So what’s all this anti-vitalism wafting on the (post-) Continental wind? What’s it working from? (Thacker? Others?) Is it anything more than another round of vanguardism (“not enough to revitalize matter, let’s devitalize life while we’re at it” — another version of the old Stalinist jingle about not being able to make an omelet without breaking some eggs)?
Anyone who was at the conference, or with the time (and a strong enough internet connection, which I don’t seem to have at the moment) to listen to the audio recordings from it, care to summarize?
i’ll summarize for you: “we’re all really smart and if we can’t contexualize a metaphysics of difference with regards to the properties of a crow-bar and a crow, then you can’t either. ”
To be fair, there was some good stuff about “Life” being the contemporary equivalent of the previous preoccupation with “Being”. Biotech and biopolitics converge into a frenzy of post-boundary-making cyborg fantasy.
I’m listening to Brassier’s critique of Bergson right now. He was originally supposed to speak about Evan Thompson’s enactivist approach to cognitive science, but that seems to be a work still in progress. I’ll probably post some thoughts in response in the next day or two.
Badiou, brittle logic and the doctrine “law,” never proven) of noncontradiction. If there has to be a line in the sand I’m in the “life” side. That is if we are forced to choose between vitalism and mechanism.
All the problems go away if you accept life as a paradoxical quality and not a Sorites problem wedged between the assumed certainties of
1) a transcendental that is necessarily immaterial
2) a mathematical base reality that is unable to cope with anything outside of Russell-Frege style logic and brittle ZF set theory.