A few excerpts from Brassiers latest: The disavowal of negativity and the glorification of affirmation is the debility of thought, thoughts sophistical capitulation to the expediency of what is. [...] As with any metaphysics built on metaphor, equivocation is always a boon, never a handicap [...] Latours irreductionism cannot be understood as a theory, where the latter is broadly construed as a series of systematically interlinked propositions held together by valid argumentative chains. Rather, Latours texts consciously rehearse the metaphorical operations they describe: they are networks trafficking in word-things of varying power, nexuses of translation between actants of differing force, etc. [...] In other words, Latours texts are designed to do things: they have been engineered in order to produce an effect rather than establish a demonstration. [...] Truth involves a transition from implicit warrant to explicit endorsement: to know that something is true is also to recognize that one is obliged to assert that it is the case, that one should move from assent to endorsement, where endorsement is the theoretical explicitation of practical inferential assent. Philosophy is the explication of truth, understood as the formal manifestation of latent content carried out via the representation of representation. [...] One of its implications would be that there can be no such thing as an extraterritorial or transcendent critique of reason, since critique is a normative term whose ultimate warrant derives from reason itself. [...] Only the scrupulously rational are entitled to skepticism about reason. [...] Anything less is complaint, not critique. [...] The transcendental difference between appearance and reality indexes a form of negativity that is at once the condition of objective truth in discourse, but also that which cannot be objectified without undermining the possibility of such truth.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 22:14:55 +0000
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