Death of a Psychopath

As I walked out the door dragging the dead corpse of my wife, I realized there was a cop across the street. He looked at me and saw what I was doing. Like any good officer of the law, he walked over and told me to put my hands on my head. At a loss at what to do, I put my hands on my feat. This got blood on my shoes. I think he admired my flexibility, as he had lost this ability long ago. His stomach was far too large.

He lost the musculature of his youth in a way that was totally different from other police officers. He normally worked out everyday and ate right because he knew he needed to be in top shape in order catch the bad guys and get promoted to a position of authority so he could boss people around. However one day he looked over at his supervisor and realized something. He saw the dead weight in that man's eyes, hunched over at a desk. The power and ego trips that the supervisor had once revealed in had now lost their effect. The man was bored and he felt no better than a rookie cop going through the practical jokes of the other officers. Realizing that he was headed to the same fate, the officer had decided then and there to stop trying. There was no point to getting ahead, the miserable life of a police officer just continued. So he stopped working out everyday and stopped eating right. And for this reason he marveled at my ability to touch my feet with my blood stained hands.

Then he shot me, just for the heck of it. The miserable life of a police officer just goes on and on. No point in wrestling a homicidal maniac to the ground for nothing. Its a good thing he shot me too, because I did still have the knife in my pocket.

After I died I saw a total blackness in front of me. Then a light. I wondered which of the religion's afterlives would turn out to be the true one. In front of me I saw a man in a three piece suit. I asked if I would be taken to hell for the things I had done. He said "No... there is no 'hell' and there is no 'heaven'. At least I don't think so anyway. I'm Gihfwodothitch, but you can call me Hitch for short. Anyway here's how this works: You just finished your third life before game over. You, or should I say rather, your will, chose to spend this life murdering one wife after another. This was interesting considering you spent your last life helping the poor in India and running for political office in France in the one before that. Anyway you get to review any scenes from your life you want to look back on. After that you will get to pick the location of your next birth as well as your income bracket. Any questions?"

"None"

On The Important

There are very few things in this world that one could call important. Importance is permitted only in silence. It is when something is so relevant to everything that you are forced to pay attention. This is a subjective judgment but that does not make this less valid. Importance may go back to child hood, to the deep battles brewing in the soul. Those moments you do daily are related and connected in a loop that is given wholeness. It is monster that keeps coming back again and again. If your life were flashing before your eyes, the events you saw would be the things that are important. When these things are joined to a something else deeply and forcefully that thing by extension carries new weight.

But not all important things are created equal. Things may end up creating hierarchies of importance. Some things seem trivial when talking about them in a detached and analytic mode, you only appreciate them when you are in tears. And memories of nights of hell vanish until they reappear ever beating down on your back. The more issues you have with something, the more it haunts you. This haunting is what the important is.

Some Ideas on Objects

Harman mentions that Husserl is an object oriented idealist. Objects always are there as objects in consciousness for Husserl. Whatever their outside reality at least they could be called subjectively given. In Lacan's analysis of the Purloined Letter he makes note of the subjective drama going on in the two scenes where the letter is taken. Both the queen and the magistrate know where the letter is but she cannot take it back, she thought it was hidden. Dupin's action of taking back the letter also does this except it was never hidden it was just a different letter when the magistrate's back was turned. He also makes note of how the police looked for the letter everywhere but even though they looked everywhere they missed something in this everywhere because it was not in its place. They as subjects were situated in something. We could say the objects they were revealed subjectively as something but they lied. The subjects work to make the objects lie. In the queen's case the she failed and for Dupin it was a success. The objects are always our power enemies. We lay our hands on them and try to make them something, try to talk about them, but the want to be their ontic selves. This is why materialism is mentioned around speculative realism (my ignorance is showing, this is only my guess).

Onticicity is more than simply the subjective conception of being given to objects. It is not what makes them objects, it is their irreduceablity itself in relation to language and being. When they form an alliance with us they say "alright I will buy into this ontology of yours". And within that ontology their onticity remains as part of that ontology.

Does this make sense though if we regard objects as events though? I may have forgotten that.

New Project

I have a new blog. It analyzes the anime Serial Experiments Lain. You should check it out if you like the anime. By extension you should also watch the anime so you can read the blog.

Analytic Experiments Lain

Memory as Perception

I have a memory of the past, this allows me to understand that time has past. Memory allows me to keep images with me as they pass from present view. Now as a way of coping one could say I deal with my world temporally and that I am a temporal being. But the operation of memory itself needs also to be looked at. I know I see with my eyes because when I cover them I can no longer see (in the context of where seeing means anything). If I plug my hears I can no longer hear. If I damage my frontal lobe, my parietal lobe, and my hippocampus will I no longer remember these activities. And if time on a clock changes I will no longer perceive this change or the duration of stasis. In one sense, I can no longer see reality in terms of time. But this no different from losing an eye. Content was not structured in terms of time, I saw time. Memory brought this aspect home to me. But now that I lack it, there is no time. I might stumble in time like a blind person stumbles in space. Others who see time would pity me, not because I could not fit into their world (though I could not), not because I would be different, but because I would fail in taking an essential feature rightly. Time was a perception as much as anything else. It was not any condition of my experience. As blinking makes one blind, so too a kind of forgetfulness or another mental state or a distraction may make one blind to time, making time as having a similar character to what we call perception. If time is a perception, and the organ we call memory allows us to have it, when does time lie to us like other perceptions sometimes do?

Question To Those Who Know More Than Me: Wittgenstein and Latour

I'm reading Prince of Networks by Graham Harman right now. I'm still very early into it. He says this:

"It also ends the

tear-jerking modern rift between the thinking human subject and the un-

knowable outside world, since for Latour the isolated Kantian human is no

more and no less an actor than are windmills, sunflowers, propane tanks,

and Thailand."

Wittgenstein also seems to do this in a way. He purposes a public world where questions of an isolated human being just gives rise to problems which can be untangled by viewing a human being as inside a form of life. The objects a person uses and the way they interact with him are part of this form of life or language. Viewing everything language encircled whole, where the language games function and rules are followed, things seem to be in their proper place and act as they do without problem (a philosophical problem that is). The description of the Stalingrad encircling movement reminded me of LW's example of people bringing stones (I would consider the stones to be just a much part of the game). Yet I wonder if this is still too reductionistic for Latour, as it does in a way reduce the function of objects to their function in the language. Also LW always seemed to put humans in charge of setting up this game which may give them too much credit for Latour (though I'm not really sure as I may have interpreted him wrong and I may misunderstand Latour) To what extent do Wittgenstein and Latour overlap/ agree?

"Latour’s difference from present-day analytic and continental thought

should now be clear. Whereas Latour places all human, nonhuman, natu-

ral, and artificial objects on the same footing, the analytics and continentals

both still dither over how to bridge, ignore, deny, or explain away a single

gap between humans and world. While graduate students are usually drilled

in a stale dispute between correspondence and coherence theories of truth,

Latour locates truth in neither of these models, but in a series of translations

between actors."

I think my question also has relevance to this passage because LW could be seen as having a coherence theory of truth. I recall him saying that religion and mysticism play different games and are therefore true despite the completely different view of science. Though maybe that is stretching the word "coherence" and LW is beyond both with Latour.

LW could also be said to explain away the gap... but it seems more likely that he rejects any notion of a private space in the mind. Does Latour's series of translations (and by extension the notion of truth) exist in the public space, or is its location somewhere else?

Reading List

This summer I finished Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. I still haven't really come to terms with it in a way, so I think I might need another dose of him. But that will have to wait. Last year was all about Heidegger. This summer was all about Wittgenstein (and some Plato). So I'm going back into phenomenology now with Husserl's Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness and a book about Phenomenology in general. If I get through those this semester what then?Maybe I'll finally actually read a book by Derrida. I read an essay by him that was in Writing and Difference and while not fully understanding it I got the point I thought. So maybe I'll read that one. My school appears to have a lot on Foucault also. But I'd rather get around to going back to reading Parallax View and In Defense of Lost Causes by Zizek. But recently I was reading Countermemory and he mentioned this thing called speculative realism. I did some research and this looks very interesting and very promising. But first Husserl.

Story!

Sorry I have not posted in a long time my followers. All zero of you. Here is a story I did for the INTP forum's writing brawl which didn't happen. Will post again soon when there is something to say. Researching Husserl right now. Note: The spacing is weird in blogger.

The Incorruptible

Maximilien stared up at the sky amid the trees in Arras. The little sunlight remaining illuminated only the edges of the trees. He had returned home soon after the constitution had been finalized. People lauded him and the rest of the Jacobins as the saviors of France, the founding fathers of a new republic. The terror was over. People were beginning to return to their normal lives. Sometimes there were still outbursts of violence but people were going back to work. But despite the adulation and congratulations the people had given him, Maximilien Robespierre still felt that things could have turned out better. In his opinion the terror should have never stopped. He knew that when he returned to Paris there would still be the enemies of the people amid his own colleagues. And he had allowed it.

Walking back down the grassy path he saw Charlotte standing in the doorway. Charlotte threw her arms around her brother. Maximilien lightly returned the embrace; he was in no mood for his over affectionate sister. The Robespierre household was cozy, not a large house, but nicely decorated with a fire going in the corner. His brother Augustine was still in Paris. How he longed to return. What was the future for the committee of public safety now that the constitution was in effect? He knew there were still enemies in Paris. His enemies and, by extension, enemies of the people and The Revolution were running the assembly. They said he was too bloodthirsty, they said he was a dictator. They even had the audacity to claim innocents had died. They only bothered stopping him when he was so close to exposing their corruption and having their heads cut off like they deserved. But then he had to face one question… why was he still alive?

He looked over those events that had lead up to the creation of the new constitution. He thought back to that night in the committee room. He had been looking over cases for the execution of a new batch of alleged counterrevolutionaries. Having supreme confidence in the local tribunal of that city he simply signed the off on the deaths. The men on the tribunal were like him, incorruptible, pure extensions of the people’s will. They could do no wrong as the people could do no wrong, as he could no wrong. The only other man in the room was Couthon. Couthon scooted his wheel chair over to Maximilien’s side of the desk.

“Don’t you think you should be a little more moderate in your use of the death sentence?” Couthon asked

Maximilien looked over at Couthon with surprise “What is this all of a sudden? You don’t trust the tribunals?”

“Listen, the tribunals make their charges at a drop of hat, taking the slightest deviation as proof positive of unpatriotic character. It is your job to make sure innocent people don’t die.”

“None of them are innocent if they gave evidence of their evil hearts.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“You don’t? I expected more from you.”

“This is why the assembly is turning against you. They say you are tyrant.”

“I am not a tyrant. It is the assembly that hides friends of tyrants.”

“If they hear of that, they will kill you.”

“Kill me?”

“Kill us.”

“Why? They should be glad I plan to liberate the assembly.”

“That is the point! You see enemies everywhere. They will fear they are next.”

“True patriots need not fear.”

“Is anyone besides you a true patriot?”

“Of course! There is you, Saint-Just, Hanriot, my brother, and millions of ordinary French citizens.”

“And if one of those citizens were to die in this terror?”

“They don’t.”

“They do. And you need to ease and lighten the terror. The new constitution is coming. After it’s drafted, people will want the terror to stop. When will it end?”

Maximilien remained silent. He remembered what he had once said as a rhetorical flourish to such a question before. It now struck him as all too true. “Never.” As he said this he took off his large glasses and slumped down in his chair.

“Excuse me? Did you just say ‘never’?”

“I’m tired Couthon. I’m so very tired. Maybe you are right. Maybe I’ll let the assembly have their constitution. Maybe lightening the terror is the next stage in The Revolution. I’ll live and France will grow.” He got up and began to go down the stairs “Good night Couthon.”

He kept his word but had Couthon killed for lack of patriotism. His head fell on the 10^th of Thermidor.

As Maximilien reflected up in his study it dawned on him that he had had a moment of total weakness. He had done all the wrong things for the only thing that had meaning for him: The Revolution. Innocents had died, Couthon was one of them, and he had allowed it. And there were still enemies on the assembly; he had allowed them to live. He was as human, as corrupt as the rest of them. He had betrayed the Revolution. He got the revolver out of the drawer. “Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood. For the Fatherland and People of France. God forgive my sins. Amen.”

And he shot himself. Charlotte screamed.