.

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Carl Schmitt, Democracy, Ireland, Legitimacy

The Idea of Ireland

As the annual St Patrick’s festival draws to a close, a global celebration of Irishness fostered by the two-headed monster of the Irish Diplomatic corps and the Tourist Board, the DUP in the North is coming under pressure to accept the terms of the latest negotiation between the UK and the EU on post-Brexit arrangements, specifically as they apply to the island of Ireland. There are significant baubles on offer, but in the eyes of most unionists it is one more step away from their cherished union with the big island next door. Nationalists meanwhile have been trying to stifle the laughter at such a self-inflicted wound as Brexit – encouraged by a dreadfully judged political position taken by the DUP – and trying to be mature about the process. A new Ireland must be considered, and planned for, given the imminent reintegration of the six counties into the island nation as a matter of formality. And yet what should that mean?

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Deleuze, Heidegger, John Moriarty, Ontology

John Moriarty and the Rhizome
John Moriarty

In considering environmental ecologies – independent, perhaps, of humans – John Moriarty uses the concept of the rhizome, to make a point, about the rootedness (or otherwise) of things. ‘Unlike the dandelion,’ Moriarty says, ‘we have now no rhizome, no rhiza, no root, down into the nourishing earth.’ He laments in the same piece how the human mind is merely clever, impoverished in some ways by its ignorance of alternate, ecological sensibilities. I’m trying to identify the actual source, though I think it’s from Night Journey to Buddh Gaia. Moriarty wonders, just before this reference, whether – just as dandelion and the groundsel has their etymological roots in French and old English, respectively, each with its own eternal story (the dandelion from ‘tooth of a lion’) – these plants had their own names ‘among the leeches who tended the warriors who had been wounded at the Battle of Maldon.’ It is as if, in some way that is strange-to-us, the leeches had their own version of the academy, their own epistemic basis for understanding the world and their role in it. Moriarty’s vision is nothing if not all-encompassing!

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Deleuze, Spinoza

Deleuze, Foucault, King Charles

I revisited some work this weekend on two areas of interest – Deleuze and Foucault. More specifically, an analysis of Deleuze and Guarrati’s interpretation of Freud, and by extension that of Lacan), and Foucault’s commentary on power. Each is separate and distinct, but they both lead back to an understanding of time and contingency, and the Spinozan notion of substance, as distinct from subject. I’m beginning to suspect that the entire project of late twentieth century French philosophy was a kind of new-Romantic desertion of the focal subject, in the light of its failure to yield better things.

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Linguistics, Nietzsche

The Decongestion of Language

So let us consider the decongestion of language. Not just unpacking words, or deconstructing words, but unburdening them, stripping away years of socialization and politics and associations. We speak in a language that has evolved considerably, where simple expressions no longer have their source meaning, but layers and layers of derivations and constructions placed upon them, like an old car gathering dust over years and years and then rediscovered. It looks nothing like its design.

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Ancient Greece, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Philosophy, Spinoza

Consciousness and Ecology

A persistent set of themes in my research has been the concept of subject/object relations, relativism, and the impossibility of the absolute. These abstract themes are realised again and again in philosophy (cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am – therefore, what are you?), politics (native vs foreigner), theology (God versus man), technology (nature versus human) and metaphysics (Deluze’s philosopher as ontologist). In dialectics, as recently discussed, enlightenment versus romanticism. In the first instance, if we take Descartes’ cogito, the impossible ‘I’ is the flaw in the argument. Who, or what, is I? It is me, surely, my consciousness, my context within which the thought is occurring. And yet the actual cogito, the thought, can only be realised in relation to the world. Therefore, the only possibility for consciousness is that it must be conscious of something other than itself. Setting aside whether there would be any point in a self-referential consciousness, one that is only conscious of itself, one has to question what the mode of consciousness would be? Descartes’ fundamental concept of consciousness is intended as a metaphor to that which you and I define as consciousness, invariably considered as a kind of awareness of itself, of its existence. When Descartes says ‘consciousness’, I immediately relate that to my consciousness. It is not consciousness of my self; the self is constructed by and beyond consciousness. It is consciousness in and of itself, the base fact of consciousness. Set aside too the mechanisms that allow us as human beings to conceive of the idea of consciousness, which in and of themselves compromise such a pure concept, like the observer effect in quantum mechanics.

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Christianity, Hegel, Nietzsche, Philosophy

Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Nietzsche & St. Paul
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I’ve been reading my Hegel, Nietzsche and St Paul. It may seem like an unlikely combination, but then my boundaries are not very firmly set these days. There remain some constants: technology, and its power to reveal truth, is never far from my thinking; the dualism of faith and reason; ecology, monism, and the Spinozan idea of substance; memory and the philosophy of history; and theories of knowledge and epistemology. I get distracted, but ultimately there is some guidance there that keeps some orientation. But yes – dialectics.

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Agency, Contingency, philosophy of history

Contingency & Attribution
Liz Truss could have become many things as she grew up. She became Prime Minister of the UK.

The demise of Liz Truss is as much a cruel personal tragedy as it is the death rattle of the Brexit project, as one columnist said. Times journalist Matthew Parris was even more excoriating, her fate being entirely predictable, as in his words ‘she ha[d] never said anything important or interesting or thoughtful.’ Much had been made of her attempts to channel an inner Margaret Thatcher, a leader still venerated in the Conservative Party for some obscure reason, a woman who had genuinely changed the world – along with Ronald Reagan, of course, similarly worshipped in the American GOP. Yet how much can truly be laid at the feet of these so-called great leaders? And how much should Liz Truss be vilified for her perceived errors and misjudgments?

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Deleuze, Latour, Spinoza

On Trains and Transcendence
Bruno Latour, 1947-2022

The world, then, has lost one of its lights. Bruno Latour has gone. We don’t exactly know where he has gone, though his ideas remain with us. On my journey this weekend to Asia, I had with me, by chance, his We Have Always Been Modern, along with Steven Nadler’s excellent commentary on Spinoza’s Tractatus, each in its own way considering the ethereal soup within which we find ourselves, churning and spinning and scrambling around to try and make sense of it all. In truth I am only at the beginning of Latour’s work, which I was pleased to begin given he had been still alive and working. Perhaps I could write to him. I couldn’t write to Spinoza, or Deleuze – but maybe Latour would answer my questions. Now I just have to find the answers in his work, like with all the others.

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