Category Archives: philosophy

Cult fiction item #8

I watched the 1999 film adaptation of Breakfast of Champions yesterday evening. I decided to check this film – after having read the delightful novel in Spain a week ago – because I considered the novel unfilmable. Unfilmable because of the book’s tone, which hovers perfectly between the surreal and the very mundane. Unfilmable also because it is an illustrated novel (with crude illustrations by Vonnegut himself, the anus illustration at the beginning sets the tone) and because the novel features many matter-of-fact explanations (what is a cow?, what is earth?, etc.).

The film was written and directed by minor American director Alan Rudolph and stars Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, Nick Nolte and Barbara Hershey. The film was widely panned by critics. It is indeed painful to watch.

Some feebly redeeming elements include the score by Martin Denny, revisiting Barbara Hershey, Glenne Headly in lingerie and the over-the-top cross-dressing scene by Nick Nolte towards the end.

The only way to adapt this unfilmable novel would have been to add at least a third person omniscient voice-over, instead of trying to hide its novelish antecedents.

This [1] unidentified excerpt – from a Vonnegut documentary I presume – is exactly what I have in mind.

Breakfast of Champions (the novel) is cult fiction item #8.

Giambattista Vico @ 340

“The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.” —Giambattista Vico, The New Science

New Science (1775) by Giambattista Vico

depicted is a revised 1744 edition

Giambattista Vico or Giovanni Battista Vico (June 23, 1668 – January 23, 1744) was a Counter-Enlightenment Italian philosopher, best known for his New Science. Vico was an outsider genius, who lived in near poverty and never met a thinker of equivalent magnitude.

New Science (original Italian Scienza Nuova) is his magnum opus; it was poorly received during his own lifetime but has since inspired a cadre of famous thinkers and artists. New Science’s core concepts are the eternal return (the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of humans), verum factum and common sense.

James Joyce was influenced by Giambattista Vico’s New Science. Joyce puns on his name many times in Finnegans Wake, including the “first” sentence: “by a commodius vicus of recirculation”. Recirculation is a reference to Vico’s theory of eternal return. Finnegans Wake begins in mid-sentence, with the continuation of the book’s unfinished final sentence, creating a circle whereby the novel has no true beginning or end.

In addition, Feldman and Richardson (1972: 50-61) argue that the study of popular culture as a scholarly discipline can be traced back at least as far as the writings of Giambattista Vico, who anticipated today’s cultural studies programs as he attempted to discover the “principles of humanity” in his New Science of 1775.

To end on a personal note: I discovered Vico through the concept of eternal return, and first actually read him in Adultery in the Novel, where he etymologically explained the origins of civilization.

From memory from that book: At first humans lived in blissful ignorance, everyone was doing “it” with everyone and nobody knew which children were whose. Then came the concept of matrimony (notice the word mater or mother in that word), which allowed one to know which offspring was whose, and also introduced the hereditary system (whereby property is passed along from generation to generation and which allows long term projects), et voila, the birth of civilization. I just ordered a copy of New Science via Amazon.

Solstice and WMC #50

Solstice

Round about this time tomorrow, I mean somewhere around an hour and a half before midnight tomorrow, or 23 hours from now, it will be solstice, the longest day of the year.

Aristotle quotes the solstice as a moment of self-reflection:

For all men begin, as we said, by wondering that things are as they are, as they do about self-moving marionettes, or about the solstices or the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square with the side. —Aristotle

The music I will be remembering this solstice is American jazz singer Andy Bey‘s “Round Midnight”[1], which some of you may know in Amy Winehouse‘s version [2]. The song, in Bey’s version is WMC #50. “River Man” of my previous post reminded me of Andy Bey, who did his own interpretation of “River Man,”

video

Andy Bey‘s “Round Midnight”[1]

video
Amy Winehouse‘s version [2]
But it really gets bad,
’round midnight.

Incidentally, here is Bey’s version of “River Man” mentioned in my previous post.

Principles of an aesthetics of death

Principes d’une esthétique de la mort by Michel Guiomar

And just when you think you’ve seen everything, a book manages to come out of nowhere and amaze you. Today, at the Antwerp book store Demian, I bought Principes d’une esthétique de la mort, les modes de présences, les présences immédiates, le seuil de l’Au-delà, a book essay by French writer Michel Guiomar, published in 1967 by French cult publisher José Corti. The book has not been translated to English, a possible translation of the title is Principles of an aesthetics of death. The book extensively references jahsonic favourite Gaston Bachelard.

What is philosophy, or, when there is no longer anything to ask

Deleuze and Guattari

Unidentified photo of see also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

“The question [What Is Philosophy?] can perhaps be posed only late in the life, with the arrival of old age and the time for speaking concretely…It is a question posed in a moment of quiet restlessness, at midnight, when there is no longer anything to ask. It was asked before; it was always being asked, but too indirectly or obliquely; the question was too artificial, too abstract. Instead of being seized by it, those who asked the question set it out and controlled it in passing. They were not sober enough. There was too much desire to do to wonder what it was, except as a stylistic exercise. That point of nonstyle where one can finally say, “What is it I have been doing all my life?” had not been reached. There are times when old age produces not eternal youth but a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity in which one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death, and in which all the parts of the machine come together to send into the future a feature that cuts across all ages…”–Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (1991). Trans. What Is Philosophy? (1996).

Contemporary philosophy and anti-philosophy

While continuing my research on contemporary philosophy from a purely semantic point of view, I came up with these:

In 2004 Alain Badiou said:

“In my view, only those who have had the courage to work through Lacan‘s anti-philosophy without faltering deserve to be called ‘contemporary philosophers‘.” From Vérité: forçage et innomable, translated as Truth: Forcing and the Unnameable in Theoretical Writings. London: Continuum, 2004. ISBN 0826461468.

Assorted “anti-philosophy” site:wikipedia.org “anti-philosophy” matches:

  • Wittgenstein’s philosophy (or rather anti-philosophy) of mathematics. …

What is interesting about any strain of anti- is that it seems to reveal more of its subject than its positive antithesis. Thus one tends to find more about the essence of psychiatry when one studies anti-psychiatry, etc…

See also: Anti- and philosophy and two posts by blogger Daniel Siksay: Deleuze, Badiou, Nietzsche: the anti-philosophical event part one and two.