The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work: he recognizes himself in it, he sees in it his own human reality, in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity, of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself. By this act of finding itself by itself, then, the [working] consciousness becomes its own meaning-or-will; and this happens precisely in work, in which it seemed to be alien meaning-or-will.
✖ Via Introduction to the Reading of Hegel by Alexandre Kojève, Cornell University Press, [1947]1980, p. 27

Here’s the original French version:

L’homme qui travaille reconnaît dans le Monde effectivement transformé par son travail sa propre œuvre: il s’y reconnaît soi-même; il y voit sa propre réalité humaine; il y découvre et il révèle aux autres la réalité objective de son humanité, de l’idée d’abord abstraite et purement subjective qu’il se fait de lui-même.] Par cet acte-de-se-retrouver soi-même par soi-même, la Conscience [travaillante] devient donc sens-ou-volonté propre; et elle le devient précisément dans le travail, où elle ne semblait être que sens-ou-volonté étranger. (Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, éd. Gallimard, Paris, 1947, p. 31)

A complete PDF copy of this book is available online. A French version of the ‘Introduction’ of this book is available here.



• Oct 02, 2010 link notes tagged: technology  work  world  production  subjectivity  other  self  alienation  slave  master  Hegel  Kojève  philosophy  consumption  consumer  capitalism  creation  art 
art philosophy illustration illustrator simpsons book kant socrates wittgenstein marx barthes sartre nietzsche foucault
✖ Via Felix Petruska photostream on Flickr: “Philosophes”, uploaded on July 9th, 2009

This illustration was created by Felix Petruska for the cover of the Spanish translation (Blackie Books, 2009) of The Simpsons and Philosophy (Open Court Publishers, 2001).

Felix Petruska is a Barcelona based illustrator and designer. Check his blog and browse his Flickr’s albums.



• Sep 19, 2010 link notes tagged: art  philosophy  illustration  illustrator  Simpsons  book  Kant  Socrates  Wittgenstein  Marx  Barthes  Sartre  Nietzsche  Foucault 

―What is a philosopher?
—That is perhaps an anachronistic question. But I will give a modern response. In the past one might have said it is a man who stands in wonder; today I would say, borrowing words from Georges Bataille, it is someone who is afraid.
✖ Via The Infinite Conversation by Maurice Blanchot, trans. Susan Hanson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 49.

Here’s the original French version:

―Qu’est-ce qu’un philosophe?
―Voilà une question anachronique, peut-être. Mais j’y ferai une réponse moderne. Jadis l’on disait : c’est un homme qui s’étonne; aujourd’hui, je dirai, empruntant ce mot à Georges Bataille : c’est quelqu’un qui a peur. (L’entretien infini, éd. Gallimard, Paris, p. 70)


• Sep 05, 2010 link notes reblogged from georgesbataille  [via] tagged: art  book  author  Blanchot  Bataille  philosophy  wonder  fear  anguish  philosopher 

Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in action, can avoid committing murder.  We can only act in terms of our own time, among the people who surround us.  We shall know nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed.  In that every action today leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether or why we have the right to kill.
✖ Via The Rebel. An Essay on Man in Revolt by Albert Camus, tr. by Anthony Bower, “Introduction” (L’Homme révolté, Gallimard, Paris, 1951, p. 14).

An electronic version of this English translation can be found over at Radical eBook Archive (along with many others).



• Aug 30, 2010 link notes tagged: art  book  essay  author  philosophy  modernity  revolution  murder  innocence  Camus 
art design philosophy humor heidegger love design poster
✖ Via 9 0 0 0 photostream on Flickr: “I Love Heidegger”

Previously on SKandalon: 9 0 0 0



• Aug 24, 2010 link notes tagged: art  design  philosophy  humor  Heidegger  love  design  poster 

Un jeune collègue, bon spécialiste de Kant, étudiant la philosophie kantienne dans ses rapports avec la biologie et la médecine du 18e siècle, m’avait signalé un texte, de l’espèce de ceux qui engendre à la fois la satisfaction d’une belle rencontre et la confusion d’une ignorance à l’abri de laquelle on croyait pouvoir s’attribuer un brin d’originalité
✖ Via Le normal et le pathologique by Georges Canguilhem, PUF, coll. Quadrige, Paris, [1966] 2003, p. 171

You’ll find a review of the English translation for The normal and the pathological here. And here’s Canguilhem’s obituary by David Macey.



• Aug 01, 2010 link notes tagged: philosophy  originality  author  book  repetition  confusion  ignorance  wisdom 

We have only to speak of an object to think that we are being objective. But, because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it. What we consider to be our fundamental ideas concerning the world are often indications of the immaturity of our minds. Sometimes we stand in wonder before a chosen object; we build up hypotheses and reveries; in this way we form convictions which have all the appearance of true knowledge. But the initial source is impure: the first impression is not fundamental truth. In point of fact, scientific objectivity is possible only if one has broken first with the immediate object, if one has refused to yield to seduction of the initial choice, if one has checked and contradicted the thoughts which arise from one’s first observation.
✖ Via Psychanlyse of Fire by Gaston Bachelard, tr. A. C. Ross, Beacon Press, [1938]1987, p. 1

Here’s the original French text:

Il suffit que nous parlions d’un objet pour nous croire objectifs. Mais par notre premier choix, l’objet nous désigne plus que nous le désignons et ce que nous croyons nos pensées fondamentales sur le monde sont souvent des confidences sur la jeunesse de notre esprit. Parfois nous nous émerveillons devant un objet élu; nous accumulons les hypothèses et les rêveries; nous formons ainsi des convictions qui ont l’apparence du savoir. Mais la source initiale est l’impure: l’évidence première n’est pas une vérité fondamentale. En fait, l’objectivité scientifique n’est possible que si l’on a d’abord rompu avec l’objet immédiat, si l’on a refusé la séduction du premier choix, si l’on a arrêté et contredit les pensées qui naissent de la première observation. (éd. Gallimard, coll. Idées, Paris, [1938]1949, p. 9)

Gaston Bachelard was a French epistemologist. Learn more on Wikipedia.



• Jul 26, 2010 link notes tagged: communication  epistemology  objectivity  knowledge  separation  relation  perception  idea  world  reality  Bachelard  understand  stand  object  subject  impression  truth  science  philosophy  poetry  psychoanalysis  fire  Prometheus  mediation  media  immediate  observation  contradiction 

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
✖ Via Theses on the Philosophy in History (also On the Concept of History, from German: Über den Begriff der Geschichte) by Walter Benjamin, tr. Dennis Redmond, [1940]2001, §IX

Here’s a French translation:

Il existe un tableau de Klee qui s’intitule Angelus Novus. Il représente un ange qui semble avoir dessein de s’éloigner de ce à quoi son regard semble rivé. Ses yeux sont écarquillés, sa bouche ouverte, ses ailes déployées. Tel est l’aspect que doit avoir nécessairement l’ange de l’histoire. Il a le visage tourné vers le passé. Où paraît devant nous une suite d’événements, il ne voit qu’une seule et unique catastrophe, qui ne cesse d’amonceler ruines sur ruines et les jette à ses pieds. Il voudrait bien s’attarder, réveiller les morts et rassembler les vaincus. Mais du paradis souffle une tempête qui s’est prise dans ses ailes, si forte que l’ange ne peut plus les refermer. Cette tempête le pousse incessamment vers l’avenir auquel il tourne le dos, cependant que jusqu’au ciel devant lui s’accumulent les ruines. Cette tempête est ce que nous appelons le progrès. (Source)


• Jul 23, 2010 link notes reblogged from chrbutler  [via] tagged: art  progress  philosophy  Benjamin  history  man  angel  past  present  future  destruction  catastrophe  order  chaos  tempest 

‘For me gravity doesn’t exist,’ said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.
✖ Via The New York Times: “A Scientist Takes On Gravity” by Dennis Overbye, July 12th, 2010

In his paper, Dr. Verlinde never wrote “gravity doesn’t exist”. Instead, he wrote:

Note, however, that from our point of view the existence of gravity or closed strings is not assumed microscopically: they are emergent as an effective description. (“On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton” PDF)

To say gravity doesn’t exist is one thing. To say it’s not real is something else. To say it’s an emergent phenomenon is yet another thing. In his New York Times essay, Dennis Overbye observes:

Dr. Verlinde is not an obvious candidate to go off the deep end. He and his brother Herman, a Princeton professor, are celebrated twins known more for their mastery of the mathematics of hard-core string theory than for philosophic flights.


• Jul 15, 2010 link notes tagged: technology  science  gravity  existence  reality  constructivism  philosophy  string theory  physic  thermodynamic  relativity  emergence 

The ‘dark’ writer of the bourgeoisie, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Mandeville, always had an appeal for Max Horkheimer, who was influenced by Schopenhauer early in his career. These writers still thought in a constructive way; and there were lines leading from their disharmonies to Marx’s social theory. The ‘black’ writer of the bourgeoisie, foremost among them the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche, broke these ties. In their blackest book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno joined with these writers to conceptualize the Enlightenment’s process of self-destruction. On their analysis, it is no longer possible to place hope in the liberating force of enlightenment. Inspired by Benjamin’s now ironic hope of the hopeless, they still did not want to relinquish the now paradoxical labor of conceptualization. We no longer share this mood, this attitude. And yet under the sign of a Nietzsche revitalized by poststructuralism, moods and attitudes are spreading that are confusingly like those of Horkheimer and Adorno. I would like to forestall this confusion.
✖ Via The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity by Jürgen Habermas, MIT Press, 1996, p. 106

Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Mandeville are “dark” writers (why?). Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche? Even darker : they are the “black” writers of the bourgeoisie. And Habermas? Habermas must be white.



• Jul 07, 2010 link notes tagged: communication  modernity  philosophy  Habermas  Hobbes  critic  critical theory  poststructuralism  Nietzsche  Sade  Machiavelli  Mandeville  Adorno  Horkheimer  hope  confusion  Enlightenment 

― Gustav ! I know how to understand humanity. Let’s reverse-engineer it.
― How Fred ?
― We’ll start with morals and Gods. Everything will follow after these.
✖ Via Leftovers: “Early discussion between Mahler and Nietzsche”, April 16, 2010.

• Jun 24, 2010 link notes reblogged from leftoverfest  [via] tagged: art  philosophy  humor  God  humanity  human  moral 

The identity of an individual is a product of human reason: it is not anything other than a rational self. Therefore, losing identity equals losing reason. So ‘communicative cognition’ is cognition as an event which occurs in a (critical) moment not controlled by reason. It belongs to the realm of affect which transcends reason or occurs due to the drive of affect. According to Bataille, the sense of an individual losing identity is also what characterizes communication with the other.
✖ Via Nami Ohi: “Cognition as Communication: The Accursed Share by Georges Bataille as a contribution to the study of Fundamental Informatics”, The New Trends of Socio-information in East Asia, Students’ workshop, at The University of Tokyo, Nov. 2007. [PDF]
“Nami Ohi is a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies (GSIIS), the University of Tokyo, supervised by Prof. Toru Nishigaki. She studies literature from the systems theory perspective. She is especially interested in haiku and analyzes it by using fundamental informatics as a theoretical framework.” (more)


• Jun 15, 2010 link notes tagged: communication  philosophy  lost  loser  individual  subjectivity  identity  representation  Bataille 

Oui, et le secret de mon fonctionnement se trouve aussi dans cette formule. Je n’ai jamais accepté le monolinguisme du discours, j’ai toujours privilégié une pluralité des langues. A mes yeux, la littérature n’est pas un instrument, c’est un milieu, et la prose philosophique admet un élément de lyrisme, comme chez Camus, que j’aime beaucoup depuis ma jeunesse. D’ailleurs, ma femme m’a souvent dit : “Il faut que tu écrives des romans ! Faire de la philosophie, c’est jeter de la confiture aux cochons !” J’ai essayé, en vain, de lui expliquer qu’écrire de la philosophie est ma réponse à la situation du roman moderne : comme la plupart des personnages du roman contemporain sont ennuyeux, mieux vaut raconter le destin passionnant des concepts - ce que j’ai fait dans ma trilogie Sphères.
✖ Via Le Monde : “Pour être philosophe, il faut devenir un personnage de roman” by Peter Sloterdijk, interviewed by Jean Birnbaum, May 20, 2010.

• Jun 10, 2010 link notes tagged: art  philosophy  novel  author  fiction  science 

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
✖ Via The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers by Will Durant, 1926, Ch. II: Aristotle and Greek Science; part VII: Ethics and the Nature of Happiness [Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 1991, p. 76]

The quote is MISATTRIBUTED to Aristotle:

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; ‘these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions’; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: ‘the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life… for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy’”.

The quoted phrases within the quotation are from the Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 4; Book I, 7. The misattribution is from taking Durant’s summation of Aristotle’s ideas as being the words of Aristotle himself. (Wikiquote)

The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant on Google Books (no preview available) and on Amazon.

Spotted in Tumblr’s Radar. It was reblogged from Tomorrow Museum.



• May 26, 2010 link notes tagged: philosophy  self  identity  action  repetition  Aristotle  book  author 

Do the “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” not fit perfectly the status of the MacGuffin? (Incidentally, one of the most famous Hitchcockian MacGuffins IS a potential weapon of mass destruction - the bottles with “radioactive diamonds” in Notorious!) Are they not also an elusive entity, never empirically specified - when, a couple of years ago, the UN inspectors were searching for them in Iraq, they were expected to be hidden in the most disparate and improbable places, from the (rather logical place of) desert to the (slightly irrational) cellars of the presidential palaces (so that, when the palace is bombed, they may poison Saddam and his entire entourage?), allegedly present in large quantities, yet magically moved around all the time by the hands of workers, and the more all-present and all-powerful in their threat, the more they are destroyed, as if the distraction of the greater part of them magically heightens the destructive power of the remainder? As such, they by definition cannot ever be found, and are therefore all the more dangerous… Now that none were found, we reached the last line of the story of MacGuffin: “‘Well,’ said President Bush in September 2003, ‘then that’s not a MacGuffin, is it?’
✖ Via “The Iraqi MacGuffin” by Slavoj Zizek, Nov. 4th, 2003

• May 18, 2010 link notes tagged: art  politic  Iraq  WMD  simulacrum  Baudrillard  Zizek  philosophy  representation  movie  cinema  film  plot  media  technology  war  critic 

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