poetix

we murder to dissect
No doubt the tacticians of the IDF, having thoroughly mastered their nomadology, will presently be poring over Badiou's account in Logics of Worlds of the rout of the Persian army:

...But we have shown that it is just here that Alexander's genius lies. The oblique formation, the two ranks of heavy infantry, the slide to the left, the gap and the charge - Alexander undertakes the undoing of the real synthesis to which Darius had subordinated the evaluations of intensity of his own military arrangement. Once the element that played the role of envelope is no longer operative, we witness the alteration of the whole of appearing, namely the collapse of the Persian army.

This reveals the extent to which military genius is really the genius of the transcendental functor; the genius of the ascent from the measures of intensity towards the effectiveness of opposing masses, the genius of the undoing of real syntheses and their conversion into inconsistency, into the rout of unbound multiplicities.

Useful if you ever run into a bunch of Palestinian militants with scythed chariots.
 
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josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Putting-themselves-in-the-right

They confirmed their mutual understanding on a higher level by excluding one who did not pronounce the same credo they repeated to one another. What they fought for on a spiritual and intellectual plane they marked down as their ethos, as if it elevated the inner rank of a person to follow the teachings of higher ideals, as if there were nothing written in the New Testament against the Pharisees. Even forty years later, a pensioned bishop walked out of the conference of a Protestant academy because a guest lecturer expressed doubt about the contemporary possibility of sacred music. He too had been warned against, and dispensed from, heaving dealings with people who do not toe the line; as though critical thought had no objective foundation but was a subjective deviation. People of his nature combine the tendency that Borchardt called a putting-themselves-in-the-right with the fear of reflecting their reflections - as they didn't completely believe in themselves... Heretics baptized this circle "The Authentic Ones."

Adorno, Jargon of Authenticity
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
If only I had read Deleuze, and learned to think for myself! Now I'm trapped - trapped! - in a dogmatic in-crowd of unreflective Pharisees and zealots, whose sole delight is in identifying dissenters and Deleuzian free-thinkers and viciously excluding them.

I weep for my generation.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Perhaps you would be better served by thinking about what Adorno says, rather than instantly identifying with his target, and then abjecting that identification in the form of weak sarcasm?

Here is a handkerchief:
EDIT: Actually, this one is probably more pertinent with respect to your own individual case.
 
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poetix

we murder to dissect
Perhaps you would be better served by thinking about what Adorno says, rather than instantly identifying with his target, and then abjecting that identification in the form of weak sarcasm?

Very well: let's consider in detail what Adorno is saying in the passage you have quoted.

They confirmed their mutual understanding on a higher level by excluding one who did not pronounce the same credo they repeated to one another.

The purpose of the credo is not so much to express a belief - the content of the credo need not be believable, or sincerely believed by those who express it - as to function as a schibboleth. It is a question of pronunciation. Moreover, the person who is to be excluded is not necessarily identified by an inability to pronounce the credo, but simply by the fact that they do not participate in the rite of public repetition.

This rite of repetition therefore serves two purposes. The first is performative reinforcement of the creed itself, reinstating it as an object of shared commitment. The second is purification of the body of believers (or creed-sayers). Pronunciation of the creed provides a criterion for selecting the one to be excluded, and the function of this exclusion is to elevate the "mutual understanding" of those who remain: the very act of exclusion binds them together as a group, refining and consolidating their identity.

What Adorno is saying here is somewhat of a sociological truism, but let's continue:

What they fought for on a spiritual and intellectual plane they marked down as their ethos, as if it elevated the inner rank of a person to follow the teachings of higher ideals, as if there were nothing written in the New Testament against the Pharisees.

Here the subjective knotting of "spiritual and intellectual" polemics and inner "ethos" is named as Pharisaism. What is a Pharisee? Within the Christian tradition, a Pharisee is one for whom there exists a system of "inner rank", of lower and higher persons distinguished by the quality of their ethos and the consistency with which they observe its demands. The Pharisee has a clear notion of what it is to be good, and strives to adhere to that notion in his own conduct. The sinner justified by grace knows that his own ethos is irrevocably compromised, and that his conduct brings him to condemnation before the law.

The sinner's first problem is one of weak observance of the law: what he calls evil, he does, and what he calls good he does not do. His second problem is one of ethical disorientation: what he calls evil and what he calls good are confused with each other, so that even his best efforts inevitably lead him into error. By the Pharisee's standards, the sinner is not a moral success. He would be a better person, a person of higher spiritual rank, if he attended to "the teachings of higher ideals", acquiring an ethos in which good and evil were clearly discernible in all cases, and fought for those ideals, both within himself and against others who did not live up to them.

What is written in the New Testament against the Pharisees is that they are hypocrites and vipers. Why? There are two reasons. Firstly, the Pharisee is often a hypocrite, unable to maintain his own standard of moral success and self-deceiving in the account he gives himself of his own conduct. Even if his conduct is really impeccable, however, his ethical rectitude is accomplished at the cost of a shutting down of situational awareness: he knows what is "right" in all conceivable situations, but the range of situations he is actually able to conceive of, the range of ethical demands he is imaginatively able to entertain, is fatally narrow. So long as he treads in the path of righteousness as he understands it, he is able to be "good"; but he has little empathy for the lives of others, and is apt to behave cynically and selfishly if he is thrown out of his usual moral routine. (The novels of Iris Murdoch are full of illustrations of Pharisaism undone in this way).

Secondly, the Pharisee is a viper, because his battle with himself to control his own conduct is invariably confused with a battle against others: he strikes venomously and compulsively against those who do not display the virtues he esteems, as if they represented a terrifying threat to his own integrity. The Pharisee is never solely concerned with his own goodness. When he evaluates the spiritual rank of others, and finds them wanting, he finds that their very proximity to him places his own moral elevation in jeopardy. They must be reformed, or blasted into nothingness.

Adorno's Pharisees are polemicists, immaterial warriors on "a spiritual and intellectual plane". Intellectual combat is essential to the maintenance of their own fragile inner peace. The little victories that they win on that plane serve to reassure them of the purity of their ethos, to uphold the elevation of their inner rank. They are always better people, in their own minds, than those they defeat.

Even forty years later, a pensioned bishop walked out of the conference of a Protestant academy because a guest lecturer expressed doubt about the contemporary possibility of sacred music. He too had been warned against, and dispensed from, having dealings with people who do not toe the line; as though critical thought had no objective foundation but was a subjective deviation.

This example neatly condenses the character of the Pharisee that I have just given. It is well understood that the "subjective deviation" against which he takes up arms is his own. Here Adorno also brings in "doubt" and "critical thought", both of which might potentially have some "objective foundation": that is, they might arise from awareness of some aspect of the situation that the Pharisee has suppressed within his own awareness. The doubter, or critical thinker, is not the person weak in belief, but the person who has noticed something with which his former beliefs were incompatible. The critical line of thought is the one which attends to this something, even at the risk of ethical disorientation. The Pharisee is someone who cannot tolerate any such risk.

People of his nature combine the tendency that Borchardt called a putting-themselves-in-the-right with the fear of reflecting their reflections - as they didn't completely believe in themselves... Heretics baptized this circle "The Authentic Ones."

"The fear of reflecting their reflections" is a very Adorno-ish way of describing the intersubjective mechanism whereby the proximity of someone who seems to me to be ethically compromised causes me to fear for my own ethical integrity. I fear that they reflect badly on me, and that I will come to reflect my own "bad" reflection. (This, interestingly, is a major theme in the lyrics of Xasthur: the mirror that shows me the falsity of everything I believe about myself, that reflects me as deformed, grotesque, a parody of my ideal self. It is a distorting mirror, but one that truly shows me my own "loss and inner distortion").

Adorno's final flourish is to adopt the "heretics"' name for the circle of Pharisees, "The Authentic Ones". What ultimately characterises the Pharisee is an overweening concern for authenticity: a fear that one is not really what one "is", that one is not wholly credible even to oneself. Only what is authentic has the right to exist; therefore the existence of everything that can be suspected of inauthenticity is in peril. (Badiou calls this the destructive passion for the real, which seeks to purify reality of everything inauthentic in order to arrive, finally, at the true life, the occluded substrate of dependable reality). The repentant sinner, by comparison, submits to the unconditional heteronomy of grace, no longer demanding of himself that he satisfy his own ethical conscience but recognising himself as justified through faith, and delivered to the subjective unbinding of hope and charity. But I doubt that is Adorno's conclusion.

Have I understood the passage correctly? Is there anything you would add to, or substract from, my account of it?

Further: could you now explain to me precisely what it has to do with Badiou and "Badiouvians"? Can you show, for example, that Badiou's Ethics expresses an essentially Pharisaical conception of righteousness?
 
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josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Have I understood the passage correctly? Is there anything you would add to, or substract from, my account of it?

I'm sorry, I really can't say. Your post was too boring to read.

Forgive me, I have a very short attention span.
 
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poetix

we murder to dissect
The odds are, however, that you're a person of at least mediocre intelligence. Is it too much to ask you to use it?
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
I feel it is more fair on you if I proceed as I'm doing.

Let me see put it like this: Why not lighten-up your discourse a little? The hermeneutic repair man act has limited applications, politically as well as intellectually. And, in fact, this is one of my problems with Badiou - with his "weighty demonstrations" and his privileging of the intellect over other, more rhizomatic-nomadological-schizophrenic (blahblahblah), modes of communication.
 
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nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
The problems with trying to use geometric logic(s) to plot the "morphology of the event" or whatever it is you want to prove with abstruse semi or quasi-mathematical mysticism on a given day (and you can prove basically anything this way)--the act of which is of course meant to imbue such thinking with proper amounts of authority and thus silence anything but "mathematical" arguments to the contrary--are many.

1) You don't reach anyone who doesn't know the math and you don't reach anyone who does. As far as I know there are no mathematicians who are interested in ontologizing their purely formal system. That sort of sullies things for them. They're above it. The rest of everybody else thinks themselves above math entirely, so there goes the masses, too.

2) There is no formal "inroads" to Being (if that exists). Duh.

3) Nobody cares about anything like this--no one with bills to pay at least--so how you could possibly tout it as some kind of politically viable alternative to everything else going among the leagues of fashion victim academics is beyond me. Thinking this sort of thing is necessary and vital is everything that's wrong with the self-appointed "Left". Tokenism. Vanguardism. Necrophilia. Etc.

4) You could make all of the same claims without the math and they'd carry the same weight and be just as easy to respond to negatively by critics, but at least you'd do away with the charges of obfuscation and equivocation, etc.

It's fun in maybe the same way hyperstition is fun. I'll buy it as an attempt to make a new more symbolically efficient, more efficiently coded game-matrix within "philosophy" for those who care about that kind of thing. Its formal viability outside of the world of academic theory is highly suspect/unlikely, however, and this remains to be acknowledged.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Remember when Descartes proved substance dualism using "logic" and Cartesian geometry? I do.
 
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nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
I hear that Von C is headlining.

See now you're being hysterical. Those people couldn't organize to save their lives. That would be too liberal. Fearing them is playing into their hands, really.

Think of them like a sort of Al Qaida, except they haven't (can't or won't?) hijacked any planes yet.

Better to just sit around thinking and making grandiose claims. Otherwise your intellectual purity might get tainted by the World.
 
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