“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, December 5, 2012

There Will Be No Laughter in the Realm of Radical Immanence. Apparently.

Philosophies, like dogs, seem to become like their owners, or vice versa. Ideas seem to code for certain ways of having them: one term for the study of this is phenomenology.

One of the ways I realized I was amongst Buddhists at the Anthropological Association conference in San Francisco was that there was a lot of laughter when I spoke, laughter from the front row. Oh finally someone gets my twisted humor, I thought. The last time this happened was at OOOII in LA.

Schopenhauer lays out a wonderful, pedantic and therefore funny, exploration of different kinds of humor. Humor comes from the phenomenon–thing gap. Likewise in Freud, the gap between conscious and unconscious content.

One of the things that drew me to Graham Harman's work was that his prose made me laugh. A lot.

I have a hypothesis. Laruellians have no sense of humor. The reason for this is that there are no gaps in a reality that is radically immanent. Prove me wrong.

NB: careful how you prove me wrong. If you jump all over me again ... :) (GOTO top of post)

1 comment:

Bill Benzon said...

I'm pretty sure GOTOs are banned in object-oriented programming, and were suspect long before then. The problem is something called spaghetti code, in which it is all too likely, for example, that somewhere there's going to be a GOTO that points to a line that got erased during a prior revision of the code.

What happens to a CPU when it's told to jump to a non-existent line?

I suppose one might, in the spirit of charity which so much in the blogosphere these days, observe that previous statement that has something of the aura of a koan. No doubt the CPI that does as it's so told will thereby experience no-mind.

Happy CPU.