Date: Sun, 5 Dec 2004 23:08:55 +0100
From: Lowe Laclau <lowe.laclau-AT-gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [AUT] Re: AUT: My New Signature: Portrait of a young artist as aleftist


Harald, 

> Negation and dialectics has no place in 'the universe,' or 'Being'.
> Agreed. Noone one this list to by knowledge has ever claimed
> such a thing. Where such notions makes sense, is in the social,
> or more precise socio-material world.

Well then you have either not understood me or you haven't understood
Hegel or Kant because this is exactly the Hegelian and Kantian
position. Addressing Being is not anything different than "the social"
or "socio-material world". And negation is for them something
meaningfully "in the world" or in Being or in "the social". Everything
you've been saying up to this point has been consistent as far as I
could tell with that position. It was from the Spinozan metaphysics
that this idea develops of a negative that results from the finite
determination of bodies.

> To my understanding of Deleuze -- and this makes up an
> essential part of what I see as substantially wrong in his
> perpsective -- he goes very far in collapsing qualitatively
> different spheres into One; almost as if as one of the same
> kind of logic could be applied to understand them all. I am
> not sure if this an advance compared to the most crude
> and mechanical manifestations of Cartesianism. It might
> be worse in some respects, however much more symphatic
> in others.

This statement doesn't really make much sense Harald. What does
"collapsing qualitatively different spheres into One" mean? Is there
an absense of qualitative spheres in D's philosophy? Where the hell
did they go? And what happened to all the different logics that make
themselves present in his work? I fear we've been having some HUGE
misunderstanding... you know... 'cause all this time I thought you
were talking about GILLES Deleuze... now it appears to me you're
talking about some other one... Christophe or Philippe... Jeanette or
Jean Pierre. C'mon Harald... can't blame those guys... they're not
even philosophers!

> Anyway, it is through such a reductionism, the tendency
> towards dissolving substantial social and socio-material
> differences, enters; all way down to the level of the
> individual. In some aspects it might be the the most total
> negation/deconstruction of the thought of Marx ever.

Please, please please, please... make concrete references to what
youre talking about because you are stating things that sound you're
simply talking out of your ass. How does one caricature lead into
another? One minutes a philosopher of difference, the next minute the
complete absense of differences. Hala! This must be one of those
Zizekian-Hegelian "I'm dead wrong therefore I'm right" type of
things... yeah.. I've never really been able to get my thought around
those things.

>            Difference is of itself *nothing*!

What does difference refer to Harald? It is obviously a quality or
quantity. It presupposes the quality or quantity of a relation. And
that means it is defined by its relations to bodies. How is "nothing"
derived from this?

> I would be more meaningful to say that God is of itself
> affirmative, and lacks nothing. At least God has an existence
> as a belief in the mind of numerous people .

God however isn't synonymous with Being. At least not in the sense of
being a "belief in the mind of numerous people".

> Harald
> 
> PS: I was not trying to address the thought of Spinoza, just
> indicate to Andy that you need not be a Hegelian of any sort
> to find the concept of negation meaningful.
> 
> There is something absurd in writing, "In Sp's philosophy all
> attributes are really distinct," given that Spinoza never gave
> any indication of what other than two 'attributes'
> might at all be.

It seems to be a recurrent theme that I have no idea what the hell
you're talking about. But anyway, attributes are defined very clearly
in section I of the Ethics. Where is the absurdity?

Lowe


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