Enjoy your Governmental GAZE!!!

Adventurer, Beau Miles

Two Adventurers Collaborate on a Book about the Spirit of Adventure

Renowned adventurer and film maker, Australian Beau Miles and I will are working on a forthcoming book project that will feature the world’s most extreme adventurers.  The book’s focus will examine the recent trends that have pushed the limits of what the human can do from ultra-running, Ironman competitions, proximity flying, extreme snowboarding, to kayaking, sailing, and space-free-falling.  Our aim is to explore what motivates people to go to the extreme limits of human capacity in hopes of better understanding the basic questions of life, learning, and collective and individual experiences.

Philosophy Workshop-Santiago Zabala-Being at Large:The Only Emergency is the Lack of Emergency

§       Provides a new interpretation of the philosophical rivalry between two key 20th Century French thinkers, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou.
§       Explains in a student friendly writing style the works of two thinkers famous for their difficult and inaccessible prose.
§       Crockett introduces the work of Catherine Malabou and his background in political theology to bring new dimensions to Deleuze and Badiou’s work.

“Remarkably illuminating. That Crockett is able to make so crystal clear some of Deleuze’s contested concepts is the result of years of patient labor over the philosopher’s writings.”
-Ward Blanton, University of Glasgow

“This is an interdisciplinary text of rare ability and power that takes the reader into not only a deeply considered discussion of two crucial thinkers but also carefully and skillfully explains the limits and possibilities in discussion.”
-Mike Grimshaw, University of Canterbury

First published in 1997, Alain Badiou’s Deleuze: The Clamor of Being cast Gilles Deleuze as a secret philosopher of the One. In this work, Clayton Crockett rehabilitates Deleuze’s position within contemporary political and philosophical thought, advancing an original reading of the thinker’s major works and a constructive conception of his philosophical ontology. Through close readings of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with Felix Guattari), and Cinema 2, Crockett argues that Deleuze is anything but the austere, quietistic, and aristocratic intellectual Badiou had portrayed. Instead, Crockett underscores Deleuze’s radical aesthetics and innovative scientific, political, and mathematical forms of thought. He also refutes the notion Deleuze retreated from politics toward the end of his life. Using Badiou’s critique as a foil, Crockett maintains the profound continuity of Deleuze’s work and builds a general interpretation of his more obscure formulations.

Clayton Crockett is associate professor and director of religious studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of several books, including Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism and coeditor, with Slavoj Zizek and Creston Davis, of Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic.

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture
Slavoj Zizek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, and Jeffrey Robbins

To read an excerpt, view the table of contents, or find out more about this work go to:
http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-16268-5/deleuze-beyond-badiou

If you would like a review copy, please hit reply or e-mail mh2306@columbia.edu your mailing address.–

—A Lecture Series by Professor Creston Davis

This lecture series will be held every Tuesday at the University Lecture Hall (Katowice) at 4:30 starting October 9th.

Lecture I:  Introduction—Transcending the Secular

Key Words & Methodology

(a) Post-Secularism

(b) Philosophy and Transcendence

(c)  The Literary Imagination

(d) Re-Enchantment

A tentative thesis:  The secular and the theological are insufficient categories and have resulted in a deadlock that I will propose to (a) identify; and (b) transcend.

Lecture II & III:  Figures  (The Subject of Trans-Subjectivity: the groundwork)

(a) Derrida

(b) Milbank

(c)  Zizek

Texts:  Derrida, Acts of Religion

Milbank, Theology and Social Theory

Zizek, The Monstrosity of Christ & Less Than Nothing

Lecture IV:  Themes  (Death is Not En Vogue)

(a) The Death of Death (Paul vs. Heidegger)

(b) Beyond the Deadlock of Modernism

(c)  Deleuze and Turmoil

Texts:  St. Paul (selections from the New Testament)

            Heidegger, Being and Time

Alain Badiou, Being and Event (I & II)

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Lecture V:  Redefining Philosophy

(a) What is Philosophy? (Deleuze)

(b) Spinoza and Post-Secularism (Toni Negri)

(c)  The Veil of Fears!  Nietzsche and the Last Man

(d) Is Nietzsche “post-secular”?

Texts: Deleuze, What is Philosophy?

            Negri,  Spinoza for our Time

Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time

Lecture VI-VII:  Language, Literature, and Subjectivity, or; “How Does Zizek read Literature?”

Texts: Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self:  The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis

Slavoj Zizek (unpublished writings)

Lecture VIII-IX:  Theology and Psychoanalysis, or; “Can the Therapist Save Us?”

Texts:  Slavoj Zizek Paul’s New Moment

Marcus Pound Theology and Psychoanalysis

Creston Davis, Clayton Crockett, and Marcus Pound Theology after Lacan (forthcoming)

Lecture X:  Post-Secularism Towards Some Conclusions

Texts:  Creston Davis, Truth after the Death of Meaning

                         Katerina Kolozova The Cut of the Real

Francois Laruelle, ChristOFiction (forthcoming in my series at Columbia University)

Professor Creston Davis

I will be giving an open lecture series on my book Truth After the Death of Meaning at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures at the University of Silesia, Poland.  This series will last ten weeks.  Here is the outline for the lectures:

1- Introduction–The Gamble of Existence
2- In the Name-of-the-Father(s)–the Bases of Psychoanalysis (Freud/Lacan/Zizek)

3- The Birth of Philosophy and The Object Little-a (objet petit a)

4- Philosophy’s “Sell-Out” (Plato to Christianity)

5- Kafka, Joyce, & Nabokov (Reasonable Lessons from Insanity)

6- de Beauvoir and Sartre (A Love Affair with a Broken Mirror)

7- Sloterdijk (Bi-Polar Philosophy)

8- Zizek & Badiou (What Can’t the Dialectic Do?)

9- Walk the Line– The Edge of “the Real” (Katerina Kolozova and Clayton Crockett)

10- Apocalypse Now!

“Big Ben” threads the needle of the Eye

Olympic madness pervades London.  The city regales its visitors with nationalist flags seemingly posted everywhere, bodies included.  There’s an electric feeling in the air.  In Chelsea it remains somewhat calm (what would you expect?), but walk to Victoria, Hyde Park, or Soho etc. and you can see athletes and enter into a “celebratory” space organized around the question: What can the human body do?  It’s odd, the city is filled with the world’s best athletes.  But , of course, we must not fall into the easy trap of romanticizing the “human-body.”   To prevent this from happening we must take into account the context within which the “body” is defined (taking our cue from Foucault).  For here I would say the body reaches it’s so called potential only within a rationalized and nationalized context.  In this sense, at the very best human-bodies remain very limited indeed as they are organized in terms of very narrowly defined events (100 m dash, the marathon, etc.) and not by other more liberating possibilities.

The measurements of the body (i.e., 100 meter dash in 9.5 seconds etc.) must itself be taken into account.  And when we talk about “measurements” we must also understand what systems of power are organized in such a way as to make the measurements themselves possible.  So in terms of the Olympics, we could say that it is a celebration of the human body and its possibilities, and this is true.  But, on a deeper level we must also be aware that the human body is organized and constituted by these measurements in terms related to a nationalist discourse.  In other words, the body in the Olympics is celebrated for what it can do within narrowly defined fields of measurements.  But is this celebration not hiding other more interesting possibilities regarding the body and human possibility?  For example, can the body not be defined differently?  Could the body be understood as a series of intensities not reducible to “Olympic measurements” but instead in terms of “trans-measurements” located on fluid admixtures of power and its relationship to other intensities?  In this way, as much as I am bedazzled by the celebration of the finest specimens on Earth, there is something dangerous about limiting the human to these Olympic specifications.  The Olympics should teach us a lesson therefore, a lesson about how the body inherently resists measurements.  So finally, we can identify something of a paradox imbued within the logic of the Olympics:  When someone breaks a world-record in a sport (i.e., they transcend the previous limits of what was heretofore possible) is this action not further proof that when a record is broken, the human becomes blinded (paradoxically) to what they can really do on the ground-zero level of power?

the Men’s Marathon

I am, of course, merely recapitulating the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari who challenge us to re-think the body not as a stable entity that can be, as Peter Sloterdijk recently argues in his book Rage and Time, manipulated psychosocially in order to merely reproduce the body in terms of normative standards (i.e., keeping people within the cell-block of enslavement to pre-existing sources of power (the State, Religion, Economic production etc.).  Until we are willing to risk rethinking the body on an infinite plane of immanence we will not know what we can do, and thus, we will not do what we are capable of doing.

I am off to visit various national “houses” (and I highly recommend to you, if you are in London, attending the Qatar house nearby the pedestrian bridge on the north bank of the Themes).