william watkin's blog (since 2003)

In the opening to Jean-Michel Rabate's recent book Given , he presents the history of aesthetics through considerations of aura, trace and neuter. I will leave to one side whether the neuter is a third aesthetic category or a development of the trace in face of the fading of the aura. In presenting the aura and the trace in this manner, Rabate at one point he cites the perfect dialectic of aesthetics unearthed in Benjamin's Arcades project as located between the trace and the aura. It goes as follows: 'The trace is an appearance of nearness, however far removed the thing that is left behind may be. The aura is the appearance of a distance, however close the thing that it calls forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us.' (Cited in Given 21). The apotropaicism of this comment goes to the very heart of the aesthetic as such which is always in our culture presented as a dialectic and certainly since Hegel a diale...

If we are to take language and/or writing as the essence of truth whether this be language as such (Agamben), as writing (Derrida), house of being (Heidegger) or as logical form of propositions (analytical philosophy) then why not do so in full? Rather than positing elements of language in contestation, is not truth-being the totality of language including those elements that we can easily observe in language that are not necessarily taken up by philosophy. If this is the case the first work would be a taxonomy of the qualities of what we call language, the second a reconciliation of contradications and oppositions, the third a full presentation of what truth is: language in its entirety. Language List: Structural Linguistics Continental Philosophy Generative Grammar Analytical Philosophy Logopoiesis Structural Language is a system of signs used by a community to approach a commonality of meaning. These signs are used, it is said, to encode information by pairing sound wi...

What if one took say the categories of analytical philosophy and logic and returned them back to a more broad brush metaphysical style. Rather than, as some have done, try to make metaphysics analytical, continuing the project of Kant but in a modern register, one should aim to make analytical conceptions metaphysical. Thus for example tautology. Here one would take the conceptualisation of tautology which is one half of the original logical empricists schema of truth as either tautology or verifiable, and develop from that a work on tautologies potential to generate meaning within culture or thought. This is the application of the the logopoiesis axiom: to think what is embedded potentially within a concept. Thus potential thinking could consist of thinking a category rather than categorical thinking. The self-evident then would be related to issues such as potentiality in Agamben, the obvious in Heidegger, tautegory in Lyotard and Nancy and so on.

A traditional error when thinking about language is to reduce it to the mere act of naming, and all the paradoxes inherent therein.  However complex and thought through Badiou's theory of the event is, its being named opens it up first to these paradoxes, and second to an attenuated vision of language that remains supicious.  Preferable by far is the wider focus on language as composed of relational phrases to be found in Deleuze.  Phrases or sentences if you prefer, raise their own set of problems.  The primary amongst these is how to contend with the subject-predicate coupling which is the basis of the very philosophical tradition Deleuze is trying to overturn.  Aside from this, possibly insurmountable, problem there is of course the nature of relation within the phrase unit, especially if the subject-predicate copula is retained.  And of course the relation between phrases which necessitates that one address simple ontological questions such as wher...