gathering vapors, dispersing precipitates

• Chris Moffett says:

  November 11, 2012 at 1:38 am

  This is not new. If things are turned upside down, it is ad naseum… Round and round. Take Plato’s Cave, and if I might graspingly quote myself: “So he says, after suggesting that the prisoners would reject the upward path as desirable, “if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn’t they kill him?” (517a) It’s as if he isn’t sure whether they have hands, whether they would work, what they could grasp, or what their range would be. What are we to make of this irruption of the grasping hands of the denizens of the underworld?”

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• intendtogether says:

  November 11, 2012 at 10:03 am

  hmm, yeah; I guess that’s the danger of tunneling, you might accidentally perforate a burial -or precipitate one, if the scaffolding doesn’t hold up… I found it surprising to hear Sloterdijk epousing what in Amerikkka functions as the autoerotic narrative of a narcissistic lottery-caste, the nouveau-riche who have forgotten (or been made blind to, precisely by their ‘good fortune’) the essential contingency of their destinies, and their dependence on the ‘open society’ for such. But the European context, we should recall, is -or ‘must be’, we could say, at the limits of graciousness- quite different. In any case, we would do well to learn that the philosopher, as technician of this flipping, turning, and spinning of interpretive contexts, and as sculptor of mediatic cascades, always remains susceptible to capture by the regimes with which s/he interacts; the signature of hir agency, like the IP address of a hacker, which provides access to the sociocultural control-panel, also serves to incriminate hir…

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