Intro to Philosophy

In the spring it looks like I will be able to teach Intro to Philosophy. I am pretty excited about it, and have several ideas about what to put in the course (particularly expanding it outside of its traditional Western comportment). However, I was curious if anyone had suggestions. If anyone wanted to send me their syllabus, suggest preferred texts and textbooks, particularly awesome or smart assignments. I think Adam once said he didn't know why we didn't spend more time talking about teaching on these things, and I agree with him. Crowdsourcing classes makes a lot of sense, so please, would love any suggestions.

Oh, I am also probably going to be teaching argumentation in the spring. Most of you probably have never taught or taken that course, but any suggestions on that front would also be appreciated.

Go crowdsourcing, go crowdsourcing, go!

DeLanda

Levi has organized a reading group around DeLanda's A New Philosophy of Society. I had thought of joining, but I'm a little worried of over-extending myself. However, it looks to be really interesting. I read DeLanda's book when it first came out, and I will probably occasionally add things to the discussion. A very early encounter of DeLanda's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (I read it either the summer before my junior year, or the summer before my senior year of undergrad) was part of a weird mixture of things I was reading as an undergrad that really lent itself to my general anti-anthropocentric realism. DeLanda is also the reason I read Braudel's Capitalism and Civilization series, which are a lot of fun and very useful.

This also reminds me that there is a DeLanda book I haven't read yet, Deleuze: History and Science. If anyone here has already read it, I'd be interested in hearing feedback. I'd also be interested in a table of contents... . Also, at one point DeLanda was writing a book on the phenomenology of animals (what I saw looked very inspired by Uexkull), anyone know any updates on that front?

Speaking of Uexkull, Wolfe's Posthumanities series is going to be releasing shortly his A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with his A Theory of Meaning. Both of them have already been translated and released into English, but it will still be nice to have them together in one affordable and in print volume. I've said it before, Uexkull is important and interesting, but I also would like for philosophers to maybe know something about the more contemporary scientific work, rather than going back a century for basis of their thought.

I've joined the dark side

For the last couple of years I have resisted adding a site counter for, I dunno, fear of being neurotic about it or having my blog be in danger of audience capture (as if I have enough of an audience for me to worry about that). However, tonight I randomly decided to add in a counter. I probably should have asked for suggestions. Right now I am using sitecounter.com.

A Post of Links

First up, if you haven't already heard, Jeremy Crampton has a new blog, Open Geographies. He also has this cfp for Philip K. Dick and Philosophy. I'm really tempted to submit an abstract, but the time frame is worrisome to me.

Peter has a good post on Derrida and difference of animals. His position is the one I basically agree with, but I am far more sympathetic to those that just wants to render inoperative such divisions in the first place. I would also like to point out the constant refrain Derrida makes about the impossibility of ever creating a rational division between what we call the human and what we call the animal.

Rodolfo has a new blog post up on disability, the animal, and the question of 'lack.' It's really interesting, and this is my favorite part of blogging. I say some random, ill-defined thoughts, and someone else comes along and writes a wonderfully insightful blog post on mine.

Do you all think I link to Prodigies & Monsters too often? Well, I think you all don't read them often enough. HJM has a wonderful post up on Hardt and Negri's third task of identity politics (the dissolution of identity). Her reading is, shall we say, kinder than mine. Though really I don't think we disagree that much. Also, MLA has two smart posts up on Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee on the issue of Secession. See here, and here. I know I should have more to add, but I don't really. Deleuze use to talk about the importance of stammering for writing and thinking. I sometimes think that political action requires us to learn stumbling. The awkward movements that don't always go together of a plurality of plans and actions. Stumbling, like stammering, is hard to do when you are trying to go somewhere. But maybe necessary.

Tim Morton has a post on OOO and buddhism. This may sound weird to a lot of you, but I use to have a lot of hostility towards buddhism. Since that time I've been working to figure out what, exactly, I think about distinct sects of buddhism.

Here is an interesting post from PaleoVeganology on if our earliest known human ancestors ate animal flesh or not, and if we should even care.

Over at Ezra Klein's place, he's on vacation and several interesting posts on private prisons sprung up. Read here and here. Also, here is a post about how prisons produce bad citizens.

For our musical ending, I've chosen Reverend Horton Heat's It's a Dark Day. It fits the rainyness of the day where I am living.

Clarifying on immunity (or, It's never Lupus)

Levi has a good post up on immunity, which ends this way:

Am I missing something? I’m not quite clear as to why Scu sees the necessity of distinguishing between immunity and autoimmunity and why he thinks Derrida is insufficient here. If anything, I think Luhmann comes up short here in not sufficiently exploring the possibility of systems auto-destructing or devouring themselves from within (which isn’t to say that a Luhmannian account of this couldn’t be developed, only that he doesn’t seem to explore this phenomenon very closely).

This caused me to reread my last post, and it made it me realize, uhm, how rambling and unclear it was. So, once more. A lot of this will be repetitive for many of you (including Levi), but it should help me being clearer.

An autoimmune disease is when the body's immune system cannot recognize part of its self as self, and therefore responds to healthy cells and tissues as if they were harmful (allergies are distinct from autoimmune diseases, but are similar and the treatment tends to be similar as well). You can see why this is such an important trope for understanding the ways that protective systems in society can actually be harmful. Levi gives the example of the Patriot Act, but let's take another example, the invasion of Iraq. In this case America is attacked. There are any number of proper immune responses, but invading Iraq is certainly not one of them. This entails a fundamental confusion, unable to tell one set of Muslims apart from another set in much the same way our own immune system gets confused. And like any allergic or autoimmune response, this caused a great deal of harm. (And I think we can all see why this goes to the heart of questions of biopolitics, no?).
Now, my argument isn't against the importance of thinking about autoimmunity, but against the particular way that Derrida talks about these issues. There is a way for which the immune for Derrida slips so easily into the autoimmune. Thus, if you look at "Faith and Knowledge" where Derrida introduces this concept he repeats "once immunity and auto-immune" at least twice, and then goes on and argues:

But the auto-immunitary haunts the community and its system of immunitary survival like the hyperbole of its own possibility. Nothing in common, nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of autoimmunity. (p. 81 and p. 82 in Acts of Religion).

And that is all true, and important, and unarguable against, and yet....
Yet, this doesn't provide a way to think the immune without it seeming to always slip into the autoimmune. And that worries me, it worries me that people will see every action of immunitary logic as autoimmunitary. The immune system is, well, important. While autoimmune disorders and allergies are important threats, only an idiot would get rid of their immune system in order to cure themselves of those threats. When I talked about Haraway's comments on the obsession with autoimmune diseases distracting us from global distributions of health and the problem of, say, parasites, I think this has important implications for the model of immune system for society. Think about the Zapatistas for a minute. They went to war against the Mexican government on January 1, 1994, the same day as NAFTA went into effect. If you read "A Storm and a Prophecy" neo-liberalism is expressed in exactly the terms of a parasite, set to destroy the indigenous peoples of Chiapas. The actions of the EZLN, including the early direct military actions, are understandable as an immunitary response to the parasites of neo-liberalism. If the figure of the immune system is going to be useful, then that means we need to be able to think both immunitary response and the threat of autoimmune diseases which is just one threat among others. If our fear of the autoimmune becomes hegemonic, then we will have trouble taking appropriate immunitary responses. This becomes all the more true, because it is the immune system that makes you feel bad. So, for example, many patients in late stage AIDS don't feel sick. Because the feeling of sickness comes from the immune system, not from those infections and cancers and parasites that are killing you. Thus, we end up with the issue of Immune Reconstitution Syndrome, where a person's immune system starts working again and paradoxically makes the patient feel much, much worse. The reactions of the immune system are both necessary and uncomfortable, at best. If this holds true socially (and indeed, that should be one of the questions for those eager to extend the logic of immunity to sociality) then there is already a great impetus for people to oppose the immune reactions. To always see them as dangerous and unnecessary.
Another note here, the hemoglobins that attack parasites are also the hemoglobins that are behind allergies. There is a theory that allergies are so much worse in the developed world because of the fact that parasites is a significantly less of a problem here, and therefore the bored hemoglobins engage in hyper-immune responses. I think the focus on autoimmunity in our social theory might also be a question of perspective, of a people that do not as directly feel the parasites.
So, I agree that autoimmune diseases are bad things, both socially and physically. But they aren't the only problem, and we need to be able to think immunity broadly and usefully. Otherwise, the insight of autoimmunity will become a bit like how Virno has characterized the concept of biopolitics:

my fear, is that the biopolitical can be transformed into a word that hides, covers problems instead of being an instrument for confronting them. A fetish word, an "open doors" word, a word with an exclamation point, a word that carries the risk of blocking critical thought instead of helping it. Then, my fear is of fetish words in politics because it seems like the cries of a child that is afraid of the dark..., the child that says "mama, mama!", "biopolitics, biopolitics!". I don't negate that there can be a serious content in the term, however I see that the use of the term biopolitics sometimes is a consolatory use, like the cry of a child, when what serves us are, in all cases, instruments of work and not propaganda words.

The last thing we need is for autoimmune to function that way. For every time we see an immunitary action we automatically assume it is an autoimmune response that needs to be avoided. Remember, it's never lupus.

The metalepsis of immunity and autoimmunity

Levi has a nice post in response to my post on Luhmann. It does a good job of explaining a bit more of the back ground on issues like risk, systems/environment, immunity, etc. However, it has also made me think that a longer post on immunity and autoimmunity might be needed over here.

For me, as well as for many other thinkers, the issues of biopolitics are bound up with the issues of immunity. For example, in Foucault we are given schematics of power that correlate to responses of disease. So, Foucault explains that responses to leprosy elucidate sovereign power, responses to plague elucidate disciplinary power, and responses to smallpox elucidate governmentality and biopower.[1] But something else emerges in Derrida[2] and in Esposito[3], rather than responses to certain diseases being models or instances of different logics of power, immunity becomes a way of thinking the social itself, a metaphor or map for community and violence. Esposito warns us that in Derrida's formulation of immunity, there seems to be no space (or only an infinitesimal space) between immunity and autoimmunity. I think this is why Esposito turns more and more to Luhmann, for whom immunity provides both a positive and negative influence on a system.
However, as Miller points out (after prompting from Mitchell) in For Derrida, autoimmunity is a "figure of a figure" (p. 124), or a metalepsis. What does that mean? Well, it means that the concept of immunity isn't particularly a natural one, but already a metaphor used to understand the way particular systems of our bodies work. In this case, I really suggest Donna Haraway's "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies"[4] and Ed Cohen's A Body Worth Defending. In Haraway's case you get an interesting story about the way certain discourses of the immune system work within the coordinates of a military-industrial complex. In Cohen you receive a longer work about how the very idea of immunity and self-defense (two different historical concepts, as Cohen points out) arise and go on to explain the notion of the way the body protects itself. This all means that certain societal arrangements became a figure for understanding the body, and that certain ways the body regulates itself has become a figure for understanding society.
This metalepsis of immunity is something we have to grapple with if we want to seriously understand the concept of immunity. This becomes all the more true if so much is suppose to depend on this issue of immunity; questions of killable and protected, of community and estrangement, of self and other.


[1] See Discipline and Punish and Abnormal for the first two examples. The smallpox example is in Security, Territory, Population.
[2] The major texts that Derrida deals with immunity are "Faith and Knowledge", in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, and in Rogues [Thanks to Matt for reminding me]. Hagglund's Radical Atheism is rightly mentioned as a great source on this concept, but I also suggest J. Hillis Miller's For Derrida and W.J. Thomas Mitchell's "Picturing Terror".
[3] Esposito's notions on immunity is worked out in his trilogy Immunitas, Communitas, and Bios. Also in his most recent book, Third Person.
[4] Haraway's work provides a nice contrast to Derrida, as well. Derrida's concern is the way that immunity slips into auto-immunity, but Haraway's essay is provoked by the death of a close friend who died of AIDS (immuno-suppression, not autoimmunity). Also, she has an interesting footnote where she observes that obsession with autoimmunity seems to come at the cost of concerns over things like parasites, which leads us to not "take responsibility for the differences and inequalities of sickness globally." (p. 252, n. 2)

I rather liked Inception

Over at Philosophy in a Time of Error, I suggested that Peter should read Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle. It seems that several people are not particularly fond of those novels. Anyway, in that conversation Mikhail wrote:

I’ve only read The Baroque Cycle, so maybe I’m wrong on Stephenson as a whole, but I found the narrative to be oh-so-dull and I’m not even sure why I kept on reading. I think it was the same reason for why people keep on watching Inception for 2.5 hours trying to see if there’s a twist or something…

Okay, before we go any further, I plan to talk about the movie Inception as if you have already seen it. That means there are going to be spoilers. You are warned.
I rather liked Inception (I've seen it twice), so maybe Makhail is onto some sort of connection here. What he seems to be missing is that my enjoyment of that movie had nothing whatsoever to do with some sort of twist at the end (Christopher Nolan is not some sort of M. Night Shyamalan). First of all, I just thought it was a fun movie. Some of the fight scenes were a little long, and it isn't my favorite Nolan movie, but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of watching the movie. Maybe Makhail just didn't enjoy watching it, nothing wrong with that. But there seems to be a push to want to say that the movie failed as an intellectual force by some of the reviewers I read (what a weird way to judge a movie). Many of them have compared it to the Matrix. They are wrong, and that wrongness is connected to the way that there was no twist at the end.
Any number of people have (rather smugly) declared that they figured out the ending before it ever happened. Good for you, you've seen a movie before. I think the ending of the movie was suppose to be foreseen, predicted. Think of it like a good joke. There are two ways (well, at least) of telling a joke. One is to tell someone a joke with an unexpected punchline, the surprise of the punchline is what causes laughter. But, that makes re-telling the joke problematic. Some of the best jokes are when the audience knows what is coming, and the comic manages to stretch things out. Nervous chuckles escape from the audiences lips as the tension builds. The climax's humor comes from fulfilling expectations, from releasing tension done through good timing. Inception was a bit like the second joke for me, where it seems many other people saw it and felt it was like a joke they had heard before.
This brings us to the ending. Everyone foresaw that the totem would not fall, that all of this was still just a dream. The movie isn't anything like Matrix, which argued that there was a real world and a fake world, and you get to the real world (and moreover, that the real world was the world that mattered). Inception, on the other hand, lives in ambiguity. It thrives on the fact that we can never really be sure which world is real or fake. That realness is never something we can sure of, and that indeed it becomes hard to tell if the real world is the world that matters. This explains the constant refrain of leaps of faith. The film doesn't deal with, "What if this isn't the real world?". but rather, "Never being able to be sure of something even as basic of reality, of love, of people, of self; how are to act and exist?" For me, the perfection of the ending isn't the fact that the totem hasn't fallen (and therefore, aha, it is a still a dream) but the wobble of the totem as the film ends. The fact that a measure of this ambiguity is preserved.