Category Archives: theory

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.

The sexually frustrated woman

I believe it was Dutch gay fiction writer Gerard Reve who said: “Gij zult het cliché niet schuwen”, which translates in English as “Thou shalt not eschew the cliché.” It is this phrase which has provided me with a rationale for liking stereotypes, archetypes and tropes. For today’s cliché I’ve chosen the sexually frustrated woman. There are two species of sexually frustrated women, the single female (also known as the spinster) and the one in a relationship. We will focus on the second variety as much more information – albeit still limited in comparison to the average frustrated chump – about her is available.

Some quick and dirty research over the course of an hour or so yields our first stereotype of the sexually frustrated woman in Egyptian mythology in the persona of Nephthys. Closer to home and our present age we find her most evidently in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the story of a woman who gets a lover because of her husband’s impotence (a similar plot element is found in von Trier’s Breaking the Waves).

To illustrate her today, I resort to Brian de Palma 1980 film Dressed to Kill and the character of Kate Miller played by Angie Dickinson.

Kate is a married housewife and mother who has just tried to seduce her therapist (played by Michael Caine) who rejects her advances. Later that day as shown in the majestic scene above, we find Kate in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (one of de Palma’s body doubles: the Philadelphia Museum of Art is provided its interiors) and for ten minutes without any dialog she has an unexpected flirtation with a mysterious stranger. Kate and the stranger “stalk” each other through the museum until they finally wind up outside, where Kate joins him in a taxi cab. They immediately begin to have sex right there in the cab, and their experience continues at his apartment.

Let me share that scene with you. One of the most erotic scenes in 20th century sinema, without an inkling of nudity:

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIaUt5KcxzI]

However, the sexually frustrated housewife – like many “final girls” before and after her pays dearly for her transgression. She discreetly leaves while the man is asleep, but not before she rifles through some of his papers and discovers that he has a sexually transmitted disease. Mortified, Kate leaves the apartment and gets in the elevator, but on the way down she realizes that she’s left her wedding ring on the stranger’s nightstand. She rides back up to retrieve it, but the elevator doors open on the figure of a large, imposing blonde woman in dark sunglasses wielding a straight razor. She slashes Kate to death in the elevator.

Unsolved trivia: I’d liked to find the titles of the two first paintings (the one with the woman’s face and the one with the monkey) Kate is enjoying while she is sitting on the bench in Philadelphia Museum of Art. If you know, let me do to.

This film is the 45th entry in the category World Cinema Classics.

Cruelty. Manipulation. Meaninglessness.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k-N6ri95Xs&]

Trailer for I Heart Huckabees

There are so many reasons to like I Heart Huckabees: the film stars French belle Isabelle Huppert, American veteran Dustin Hoffman (who I’ve actually come to like in his later years in supporting small roles such as A Series of Unfortunate Events, Perfume and Stranger Than Fiction, I’ve even come to appreciate his mouth-mannerisms, which I disliked so much), and cult favorite Lily Tomlin.

Huckabees’ director David O. Russell seems to belong to the club of smart, intellectual and philosophical North-American filmmakers which also includes P. T. Anderson, Michel Gondry (I know he’s French), Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, and to a lesser extent Vincent Gallo, Hal Hartley, Alexander Payne and Terry Zwigoff. British film critic James MacDowell, in a semantic approach I also worked on at Jahsonic.com [1], dubbed these directors the “The ‘Quirky’ New Wave”[2], for their “quirkiness“. The denotation of MacDowell overlaps with the recent spate of what has come to be termed “Indiewood” features.

The film is indeed overtly philosophical, with special attention given to concepts such as existentialism and pure being. In my limited philosophical expertise, Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin represent good old American positivist, buddhist-inspired, self-help therapy and Isabelle Huppert, personified as Caterine Vauban (whose business card reads: “Cruelty. Manipulation. Meaninglessness.)”, represents evil French Deconstructionist continental obfuscating philosophy.

Fear not, the two strains are reunited towards the end, all to the sounds of a beautiful soundtrack by Jon Brion, who you may be familiar with via his work on Magnolia (1999) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2003).

Huckabees’ is a 2000s entirely sympathetic entry for the anarchic comedy film category.

This post is a continuation of sorts of this post.

Black Surrealism et al.

I may be a jackass

A “Jackass” sits atop a tall ladder in front of the Palmetto Theater to promote “Hellzapoppin” starring the comedy team of Olsen and Johnson. The sign on the ladder reads, “I may be a Jackass but I’m not coming down until Helzapoppin’ with Olsen and Johnson opens.” The film was released in 1941 by Universal Pictures. Via here

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmw7un31UR0&]

A Cadillac commercial by Dylan centered around Bob’s radio show

Spent yesterday evening in the vicinity of the Nachtegalenpark where I listened to The Faces, Nicola Conte‘s newest compilation but most of all to Bob Dylan‘s The Best of Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour. Came home and got sick. Slept for more than 15 hours.

Woke up and thought about Black Surrealism, through my first exposure to the work of Slim Gaillard and his role in films such as the 1941 film Hellzapoppin’, of which Ado Kyrou was a fan. Black Surrealism is a concept first put forward by Robin D.G. Kelley in A Poetics of Anticolonialism (1999), although he had overlooked the popular dimension of the concept.

The popular strains of any art form are often forgotten, take for example Ma and Pa Kettle, the American comic duo known for their celebration of the absurd, but much less known and appreciated than comparable films by Jacques Tati (I am referring specifically to Tati’s attack on modernity which was just as prevalent in the Kettle films).

To conclude, a recommendation: if you only buy one CD in 2008, make it Bob Dylan‘s The Best of Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour. You’ll enjoy tracks such as Mary Gauthier’s “I Drink”, Dinah Washington’s bawdy “Long Big Sliding Thing” and many more. Trust me.

For the sake of a book

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4wyQCD70sQ&]

Truman Capote/Andy Warhol with the Rolling Stones

Yesterday evening, after visiting friends who provided me with a Joe Sarnoesque [1] experience of suburban want and need in the Antwerp district of the Tentoonstellingslaan, I finished my viewing of Capote, which sheds light on the nature of fiction and modern writing. The key to the film is in its final five minutes where Truman Capote contends that there was nothing he could have done to save the life of the murderers, but as Nelle (Christine Keener, who I recently admired in Friends with Money, a portrayal of American depression) responds, he did not want to do that. Implied is that he did not want to save the murderers for the sake of his book In Cold Blood and in fact, put his own life to a perverted use subjugated to the pursuit of writing fiction. (see semi-autobiographical and autofiction.)

Aimé Césaire (1913 – 2008)


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Aimé Fernand David Césaire (25 June 1913 – 17 April 2008) was a French poet, author and politician. He was with Léopold Sédar Senghor one of the figure heads of the négritude movement, the precursor to the Black Power movement of the 1960s. His writings reflect his passion for civic and social engagement. He is the author of Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) (1953), a denunciation of European colonial racism which was published in the French review Présence Africaine. In 1968, he published the first version of Une Tempête, a radical adaptation of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest for a black audience.

Contemporary philosophy

Collapse 4

Collapse IV (2008)

Order it here.

This looks interesting. Nice cover too. A bit arcimboldesque. I wonder who did it. This is the cover of a contemporary philosophy magazine of which this issue is dedicated to the theory of horror. Any philosophy of horror and the representation thereof (which is also the theory of the aestheticization of violence) needs to start with Aristotle, as I’ve stated before. Aristotle said on the subject:

“Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies.” —Aristotle from the Poetics.

As you may have guessed by now, I have limited first-hand knowledge on some subjects; I do not have the patience to read Aristotle. Nevertheless, in my infinite ignorance, I dare to state that I like Aristotle and dislike Plato. Plato strikes me as a bore (much like Kant does), Aristotle was a sensationalist like myself. From “my” page on aestheticization of violence, Plato comes across as the sort of moral crusader I’ve never felt any sympathy for (except that they have sometimes pointed me in the direction of worthwhile art, see the censor/censored dilemma):

Plato proposed to ban poets from his ideal republic because he feared that their aesthetic ability to construct attractive narratives about immoral behavior would corrupt young minds. Plato’s writings refer to poetry as a kind of rhetoric, whose “…influence is pervasive and often harmful.” Plato believed that poetry that was “unregulated by philosophy is a danger to soul and community.” He warned that tragic poetry can produce “a disordered psychic regime or constitution” by inducing “a dream-like, uncritical state in which we lose ourselves in …sorrow, grief, anger, [and] resentment.

Back to contemporary philosophy. From Wikpedia:

“Philosophy has re-entered popular culture through the work of authors such as Alain de Botton. This trend is reinforced by the recent increase in films with philosophical content. Some films, such as Fight Club, eXistenZ, The Matrix trilogy, Little Miss Sunshine, and Waking Life have philosophical themes underpinning their overarching plots. Other films attempt to be overtly philosophical, such as I ♥ Huckabees.”

I’ve done Fight Club, eXistenZ, The Matrix and Little Miss Sunshine and of those three I like eXistenZ best. I will want to see Waking Life and I ♥ Huckabees. Where do I start. Huckabees? It stars Huppert. And from what I’ve Youtubed of Waking, it reminded me of Scanner Darkly, with which I was not too impressed (but has lingered on afterwards). Any thoughts, dear readers?

Update 17/4: More on Collapse. Collapse has links with New Weird and Speculative realism. The cover is probably by the Chapmans (“new etchings from Jake Chapman“). Of all its contributions I am most curious about Graham Harman on the unnatural bond between Husserl and Lovecraft and Iain Hamilton Grant on Lorenz Oken‘s naturphilosophische slime-horror.

American academics down on their knees kissing French bums


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I am re-reading Sex, Art, and American Culture by Paglia after my brother salvaged a copy from the dustbin. It must have been 4 years since I first read it and I understand a lot more. The vehement attack on “French theory” now surprises me in the sense that she mainly focuses on Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard without mentioning what are imo the truly great French theorists: Barthes, Deleuze, Bataille. I know from a Salon q&a[1] that she doesn’t even like Bataille. Really! Re-read him Camille! In that short 1997 q&a she notes that she “was deeply disappointed in Bataille from the moment I picked up his books. His themes are my themes, his influences (in many cases) my influences.” She does confess to like Sade, Gautier, Balzac, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Sartre (whom I find difficult to stomach), de Beauvoir, Genet and Bachelard.

Of course her style is offensive (and I suspect it has had some re-writing in subsequent editions). As a European I find the following derogatory remarks on the French post-wwii-climate difficult to swallow (but funny anyhoo):

“Of course the French felt decentered: they had just been crushed by Germany. American G.I.’s (including my uncles) got shot up rescuing France when she was lying flat on her face under the Nazi boot. Hence it is revolting to see pampered American academics down on their knees kissing French bums.”

Nevertheless, Paglia strikes me time and time again as a great intellectual with an amount of books read which seems astronomical and a very astute power of analysis: how she equates Foucault’s taxonomy to Primitive Classification by Mauss and Durkheim and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to Durkheim‘s The Division of Labour in Society.

This reading also brought Arnold Hauser‘s The Social History of Art to my attention.

Sex, Art, and American Culture is a sensible buy for someone who wants to brush up on cultural history from an irreverent but yet well-read perseptive.

On a different note, and only for a Dutch-reading public: the publication of Hermans-Reve correspondence is imminent. Hermans was brilliant and Reve a bit of a bore, at one point Hermans decided not to continue the correspondence. Read more at The Paper Man.