The graduate students of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, invite submissions for its annual conference: Impasse University of California, Irvine Friday, March 2, 2012 Humanities Gateway 1030 Website: impasse-uci.tumblr.com Keynote Speaker: Professor Homay King, Bryn Mawr College In a climate of seemingly insurmountable economic indebtedness, a poisonous and ineffectual…
Category Archives: Operations
is, more than numbers (or answers), what Math is about, which really asks matters of logistics, i.e. “How?”
Tony Perez’s Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao (1995) begins after a gruesome crime. Some terrible event—criminal rapes kid, criminal kills kid, cop chases criminal, criminal kills cop, criminal kills self (xii)—is briefly sketched in the prologue that serves as “a short history before the novel begins” (prologue title) (xii). The novel itself (separated by a section title, “Kid,…
[Continues part 1] [Image from the Spanish edition of Jorge Luis Borges' The Aleph] Deleuze clarifies that the past he is referring to in the second synthesis “is not the former present itself but the element in which we focus upon [that former present]” (80). Deleuze characterizes the former present (has been) as a particular…
[Claude Monet's La Gare Saint Lazare (1877)] In the preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition (1968; 1994), Gilles Deleuze writes “that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think” (xvi). This is the infamous image of thought that…
[Some of the PhD programs I applied to wanted to know more about my person and how it has shaped the kind of work that I do. This is the statement of “personal history and philosophy” I wrote in addition to the “purpose of study.”] I was born in cosmopolitan Manila, capital of the Philippines,…
I recently finished and defended my thesis for my MA in Philosophy. I wrote about surplus value in economics, Marx, and Deleuze. Here’s the introduction: In his critique of political economy from the Grundrisse to Capital, Karl Marx presupposes abstraction and quantification. The process by which activity and its product are alienated from the human…
I finished teaching Marx in class today. We had started out with his philosophy where I traced Marx’s intellectual development (in the context of Hegel and Feuerbach) and the historical materialist method that he developed (I offered a schematic and a narrative based on a Deleuzian flat ontology made possible by Heidegger’s notion of mode).…
After Marx has laid out the model spatially, he repeats the gesture, as if to say, “Again, again, again . . . Let’s do it again.” But differently, in another way: [Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory] Model 2: “Narrative” Human beings, first of all (before they are even “able to ‘make history’”), “live” (the…
[The Berkeley Free Speech movement; Image from The Berkeley Daily Planet] In the section of the essay of the book of the same title, Jean-Luc Nancy explicates his notion of being singular plural. Composed of three words that, as Nancy describes, “do not have any determined syntax (‘being’ is a verb or noun; ‘singular’ and…
[An example of a signifier that différance slides] [Presented in François Raffoul’s class on Contemporary French Philosophy at LSU in the fall of 2008; contains his additions and corrections] Jacques Derrida begins the essay “Différance” (perhaps the most systematic articulation of the non-concept that, according to Derrida, he “ha[s] been able to utilize” in previous…
