Hyperlinked Theory Bibliography!

Well, I dunno what people mean when they talk about 'theory'. It's all just thought, innit. But anyway, here is a list of some of the best pieces available online, in my humble opinion:

BADIOU. The Badiou archive is here:

http://bulldog.unca.edu/~kjharlan/badiou/

The best piece to start (an interview from 2001) is probably:

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php

There's a piece on Badiou here (which misspells Beckett in the title, but ignore that):

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2188&editorial_id=10208

ZIZEK

Author of a fine blog, Adam Kotsko (http://www.adamkotsko.com/weblog) has handily summarised loads of good online links, both by and about Zizek, here:

http://www.adamkotsko.com/zizeklinks.htm

Particularly interesting, I reckon, is this piece that sets out the context for his work:

http://eserver.org/bs/59/zizek.html

Links to his London Review of Books pieces can be found here, which at least have the benefit of proper editing (not always a high priority it seems):

http://www.lrb.co.uk/contribhome.php?get=zize01

DELEUZE

Most of the Deleuze (and Deleuze and Guattari) weblinks are listed here:

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/d-g_html/d-g.html

Lots of Deleuze lectures here, most in French but with a fair few translations:

http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html

DERRIDA

A bit of a weirdly designed site, though with lots of links, is here:

http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/content.html

This interview is pretty good, fairly wide-ranging:

http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/laweekly.html

In it, Derrida answers questions about the film made about him (er, 'Derrida', not much cop really), also about God, and provides an answer to the following question: Why aren't there any female philosophers?

'Because the philosophical discourse is organized in a manner that marginalizes, suppresses and silences women, children, animals and slaves. This is the structure -- it would be stupid to deny it, and consequently there have been no great women philosophers. There have been great women thinkers, but philosophy is one very particular mode of thinking among other modes of thinking. But we're in a historical phase when things like this are changing.'

OTHER THINGS:

One of the most important and most interesting discussions regarding human nature, I think, is Foucault and Chomsky's 1971 debate, here (might not be all of it, but certainly lots of class stuff):

http://www.antonio.homechoice.co.uk/chomfouc2.html


Well, that should do for starters. Hope all the links work and stuff.
 

luka

Well-known member
yeah good one. i tried to read the interview but i'm too old for all that now, haven't got the stamina. i'm sure its interesting though.
 

luka

Well-known member
well strcitly in terms of years maybe, in terms of wear and tear its a different story!
 

jaybob

Member
why is it that theory in these forums is so centred on deleuze, guatarri, zizek etc. i'm tempted to think that Dissensus, like the nu-look K-punk, has become little more than a course discussion group at a third-rate university. Cold rationalism, decoding the human OS, Utopian fantasies of a world beyond the horrid exigencies of personally degrading realities, luxuriating in the Spinozist embrace... it's_all_just_bollocks. it's neither new, nor interesting. It's just the disenfranchised of the Goldsmiths cafeteria online.
 

luka

Well-known member
jaybob, sunshine, this is the thread where clever people like you introduce stupid people like me to the delights of theory. if we're being shown the wrong theory then show us the right theory. we are stupid, we need to be told what is right and wrong, take us to your leaders...

show us your product...
 

luka

Well-known member
and a signficant number of people are commited to bullying mark out of his recent dead end fixations and getting him to write something good again, so don't be such a grumpy cunt, share with the community, heh!
 

jenks

thread death
Originally Posted by jaybob
It's just the disenfranchised of the Goldsmiths cafeteria online.

Dunno about Goldsmiths, down here at the seaside i've only the gulls to talk to
 
Well, I've only been to Goldsmiths' cafe once, and I certainly didn't do more there than have a coffee and read the paper....I put this list together cos Sufi, I think, was saying that it would be good to have some links to various references. It wasn't a question of setting parameters to dissensus discussions or claiming only certain figures are important etc. etc. People who read a lot tend to read widely (science, novels, nature books, all the things getting discussed on this fine list!) - not just 'theory', believe it or not.

In fact, I was going to do some more in future: a Marxist one (with Hegel, Feuerbach, Lukacs, Marx, Althusser and Balibar), an aesthetics one (Kant, Adorno, Lyotard etc.), maybe a linguistics one (Sassure, Chomsky, etc.). What do you think, jaybob.....ALL just bollocks? Not like the world, eh, that's just peachy and straightforward.....

Having grown up in a thought-free vacuum, i.e. the countryside, what these texts do, far from muddying the waters, or making me feel clever, is to CLARIFY things that otherwise remain obscure. When Zizek (in this online interview: http://www.philosophyandscripture.org/Issue1-2/Slavoj_Zizek/slavoj_zizek.html) makes the following argument, it's clear, anyone can understand what he's trying to say. You may not agree with him, but there's something to go on, it's not nothing:

'[Look at ] a movie that I like, Fight Club, where at first, you hit yourself. This is the most difficult part. The change is a change in you. Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, so sadly forgotten today, put it in a very nice way in his essay on liberation, "freedom is the condition of liberation." In order to liberate yourself you must be free.

We see this today, with feminists, that the first step in liberation is that you perceive that your situation is unjust. This already is the inner freedom. The problem is not, at first, that the situation for women was bad, but [rather] that they just accepted it as a fact. Even in revolution it goes like this. If you look at the French Revolution, the shift was purely ideological. They overthrew the king when they started to perceive that position as unjustified. Look at it in an objective way. The ancienne regime was, in the second part of the 18th century, much more liberal and open than before. It's just that the implicit ethical standards changed. My big obsession with Christianity is that there is something extremely precious in this legacy that is being lost today.'

All the thinkers that I listed before all have something extremely interesting to say about crucial things: religion, sexual difference, politics, capitalism, etc.

If not these thinkers and those questions, who else? A world in which Johann Hari and Christopher Hitchens (and other self-proclaimed thinkers), set the agenda would be a pitiful and desperate one, surely....
 

jenks

thread death
Excellent last post IT. This is why i come to this forum when i should be marking - cheers!
 

jaybob

Member
i guess my gripe with the way things seem to be going here is people's fanatical adherence to theoretical systems and the arrogance that results. ie Claims that reading certain theory will give you a universal template for understanding all human experience. You tear down one oppressive system and you erect another. And you do it all in joyless, arcane, riddled language which effectively acts as a secret code between carefully chosen interlocutors. It's a gang mentality and that's the way theoreticians have always worked; in vicious, carefully policed packs. Schools working and reacting against each other without ever accepting that they're caught in a cycle.

So, I guess, what I would recommend reading, on a theory tip, is Valentine Cunnigham's 'In the Reading Gaol'. It's a good, ironic, generally disbelieving survey of a good couple of 1000 years of theoretical thought and you can dip in and out nicely.

On the stupidity of all-consuming systems and their belief in their own potential to hold salvation (as a non-examined misappropriation of Christian mythology) i'd read anything by John Gray.

Think empirically, think locally. Examine what's in front of you. Here and now's. Then think historically, think what's happened before. Stop using dead, white, European men of rarefied culture whom you happen to have encountered on your university degree as a millenarian key to all knowledge.

And stop thinking that sensory pleasure - be it drug-taking, sex or intoxication of any other physical kind - some how cements your complicity with your ideological overlords. Allow people their individualism and stop assuming that individuals are only created by your inherited, second-hand pedagogy.
 

jaybob

Member
to IT, xpost, no of course i don't think that all theory is bollocks. i like a lot of it, but i like it when it promotes questioning rather than insists on its own vadlity. I would also like theoreticians to engage with populist writers like Hitchens or Hari more and meet in the middle rather than just move the debate into academia. However right someone like Baudrillard may have been about the first gulf war being a simulacrum that's not going to have that much effect in the worlds of public opinion or politics, but perhaps that would, for you, devalue and sully the purity of the theoretical work?
 

JimO'Brien

Active member
jaybob said:
I would also like theoreticians to engage with populist writers like Hitchens or Hari more and meet in the middle rather than just move the debate into academia

The problem with the meeting in the middle may be more to do with the lazy anti-intellectualism of the populist writers than the avoidance of debate by those interested in a more theoretical argument. Hari's piece on Derrida's death was blatantly based on a complete refusal to debate with Derrida's writings in any way whatever. (Similarly with the recent piece in the Observer attacking the new Birkbeck centre for Public Intellectuals. )
 

johneffay

Well-known member
jaybob said:
And you do it all in joyless, arcane, riddled language which effectively acts as a secret code between carefully chosen interlocutors. It's a gang mentality and that's the way theoreticians have always worked; in vicious, carefully policed packs.

Whilst I agree with you about theoretical fanaticism, this is just anti-intellectual bollocks. The reason people talk in the 'riddled language' is that the stuff they're talking about is difficult and requires a certain amount of training and discipline to engage with properly. Do you whine about chemists talking about stuff you don't understand? What about mathemeticians with their equations it takes years to master; are they deliberately excluding you with their secret codes?

I understand Deleuze et al because I've spent years working at the stuff; I learnt to read French so that I could wrap my head round some of it. Does that mean that I'm excluding other people from questioning what I'm talking about because they can't understand some of the books I can? If you've got a problem with the theoreticians people are using, say something interesting about other forms of thought (of whatever provenance) which bear upon the subject in question, and I'm sure that most of us will read you respectfully.
 
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