discourse notebook

October 6, 2009
Sense Certainty. The necessity and impossibility of sense certainty. Sense certainty as the problem of intuition. Epistemic homelessness as banishment from the immediate. Sense certainty is the demonstration that there is no first. The first as an epistemological Eden that is always already lost. The logic of  iterability – we cannot begin at the beginning; nothing can be first until there is a second = kant on the reproductive imagination. A radicalization of the Kantian transcendental dialectic. A Grammar of intelligibility. Hegel’s critique of Kant = there is no original passivity.

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October 13, 2009
Perception. Method – Knowing, and the corresponding conception of knowing an object. It is by virtue of universals that we are able to be in contact with objects in the world. We see properties immediately. But we see a thing with properties. This implies some notion of oneness which we identify through its many properties. This chapter concerns the way the one and the many hang together. What makes something “one”? Will the recurring set of properties conception be sufficient. Force and Understanding as a final form of realism. Representation taken as the fundamental relation to the world: Epistemology as first philosophy yields a passive subject. Solving philosophical problems with scientific (Newtonian) means. A dialectical demonstration of the Copernican turn to supplement Kant. The bare substratum. Unity in Kant: The transcendental object = x.

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October 20, 2009
Force and Understanding. The internal connection between law and appearance. Newton’s laws as the combination of terrestrial and celestial mechanics. Conceptual Ascent: the movement of many gods to one god, the movement of many laws to one underlying law. Law and Force, is analogous to the relation of thought and being. The inverted world. Infinity, self-differing from itself and returning to itself. Infinite thinking, as the removal of the Noumena.

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November 10, 2009
Master/Slave Dialectic. Modernity as freedom, freedom as sociality. Absolute negativity. Derrida and Bataille on play. The closure of Western Metaphysics: Acknowledgment reduced to appropriation.

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November 24, 2009
Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness. Objectification and form together as the freedom of thought. The self control of the Stoic. The deep failure of Stoicism as the disconnect from reality. Unhappy Consciousness as the divided self. Devotion as the empty vapor of mere self-feeling. The Crusades. The self-feeling body as the body of worship and the unchangeable spirit. Desire, work, and satisfaction: Labor of life as repayment to God. Self mortification: The renunciation of satisfaction. Luther’s Constipation. Butler’s Hegel. Independence as a figure of dependance. Repressive law represses. The changing and the unchanging. God, Jesus, Spirit. From Luther to Descartes. Protestantism as the combination of God, Self, and Reason. The internalization of unchangeable essence in me. The rationalists claim that reason is self sufficient and the truth of the whole.

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December 1, 2009
Beginning of the Section on Reason. Reason is the certainty which consciousness has of being all reality. Early modern scientism and the genealogy of modern Reason. Reason as all reality. The overcoming of skepticism through skepticism. The cogito. The performative self-contradiction of self-denial. The distinction between empirical and transcendental ego. A wholly immanent absolute. The universal perspective as a theological conceptions of truth. The renaissance as the world of reason. Being at home in the world: an affirmation of immanence. Reason over moral truth. Reason as the creator of nature. Empiricism as either rationalism or idealism. Reaching the beginning of the book itself. Reason’s forgotten path. Universality as a form of forgetting.

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December 8, 2009
Observing Reason as an engagement with science rather than philosophy. The Cartesian certainty of authority over the meaning of reality in general. The certainty of the in-itself. Positivity in Hegel. The Category as the basis of unity and thinking. Kant’s metaphysical deduction of the categories. Descartes, Kant, and Fichte on self-identity. The emptiness of Idealism: The critique of Kantian formalism. The identity of self-unity and the thing. The satisfaction of reason through empirical research. The sciences as the actuality of Reason. The extraneous impulse. The dissection of the body: the living as dead Scientism as a metaphysics of presence. From generality to true universality. The inner and the outer. Hegel’s rebuttal of the Third Critique.

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December 15, 2009
An observational knowledge of reason itself. The laws of thought: Philosophy), Pyschology, Physiognomy, and Phrenology. The separation between law and content. The relation between law and structure or the relation between freedom (negativity) and regularity. Knowing as irreducibly first person. Observation as other than knowledge. Psychology as the reduction of subjects to animals. Freedom v. Behaviorism. The outer as a sign of the inner. Spirit is a bone. From observation to reason as action. The organ of generation as the organ of urination. Pissing the transition.

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January 27, 2010

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February 3, 2010

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March 3, 2010

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March 10, 2010

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March 24, 2010

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March 31, 2010

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April 14, 2010

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