Author Updates
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Blog postThe so-called “philosophies of difference” had great importance in the 1960s in France, but by the end of the 60s something else was happening in thought. The “deconstruction” of structuralism was already under way. Difference is the master-concept of structuralist philosophies, multiplicity characterises a non-structuralist, or “post-structuralist” thought that attempts to have done with the master-function of such concepts by subjecting them to various processes of multiplication, relativis
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Blog postIn this post, now greatly expanded and re-written, I show the explanatory power of viewing Laruelle’s non-philosophy as a metaphysical research programme.
Laruelle’s blind spot with respect to other “non-standard thinkers” such as Deleuze and Guattari, Latour, Stiegler, Zizek, and Badiou, can be elucidated in terms of a fundamental defect at the heart of his system.
Laruelle’s “non-standard” thought is thus a half-way house between standard philosophy and ontological plurali -
Blog postI agree with Artxell Knaphni that the words “immanence” and “transcendence” belong to a conceptual metaphorics. Deleuze’s own use of “immanence” is in danger of being self-contradictory, as the intended anti-foundational meaning of the word can be negated by its use as part of some foundational litany.
The reiterated use of a “non-theological” vocabulary is often itself a theological gesture. Repeating it three times (or horror! more) does not make it so. A “Deleuzian” veneer can hid -
Blog postWe cannot understand the beginning of WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? without having at least some idea of the conceptuality developed in order to answer the question embodied in the title. At first glance, and many readers seem to have been content with that, the text seems to refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s own experience: we are now old enough to ask the question with our whole being and personal history, with our oeuvre behind us, at an age when if one is lucky “all the parts of the machine come toge
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Blog postOld age is usually thought of as a state of greater entropy, differences of potential are reduced, making change rarer and more difficult. Ageing progresses under the law of increasing entropy, until a final state is reached, one that can no longer support life.
Against this modern idea of old age Deleuze and Guattari juxtapose the idea of old age as one of those pathological moments that can open a breach in the roof of the Cavern and that allow us to bring through some part of chaos -
Blog postPhilosophy, for Deleuze and Guattari, begins with a pathology, or a pathological process: a jolt, a shock, a malfunction, a wound, a delirium, a crack-up, sickness, old age. The task is extract the event in the state of affairs and to be worthy of the event.
The shock, we will learn explicitly at the end of the book (but we already know it), opens a crack in the ordered world of opinion, a crack onto chaos and disorder. The task is to meet something negative (the shock or the crack) w -
Blog postChateaubriand published his Vie de Rancé in 1844, only four years before his death, at 80 years of age, in 1848. He lived to explore the continent of old age and taught us to distrust “old age in power”. This is the impotent power of those who cannot transform the world, but can only interpret it, and confine themselves and others to their interpretation. It is the power of abstraction and of the abstract concept (which is not a concept in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms).
There i -
Blog postAcademic “normal” philosophy is much concerned with distinctions and determinations, classifications and demarcations, and rightly so. All thought is impregnated with theories and concepts, and we could not even get started if we were not already categorising and norming the world and its knowledge procedures.
As remarked earlier, we already know the answer to the question “What is philosophy?” before we begin the book, the answer being “philosophy is inventing concepts”. This answer -
Blog postWe already know Deleuze and Guattari’s answer to the question “What is philosophy?”, and they knew it too, for many years before writing the book. Now, however, they place themselves in an existential drama occurring in a particular life situation (“old age”, but one must not take this too literally) and in a particular mood (uncertainty: the title is a question and the first word in the French is “Peut-être”, “Perhaps”).
For more on this non-literal or intensive use of “old age -
Blog postAs a philosopher, but everyone is or can be a philosopher, my way is the way of dreams and of their dialogue. Arguments and analyses are important, but they take their place in the light of the dreams they express or criticise.
Dreams can be used to criticise the world but this is not a one way exchange. There is no dictatorship of the dream, and even dreams need to be expressed and explored, shared and confronted, confirmed and revised.
I find nourishment and inspiration for -
Blog postI found CHILDREN OF TIME slow going to begin with. I disliked the first chapter (but this is in fact normal as the point of view character, Dr Avrana Kern, is deliberately quite antipathetic) and put the book down for a while before trying again. Finally, the book was a very rewarding read, so I advise anyone with doubts at the beginning to persist.
The plot takes a while to pick up but I found the later social and technological evolution of the spiders interesting and enjoyable. Ther -
Blog postI really enjoyed Yoon Ha Lee’s NINEFOX GAMBIT, the first novel in the Machineries of Empire Trilogy and felt inspired to defend it from the Shadow Clarke’s critiques of its uncritical use of genre clichés, personality stereotypes and formulaic plot structure. I argued that these defects were more than compensated for by the novel’s speculative … Continue reading RAVEN STRATAGEM: sequelitis and its discontents
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Blog postI have been giving a generous or charitable reading of Yoon Ha Lee’s NINEFOX GAMBIT. I don’t read much Space Opera, for precisely the reasons that many give for its personally and politically problematic, and so less enjoyable for me, nature.
I was enthusiastic about 9FG because it tied into my exploration of a turn towards an immanent or pluralist Platonism not just in philosophy but also in SF. I discussed Neal Stephenson’s ANATHEM from this point of view (https://terenceblake.wordp -
Blog postThree reviews take Yoon Ha Lee’s recent NINEFOX GAMBIT to task for its conformity to Manichean, individualist, élitist, anti-democratic, violence-banalising space opera tropes. All three reviews are from a shadowy institution calling itself the “shadow” Clarkes. There is a noteworthy convergence of views in the three posts, condemning the novel for its lack of political … Continue reading IS SPACE OPERA EVIL?: Ninefox Gambit and The Shadow Consensus
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Blog postGuattari thought that fascist desire was in the service of some transcendence, a fixed supreme value in the name of which the fascistic order is imposed. Being woke, being aware of the semiotic machine and the power mechanisms driving that imposition of an order, is not enough, but it is a good beginning in the process of deterritorialisation (estrangement) that can lead to greater freedom.
In these terms NINEFOX GAMBIT is a critique of fascism rather than its sublimated (because fant -
Blog postJonathan McCalmont has published a couple of interesting reviews of Yoon Ha Lee’s NINEFOX GAMBIT (full review here, and later reflections on his personal blog).
I agree with everything that McCalmont says about the novel’s structural flaws, and in particular the problematic subordination of Yoon Ha Lee’s speculative inventivity and complexity to the fascistic, bellicose form of military science fiction. However, I don’t fully recognize the novel from McCalmont’s description.
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Blog postPROVIDENCE is a densely layered graphic novel devoted to re-imagining Lovecraft’s life and work in terms of the mythos that emerges from and subtends his creations.
These are not my “annotations” to the graphic novel, the people at the blog “Facts in the Case of Alan Moore’s Providence” have done an excellent job, and I am indebted to their work. I have also read with profit the discussions of PROVIDENCE on Sequart, by David Whittaker and by Matthew Kirshenblatt.
This is rathe -
Blog postI am dissatisfied with the analyses of those thinkers and writers who seek to establish a demarcation in Lovecraft between the pure horror works and the dream cycle.
The same noetic estrangement underlies both, and the arbitrary privileging of the horror over the dream excludes Lovecraft’s unitary vision of such estrangement or weirdness. This unitary perspective on horror and the dream can be explained in terms of Deleuze’s concept of the “weird”, which is
“the approach of a -
Blog postI have just finished reading Providence #12. It manages to tie a lot of threads together from the preceding issues, and also from Alan Moore’s The Courtyard and Neonomicon. It does this final wrap-up in a satisfying, but not mind-blowing way.
I liked the idea of all books and narratives as “spoors”, life from other worlds infiltrating our minds. Books and works of art are presented as not only mind-transforming but also world-changing devices, of a piece with dreams.
Lovecraft -
Blog postLe nouveau roman d’Aliette de Bodard est une histoire fantastique insolite, défiant toute classification par genre: une fantasy urbaine, néo-Gothique, post-apocalyptique, qui mêle l’histoire alternative avec une cosmologie et une poly-théologie pluralistes. Dès le début du roman, “La Chute de la Maison aux Flèches d’Argent” est une lecture passionnante, que j’ai dévorée avec grand plaisir … Continue reading “La Chute de la Maison aux
Books by Terence Blake
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