The use of philosophy

Under Pressure Sand Sculpture by Bert Adams, at Sand in the City in Port Aransas, Texas

Deleuze teaches us that the question “what is the use of philosophy” is an attempt at irony and sarcasm, and deserves an aggressive answer. Philosophy has no concerns. It does not obey the State or the Church or any other established power. Continue reading The use of philosophy

A return to subjectivity

What is subjectivity other than a pattern of life? A pattern that answers the question posed by a dialectic of subjectivity. Among the candidates of this pattern: Locke’s selfhood, Husserl’s transcendental ego, personal identity. In this blog I will show how a different logic reveals this pattern of life: Gilles Deleuze’s “impersonal individuation,” (Difference and Repetition, p. 277) one that is distinct from personal individuation, a singularity instead of something particular.

If life is indefinite, then no pattern can ever completely graph life tout court; it is always just “a” life. The characterization of life as “impersonal, yet singular” distinguishes it from the self and obliges a more unbridled version of empiricism, that of transcendental empiricism. Continue reading A return to subjectivity

Nihilism, anyone?

wallpaper-344009
Nihilism: just plug in

The majority of people are so afraid of the possibility that life has no meaning, that it lacks any intrinsic worth whatsoever. This nihilism, due to the fear of the inevitability of meaningless suffering, is bolstered by the modern scientific view of the human species as just the “moldy film” of a tiny planet orbiting a very ordinary star in a ocean of billion of stars in a very ordinary galaxy in a cosmos of billion galaxies. Continue reading Nihilism, anyone?