However, I have since revised the talk; I am much happier with the text as it now stands, and can be downloaded here (pdf).

However, my talk at the Debt conference is available here (pdf).

Additional note: the papers from the Debt conference are supposed to be published as an edited volume. But according to the schedule that the conference participants were given, publication will not occur until January 2013 (!!!). This is because the schedule involves endless rounds of reviews and revisions, plus the fact that the eventual publisher (Indiana University Press) works at a glacially slow pace. This seems completely, outrageously unconscionable to me — there is absolutely no excuse, either for the sclerotic and overly baroque review process, or for a press that processes books at so slow a speed, it is as if the technologies of the last thirty years didn’t exist. So I have decided, in protest, to withhold my text from this volume (just as I have already started the practice of withholding texts from volumes that are published at outrageously high prices).

The fact is, that many academics (especially younger academics) are compelled to publish work under ridiculous conditions (taking way too long to appear in print, or appearing in volumes that nobody can afford) because they have to — they need such publications on their Vita in order to get tenure or promotion, or to survive in academia at all. However, I am in a position where I can afford to neglect such considerations. Which is why I have decided, as has been the case several times before, to simply publish the article in question on my website, list it in my Vita as an “electronic publication,” and refuse to collaborate with a decrepit academic publishing system. If I don’t do this, who will? And if nobody does this, how will the system ever change?

Featured in this issue as an “extended article” (it comes out to 100 pages!) is my latest: “Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales.”

The article is freely available for download; it comprises about two thirds of my forthcoming book Post-Cinematic Affect, appearing sometime later this year from Zero Books. (The book version will include two additional chapters: one on Neveldine/Taylor’s Gamer, and a general conclusion).

“Some Years From This Exact Moment”: Neveldine/Taylor’s Gamer and the Control Society

Thursday, February 18, 7 pm, Holt Center, Trinity University.

For more information, see http://transmedia.trinity.edu

Earlier this week, returning home to Canada from the US, Watts was assaulted for no good reason by US Homeland Security guards at the border, and charged with a felony for supposedly assaulting a Federal officer. Cory Doctorow has the whole story at BoingBoing, here. Watts’ own account of the incident is here.

Watts was released on bail, and is back home in Toronto, but he needs money for his legal defense. I am going to make a contribution, and I urge all everyone reading this to do likewise. (There are details on how to contribute on the BoingBoing page I cited already).

This is something that could happen to anybody, given how security mania connected with the so-called “war on terror” has become so completely excessive and out of control. But it sort of hits home when I see this happening to somebody whose work I greatly admire. (I do not know Watts personally, though I exchanged email messages with him once).

Graham quotes, against my reading of Whitehead as a kind of post-Kantian, Whitehead’s own assertion that Process and Reality involves “a recurrence to pre-Kantian modes of thought” (page xi). Throughout my book I am referring, instead, to a passage where Whitehead instead credits Kant as “the great philosopher who first, fully and explicitly, introduced into philosophy the conception of an act of experience as a constructive functioning” (page 156). This particular way of relating to Kant is crucial to my whole reading of Whitehead; it is why I position Whitehead as a kind of (radical) post-Kantian. Ultimately, which of these two sides of Whitehead’s attitude towards Kant one wishes to cite is a tactical decision. But in any case, I think that my Kant/Whitehead juxtaposition is more than what Harman dismisses as a “bats and birds both fly” argument.

I certainly do take Graham’s point when he says: “So, why do I choose to portray Kant as an enemy rather than an ally? Largely because of how Kant has been appropriated.” From an anti-correlationist position, Kant is indeed the source of the problem diagnosed by both Harman and Meillassoux, and it makes sense for them to move against him.

My own positioning of Kant as an ally has a different genealogy. It really comes out of the implicit “Kant vs Hegel” faultline in French philosophy. My very first book was on Blanchot and Bataille, and a big part of my argument (inherited from my initial advisor, Joseph Libertson) was that they were reacting against Hegel (whom they encountered via Kojeve) by disassembling the whole (Kojevian more than actually Hegelian, perhaps) “labor of the negative” — hence Bataille emphasizes “negativité sans emploi,” and Blanchot “desoeuvrement” — both of which mean that negativity cannot be put to work, cannot perform a labor. Negativity is weak, and not productive. I saw a link here between the Bataille/Blanchot critique of negativity and Kant’s emphasis on limits: even though Bataille and Blanchot never themselves say anything about Kant. But Foucault definitely positions Bataille in relation to Kant (rather than to Hegel) for this reason in his crucial early article on Bataille, “A Preface to Transgression.”

Subsequently, thisconfiguration seemed to me to be the key to Deleuze’s hatred of the dialectic, and to his presentation of Nietzsche as the thinker who “stood Kant on his feet” in a manner analogous to how Marx stood Hegel on his feet. Deleuze separates productivity entirely from negativity. Similar anti-dialectical stances in Foucault and even in Derrida are grounded in this sort of argument, as well. From there I came to a sense that one could read the second half of the First Critique (the Transcendental Dialectic) as, in effect, Kant’s rejoinder-in-advance to Hegel’s critique of him in the Encyclopedia Logic. And this, in turn, takes on considerable relevance today, since Hegel’s critique of Kant is such a centerpiece of everything that Zizek does. I never managed to work this out in a form that I was satisfied enough with to publish — but it definitely stands behind why I found Kant of such importance in talking about Whitehead and Deleuze.

To try to put this more concisely: Kant’s importance is in saying that there are limits to the pretensions of thought to determine the cosmos. Hegel and Zizek argue that any limit to thought is illusory, since it is turns out to be thought itself that is positing such a limit. I think that Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic is best read as a rejoinder in advance to this sort of argument. It is in this particular sense that I argue for reading Kant as (surprisingly, perhaps) an ally of some of the speculative realist arguments against unlimited correlationism; rather than seeing this part of Kant’s philosophy as being — as Deleuze sometimes implies — a policing action against speculation. Of course it is both, but my reading of Kant in Without Criteria is designed to bring out some of the often overlooked “minor” aspects of Kant — which is something that gets me in trouble with more orthodox Kantians,and more generally with normativists, as much as it does with speculative realists who see Kant as the enemy.