Bearing Witness

Like, in what ways is Laruelle not performing the same old schtick of the phiosopher telling us what counts as non-philosophy by privation of philosophical categories? What’s the difference between his delineation of non-philosophy and Badiou’s schematization of anti-philosophy?

I don’t really understand the whole Laruelle hype. Didn’t Nietzsche (and then Deleuze) already tell us that power/desire underlies philosophizing? That philosophy is deluded by its own image, when the most original thought has always ‘decided problems and affirmed differences’?

after stirner, i have no idea what i’d like to work on. spinoza? 

“As is evident, when it came to the moment of death, I too failed to articulate philosophically my fears for her and her family in the face of this trauma, fears that I had spent so long turning over and over in my “cold” and “inhuman” philosophical mind. I too turned away from philosophy towards what is for me the most spiritual of all spiritualities: music, trusting in its incomparable, but incomprehensible communicative power. So maybe that is my vocation, composer/musician, purveyor of a certain kind of silence that, as Nietzsche expresses it, is “too silent for mere silence”, sotto voce, a silence beneath or within the sound or the voice that holds the silence in its proper place, not allowing it to dissolve into a dumb muteness articulating nothing or nothing of importance.” Gary Peters, “The Death of a Friend: Some Themes in Jacques Derrida’s The Work of Mourning”

Your fears about Trump have all been realized under Obama and every President before him; moreover, they are the bedrock of America

A passage from Max Stirner’s infamous Der Einzige und sein Eigentum in which he most clearly expresses his critique of Feuerbach: “His hair — wack. His gear — wack. His jewellery — wack. His foot-stance — wack. The way that he talks — wack. The way that he doesn’t even like to smile — wack. Me? I’m tight as — fuck.”

“Egoism, as Stirner uses it, is not opposed to love nor to thought; it is no enemy of the sweet life of love, nor of devotion and sacrifice; it is no enemy of intimate warmth, but it is also no enemy of critique, nor of socialism, nor, in short, of any actual interest. It doesn’t exclude any interest. It is directed against only disinterestedness and the uninteresting; not against love, but against sacred love, not against thought, but against sacred thought, not against socialists, but against sacred socialists, etc.” Max Stirner, “Stirner’s Critics” (1845); Trans. Landstreicher. Page 19. Stirner makes two distinctions which must be understood in order to grasp his project: 1. Determination vs. Indeterminacy -- See: Hegel’s meditations on Spinoza’s famous principle, omnis determinatio est negatio. Stirner says the Unique “is indeterminacy itself”; the answer to the question of whether Stirner is dialectical or anti-dialectical (a philosopher of a sophist; serious or ironic) rests on the interpretation of ‘dissolution’ in contradistinction to ‘determination’.  2. Principle vs. Interest -- Stirner says in “The Philosophical Reactionaries” (1847) that there is no principle that is not invested with interest, and no interest that could not--for a moment--be raised into a principle. Egoism is a phenomenology, it is ontological; interpreting ‘egoism’ as any kind of political or moral philosophy of ‘individualism’ or ‘utilitarianism’ is impossible given Stirner’s comments on the fallacy of the principle/interest distinction

sometimes i get caught listening to french impressionist music and can’t leave the house for hours