Fontenelle Hybridized, Human extinction, and Spinozism | nescio2
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid…| nescio2
Yesterday in my history of Western philosophy course, where my students are reading Richard Tarnas’ Passion of the Western Mind (1991), I lectured on a couple of seventeenth century philosophers in an attempt to catch the nature of the shift that historians call “the Enlightenment.” I then connect their innovations to a couple of nineteenth and twentieth […]| Footnotes2Plato
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid…| nescio2
On Friday 3rd October 2025, in the Aula of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, starting at 16:00 CET, I'll deliver my inaugural lecture as professor by special appointment on the chair "The Actuality of Spinoza". It sounds very formal, and in fact it is, but I hope to handle it with some subtle humor. The event is public but it will also be accessible remotely and the same link used for the live stream can be used at any later time to listen to the recording. Here's the link:https://eur.cloud.pano| Dhammavicaya
Hey, its been great. Heading to Thailand for a while, and in all likelihood this wonderful blog experiment is going dark. Its lived at least its first incarnation. Thank you for all the relationships I’ve developed over the brief time of my writing, those adversarial, and those inspirational (not mutually exclusive of each other). A […]| Frames /sing
Ether Wave Propaganda as up a nice video of Schaffer on Latour, but the commentary on the question of agency is even more interesting. As EWP points out, the difference between Schaffer and Latour …| Frames /sing
Unwrapping Christmas Gifts This is my last post on “The Autonomy of Affect” and I expect to go onto the rest of the book. Near the end Massumi makes a fantastic point about the somewhat false problem of transcendence vs. immanence, something that he also perceptively links to our spatializaton of concepts, and to his own prescription […]| Frames /sing
Massumi writes, Affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things the embody them. The autonomy of affect is its participation in the virtual. Its autonomy is its openness. Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it […]| Frames /sing
I have to admit that the first essay that confronted me in Massumi’s book has really stymied me. The difficulty comes at several levels, not the least of which that I had read this essay befo…| Frames /sing
