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Gabriel Tarde's Monadology and Sociology

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:39:26 -0500

Gabriel Tarde's Monadology and Sociology :

Monadology and Sociology, Tarde’s 1893 book, is now available from re.press, as an open access pdf.

From re.press:

Gabriel Tarde’s Monadology and Sociology, originally published in 1893, is a remarkable and unclassifiable book. It sets out a theory of ‘universal sociology’, which aims to explicate the essentially social nature of all phenomena, including the behaviour of atoms, stars, chemical substances and living beings. He argues that all of nature consists of elements animated by belief and desire, which form social aggregates analogous to those of human societies and institutions. In developing this central insight, Tarde outlines a metaphysical system which builds on both classical rationalist philosophy and the latest scientific theories of the time, in a speculative synthesis of extraordinary range and power.
Tarde’s work has only recently returned to prominence after a long eclipse. His work was an important influence on later theorists including Deleuze and Latour, and has been widely discussed in the social sciences, but has rarely been a focus of philosophical interest. The translator’s afterword provides an explication of the key ideas in the text and situates Tarde’s theory within the context of the philosophical tradition, arguing for the importance of the text as a highly original work of systematic ontology, and for its importance for contemporary theoretical debates.
About the Author
Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) was a French sociologist, criminologist and social theorist. He originally trained in law and worked as a judge. Subsequently he was director of criminal statistics at the French Ministry of Justice, and then held the chair in modern philosophy at the Collège de France. His works cover a wide range of interests; he is best known for his theories of imitation and his work on crowd psychology, and for his debates on sociological theory with Émile Durkheim.

Theo Lorenc is Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Gilles Deleuze from A to Z

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:43:08 -0500

Gilles Deleuze from A to Z:

From Semiotext(e):
Gilles Deleuze from A to Z
Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet and Pierre-Andre Boutang
Translated by Charles J. Stivale

Although Gilles Deleuze never wanted a film to be made about him, he agreed to Claire Parnet’s proposal to film a series of conversations in which each letter of the alphabet would evoke a word: From A (as in Animal) to Z (as in Zigzag). These DVDs, elegantly transtlated and subtitled in English, make these conversations available for English-speaking audiences for the first time.

In dialogue with Parnet (a journalist and former student of Deleuze), the philosopher exhibited the modest and thrilling transparency that his seminal works (such as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus) reveal. The sessions were taped when Deleuze was already terminally ill; he and Parnet agreed that the film would not be shown publicly until after his death. The awareness of mortalityfloats through the dialogues, making them not just intellectually stimulating but also emotionally engaging. Because Parnet knew Deleuze so well, she was able to draw him out—as no one else had—to what might be the 1001st plateau: a place of brilliance, rigor, and charm.

In “A as in Animal,” for example, Deleuze vents his hatred of pets: “A bark,” he declares, “really seems to me the stupidest cry.” Instead, he praises the tick: “… in a nature teeming with life, [the tick] extracts three things”: light, smell, and touch. This, he claims, in a sense is philosophy. “And that is your life’s dream?” Parnet wryly asks. “That’s what constitutes a world,” he replies.

Bruno Latour's new website

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:02:25 -0500

Bruno Latour's new website

Reclaim Resi[lience]stance

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:10:18 -0500

Reclaim Resi[lience]stance:

CFP: Log 25, “Reclaim Resi[lience]stance, edited by Francois Roche.

Parrhesia, Issue 12

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 11:19:31 -0500

Parrhesia, Issue 12:

Issue 12 of Parrhesia, which includes essays by Meillassoux, Lyotard and others, is available for download.

STUDIO Magazine Issue#01 "[from] CRISIS [to]"

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:22:16 -0500

STUDIO Magazine Issue#01 "[from] CRISIS [to]":

RRC studio architects is proud to announce you that STUDIO Magazine Issue#01 is OUT now!

The theme of this issue -[from] CRISIS [to]- is the Crisis as a turning point, as a decision moment that involves also the urban contexts.
Contributions have been written by several international architects, critics, photographers and artists: Bernd Upmeyer (MONU magazine), Domenico di Siena (Ecosistema Urbano), Marco Introini and others.

You can download the Magazine at STUDIO.

Filip Dujardin

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:53:24 -0500

Filip Dujardin:

HORIZONTE N° 4 Release

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:25:17 -0400

Horizonte – Journal for Architecture, No. 4, “Building Matters” is now available in Germany and from Motto.

Read more (in deutscher Sprache) at Arch+.

http://library.nu/

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 21:07:04 -0400

http://library.nu/

Artists Documentation Program

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:57:54 -0400

Artists Documentation Program:

The Artists Documentation Program (ADP) interviews artists and their close associates in order to gain a better understanding of their materials, working techniques, and intent for conservation of their works. All interviews are conducted by conservators in a museum or studio setting.

NOTE: access to the interviews requires registration.

Villa Flaming Lips

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:01:00 -0400

Villa Flaming Lips:

A Cock and Bull Contest

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 17:34:07 -0400

A Cock and Bull Contest:

Peter Sloterdijk's Bubbles, the First Volume of Spheres: Microspherology

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 22:29:36 -0400

Peter Sloterdijk's Bubbles, the First Volume of Spheres: Microspherology:

From Semiotext(e):
Bubbles
Spheres Volume I: Microspherology
Peter Sloterdijk
Translated by Wieland Hoban

If I had to place a sign of my own at the entrance to this trilogy, it would be this: let no one enter who is unwilling to praise transference and to refute loneliness.
—from Bubbles

An epic project in both size and purview, Peter Sloterdijk’s three-volume, 2,500-page Spheres is the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger’s Being and Time. Rejecting the century’s predominant philosophical focus on temporality, Sloterdijk, a self-described “student of the air,” reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial and immunological project, from the discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world (globe) to the poetics of plurality (foam). Exploring macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to the contemporary urban apartment, Sloterdijk is able to synthesize, with immense erudition, the spatial theories of Aristotle, René Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille into a morphology of shared, or multipolar, dwelling—identifying the question of being as one bound up with the aerial technology of architectonics and anthropogenesis.

Sloterdijk describes Bubbles, the first volume of Spheres, as a general theory of the structures that allow couplings—or as the book’s original intended subtitle put it, an “archeology of the intimate.” Bubbles includes a wide array of images, not to illustrate Sloterdijk’s discourse, but to offer a spatial and visual “parallel narrative” to his exploration of bubbles.
Written over the course of a decade, the Spheres trilogy has waited another decade for its much-anticipated English translation from Semiotext(e). Volumes II, Globes, and III, Foam, will be published in the coming seasons.

About the Author

Peter Sloterdijk (b. 1947) is one of the best known and widely read German intellectuals writing today. His 1983 publication of Critique of Cynical Reason (published in English in 1988) became the best-selling German book of philosophy since World War II. He became president of the State Academy of Design at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in 2001. He has been cohost of a discussion program, Der Philosophische Quartett (Philosophical Quartet) on German television since 2002.

Quiz: Which Metaphor Best Captures Your Personal Brand of Post-Modern Ennui?

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 11:54:58 -0400

Quiz: Which Metaphor Best Captures Your Personal Brand of Post-Modern Ennui?:

Answer: A bathroom in a hipster bar from which the mirror has been removed because it caused excessive self-consciousness in its patrons

Herzog & De Meuron

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 22:40:12 -0400

Herzog & De Meuron:

I just discovered that Herzog & De Meuron finally have an official website. However, after a few minutes frustratingly clicking around, I have to say I preferred the ~~obstinacy~~ mystery of the firm sans site.

"Let me ask you what brought you to Spinoza? […] “I read through a few pages and kept on..."

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 08:06:54 -0400

““Let me ask you what brought you to Spinoza?
[…]
“I read through a few pages and kept on going as though there were a whirlwind at my back. As I say, I didn’t understand every word but when you’re dealing with such ideas you feel as though you were taking a witch’s ride. After that I wasn’t the same man.”
[…]
“Would you mind explaining what you think Spinoza’s work means? In other words if it’s a philosophy what does it state?”
[…]
“The book means different things according to the subject of the chapters, though it’s all united underneath. But what I think it means is that he was out to make a free man of himself-as much as one can according to his philosophy, if you understand my meaning-by thinking things through and connecting everything up, if you’ll go along with that, your honor.””

- Bernard Malamud, The Fixer

Fishing With Spinoza Fishing with Spinoza is about the two...

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 19:30:29 -0400

Fishing With Spinoza

Fishing with Spinoza is about the two friends, Jude and Ruby who are out fishing for a legendary fish, called Moby. To kill time they engage in a conversation about Hemingway, the movie “Wild at Heart” and the controversial philosopher Spinoza. When suddenly, Jude is snatched out of the boat and into the depths of the lake, Ruby jumps in to save his friend and a struggle between life and death begins.

"Essences, perhaps, have imprisoned themselves, have enveloped themselves in these souls they..."

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 06:45:45 -0400

“Essences, perhaps, have imprisoned themselves, have enveloped themselves in these souls they individualize. They exist only in such captivity, but they are not to be separated from the “unknown country” in which they envelop themselves inside us. They are our “hostages”: they die if we die, but if they are eternal, we are immortal in some fashion. They therefore make death less likely…”

- Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 44.

GAUDEAMUS IGITUREvery year at E.T.A., maybe a dozen of the kids...

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 07:45:58 -0400

GAUDEAMUS IGITUR
Every year at E.T.A., maybe a dozen of the kids between maybe like twelve and fifteen — children in the very earliest stages of puberty and really abstract capable thought, when one’s allergy to the confining realities of the present is just starting to emerge as weird kind of nostalgia for stuff you never even knew — maybe a dozen of these kids, mostly male, get fanatically devoted to a homemade Academy game called Eschaton. Eschaton is the most complicated children’s game anybody around E.T.A.’d ever heard of. No one’s entirely sure who brought it to Enfield from where. But you can pretty easily date its conception from the mechanics of the game itself. Its basic structure had already pretty much coalesced when Allston’s Michael Pemulis hit age twelve and helped make it way more compelling. Its elegant complexity, combined with a dismissive reenactment frisson and a complete disassociation from the realities of the present, composes most of its puerile appeal. Plus it’s almost addictively compelling, and shocks the tall.

[…]

Eschaton takes eight to twelve people to play, w/ 400 tennis balls so dead and bald they can’t even be used for service drills anymore, plus an open expanse equal to the area of four contiguous tennis courts, plus a head for data-retrieval and coldly logical cognition, along with at least 40 megabytes of available RAM and wide array of tennis paraphernalia…

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Ceci n’est pas une rêverie: The Architecture of Stanley Tigerman

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 09:41:07 -0400

Ceci n’est pas une rêverie: The Architecture of Stanley Tigerman:

From the YSOA press release:

A retrospective exhibition celebrating the creative life, work and spirit of the eminent architect and educator Stanley Tigerman will usher in a new term at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery, 180 York Street, on August 22.

Titled, “‘Ceci n’est pas une reverie’ [This isn’t a dream]: The Architecture of Stanley Tigerman” the exhibition, curated by Yale School of Architecture Associate Professor Emmanuel Petit, will be at the Gallery in the historic Paul Rudolph Hall until November 4.

Tigerman will formally open the show with a public lecture, titled “Displacement,” on August 25