Monthly Archives: August 2013

Philip Conway has set the reading and discussion of Latour’s AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE off to a fine start. For the moment the discussion has centered on a certain vagueness and conceptual tension in Latour’s use of the … Continue reading →

Bruno Latour’s book AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE purports to describe the felicity conditions of a plurality of modes of existence and of their corresponding modes of veridiction.  So it is reasonable to raise the question of the situation … Continue reading →

At the beginning of AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE Bruno Latour recounts an anecdote to illustrate the new situation we find ourselves in today, at the end of the “modernist parenthesis”: “They’re sitting around a table, some fifteen French … Continue reading →

Andrew Gibson has published a very interesting quote from Ursula Le Guin concerning the increasing hegemony of the indicative mood and of the model of certainty. She makes a plea for restoring the dignity and potency of the subjunctive mood … Continue reading →

Alex Reid poses the question of the relation between Latour’s notion of instauration and Blanchot’s notion of the absent author. In both cases what is constructed or composed is irreducible to the subject-object paradigm and takes on an instituted, and … Continue reading →

Deleuze’s thought was devoted to a an exploration of the primacy of difference, multiplicity, movement, and alterity, so it is only fitting that Zizek misreads it, and Deleuze’s work generally, as avoiding any encounter with Hegel, who he (Zizek) claims represents … Continue reading →

“Contrary to all appearances, this is what happens in psychoanalysis: the treatment is over when the patient accepts the nonexistence of the big Other”. (Zizek, THE PUPPET AND THE DWARF, page 169-170). This quote highlights a general tension in Zizek’s … Continue reading →