Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

"To think with Nietzsche against Nietzsche." Thus the editors describe the strategy adopted in this volume to soften the destructive effects of Nietzsche's "philosophy with a hammer" on French philosophy since the 1960s. Frustrated by the infinite inclusiveness of deconstructionism, the contributors to this volume seek to renew the Enlightenment quest for rationality. Though linked by no common dogma, these essays all argue that the "French Nietzsche" transmitted through the deconstructionists must be reexamined in light of the original context in (...) which Nietzsche worked. Each essay questions the viability of Nietzsche's thought in the modern world, variously critiquing his philosophy of history as obsessed with hierarchy, his views on religion and art as myopic and irrational, and his stance on science as hopelessly reactionary. Contending that we must abandon the Nietzsche propped up as patron saint by French deconstructionists in order to return to reason, these essays will stimulate debate not just among Nietzscheans but among all with a stake in modern French philosophy. Contributors are Alain Boyer, André Compte-Sponville, Vincent Descombes, Luc Ferry, Robert Legros, Philippe Raynaud, Alain Renault, and Pierre-André Taguieff. (shrink)

In recent years the sociology of literature has developed on the basis of another formula: literature is part of the larger social order. It is not the “expression of society” but an integral part of it. The idea is simple, the implications are great. Literature as part of the social order goes beyond a study of the external social manifestations of literature, beyond the sociology of the book, author, and reader practiced, for example, by Robert Escarpit—a sociology which leads inevitably (...) to a positivist outlook.5 Nor can we be satisfied with a wholesale borrowing of sociological concepts that does no more than provide the tools for arguments in favor of one or another theory of literature.6 Whatever the interest of these theories , a sociology of literature becomes possible only when it includes the sociology of the theories elaborated on the subject itself. 5. See Robert Escarpit, Sociologie de la literature . See also Escarpit et al., Le Littéraire et le social: Éléments pour une sociologie de la literature .6. Pierre V. Zima’s presentations of the sociology of literature seem to be taking him toward this failing. See Zima, Pour une sociologie du texte littéraire . Alain Viala is a professor of the Université de Paris II—Sorbonne Nouvelle. Author of Naissance de l’écrivain: Sociologie de la literature à l’âge classique and Les Institutions de la vie littéraire en France au XVIIe siècle , he is currently working on studies of the sociology of literature, Racine, and literary strategies. Paula Wissing is a free-lance translator and editor. (shrink)

JEAN-PIERRE CLERO, LYNDA LOTTE. — Lacan est mort il y a un peu plus de vingt ans, en 1981 ; il semble que sa présence, pour ne pas dire son règne, n’ait jamais été aussi éclatante. Il faut toutefois se méfier de ce qui paraît évident et peut-être y a-t-il eu de profonds changements au cours de ces deux dernières décennies où son œuvre est apparue..

Dans Science, Perception and Reality, Sellars distingue l’image manifeste de l’homme et l’image scientifique de l’homme. La première est obtenue à partir de la façon dont nous prenons conscience de nous-mêmes comme humains dans le monde. La seconde correspond à ce que les différentes sciences nous amènent à postuler sur la manière dont l’homme est constitué. Van Fraassen, lui, étend au monde ces concepts...

Pierre-Alain Tilliette is a Breton writer, who lives with his family in Paris, where he is Conservateur des fonds étrangers at the Bibliothèque de l'Hôtel de Ville. The tragi-comic inventiveness of his fiction, with its Gaelic humor and extraordinary linguistic virtuosity, has made a small stir in France, but is still virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. His first novel, Gapos: vies chimériques, published by LePassage in 2011, described in Le Monde as "une des excellentes surprises de ce début (...) de l'année", placed him squarely in the lineage of Rabelais to Joyce. In 2015, Tilliette's second Bildungsroman-gone-awry, Un sentiment humain... (shrink)

Dans un texte désormais célèbre, Ferdinand de Saussure insiste sur l’arbitraire du signe dont il vante les qualités. Toutefois il s’avère que le symbole, signe non arbitraire, dans la mesure où il existe un rapport entre ce qui représente et ce qui est représenté, joue un rôle fondamental dans la plupart des activités humaines, qu’elles soient scientifiques, artistiques ou religieuses. C’est cette dimension symbolique, sa portée, son fonctionnement et sa signification dans des domaines aussi variés que la chimie, la théologie, (...) les mathématiques, le code de la route et bien d’autres qui est l’objet du livre La Pointure du symbole. -/- Jean-Yves Béziau, franco-suisse, est docteur en logique mathématique et docteur en philosophie. Il a poursuivi des recherches en France, au Brésil, en Suisse, aux États-Unis (UCLA et Stanford), en Pologne et développé la logique universelle. Éditeur-en-chef de la revue Logica Universalis et de la collection Studies in Universal Logic (Springer), il est actuellement professeur à l’Université Fédérale de Rio de Janeiro et membre de l’Académie brésilienne de Philosophie. SOMMAIRE -/- PRÉFACE L’arbitraire du signe face à la puissance du symbole Jean-Yves BÉZIAU La logique et la théorie de la notation (sémiotique) de Peirce (Traduit de l’anglais par Jean-Marie Chevalier) Irving H. ANELLIS Langage symbolique de Genèse 2-3 Lytta BASSET -/- Mécanique quantique : quelle réalité derrière les symboles ? Hans BECK -/- Quels langages et images pour représenter le corps humain ? Sarah CARVALLO Des jeux symboliques aux rituels collectifs. Quelques apports de la psychologie du développement à l’étude du symbolisme Fabrice CLÉMENT Les panneaux de signalisation (Traduit de l’anglais par Fabien Shang) Robert DEWAR Remarques sur l’émergence des activités symboliques Jean LASSÈGUE Les illustrations du "Songe de Poliphile" (1499). Notule sur les hiéroglyphes de Francesca Colonna Pierre-Alain MARIAUX Signes de vie Jeremy NARBY Visualising relations in society and economics. Otto Neuraths Isotype-method against the background of his economic thought Elisabeth NEMETH Algèbre et logique symboliques : arbitraire du signe et langage formel Marie-José DURAND – Amirouche MOKTEFI Les symboles mathématiques, signes du Ciel Jean-Claude PONT La mathématique : un langage mathématique ? Alain M. ROBERT. (shrink)

After reviewing the literature on current knowledge about consciousness in humans, we present a state-of-the art discussion on consciousness and related key concepts in animals. Obviously much fewer publications are available on non-human species than on humans, most of them relating to laboratory or wild animal species, and only few to livestock species. Human consciousness is by definition subjective and private. Animal consciousness is usually assessed through behavioural performance. Behaviour involves a wide array of cognitive processes that have to be (...) assessed separately using specific experimental protocols. Accordingly, several processes indicative of the presence of consciousness are discussed: perception and cognition, awareness of the bodily-self, self-related knowledge of the environment (including social environment). When available, specific examples are given in livestock species. Next, we review the existing evidence regarding neuronal correlates of consciousness, and emphasize the difficulty of linking aspects of consciousness to specific neural structures across the phyla because high-level cognitive abilities may have evolved independently along evolution. Several mammalian brain structures (cortex and midbrain) are involved in the manifestations of consciousness, while the equivalent functional structures for birds and fishes would likely be the pallium/tectum and midbrain. Caution is required before excluding consciousness in species not having the same brain structures as the mammalian ones as different neural architectures may mediate comparable processes. Finally, specific neurophysiological mechanisms appear to be strongly linked to the emergence of consciousness, namely neural synchrony and neural feedback. Considering the limited amount of data available and the few animal species studied so far, we conclude that different manifestations of consciousness can be observed in animals but that further refinement is still needed to characterize their level and content in each species. Further research is required to clarify these issues, especially in livestock species. (shrink)

Physicien théoricien, philosophe de la physique et historien des théo­ries physiques, le savant catholique français Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) a profondément marqué la pensée du vingtième siècle. Chacun connaît le Système du monde, dont les dix volu­mes ont contribué à la redécouverte de la science médiévale, et La théorie physique, qui a notamment donné lieu à la célèbre «thèse Duhem-Quine». Si Clio a donc gardé de Duhem le sou­venir d’un grand historien des sciences et d’un philosophe perspicace de la physique, lui-même (...) cependant n’aspirait qu’à être reconnu comme physicien. Son œuvre est en effet traver­sée par un projet scientifique qui consiste à ordonner et à réunir les diverses branches de la physique sous l’égide de la thermo­dynamique dans le cadre d’une théorie représentative et non explicative du réel. C’est ce projet que Duhem a voulu réaliser dans ses publications scientifiques, exposer dans ses écrits philoso­phiques, et finalement cautionner par ses recherches historiques. -/- Cependant l’investissement toujours plus important de Duhem en histoire des sciences et la présence dans son œuvre de con­sidéra­tions apologétiques et d’écrits patriotiques peuvent don­ner à penser qu’il s’est progressivement détourné de ce projet primordial au profit d’autres préoccupations. De même, les tensions qui, à l’inté­rieur de ce projet scientifique, subsistent entre sa volonté unificatrice et sa revendication phénoménaliste peuvent conduire à une relativi­sation de cette dernière, conçue comme une demande contextuelle, passa­gère et finalement peu significative. Sans ignorer ces préoccu­pations historiques, religieuses ou patriotiques, sans négliger ce con­flit d’intérêt entre les deux parties constitutives du projet duhémien, cette étude entend tout d’abord réaffirmer que ce projet scientifique ne sera jamais ni abandonné, ni amputé. -/- Toutefois, dès lors que sont maintenues la permanence, la prio­rité et l’intégralité de ce projet, trois paradoxes surgissent im­médiatement. Si Duhem se voulait avant tout physicien et souhaitait être reconnu comme tel, par quelle extravagance de l’histoire est-il finalement connu pour ses recherches histori­ques et ses travaux philosophiques et non pour ce qui lui tenait le plus à cœur ? S’il ne voulait être qu’un illustre physicien, pourquoi s’est-il acharné, au retour du laboratoire, à exhumer de l’oubli les manuscrits et les théories scientifiques des au­teurs médiévaux ? Enfin, s’il voulait vraiment établir une physi­que qui soit unifiée, cohérente et parfaite, pourquoi se prive-t-il du réa­lisme et s’embarrasse-t-il du phénoménalisme ? Basée sur la corres­pondance inédite de Duhem, cette étude, centrée plus particu­liè­rement sur ce troisième paradoxe, contribue fina­lement à élucider chacun d’eux. (shrink)

Developing earlier studies of the system of numbers in Mundurucu, this paper argues that the Mundurucu numeral system is far more complex than usually assumed. The Mundurucu numeral system provides indirect but insightful arguments for a modular approach to numbers and numerals. It is argued that distinct components must be distinguished, such as a system of representation of numbers in the format of internal magnitudes, a system of representation for individuals and sets, and one-to-one correspondences between the numerosity expressed by (...) the number and its metrics. It is shown that while many-number systems involve a compositionality of units, sets and sets composed of units, few-number languages, such as Mundurucu, do not have access to sets composed of units in the usual way. The nonconfigurational character of the Mundurucu language, which is related to a property for which we coin the term 'low compositionality power', accounts for this and explains the curious fact that Mundurucus make use of marked one-to-one correspondence strategies in order to overcome the limitations of the core system at the perceptual/motor interface of the language faculty. We develop an analysis of a particular construction, parallel numbers, which has not been studied before, elucidating the whole system. This analysis, we argue, sheds new light on classical philosophical, psychological and linguistic debates about numbers and numerals and their relation to language, and more particularly, sheds light on few-number languages. (shrink)

"This wonderfully eloquent and playful colloquy of two brilliant minds gives new life to the old notion of Dialogue, a sadly forgotten form now.... I "love" this book!

Peter Sloterdijk's 'In the Shadow of Mt. Sinai' and Alain Badiou's 'Our Wounds Are Not So Recent' represent distinctly different attempts to come to grips with the conflict between the West (the US, the UK, France) and the Muslim world after the September 11th attacks. Although Sloterdijk finds the source of conflict in the religious zealotry of the Abrahamic religions, while Badiou blames the multinational capitalist system for drating a disaffected underclass, the two complementary perspectives work together to make this (...) ongoing conflict intelligible, if not, finally, to stop the war on terrorism. (shrink)

This paper compares Pierre Hadot’s work on the history of philosophy as a way of life to the work of Albert Camus. I will argue that in the early work of Camus, up to and including the publication of The Myth of Sisyphus, there is evidence to support the notions that, firstly, Camus also identified these historical moments as obstacles to the practice of ascesis, and secondly, that he proceeded by orienting his own work toward overcoming these obstacles, and thus (...) toward a modern rehabilitation of ascesis. Moreover, in contrast to Hadot’s Platonism, Camus located the source of this practice in the pre-philosophical stage of Athenian tragedy. This points to a further contrast between these two figures, which has historical and cultural precedents, in the distinction between this pre-Platonic form of ascesis - favoured by Camus - and the latter Christian form of asceticism - favoured by Hadot, with the status of Platonic ascesis rendered in terms of prefiguring this Christian form of asceticism. (shrink)

Cet article se propose de situer le livre Situation de la France (2015) de Pierre Manent dans le débat contemporain sur la gestion de la diversité religieuse, et ce, à partir de deux principales thèses interprétatives. La première thèse est que le modèle de Manent s’appuie sur une forme de collectivisme méthodologique. La seconde thèse est que la place que Manent accorde au discours religieux dans la « conversation civique » est justifiée par une volonté de faire contrepoids à la (...) primauté qui est généralement accordée au discours des droits de la personne dans les sociétés libérales contemporaines. (shrink)

This essay is a reappraisal of Pierre Hadot's concept of spiritual exercises in response to recent criticisms of his work. The author argues that contrary to the claims of his critics, Hadot articulates a compelling argument that spiritual exercises that employ imaginative, rhetorical, and cognitive techniques are both necessary for and successful at producing a subject in which reason is integrated into human character. Such exercises are critical for overcoming the effects of habit, as a result of which everyday conduct (...) resists rational control, and Hadot provides a nuanced account of how particular practices affect different aspects of emotion, behavior, and thought. The concept of spiritual exercises remains a viable component of theoretical frameworks for the study of religious ethics, though the author concludes that Hadot's position on habit and its role in ethical practice requires further investigation. (shrink)

Nel presente articolo sono illustrati i concetti che distinguono la sociologia di Pierre Bourdieu – campo, capitale, habitus, interesse, azione – indicando il nesso tra la costruzione di definizioni astratte, più frequenti negli scritti degli anni ’70, e la pratica di ricerca da cui quei concetti derivano e in cui trovano applicazione. Il sociologo francese ha costruito, infatti, un sistema di concetti interconnessi con cui descrive le componenti e i processi di riproduzione fon-damentali del mondo sociale e indirizza le ricerche (...) empiriche su ambiti d’analisi particolari. D’altra parte, egli ha mostrato una resistenza a presentarlo criticando le operazioni “scolastiche” di sistematizzazione che, secondo il sociologo, “normalizzano” l’opera ai fini accademici dell’insegnamento e intellettuali della divulgazione facendo perdere la complessità del lavoro in cui i concetti sono impiegati. Egli ritiene, infatti, che non si possa comprendere l’opera – l’opus operatum – se non si restituisce al “fare” della ricerca sugli oggetti – modus operandi. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu si è misurato a lungo con la definizione del “quadro concettuale” della “teoria della società”, a partire dalla riflessione sul rapporto non chiarito fra la “teoria dell’azione” e la “teoria strutturalista”, ossia dalla questione preliminare di come le due principali strategie concettuali attraverso cui si sono orientate le scienze sociali si possano integrare in un “modello unitario”. La “prospettiva relazionale” indaga la genesi, lo sviluppo e la crisi tanto delle strutture sociali quanto delle rappresentazioni, dei comportamenti e dei (...) vissuti soggettivi che si manifestano all’interno di tali strutture, focalizzando l’analisi sui sistemi di relazioni tra oggetti ed eventi piuttosto che sui singoli fenomeni. Bourdieu tenta di superare il tradizionale antagonismo tra la “fisica oggettivista” dello strutturalismo e il “soggettivismo costruttivista” della fenomenologia e della teoria dell’azione, mettendo in relazione la riproduzione-distribuzione delle risorse materiali (“oggettività di primo ordine”) e degli schemi mentali e corporei tramite cui sono interpretate, valutate e vissute le situazioni e si rinnova simbolicamente la società (“oggettività di secondo ordine”). Come vedremo, i concetti di capitale e di habitus a disposizione dei soggetti individuali e collettivi all’interno dello spazio sociale e dei campi specifici caratterizzano tale indagine. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss Alain Badiou’s 2008 address titled “The Three Negations.” Though the text was originally presented in a symposium concerning the relationship of law to Badiou’s theory of the event, I discuss the way this brief address offers an introduction to the broad sweep of Badiou’s metaphysics, outlining his accounts of being, appearing, and transformation. To do so, Badiou calls on the resources of three paradigms of negation: from classical Aristotelian logic, from Brouwer’s intuitionist logic, and in (...) paraconsistent logics developed by DaCosta. I explain Badiou’s use of negation in the three primary areas of his metaphysics, as well as to diagnose the degrees of transformation that may have occurred in a situation. My analysis of Badiou’s use of negation in this text is aided by examples from his broader ontological oeuvre. I also explain the underlying requirement in Badiou’s work that formal considerations - mathematical or logical - get their sense by being tethered to readily-identifiable political, aesthetic, scientific, or interpersonal concerns. I conclude by addressing the foundation Badiou’s work establishes for pursuing a new metaphysics, and by discussing certain of the liabilities that remain in the wake of his account. (shrink)

The famous Epistola Luciferi, written in late 1351 or early 1352, caused quite a stir in the Avignon of Pope Clement vi, quickly became a medieval best-seller, and thereafter remained topical, being copied and printed down to the present day. Traditionally ascribed to Nicole Oresme or Henry of Langenstein, the letter was attributed to the Cistercian Pierre Ceffons by Damasus Trapp in 1957. Trapp merely took Ceffons’ authorship for granted, however, and in the most thorough study of the Epistola Luciferi (...) and of the entire genre of Devil’s letters, her 1982 PhD dissertation, Helen C. Feng rejected the attribution. Presenting codices and works of Ceffons of which Trapp was unaware, this article argues in favor of Ceffons’ responsibility for the Epistola Luciferi, while offering a new critical edition of the letter, an English translation, and a supplemental list of manuscripts and editions. (shrink)

Pierre Levy è un professore di filosofia dell’Università di Parigi VIII a Saint-Denis che si è formato alla Sorbona seguendo i corsi dei maestri, M. Serres e C. Castoriadis. I suoi interessi di studio sono rivolti alle trasformazioni dello sviluppo tecnologico nell’ambito delle forme della conoscenza e della comunicazione e alle conseguenze economiche e politiche del nuovo cyberspazio sull’evoluzione antropologica e sociale. Pierre Levy esamina, quindi, i processi basilari del processo di globalizzazione su cui si concentrano le scienze sociali; ma (...) a suo modo, da intellettuale francese che «non aspira all’esattezza storica o scientifica, ma alla fecondità filosofica e pratica». L’intelligenza collettiva. Per un'antropologia del cyberspazio (1994) si presenta come un'opera suggestiva che contiene riflessioni lucide in un linguaggio personalizzato, con concessioni liriche imbarazzati e con una narrazione ridondante. Tuttavia, in questa opera così eterodossa, è possibile ritrovare un nucleo di analisi sociologica che affonda alcune delle sue premesse nella teoria dell’evoluzione dei sistemi sociali. Nella prima parte ,presento la teoria degli spazi antropologici , da una prospettiva diacronica: gli spazi antropologici – Terra, Territorio, Merci, Sapere – corrispondono a sviluppi evolutivi della specie umana - società primitive,antiche, moderne e contemporanee - in un processo discontinuo di significazione della riproduzione simbolica e materiale. Nell’analisi dello Spazio del sapere, si evidenzia come il consolidarsi del nuovo cyberspazio potrebbe ridefinire l’organizzazione e lo sviluppo degli spazi precedenti e si sottolineano le finalità pratiche della complessa prospettiva di Pierre Lévy (A): «una filosofia politica degna di questo nome non può accontentarsi di analizzare e sezionare una situazione senza assumersi il rischio di indicare una via di uscita adeguata». L’ambito dell’analisi diventa, infine, quello delle relazioni armoniche e cacofoniche tra i differenti spazi antropologici con la riuscita metafora dei quattro punti cardinali (B). (shrink)

The article reconstructs the diffusion of the ideas of the Scottish philosophical school (Reid, Smith, Stewart) in France in the early nineteenth century and the role played by the Geneva philosopher Pierre Prevost. Prevost emphasizes the originality of the Scottish school compared with the French and German school in his writing “Reflections after my translation of the posthumous works of Adam Smith” of 1797. From at least 1792 already Prevost had begun a correspondence with Dugald Stewart, which lasted until the (...) death of the latter in 1828. About twenty letters of Stewart to Prevost are preserved in Geneva. Through the mediation of Prevost the Scottish Enlighteners influenced the development of French philosophy from Ideology towards Eclecticism (Degérando, Pictet, Royer-Collard, Cousin). (shrink)

Introduction / St.L. JAKI (pp. 9-19). Présentation / J.-Fr. STOFFEL (p. 21). – L'œuvre de Pierre Duhem (pp. 25-113). Publications post­humes (pp. 115-129). – IIe partie : Les travaux de ses doc­torands. Fernand Caubet (pp. 133-135). Henry Chevallier (pp. 137-141). Émile Lenoble (pp. 143-144). Lucien Marchis (pp. 145-154). Eugène Monnet (pp. 155-156). Henri Pélabon (pp. 157-168). Paul Saurel (pp. 169-172). Albert Turpain (pp. 173-197). – IIIe partie : La litté­rature secondaire. Thèses et mé­moires (pp. 201-202). Livres (pp. 203-205). Biographies et (...) étu­des générales (pp. 207-209). Duhem en perspective (pp. 211-212). Le philosophe de la physique (pp. 213-234). L'histo­rien des théories physiques (pp. 235-243). Le physicien (pp. 245-251). Le croyant (pp. 253-256). Notices nécrologiques (pp. 257-258). Notices de dictionnaires et d'encyclopédies (pp. 259-260). – IVe partie : Index. (shrink)

Review of Jan van der Stoep's published PhD dissertation on the work of Pierre Bourdieu.en de politieke filosofie van het multiculturalisme Kok Kampen 2005. My review is in English. van der Stoep's book is in Dutch with an English summary.

This work presents a mathematical model describing the interactions between the cross-shore structure of small pelagic fish population an their exploitation by coastal and offshore fisheries. The complete model is a system of seven ODE’s governing three stocks of small pelagic fish population moving and growing between three zones. Two types of fishing fleets are inter-acting with the fish population, industrial boats, constrained to offshore area, and artisanal boats, operating from the shore. Two time scales were considered and we use (...) aggregation methods that allow us to reduce the dimension of the model and to obtain an aggregated model, which is a four dimension one. The analysis of the aggregated model is performed. We discuss the possible equilibriums and their meaning in terms of fishery management. An interesting equilibrium state can be obtained for which we can expect coexistence and a stable equilibrium state between fish stocks and fishing efforts. Some identification parameters are also given in the discussion part of the model. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 44–55. Philosophers are sperm, poetry erupts sperm and dribbles, philosopher recodes term, to terminate, —A. Staley Groves 1 There is, in the relation of human languages to that of things, something that can be approximately described as “overnaming”—the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and (from the point of view of the thing) for all deliberate muteness. Overnaming as the linguistic being of melancholy points to another curious relation of language: the overprecision that obtains in the tragic (...) relationship between the languages of human speakers. —Walter Benjamin 2 Prologue. Any text with an inflection of the word “thesis” in its title risks closing the borders of what is posited in it. However, perhaps it would be possible to think this act of defining in a way that is less, so to say, definitive. I would like to recall the opening line of Aristotle’s De Interpretatione , a constellation of theses, if anything. “First it needs to be posited [ thesthai ] what a noun and what a verb [is].” 3 Upon closer inspection, the definitions of the noun ( onoma ) and verb ( rh?ma ) do not at all appeal to any notion of strictly bordering-off, but are merely captured in a movement toward definition, establishing their own horizons. 4 It is therefore not a coincidence that Aristotle deploys the aorist medio-passive infinitive thesthai to describe this process. It is an infinite, self-instigating movement without proper horizon or telos . 5 It is this sense of thesis in relation to the basic components of language that I will attempt—perhaps in what may prove to be a gesture of what Walter Benjamin called “overnaming” 6 —to posit as cumposition , the composition of philosophical discourse that is conscious of the abyss of language in which it moves. 7 1. In her essay “When Philosophy Meant the Love of Wisdom,” Avital Ronell evokes the following question: What if philosophy’s love for wisdom has gone bad? The perversity of philosophy’s love not only appears in its recursiveness as the love of love for wisdom, first presented in Plato’s Symposium , but also “in all its brutality, especially when it’s set against literature and poetry.” 8 Philosophy’s love is a brutal one, perverse. Indeed, Immanuel Kant famously described the scene of metaphysics as a ‘battleground of … endless controversies,” 9 and “destined for exercising its forces in mock combat, and upon which no combatant has ever been able to gain even the least ground for himself by fighting.” 10 Because of the many modalities of love from the onset of philosophy onwards, Ronell signals the difficulty of addressing in any universal way the question of love in philosophy, unless she would consider it “in its essentially sado-masochistic dimension.” 11 As Heidegger already remarked parenthetically in his Introduction to Metaphysics , polemos as war and confrontation is the same as the logos . 12 Philosophy has always been a polemical discourse. 2. At the same moment, however untimely this moment may be, love has been conspicuously absent from Heidegger’s work. Nevertheless, Giorgio Agamben has been able to tease out Dasein’s love as a “passion of facticity.” 13 Agamben develops from out of Heidegger’s war-struck logos the following definition of love, which will allows to proceed to a reading of the origin of philosophy itself as the love of wisdom, a relation that in itself may hide “a kind of original fetishism.” 14 What man introduces into the world, his “proper,” is not simply the light and opening of knowledge but above all the opening to concealment and opacity. Al?theia , truth, is the safeguard of l?th? , nontruth; […] Love is the passion of facticity in which man bears this nonbelonging and darkness, appropriating ( adsuefacit [ ereignet ]) them while safeguarding them as such. Love is thus not, as the dialectic of desire suggests, the affirmation of the self in the negation of the loved object; it is, instead, the passion and exposition of facticity itself and of the irreducible impropriety of being. In love, the lover and the beloved come to light in their concealment, in an eternal facticity beyond Being . 15 Truth as al?theia , “unhiddenness” or “unconcealment,” which has in recent times again gained a special prominence in certain regions of philosophical discourse, is thus the ultimate expression of Dasein’s love, even if, for the philosopher, the beloved is love itself. 3. In Plato’s Symposium , Socrates famously introduces the philosopher as a figure in love with wisdom. But also Love himself is a philosopher, a lover of wisdom; he is an interpreter ( herm?neuon ), 16 a hermeneutic, a messenger between the gods and men. He organises all intercourse and dialectic interaction between them. 17 Plato’s definition starts with Socrates invoking Diotima of Mantineia, who had instructed him in eroticism. 18 Diotima inseminated Socrates with the seeds of philosophy, taught him how to love. We can imagine young Socrates paying his first visit to her, seeking affection and pleasure in her maternal body. “What then,” we hear Socrates asking, “may love be?” And here we find Diotima answering his call: “the love of the good is always to its own [ aut?i einai aei ].” Socrates answers: “that is the very truth [ al?thestata ],” 19 or, as Heidegger would translate it, “the most unhidden.” 20 So already in this primal scene of philosophy’s love we find the intimate relation between love and unconcealment. 4. If Love is a philosopher who practices the love of the good as the highest truth, an abyss opens: what is the truth of philosophy itself? Necessarily, this must be a truth outside the logic of (un)concealment, outside the logic of the Ereignis or the event, if it doesn’t want to fall into an infinite regress. Some have argued that there is no such thing as philosophical truth, yet this truth has appeared, albeit marginally, in another discussion of love, as the etumos logos , true discourse. 21 This was already pointed at by Michel Foucault, 22 and later commented upon by Christopher Fynsk: “the exigencies to which Foucault answered in seeking his 'truth,' [ etumos ] […] are linked to an exigency met in any consequent meditation on the essence of language.” 23 Any consequent meditation on the essence of language, perhaps a meditation as it takes place within philosophy on its own language, will have to arrive at a certain truth, even when as unstable, incoherent, and assaulting the borders of finitude as etymology may be. Etymology is the truth of philosophical discourse. 5. Our meditation on the relations between philosophy, love and truth means in no way to move toward a philosophy which would take “Desire” as its transcendental signified, distributing different desires for truth through different discourse levels, nor discard it as an extra-philosophical affect. A position such as would be assumed by any philosophy of desire is ferociously attacked by Jean-François Lyotard in his book Libidinal Economy , but in doing so he hits upon a—for him despicable—condition of the philosopher, the one who is “nothing but thought,” the one with whom we tend to sympathise; the condition of the “as if.” This is philosophy’s meta-ontological mask. Philosophy’s love is the love of the as if: “[A]nd so, to be, I have only to place myself as well in the circumference, turn with the intensities, act as if I loved, suffered, laughed, ran, fucked, slept, shat, and pissed, I, thought.” 24 Even though Lyotard wishes that “this supreme effort of thought die,” 25 we, in our turn and not so afraid to die, may now also perhaps define etumos as truth “as if” al?theia ; the former makes an appeal to the latter’s affect, but is not “the real thing”—or wherever the quotation marks need to take hold to stabilise our discourse. 6. Even a philosophical discourse as self-asserting and sanitised from any affective overtones as Alain Badiou’s does not escape this condition. In his work, the philosopher is a figure of circulation, someone who, at the end of the day, can only act “as if.” This typology of the philosopher is first hinted at in Being and Event , when Badiou claims that, “philosophy is not centred on ontology—which exists as a separate and exact discipline—rather it circulates between this ontology […], the modern theories of the subject and its own history.” 26 Philosophy is thus in the first place separated from ontology and therefore merely circulates along it. Beside ontology, which in Badiou’s work appears as a fully atonic axiomatization of set theory, 27 philosophy circulates through the theories of the subject, which, under the procedure of poetry, are subtractive of ontology, thus allowing for the appearance of a truth as an event ( Ereignis as the unconcealment of concealment) and subjective fidelity, and the history of philosophy itself: its discourses and the story of its limitless love of wisdom. For Badiou, the right of philosophy is the right to cite its conditions, the right to cite their truths. The text of philosophy is the text of citation. 28 The philosophical act thus is “an act of second thought.” 29 7. If, as Plato suggested, the love for the good is the highest truth, the bursting forth of this truth as event happens outside philosophy. Either as the ultimate idea that is sought or as uncounted inconsistency exploding into maximum existence, registered on philosophy’s seismographs, this truth as event remains tightly bound to a philosophical desire for truth. Mehdi Belhaj Kacem even claims that “the event […] is the ontological structure of Desire,” 30 and “Desire wants the event.” 31 Superlatively (perhaps: most truthfully), “The event has the structure of rape.” 32 Although we should place a number of question marks in the margins of Kacem’s philosophical project and his rapid conflation of multiple textual registers, he does point out a certain sedation of philosophy’s love of wisdom in Badiou’s work. However, that philosophy would be a place to house multiple truths, circulating among them, again opens us to the ‘perversity’ of this love that Ronell pointed out. Philosophy cruises truths. 8. How does philosophy’s “second thought” arrive, if ever? Philosophy’s lovely circulation through what is already presented by mathematics, theories of the subject and its own history is first conditioned by a sustained belief in the possibility of formalisation. But what if this formalisation itself is bound to fail? What if we deny formalisation, or at least point to the discomfort we experience of such forcing to formal appearance such as painstakingly described in Witold Gombrowicz’ literary oeuvre. Jacques Derrida already pointed out in reference to Husserl’s final appeal to geometry, that “the institution of geometry could only be a philosophical act.” 33 Similarly, we could criticise that the act of formalisation on which Badiou’s citational appropriation of mathematics, and therefore the circulation of philosophy, rests: “As soon as we utilize the concept of form—even if to criticize an other concept of form—we inevitably have recourse to the self-evidence of a kernel of meaning. And the medium of this self-evidence can be nothing than the language of metaphysics.” 34 At the end of the same essay Derrida sketches out the consequences this has for philosophy, which, however, strangely resonate with what Badiou proposes as philosophy’s circulation. One might think […] that formality—or formalization—is limited by the sense of Being which, in fact, throughout its entire history, has never been separated from its determination as presence, beneath the excellent surveillance of the is : and that henceforth the thinking of form has the power to extend itself the thinking of Being. But that the two limits thus denounced are the same may be what Husserl’s enterprise illustrates[.…] Thus, one probably does not have to choose between two lines of thought. Rather, one has to meditate upon the circularity which makes them pass into on another indefinitely. And also, by rigorously repeating this circle in its proper historical possibility, perhaps to let some elliptical displacement be produced in the difference of repetition: a deficient displacement, doubtless, but deficient in a way that is not yet—or no longer—absence, negativity , non-Being, lack, silence. 35 In many ways this resounds with what I have stated above. Although Badiou radically separates the “thinking of form” and the “thinking of Being” to respectively the meta-ontological/philosophical domain and the ontological/mathematical domain, the remainder within philosophy itself appears as this “ circle in its proper historical possibility.” And indeed we may have traced a “deficient displacement” which is not yet or no longer an “absence” as would be the truth subtractive to ontology: the “as if”–truth 36 of the etumos as truth in philosophy itself, the truth of philosophy as love of wisdom. 9. We may want to ask whether the two lines of thought theorised by Derrida and again separated by Badiou both exhibit this circularity. If that would be the case, this would allow us to consider their intertwinement more in depth. What Derrida calls the “thinking of Being” and Badiou refers to as “ontology” is thoroughly unbound by what is commonly referred to in an economic discourse as capitalism. The sudden insertion of a materialist trope may seem infelicitous here, however, capitalism has, as Badiou put it succinctly, also a “properly ontological virtue.” 37 The logic of capitalism, even though it operates in the “most complete barbarity,” 38 has an ontological virtue of its own, namely the destruction of the One as viable metaphysical point of departure. The “barbarity” of capitalism’s destructive character operates by “brute force,” but also sometimes by, as Walter Benjamin put it, “the most refined” 39 one. In any case, it unbinds all. As Lyotard stated in one of his seemingly unending sentences: Capital is not the denaturation of relations between man and man, nor between man and woman, is the wavering of the (imaginary?) primacy of genitality, of reproduction and sexual difference, it is the displacement of what was in place, it is the unbinding of the most inane pulsions, since money is the sole justification or bond, and money being able to justify anything, it deresponsibilizes and raves absolutely, it is the sophistics of the passions and at the same time, their energetic prosthetics; […] it has certain anti-unitary and anti-totalizing traits [...]40 Thus capital and capitalism are figures of unbinding and circulation. We find ourselves here in the metaphorical domain of philosophy that both in Lyotard and Badiou has its recourse to an economic discourse. Derrida has addressed this tendency at length in his essay “White Mythology,”41 and in a different register I will attempt to address it below, acknowledging that indeed philosophical language may be a “fund of 'forced metaphors.'”42 10. How is it that truth emerges from the ontological wasteland of capitalism, to be captured by philosophy’s love of wisdom? What is this love responding to and how is it that philosophy refuses to turn the other cheek to reality? Perhaps a beginning of an answer to this question may lie in the way in which Marx parenthetically defined capitalism: “the universal relation of utility and use” as “universal prostitution.” 43 which includes everyone: Prostitution is only a particular expression of the general prostitution of the worker, and because prostitution is a relationship which includes both the person prostituted and the person prostituting—whose baseness is even greater—thus the capitalist, too, etc. is included within this category. 44 It may prove fruitful to read general prostitution here in the logic of unbinding and circulation, following Benjamin, who speaks of an “erotology of the damned.” 45 Benjamin’s work on the German translation of Charles Baudelaire must definitely have influenced his work on the destructive character of capitalism. The tropes of prostitution and destruction already appear in his note on the poem “Destruction” from Les fleurs du mal . “The bloody apparatus of destruction,” Benjamin asks himself, where is this phrase in Baudelaire? 46 In Baudelaire’s poem, the demon of destruction takes on the “most seductive form” of women, and seduces the visitor to the “planes of Boredom,” where he is introduced to the “filthy clothes' and “open wounds” and the “bloody apparatus of Destruction.” Is it from these “planes of Boredom, profound and barren” 47 that philosophy gleans its truths. 11. If philosophy thinks ontology as prostitutional, whom does it cite? Although to some authors, it would suffice to use the indicative quality of language as such to open such an ontology, 48 we should perhaps focus here on the atonic desert where the prostitutional machinery is blithely at work as captured in the work of Pierre Guyotat. He opens up to such an interpretation when he states that his novel Tomb for Fifty Thousand Soldiers is, “in spite of everything, metaphysical; a metaphysics of history, certainly not religious; it is also a somewhat ontological.” 49 Several philosophers that I have addressed above refer to his work; for example Badiou, who refers to the “neo-classicism” of Guyotat as a resurrection of the “cosmological aim” of grand literature hearkening back to Lucretius. 50 Guyotat’s “prostitutional universe,” 51 which reduces “all vital norms to the immediate commercial potentials of the body.” 52 On the other side of the philosophical spectrum, Lyotard digs deeper, describing the actual jouissance of the worker submitted to the capitalist machinery, “the machine of the machine, fucker fucked by it.” 53 And he continues: “And let’s finally acknowledge this jouissance , which is similar […] in every way to that of prostitution, the jouissance of anonimity, the jouissance of the repetition of the same in work, […]. Jouissance is unbearable .” 54 This is what Guyotat so “admirably” expresses in his work, and is also professed by himself. The same logic as Lyotard’s clearly appears upon reading a few sentences from his seminal essay Langage du corps (Language of the body). But on reflection, what spectacle is more brutally exciting than that of a child wanking with his left hand, in this system, and writing with his right. In the resultant disarray. There must be seen one of the terms of this contradictory pulsional will, being at the same time seen and voyeur (“seeing”), pimp and whore, buyer and bought, fucker and fucked. 55 Lyotard described this—within a philosophical discourse that is—as a “superbly capitalist dispositif ,” 56 a mode of writing-masturbating in which production and consumption coincide, truly a “bloody apparatus of destruction.” This logic equally distorts the clear distance that is regularly maintained by writers—and nearly always by philosophers—toward their own work. To me, the most concise formulation of this contracted distance can be located in the neologism that Guyotat coins in his novel Prostitution: “ nhommer ,” ringing with both homme (man) and nommer (to name). For example in the otherwise “untranslatable” sentence: ma e s’renâcl’ chuya se l’mâl’ le nhomme’, lui prend la fess’ o lui frott’ la mostach. 57 Nhommer is therefore an en-hommer , an insemination of a man, life-giving and naming, as well as a n’hommer , its own negation and undoing. This is echoed by Benjamin when he says that in the Bible, “the 'Let there be' and in the words 'He named' a beginning and end of the act, the deep and clear relation of the creative act to language appears each time.” 58 Nhommer is a creative act philosophy cannot accomplish but only approach. The writer always n/mam/nes , the philosopher may only cite, at the risk of introducing prostitutional logic, the shortcuts between naming and creating, creating and exploiting the fabric of philosophy. 12. Prostitutional ontology, materially captured by the bloody, short-circuiting apparatuses of capitalism, can only be cited by philosophy, acted out, at the risk of unbinding the whole of philosophical discourse itself. The events and miracles on the atonic planes of boredom may not affect philosophy itself. This could be one of the reasons that sex and sexual difference have largely remained outside of the realm philosophy. Derrida has already done a considerable amount of work on this curious lack, especially in two essays entitled “ Geschlecht ” on Heidegger’s work and Dasein’s sexuality. In “ Geschlecht 1: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” Derrida investigates the role of sexuality in Heidegger’s definition of Dasein, and his general silence on the topics of sex and gender. “It is as if […] sexual difference did not rise to the height [ hauteur ] of ontological difference. […] But insofar as it is open to the question of Being, insofar as it has a relation to Being, in that very reference, Dasein would not be sexiferous [ sexifère ].” 59 The material that I adduced above might give us a frame in which to interpret this repression of Dasein’s sexuality in Heidegger. In philosophy, sexual difference is cited as ontological difference. Prostitution is cited as the unbinding of Being. However, the unbinding or separating force, hailed as the virtue of capitalism and eagerly imported into philosophical discourse, perhaps even brought to the “height of ontological difference,” is also always already at work in philosophy itself, be it as a separation between ontological and theological domains in Aristotle or the separation between a truth procedure and the citational dispositif of philosophy in Badiou. The truth, as Anne Dufourmentelle put it in her book on sex and philosophy, extracted from the “torture chamber” 60 of philosophy is that this separation is always already sexualized. If etymology is not the key to Bluebeard’s seventh door, it at least opens up a little skylight in the chamber of horrors. In Latin, sexus means separation. The Church Fathers to whom we owe the development of the Latin language thus anticipated by several centuries Lacan’s too famous remark: “There is no sexual relation.” 61 The truth of Lacan’s statement that “there is no sexual relation,” in the precise sense that the term “sex” derives from “separation” and vice versa is only etymologically validated within philosophy. The power of its truth only appears etymologically as philosophical truth. 13. Literature does not need to prove this point. It immediately participates in the circulatory logic of sexuation, without the need to distance itself from it through citational checkpoints and border patrols. It allows language to derange freely, as literature often reminds us of. Dufourmentelle clarifies to us once again, illustrating Guyotat’s point that I cited above. The act of writing is performative: writing and thinking are acts. What philosophy cannot tolerate is the nonresponse to which the enigma of sex refers it. No philosopher can bear up the boudoir. What philosophy does not succeed in conceptualizing is the traversal of a disaster. […] It may be that traversing the impossibility of the relation to sex is what founds philosophy. The black sun of thought about sex. Sex is what leads to traversal, to exile; it orients and disorients. From this exile, literature is born. Literature is the other, hidden guest at this blind date in the boudoir. 62 In her introduction to Dufourmentelle’s book, Ronell even goes as far as suggesting that certain regions of philosophy may be coinciding with the realm of “obliterature,” a space of thought’s disavowal of sex. 63 Indeed, sex induces in philosophy an anti-Platonic “black sun of thought,” that is, following Julia Kristeva, melancholy, when the words don’t come: “Recall the speech of the depressed: repetitive and monotonous. Within the impossibility to link up, the phrase interrupts itself, depletes, halts.” 64 To refer ourselves to Aristotle’s first thoughts on properly philosophical language with which we opened this text, for Aristotle the mind suddenly “halts” the moment it hears a noun or verb that is not well inflected, not properly disseminated into language. 65 Already the minimum of grammatical failure is enough for the philosopher to fall into a stupor. The unworking of grammar is the melancholic condition of philosophy. 14. We need to find the language in which philosophy writes, a writing that organises the “ elliptical displacement” of philosophy blindly circulating through its conditions, perhaps even a “language of decentering, or a dispositif of acephalic writing.” 66 But as Ronell has brilliantly argued in her reading of Freud’s case of the Rat Man, “The Sujet suppositaire ,” the circulation of philosophy should always be read through a lexicon of intervention and insemination which she calls an “Oedipedagogy,” 67 a mode of obsessional neurotic thinking, that is, a mode of cir- cul -ation: around the arse, around the riddles of the sphincter. 68 As a mode of what Ronell calls with Freud the “obsessional neurotic style,” a style of punning, the cir- cul -ation of philosophy rests on paronomasia, that is, the domain of paronomy and etymology. This is however not without scandal. In some circles of truth’s closure, pun has remained the name of an indictment, an accusatory identification of that which takes too much pleasure, disarranging academic languages, promoting a rhetoric of looseness within the parameters of a recreational linguistics, valuelessly succumbing to the most indefensible copulations of meaning, related […] to the temporal succession of shame over pleasure, incriminating the grammar of some strict order of things, and so forth. 69 That punning and its avatars of paronomasia and etymology are already present in one of the most philosophical grammars of a “strict order of things” provides us with a clue that in composition of philosophical language itself, something may be “indefensibly copulating.” 15. In the opening paragraph of Aristotle’s Categories , otherwise a work of remarkable philosophical rigour and properly purged language, we may track down the “elliptical displacement” or “acephalic writing” of philosophy. This is not to be found in the first two semantic relations described by Aristotle—homonymy and synonymy, or the grand metaphysical concepts equivocity and univocity—but in the third one, largely neglected in the corpus of occidental philosophical discourse, or so it seems. This relation, or perhaps more felicitous, movement in language, is called paronymy , and is defined as follows: “Paronymous are called those which, differing from something through case, have an appellation according to the name [of those], like 'grammarian' [ grammatikos ] from 'grammar' [ grammatik?s ] and 'courageous-man' [ andreios ] from 'courageous' [ andreias ].” 70 Paronymy, which is regulated through case ( pt?sis ), the way in which words fall into a sentence, is addressed to the form of the word, the manner of its signification, and not its meaning. 71 Case is also the driving force behind ontological differentiation, regulating the formal aspects of Being falling into beings. What is regulated by case in philosophy is regulated by the supposedly unrestrained punning and paronomasia in the process of sexual differentiation. Paronymy and case offer philosophy a window to peek into modes of discourse it does not like to associate itself with. But at the same time, philosophy is already contaminated by paronymy, which introduces the problematic of formalisation itself, the form of the name and of language at the heart of many metaphysical issues. The glorious theories of accident and substance, subject and object, Being and beings, and so on, cannot be inserted in the philosophical discourse without the lubricant of paronymy. 16. Paronymy, moving from form to form, is not without its methodology. Aristotle’s logic of the paradigm closely mimics the movement of case, neither from particular to universal, nor from universal to particular, but from particular to particular. 72 We are confronted here with what Agamben calls a “paradoxical type of movement,” 73 a movement that moves along itself and away from the doxa , the rule, and which should only be deployed when other means of deductive of syllogistic reasoning are no longer available. The paradigm signifies an insufficiency of properly philosophical thought. It should therefore not surprise us that the paradigm finds its modern inflection in what Lacan calls the “signifying chain,” where “no signification can be sustained except by reference to another signification.” 74 Metaphor is here the name for “the effect of the substitution of one signifier for another in the chain, nothing natural predestining the signifier for this function of phoros apart from the fact that two signifiers are involved, which can, as such, be reduced to a phonemic opposition,” 75 whereas at same time it is the “sole serious reality for man.” 76 It is here that Lacan explicitly chooses the reality of the etumos , the material cause of psychoanalysis, over the revelation al?theia . We might therefore interpret psychoanalysis as the only inflection of philosophy that insists on etumos as the sole source of truth. 17. If it the case, again according to our teacher Aristotle, that all meaningful philosophical discourse is essentially composed in an organised manner, we may insert in the composition of that word itself, in its philosophical circulation, a foreign element. Perhaps this also means that I insert myself in a lineage of paranoia and obsessional neurosis, but then again, as Guy Hocquenghem remarked, homosexuality itself is commonly associated with paranoid persecution mania, 77 “the apparition of the word curiously drives a cascade of lapses, or at least of the interpretation of common words as lapses. There is no innocent or objective position toward homosexuality, there are no situations of desire in which homosexuality doesn’t play a role.” 78 So why would I pretend otherwise? As Ronell adds, and I should have warned you before, “neologisms are much more common in persecution mania patients than in others.” 79 In recognition of what composes philosophy always remains in circulation, no matter whether approached from an “ontological” or “linguistic” perspective, no matter how “meta” the separation machinery drives us, it is circulation itself that justifies the term, if it is one, cumposition . In naming the decentering force of philosophical discourse thus, I not only intend to stress the “with” ( cum ) of the philosophical sum-plok? or com-positio , that is present in it already since Plato, 80 but also the position of philosophy itself, whenever it will have arrived or cum, shooting for the stars of wisdom on the metaphysical firmament. NOTES 1. A. Staley Groves, Poetry Vocare (The Hague/Tirana: Uitgeverij, 2011), 86. 2.Walter Benjamin, “On Language As Such and the Language of Man.” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Select Writings. vol. 1, 1913-1926 , eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 73. 3.Arist. DI 16a1. 4.If only because already the translational issues with these two words are in themselves breaching the constraints of sound definition. 5.Giorgio Agamben’s work has focused extensively on this mode, see for example Potentialities , trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 234-5. 6.Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language As Such…,’ 73. 7.This is not to say that philosophy only resides in certain language games, as Wittgenstein would have it, but that negotiating the limits of those games—which, etymologically speaking, already carries in it the “com-” of philosophy’s “composition” as the morpheme “ga-,” cf. Gothic gaman , ‘participation’ or ‘communion’—determines to a large extent how much liberty philosophy is willing to grant itself in placing certain truths inside or outside its domains. 8.Avital Ronell, Fighting Theory , trans. Catherine Porter (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 1. 9.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , trans./eds Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 99 (Aviii). 10.Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics , trans./ed. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 143 (Bxv). Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 109 (Bxv). 11.Ronell, Fighting Theory , 2. 12.Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics , trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press), 65. 13.Giorgio Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity,”in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy , trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, 202. 14.Ibid. 196. 15.Ibid. 203-4. 16.Plat. Sym . 202e. 17.Plat. Sym . 203a. Philosophy as the love of wisdom is therefore recursively defined. Here we could perhaps trace one of the origins of philosophy’s auto-immunity that Ronell has commented upon on several occasions. She signals the so-called “end of philosophy” as one of the tropes characterizing the developing auto-immunity in the body of philosophy, and while at the same distancing herself from this trope she insists that we “continue to interrogate the figures used to designate the end, and to recognize the difference among such terms as closure, finality, terminus.” (Ronell, Fighting Theory , 3) 18.Plat. Sym . 201d. 19.Ibid. 206a. 20.Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth , trans. Ted Sader (New York: Continuum, 2002), 48. 21.Plat. Phaed . 244a. 22.Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2 , trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 235. 23.Christopher Fynsk, The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 65. 24.Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy , trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13. 25.Ibid. 13. 26.Alain Badiou, Being and Event , trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2006), 3. 27.That is, the Zermelo-Fraenkel axiomatization, explicitly including the axiom of separation which does not allow for any inconsistent multiplicity, i.e. the appearance of the event. Nevertheless, ever since Richard Montague’s dissertation Contributions to the Axiomatic Foundations of Set Theory (Berkeley: University of California, 1957), we know that set theory can never be finitely axiomatized. 28.Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and John Van Houdt, “Circulating Philosophy: A Note on Two Apparent Misquotations in Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds,” Theory and Event 14.2 (2011). 29.Alain Badiou, Conditions , trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2008), 290, fn. 4. 30.Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Événement et répétition (Auch: Tristram, 2004), 208. 31.Ibid. 209. 32.Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, L’affect (Auch: Tristram, 2004), 93. 33.Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s ‘Origin of Symmetry’: An Introduction , trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 127. 34.Jacques Derrida, “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language,” Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 157. 35.Derrida, Ibid. 172-3. 36.Or, if you like, the “false truth.” See for an indictment of etymology along these lines Jean Paulhan, La preuve par l’étymologie (Paris: Minuit, 1953). 37.Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy , trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 57. 38.Ibid. 57. 39.Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” Selected Writings, Vol. II.2, 1931-1934 , trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 541-2. 40.Lyotard, Libidinal Economy , 135. 41.“In signifying the metaphorical process, the paradigms of coin, of metal, silver and gold, have imposed themselves with remarkable insistence. Before metaphor—and effect of language—could find its metaphor in an economic effect, a more general analogy had to organize the exchanges between the two 'regions.'’ Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1982, 216. 42.Ibid. 257. 43.“The exchangeability of all products, activities and relations with a third, objective entity which can be re-exchanged for everything without distinction—that is, the development of exchange values (and of money relations) is identical with universal venality, corruption. Universal prostitution appears as a necessary phase in the development of the social character of personal talents, capacities, abilities, activities. More politely expressed: the universal relation of utility and use.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy , trans. Martin Nicolaus, New York: Random House, 1973, 163. 44.Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” Karl Marx Selected Writings , ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 90. 45.Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project , trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 347. 46.Ibid. 256. 47.Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal , (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1999), 161. 48.For example, Jean Pierre Brisset, Le grammaire logique, suivi de La science de Dieu . Paris: Tchou, 1970, pp. 155ff. But we could equally point to the work of Jacques Lacan or refer to the intimacies between sexual and ontological differentiation as investigated by Jacques Derrida. 49.Pierre Guyotat, “L’autre scène,” Vivre (Paris: Denoël, 2003), 45. 50.Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2 , trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum), 76. 51.Alain Badiou “Guyotat, prince de la prose,” unpublished lecture (Paris: 21 October, 2005), n.p. 52.Ibid. 53.Lyotard, Libidinal Economy , 109. 54.Ibid. 110-1. Lyotard formulates a position here parallel to Lacan’s analysis, which argues that the slave “can accept to work for the master and give up jouissance in the meantime.” (Jacques Lacan, Écrits , trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton, 2006, 259) This renunciation of jouissance founds the obsessive subject that I will discuss below, in an extension of the prostitutional logic developed by Lyotard. 55.Pierre Guyotat, “Langage du corps,” Vivre (Paris: Denoël, 2003), 24. Translation quoted from Lyotard, Libidinal Economy , 139. 56.Lyotard, Libidinal Economy , 139. 57.Pierre Guyotat, Prostitution (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 90-1. In relation to his work we would also do well to recall the Lacanian dictum that “Punctuation, once inserted, establishes the meaning.” (Lacan, Écrits , 258) 58.Benjamin, “On Language As Such…,” 68. 59.Jacques Derrida, “ Geschlecht 1: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” trans. Ruben Bevezdivin and Elizabeth Rottenberg, in Psyche, vol. 2 , eds Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 8. 60.Anne Dufourmentelle, Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy , trans. Catherine Porter (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 56. 61.Ibid. 57. 62.Ibid., 101. 63.Avital Ronell, “The Stealth Pulse of Philosophy,” introduction to Anne Dufourmentelle, Blind Date: sex and philosophy , trans. Catherine Porter (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), xv. 64.Julia Kristeva, Le soleil noir: Dépression et mé?ancholie (Paris, Gallimard, 1987), 45. 65.Arist. DI 16b20. 66.Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2 , trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum), 545. 67.Avital Ronell, “The Sujet Suppositaire: Freud, And/Or, the Obsessional Neurotic Style (Maybe),” Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 108. Cf. also: “As mere reversal, this maintains the 'intervention' of which Lacan speaks in its classic column, still following the marching orders and route traced out by the commanding symbolicity of male homosexuality whose structures, in place since the time of Plato, continue to assure the paradigm of the transmission of knowledge.” (Ibid., p. 106) 68.“The anus can be said to mark a locus of privileged transaction between at least two gendered entities. It organizes a space from which rental agreements are negotiated, leases are taken out by one gender to permit the other gender provisionally—depending on the terms of the agreement—to occupy its space. The other of genital sexuality, determinable neither as masculine nor strictly speaking as feminine, anality nonetheless constitutes a sexuality, a shared space that is often vaginized.” (Ronell, “The Sujet Suppositaire,” 108) One could, and perhaps ought, to read Guyotat’s Prostitution , as exactly a constant negotiation of this sort, where language itself succumbs to this logic of “indefensible copulations.” (Ibid., 110) 69.Ronell, “The Sujet Suppositaire,” 110. 70.Arist. Cat . 1a12-15. 71.Cf. Pierre Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote (Paris: PUF, 1962), 184, fn. 3. 72.See Rhet . 1357b26-30 and APr 69a13-16. 73.Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method , trans. Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 19. 74.Lacan, Écrits , 415. A similar idea, originating from a different perspective, but with a similar foundation in Aristotle, can be found in the work of Paul de Man: “The convergence of sound and meaning […] is a rhetorical rather than aesthetic function of language, an identifiable trope (paronomasis) that operates on the level of the signifier.” (Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986, 10) 75.Lacan, Écrits , 756. 76.Ibid., 758. 77.“Psychiatry supposes in general an intimate relation between homosexuality and paranoia, but gives it often the following form: the homosexual frequently suffers from persecution paranoia.” (Guy Hocquenghem, Le désir homosexuel , Paris: Fayard, 2000, 32) 78.Ibid., 59. 79.Ronell, “The Sujet Suppositaire,” 117. 80.See Plat. Soph . 262c. (shrink)

Nel presente articolo esamino l’idea di una “sociologia riflessiva” – a lungo professata e auto-imposta da parte di Pierre Bourdieu – che tematizza il rapporto tra la teoria sociale e la prassi di vita al fine di riflettere sulle modalità pratiche della ricerca sociologica e di interpretare il ruolo svolto dai sociologi in quanto tali nella riproduzione dell’ordine sociale. Secondo Bourdieu, infatti, il controllo del rapporto tra il ricercatore e l’oggetto di indagine deve avvenire, al contempo, su tre livelli di (...) riflessione: sul piano delle condizioni epistemologiche e socio-culturali che rendono possibile la pretesa di scientificità della conoscenza sociologica, sul piano delle disposizioni pratiche che orientano il lavoro di ricerca di soggetti dotati di particolari habitus, e sul piano della loro collocazione specifica nel campo culturale e nello spazio sociale. Questa compresenza di riflessioni sui concetti, sui metodi e sui compiti della teoria sociologica conferma la continuità dei suoi studi rispetti ai classici, con una particolare attenzione a disseminare le armi di difesa contro la dominazione. (shrink)