Virginal Extractions

'Extra virgin' - indeed a pure virgin?

Descartes' god who fools you to think

Rather to escape the ecclesiastical prosecution than for the sake of metaphysical necessity Descartes postulates God as he does in his system – even if Descartes’s reason for postulating God at the top of his doubt is rational it is nevertheless not what he actually experiences, that for his being to think only existence is required. God is superficial here so far. Beyond the being that thinks however is the world one wants to calculate and measure, to create the world by means of technology. An operation that cannot be undertaken by experience and ultimately intuition – it requires science, notably mathematics. Somebody must nevertheless guarantee the existence of physical laws that allows for a scientific examination of the world, for human technological creation. As for Kant God is merely needed to guarantee freedom and not our metaphysical knowledge Descartes is yet an Aristotelian in supposing the world to be created by the transcendent god. But the god of physical laws is miles away from the god of Christian eschatology. Therefore, and also by learning to know  rather than to believe, like Aristotle, Descartes was not a Christian. Descartes’ god fools you to think. A god almost impossible to tell apart from the drive that urges one to want to know.

End of Maya Calendar

Right now the time is facing the end of Maya calendar. Twelve days. Time for a new age is dawning.

want to believe

Incredible how the following words after thousands of years still manage to make a statement against despotism of institutionalized belief, religious or other forms of ideology:

"I do not want to have faith in any truth of which I am told as long as I am able to know what I want to believe and not and doubt again and again on the top of it all."

Critical Reason    

Don't like

The absence of possibility not to like at the popular f...book makes people like whatever they otherwise would never consider to like.

>like<

Despite Plato: A Question of "Rewriting"

“Despite” - a reading of Plato by Adriana Cavarero, notably In Spite of Plato: A Feminist rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, Polity Press, 1995 (1990). I am perhaps not the first to notice, but interestingly the Italian original title does not inform anything of the “rewriting” ascribed in the English translation. The original reads Nonostante Platone: Figure femminili nella filosofia antica, which, as I understand it, simply promises to treat “feminine figures in antique philosophy” – those eventually “despite” (nonostante) Plato. The emphasis of the English transliteration on “rewriting” almost suggests a project similar to and intolerable as the Stalinist rewriting of history. (Cf. Amy Knight, ‘Beria and the Cult of Stalin: Rewriting Transcaucasian Party History’, Soviet Studies, Vol. 43, No. 4, 1991, pp. 749-763.) As Derrida writes, Western philosophy is phallogocentric (Cf. Derrida, La dissemination). The Socratic dilemma of philosophy’s written or spoken for example in the Pheadrus 274a-276b implies, in my view, that “rewriting”, feminist or any other, is still a phallogocentric activity. "Rewriting" reassures the writing it opposes since any writing is phallogocentric. I doubt however that the nonostante of Cavarero entangles any “rewriting” but certainly a feminist reading of ancient philosophy. 

On the Writer

The written as a source of  thinking is mistaken to represent the writer who is known only as a figure of a writer. Do we really know Plato or Derrida, indeed any writer? With all the footnotes and (anti)theses philosophers engage in “dialogue“ with the writer, the person of the writer becomes repressed by the text – there is no-one outside the text, we may say with Derrida (il n’y a pas de hors-texte, “there is nothing outside text”; Cf. Derrida, On Grammatology) Simultaneously, the writer is represented as a spirit or a spectre, or psychoanalytically speaking as an imago of the real person. Albeit the real person of the writer is there, outside the text, but as the writer the person of the writer is repressed by the metonymy of language which structures (and dictates) the text; repressed in the literal sense of being reissued and repressed in psychoanalytical sense of being “forgotten”. Hence the writer whom we suppose to know as we read the text basically underlies the text as a writing subject who is supposed to know. As we are now embarking on Lacan’s concept of the “subject supposed to know” (sujet supposé savoir), that is, the unconscious subject, we may perhaps consider the real person of the writer as the unconscious subject of the text –– a real person who as any other is unconscious and writes his or her desire. (On reading/writing and desire cf. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against Historicists) Unnoticed in the writing of the other the writer is also an unconscious sub-text of that other, drifting metonymically aloft the meaning. Unceasingly, or to say with Lacan: it will never stop being written. Perhaps as there is nothing outside the text it needs to be filled with the text, which often outlives the writer. Therefore the writer is a tool of writing.