Hauntology

Sep 092011
 

Here’s an essay on hauntology (word derived from one of Jacques Derrida’s puns). I place it here as a addendum to my essay on the history of philosophy just published. Haunting, hauntology, the ghostly feeling of immateriality–new metaphors for the way we feel today, what is also called nostalgia, or nostalgia for being. Philosophers are really poets of Being. They are always thinking up new metaphors for the relationship between Self and Other. Today it is haunting. We are haunted by Being. In this case, the idea is not so new, as the author points out.  This essay is by Andrew Gallix and it first appeared in the UK Guardian.

dg

Today, hauntology inspires many fields of investigation, from the visual arts to philosophy through electronic music, politics, fiction and literary criticism. At its most basic level, it ties in with the popularity of faux-vintage photography, abandoned spaces and TV series like Life on Mars. Mark Fisher — whose forthcoming Ghosts of My Life (Zer0 Books) focuses primarily on hauntology as the manifestation of a specific “cultural moment” — acknowledges that “There’s a hauntological dimension to many different aspects of culture; in fact, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud practically argues that society as such is founded on a hauntological basis: the voice of the dead father”. When you come to think of it, all forms of representation are ghostly. Works of art are haunted, not only by the ideal forms of which they are imperfect instantiations, but also by what escapes representation. See, for instance, Borges‘s longing to capture in verse the “other tiger, that which is not in verse”.

via ANDREW GALLIX.

Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought, an Essay by Douglas Glover at The Brooklyn Rail

Sep 062011
 

Herewith a link to dg’s distillation of 30,000 years (give or take) of Western philosophy. The idea for this essay came from reading Witold Gombrowicz’s wonderful little book A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes. DG thought six hours seemed a little long and tedious and that he could condense all the important points into about fifty minutes. This essay is a version of the lecture dg gave at Vermont College of Fine Arts last January (in the event, he was not able to get ALL of philosophy into the time slot), including his own incredibly helpful diagrams and sidebar comments which clear up the complicated points.

dg

Plato was right when he said that we can only know what we know already, that knowledge works by identity. What we cannot know, cannot access, we also cannot experience, and yet this unknowable is all around us, lies inscrutable and threatening behind everything we do know, crouches even within our hearts in a place Freud called the Unconscious. Mostly we cannot escape the feeling that it is watching us, waiting to trip us up, or sometimes bless us. At the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein threw up his hands and wrote that we must remain silent about the things whereof we cannot speak, by which he meant a long list of absolutes including God, the Good, Beauty, etc. But that sort of realism has never stopped humans whose imagination is prolific in inventing dream meetings with the Other. The history of our philosophies has been a history of such dreams.

via Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought – The Brooklyn Rail.