Wednesday 21 October 2009

A very brief note on M.D.


The following short passage might help to contextualise a little of the father-slaying that went on earlier this year:

At this juncture, Badiou can respond in two ways: he can either choose to correct the anti-phenomenological bias of the concept of presentation by supplementing the subtractive ontology of being qua being with a doctrine of appearance and of the ontical consistency of worlds albeit at the risk of lapsing back into some variant of the ontologies of presence. Or he can accept the stringency of his concept of presentation and embrace the prohibitive consequences of the logic of subtraction. The recently published Logiques des mondes (Logics of Worlds) suggests that he has – perhaps reasonably, albeit somewhat disappointingly from our point of view – opted for the former.

-Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound p.115

I think, perhaps naively, that the appropriate question here is - "why is disenchantment the object?"
We can trace the development of this copernican disenchantment over the last thousand years, we can outline the current vectors of disenchantment, but unless Meillasoux or somebody else can develop his hyper-chaos=noumenon argument into more than a virtuosic curio, then I am yet to be convinced that this push for disenchantment is anything more than a tautological 'we are against phenomenological mysticism because it is mystical'.

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