Of the many unresolved debates surrounding the work of Martin Heidegger, the following question returns with some regularity: Is Heidegger’s phenomenology ultimately a question of hermeneutics and interpretation, or is it ultimately a question of immanence and truth? Is Dasein forever questing after a Being that withdraws, or does it somehow achieve a primordial communion with the truth of Being? In other words, is Heidegger the philosopher of blackness or the philosopher of light?

Hermeneutics was an important topic for theory in the 1960s. Hence it is not surprising that Heidegger, who was being rediscovered and rethought during that period, would often be framed in terms of hermeneutics. To be sure, the critical tradition handed down from post-structuralism leaves little room for modes of immanence and immediacy, modes that were marginalized as essentialist or otherwise unpleasant (often for good reason). Thus it would be easy to assimilate into the tradition of hermeneutics a figure like Heidegger, with his complicated withdrawal of Being. For where else would he fit?

Indeed it is common to categorize Heidegger there. But is it not also possible to show that Heidegger is a philosopher of immanence? Is it not also possible to show that he speaks as much to illumination as to withdrawal? That he speaks as much to the intuitive and proximate as to the detached and distanced? Continue reading →

Bob Dylan

Hood By Air

Hegel

copyright law

The Olympics

Mallarmé

NPR

Bernadette Corporation

Burning Man

Ai Weiwei

Alexander Hamilton

Giorgio Agamben

Hillary Clinton

Read my interview with the artist Sarah Oppenheimer published in the new issue of Bomb magazine. A remarkable artist working at the intersection of sculpture and architecture, Oppenheimer has three large scale projects under way, one at the Pérez Art Museum Miami opening this month, as well as works for the Wexner Center in Ohio and Mass Moca in North Adams, MA, both opening next year.

Announcing my fall graduate seminar. Download syllabus as PDF.

FALL 2016

Professor Alexander R. Galloway
agalloway@fas.harvard.edu
Office Hours: Thu 4-5pm & Fri 10-11am
Time: Thursdays, 2 - 4pm
Location: Carpenter Center 401

From climate change and infrastructure to objects and animality, the nonhuman realm exerts a growing influence on contemporary life. In this seminar we consider persons as things and things as persons, but also peer beyond the human into a world devoid of humanity. What does personhood mean in the age of the posthuman? Themes include proletarianization, animality, new materialism, posthumanism, pessimism, and the commons.

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To ask the question “What is philosophy?” typically requires that the philosopher return to the origins of thought, to plumb the depths of being in pursuit of its foundations. This is what Kant does in the Critique of Pure Reason, what Heidegger does in Being and Time, and even what Deleuze and Guattari do in What Is Philosophy? It is the most emblematic philosophical chore, to return to first principles.

François Laruelle, however, does no such thing. This kind of question is the very question he refuses to answer, refuses even to pose. Not what philosophy? Not how philosophy? Not even where or when philosophy? If Laruelle asks anything, he asks Why philosophy? And, more important, Why not? Why not no philosophy? Continue reading →

Badiou's Gauntlet, the challenge that Badiou issues to any kind of philosophy, is that the categories are three. No more than three, but also no less than three. Badiou's Gauntlet is that there are bodies and languages, but also truths.

The challenge permeates all of Badiou's work. One particularly clear expression of it comes at the start of Logics of Worlds, where Badiou differentiates cleanly between the two-category thinkers and the three-category thinkers. The two-category thinkers claim that there are only bodies and languages, only two basic categories of existence. These “bodies and languages” may appear under any number of alternate names. Some philosophers talk about objects and relations, others about extension and thought. Some contemplate matter and mind, others wrestle with things and information. The names are not as important as the commitment they entail, that there are only two basic things in the world, only real entities and the languages through which they interrelate. Continue reading →

I gave an interview to the Frankfurter Allgemeine, which was published over the weekend. (German only)

I recently interviewed Andrew Culp about his new book Dark Deleuze. Read the whole interview here.

Alexander R. Galloway: You have a new book called Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). I particularly like the expression “canon of joy” that guides your investigation. Can you explain what canon of joy means and why it makes sense to use it when talking about Deleuze?

Andrew Culp: My opening is cribbed from a letter Gilles Deleuze wrote to philosopher and literary critic Arnaud Villani in the early 1980s. Deleuze suggests that any worthwhile book must have three things: a polemic against an error, a recovery of something forgotten, and an innovation. Proceeding along those three lines, I first argue against those who worship Deleuze as the patron saint of affirmation, second I rehabilitate the negative that already saturates his work, and third I propose something he himself was not capable of proposing, a “hatred for this world.” So in an odd twist of Marx on history, I begin with those who hold up Deleuze as an eternal optimist, yet not to stand on their shoulders but to topple the church of affirmation.

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In 1997 I quit my dot-com job and moved to North Carolina to study with Fredric Jameson. Nearly twenty years later I've managed to write something about him and explain why I find his work so valuable. It's been published in a special issue on Jameson published at Social Text. Read my piece "History Is What Hurts: On Old Materialism" along with excellent contributions by Jonathan Beller, Sulgi Lie, Amy Villarejo, Jennifer Bajorek, and Alberto Toscano, as well as an interesting new interview with Jameson conducted by issue editors Nico Baumbach, Damon Young, and Genevieve Yue. (If you're blocked behind the paywall just email me.)

One might query any contemporary artist and, as a kind of litmus test, ask the following series of questions: Do you think of yourself as primarily working “on” the digital or primarily “within” it? Is the computer incidental to your work, a tool like any other? Or is the computer at the heart of what you do? Shall art orient itself toward the digital? Or shall art merely live inside the digital, while concerning itself with other topics entirely?

Continue reading at e-flux

(Also available in Spanish translation.)