May 2010
14 posts
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I should not be let loose on theory so early on a...
Daniel Hourigan: Calling all queer crits. Warning. Warning. Phallocentric illusions everywhere in Fb privacy guide, i.e. "Gender is public so we can correctly display your gender (for example, "Add her as a friend.")" http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php
Paul: Is it phallocentric because of your unfortunate placement of the close bracket between the quote marks? Seriously, I don't understand where the masculine language is in that sentence.
DH: @Paul that's Fb's official closed brackets -- follow the link. The phallocentrism is in the notion of 'public' and/or (if one were more radical about it) the notion of gender itself as part of what can be registered by discourse/the Symbolic.
DH: Of course, you could spin that off in post-Lacanian ways... Cixous, for example, on "feminine écriture" as "that which cannot not keep writing" precisely because the network of the Symbolic we call "the field of the Other" (a la Fb) is non-All. Fb, conversely, understands gender as All: notice the logical operation of its language, it is clearly geared (ideologically) for some sort of spurious "clarity" wherein gender can be pinned down, signified to the full extent of the law of the Other which says "thou art that!".
Why not let us "Add her/him as a friend?" or "Add them as a friend?". It's all very strange.
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"Like they'll care..." Ideology on Parade
Another week, another email from the dangerous pedagogy institute:
The Previous Student Feedback section gives Course Convenors the opportunity to let students know what has worked well and what improvements have been made to the course as a result of student feedback.
As per my earlier comments, what this evaluation process will revel in is what Lacan calls “les non-dupes...
three things of no more importance than the other →
On Saturday night we went to the Crosstown Eating House for dinner with my mum and sister and, I have to say, it was a very enjoyable experience. Good food. Will return. Alana Hill are jerking Sally…
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IJŽS objets de kitsch →
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“So basically, a philosopher is a lawyer who didn’t sell out.”
– http://community.nytimes.com/comments/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/what-is-a-philosopher/?permid=18#comment18
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Evaluate.
The university has decided to impose deploy a “new” online evaluation system. This unremarkable piece of bureaucratic activity was announced in an email that included several anonymous pieces of praise for the new system. One of these caught my eye and left me wondering what kind of communication skills the university’s actually imparted…
““I recognise the importance...
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Theorise!
If I can’t theorise it, I can’t speak. And if I can’t speak, I’m dumb. Theory opens the world to me, philosophy unravels its wonder and makes all it’s awe-filled fecundity shimmer and gleam.
Some of my Jurisprudence students quizzed me about the legitimacy of ‘the sites of the law’ in the Law and Literature movement. It was fun seeing their symptomal...
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Zizek coursing for ever more
The power that be at the University have deemed my new third year contemporary Continental philosophy and pop-culture course viable, worthy of inclusion in a major, and able to be an advanced jurisprudence elective. All these bureacratic signs are hallmarks of the course’s general acceptance, but I wonder if there will still be the promised interest from students… Time shall tell.
Times Higher Education - Philosophical view:... →
The signatories of this letter in THE, which is protesting the closure of Middlesex University’s philosophy department, are some serious starfucker material. Of course, even their status won’t assure saving Continental philosophy at Middlesex… But it definitely won’t hurt.
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Repurposing a Seminar Paper: utilitarianism for...
One of the quirks to the academic conference circuit is the utilitarian repurposing of papers. This saves on time and, to a more economic extent, mental energy (libido). Of course, I’d also call this a guilty pleasure.
The repurposing of any seminar paper is a weird nether-process, a kind of return of the repressed where those words you once wrote are now in control of you and not the other...
