Leith

What I’ve been considering this very early morning was something we could call inherent properties. Now everything has inherent properties. But in regards to operative absences, it becomes difficult to speak about inherent properties when the thing is absent. However, if we kept in mind that we were looking for inherent properties, not only could […]

Eigen

. The child becomes a kind of phenomenological limit-case: if we want to know what our institutions, laws, economies, architectures, families, technologies, and habits actually do, we can ask what world they disclose to someone who has not yet acquired the adult world’s sedimented assumptions. The discrepancy between the two worlds is therefore not an […]

Kinder

. The child is one of the most persistent facts of human existence and one of its strangest historical absences. Every adult has passed through childhood, yet history has rarely treated the child as a force in its own right. The child is recorded as someone’s son or daughter, a student, a dependent, a future […]

Fecundity

Separation, effected in the concrete as habitation and economy, makes possible the relation with the detached, absolute exteriority. This relation, metaphysics, is brought about primordially by the epiphany of the Other in the face. Separation opens up between terms that arc absolute and yet in relation, that absolve themselves from the relation they maintain, that […]

Amsterdam

“mark the obstacles he puts in my way” The problem of difference is often presented as though it begins with the existence of different peoples. But the deeper problem begins earlier, with the question of what it means for anything to remain itself through change. A people survives migration, conquest, conversion, intermarriage, political transformation, linguistic […]

Immortal

Approaching philosophies of formation whose own concepts must remain capable of formation. Immortal begins from the other side of this failure; what happens when formation does not arrive at the form toward which it appears to be moving? We have been treating entropy as though it were a tendency belonging to a system, a statistical or physical […]

Algebra

abstract Perhaps the deepest problem is not how something emerges from absence, nor how a programmed machine becomes capable of learning. It is what happens to determination when a system can acquire an organization that was never explicitly specified. Classical programming gives us a familiar image of determination: the sequence is written first, and execution […]

/lit/

In the morning I read these in sequence. Pieces from Russian Writers, Sensors, and Readers by Vladimir Nabokov, read at Festival of Arts, Cornell, 10 April 1956. “Russian literature has a notion, an immediate idea. This notion in the minds of non-Russians is generally limited to the awareness of Russia’s having produced half a dozen […]

With You

“With regard to what is best and right, virtue is an extreme.” Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics, II.6 Introduction Across the Western horizon, where the grass runs into sky and the mountains seem to withdraw as the eye approaches them, desire acquires a landscape. The West is filled with objects that appear to promise arrival: gold […]

Names

A voice is separated from the person who spoke it. The person is no longer in the room; perhaps no longer alive. Yet the recording does not simply preserve the voice as a souvenir. It can address us. It can alter what we do, bring someone into a room who is not there, make a […]

Instinct

introduction The availability of formalization within an external symbolic medium introduces a distinction between conceptual apprehension and formal articulation. A philosophical structure need not originate in mathematical notation in order to possess formalizable relations. One may apprehend a configuration of concepts—such as the distinction between instinct and impulse, the efficacy of absence, or the relation […]

The Rye

“I went over to my window and opened it and packed a snowball with my bare hands. The snow was very good for packing. I didn’t throw it at anything, though. I started to throw it. At a car that was parked across the street. But I changed my mind. The car looked so nice […]

*

“We come now to metaphysics, a purely speculative science, which occupies a completely isolated position and is entirely independent of the teachings of experience. It deals with mere conceptions—not, like mathematics, with conceptions applied to intuition—and in it, reason is the pupil of itself alone. It is the oldest of the sciences, and would still […]