i have a gridded themememememememe

Today is the first day of classes; I reread some Badiou this morning. I was thinking over “Thinking the Event,” and as apparent as the title of the talk, I only just understood what it meant. The book in which this talk appears alongside Zizek’s talk “Philosophy is not a dialogue” (Philosophy in the present, polity books, 2005, trans. 2009) centers itself on the question of philosophy and living philosophically. For Badiou, not everything is a philosophical thing, not everything *has philosophical potential*.

But what I can understand from this talk in addition to my current thoughts (I might be transposing) is that the “event” of philosophy is not a unique kind of situation that pops up in front of the philosopher as an already occurring process. Thinking the event implies that philosophy is a kind of gridded intersection of philosopher and everyday day events–and the relation between the thinker and the everyday event (I suppose a quick index name for this would be watching an advertisement for a mop or a run-in with a policeman) that freezes both the thinker and the thing/moment just before the imagined “crossroads.” The philosopher, who is thinking the event, is the only thing that allows philosophy to occur in that moment because of his refusal to make sense of the everyday occurrence, i.e. he refuses to vote in his elections nor is he silent about why.

Not everything has philosophical content from within the designed mechanism, from within the given array of “choices”–that is why it is accurate to say that there is no legitimate kind of philosophy in American government, because the options, debates, language, are all pre-determined and cannot be fundamentally or radically altered in their perspective or delivery.

So I would argue that by thinking the event, as Badiou says, one lives philosophically in the rift between the possibility for truth (i.e. the real possibility for healthcare) versus the toy-like apparition of choice (the Massachusetts elections as something to be sad over, to be considered a “real” opportunity). The matter of finding a philosophical situation depends mostly on the thinker and only marginally on the everyday event.

What I love about redundancy is that it always means something different-

This little turn about the timeworn path of new year’s is worthwhile, in spite of itself. Not because it is really a new year or that it really is a fresh chance, but because it is something I might do every once in a while, anyway. Some things that I would like to work on this year-

Blogging; this doesn’t appear to be *too* difficult to manage at first. But I think I should take my writing in this blog to a new place. Being a self-conscious thinker usually leads to my being a bad thinker. In a sense, all of my writing, specifically my blogging, will not be as concerned with being “right” (or as it really turns out to be) an exercise in not appearing to be a sycophant. Perhaps all along I really was more concerned with fitting myself into a long line of history and philosophy that could be discussed normally. This is a tricky place to be in at my level of reading and maturity: for a more advanced person, the difference between posing new problems in a new way and posing problems in an unrigorous way is a danger. [I think it might be, at least for me, but I will have to muddle through this for now. i.e. the top of the ramble.] In short, blogging this year will be more concentrated on particular pieces of writing or ideas or events without my accidental self-conscious attempts to make everything fit before I speak. But this is a process.

Stories; it’s been over a year and there are still huge gaps in the story I am writing. I don’t know whether or not it’s any good but I do enjoy writing it. What can I do? Attempting to iron out the end of the plot by the end of the year. Also, writing new short stories might be a good idea.

Self-consciousness; I’ve mentioned it several times before. It’s my biggest problem. I don’t know if it is because I didn’t receive an organized, standardized education or because I wonder if I am always fatally flawed in my thinking and ultimately have nothing to offer. That would be very bad, but we can’t all be philosophers and if I am not a very good thinker, perhaps I’ll learn something else to do with my time. Most likely, though, I should drop the self-consciousness in spite of being a little dull because I don’t really think I would ever give it up.

Public Conversations; there is such a thing as truth. That doesn’t mean I know what it is, but it also doesn’t mean that it ceases to exist when someone doesn’t agree with my general point of view. I’m sure that almost no one agrees with me and not because I’m so great. Learning when to not argue with people–i.e. when politics and philosophy are fundamentally confused (can’t you tell I’ve been meditating on Badiou and Zizek?) and reduced to the level of “taste”. Learning when to laugh at a very bad and confused joke, learning not to enter into a conversation with the latent intent to undermine the other’s point of view.

Thinking; without forcing it into the confines of history and a historically “whole” conception without slipping into nothing deconstruction. Not everyone can do/be everything- Badiou really puts this into perspective for me in Philosophy in the Present. Fighting with everyone for a world-view is rather stupid because it’s all just caught up in itself.

Future; big, scary word. I can’t ease my way out of this one.

Commitment; Next semester is going to be a douzy. I’m interning two days a week in the city at a mainstream publishing house, taking two upper level French courses and two upper level English courses in addition to a science course. Oh, and somehow finding money to eat. But after all that, it still leaves out my primary passion and concerns. (Of course the English and French courses will be great, but those are not nearly sufficient.) And so I’ve got to get creative. I’m not 100% on the second French course yet, but I think I should do it because I need to step up to the next level, anyway. But there is still the problem of commitment; I can’t say it’s a problem of time or anything else. It’s a matter of personal endeavor and dedication- for instance, I never really liked television anyway but now it’s necessary to give it up, entirely. I’m a bit too easy on myself and give myself too many breaks (that’s what happens when you listen to people around you…) Because for me this isn’t work to get into a good graduate program. Of course that would be lovely and I would learn a lot but that possibility is a. a bit stifled and b. highly unlikely for me. This is what I consider “real life” and it would be a shame to live without it.

I had a thought but I’m not convinced

I’m reading Badiou and Zizek’s Philosophy in the Present and in Zizek’s section of the book, he describes the disconnect between philosophy in concrete and creative practice. Well I don’t know if that’s really the right way to put it. But basically, here’s what he writes:

Instead, we find [philosophy] in cultural studies, in English, in French and German departments. If you want to read Hegel and Badiou, you must paradoxically choose comparative literature with majors in French and German. If, on the other hand, you do research on the brains of rats and perform experiments on animals, you go to the philosophical faculties. But is is not uncommon that philosophy occupies the place of another subject: when, for example, communism fell apart, philosophy was the first place in which the resistance was formulated. It was more political than ever at this point in time. However, here you might like to object that great German philosophy was nothing but philosophy. Absolutely not! Already with Heine, not just with Marx, we know that philosophy was the German substitute for the revolution. That is the dilemma: you can’t have both. It is false to claim that the French could have had philosophy if only they had been clever enough. Conversely, the non-appearance of the revolution was the condition for German philosophy. My idea is the following: perhaps we have to break with the idea that there is a normal philosophy.

Now that’s a lot to handle. But what I want to talk about is the survival of philosophy in English- leaving aside the idea of a normal philosophy, perhaps philosophy (in the B/Z sense) survives in “creative” writing and more specifically in fiction because it can survive the particular and the universal. Individual characters or narratives that would otherwise be bogged down by the concept of the individual circumstance manage to highlight and diagnose social symptoms of the moment. I don’t think that I can go much further without being much more specific, since there are many different types of literatures (and I don’t think all fiction can be considered literature…). It was just a thought and I will write more on this, I’m sure.