Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Thinking About Thinking: Post-Continental Philosophy
I recently received from inter-library loan a book by John Mullarkey titled Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline. This looks at four contemporary philosophers: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, and Francois Laruelle, all of whom, according to the author, deal with the topic of immanence in different ways in order to renew thought. The common denominator that Mullarkey identifies is that they all "show" rather than tell via diagrams, and he proposes a "diagrammatology" (W.J.T. Mitchell's term) as a mode of philosophical discourse to "think immanence":
And such images are never mere ornament -- they are often frames around which whole arguments are set. . . . Diagrams have long been useful in teaching and learning logic . . . but now their foundation to all understanding has been highlighted through research in cognitive science and visual studies. Diagrams are 'problem solvers' because they 'automatically support a large number of perceptual inferences, which are extremely easy for humans. (162)Mullarkey's conclusion points to the changes that a "post-continental philosophy" might induce in how we think:
What we are saying -- and what a Post-Continental thought indicates -- is that philosophy must take up the challenge of renewal and acknowledge the possibility that art, technology, and even matter itself, at the level of its own subject-matter, in its own actuality, might be capable of forcing new philosophical thoughts onto us. With that, however, there might also come a transformation of what we mean by philosophy and even thought itself. (193)The transformation of thought itself: this is the theme of this blog and of electracy as a description of what becomes possible when fundamental changes occur to the communicative apparatus of a society. Mullarkey's book, I am suggesting, offers thinking with and through diagrams as one way of of manifesting an electrate form of thinking.
Labels: badiou, deleuze, mullarkey, philosophy, thinking, thought
# posted by Richard Smyth @ 6:14 PM 
