Dread, Walking.

Good stuff. ScriptGenerator©®™ lives!

yes, hadn't thought about that connection, but it is similarly sinister, don't you think? Or is it just my paranoia....

Of course. I read it last week, and that offshore oil rig room full of the computers looks just like life feels now, I'll vow. What interests me about Vasset is how he will write a second novel after making one this clever to begin with. Yours is funny about Switzerland, especially the 'no-car policy in the heights' and the last line like a fantasy of a nursing home for Stelarc.

but it's ALL TRUE, goddamit, PJ!

oh, hold on, the last bit hasn't actually been confirmed yet. But if anyone's in charge of this shit, it's got to be Hegel's cryogenically-preserved medicyborg corpse, right?

>>> it's got to be Hegel's cryogenically-preserved medicyborg corpse.

you mean this? http://egs.edu/faculty/schirmacher.html

Diane D. Davis posts to the Badiou/Lyotard list every now and then. She is one of the suggested contacts for those wanting to do PhDs. If I remember correctly, she said she went there to do a second PhD.

oh, and I had a brief chat with Paul Miller/DJ Spooky after a talk he gave in Sydney. He said it was a pretty cool place. Then he signed my book! At least he knows he is a superstar DJ and his conceptual work has been developed to enable his more artistic practices.

So, yeah, the place is very real!

The comparisons of Zizek to rock stars are apt. Like a rock star he's all about ego and high energy and a bogus hipsterism and real low on substance, depth, or argument. Continental marxists such as Zizek, having dispensed long ago with quotidian notions of truth, contigent or necessary or otherwise, now offer pages of jargon-laden ideology, impressing all the big-eyed bourgeois leftist galsteins at Friday afternoon par-tays with some tired red-bear schtick, and then the galsteins'll make a movie of it. It's Lit Chix gone wild, by Zizek.

Yes, well, but you or someone else wrote it up, so it's logical enough that I would be interested in the writing style rather than the 'true' in the title. I knew about Scenario I already from other dismayed accounts. It's true, of course, that the author cannot, then, be cited for knowing how to 'do Swiss style.' (One of my closest friends is a lausannois, and I stayed there for a month; he's not rich yet just because his father is, but he freaked out when I pointed out an apartment house entryway with a hanging pot of plastic flowers, no, that couldn't be in La Suisse, no, not at all...) It is curious that I just fell into the narrative as though it were fiction, though, (especially since I also clicked on the links), since I knew the first one wasn't fictional.

After all, the inhabitants of this camp are not going to all see it like it was some multinational corporate party--or not purely that way. They'd all tell the story differently if at all, wouldn't they? As told here, it is also like the way Ballard writes about the Eden-Olympia business park and the Cannes Festival in 'Supercannes.' So, ultimately, it's also fiction because of the tone--but that's beside the point now, because that's not what you/someone were/was doing consciously.

However, since it worked on that level, it really ought to be slipped into ScriptGenerator©®™, because I don't think this elite philosophy gathering has been done as a party of high debauchery. Such a phenomenon would go against Badiou's 'Philosophy is irreducible to other forms of thought,' wouldn't it? so therefore, even though he surely meant more explicit 'thought things' like fiction, it might as well be exploited by the most muscular novelists--since fiction is probably not lower than a self-congratulatory party. And anyway he may be wrong about the irreducibility. This is getting a bit difficult, but I don't think I'm the only one in over my head; it's just that there's an equivalent or greater shock every day in the U.S., and a lot may have to do with what you get used to as long as you can stand it, which doesn't mean I can. In varying ways, though, Virilio is not there; but by next year, one might see Orlan, the face-mutilant, and/or Catherine Deneuve, mightn't one? although none of this is meant to compensate for what I now think you see as tragic, although I don't know how tragic.

supercannes is one of my favourite novels. I went to Cannes once and it really was that weird.

I e-mailed Hardt and he said the place is real, but that being on the faculty means "I agreed to speak there for a week."

The truth is that Anglo-American universities enforce a de facto non-current/relevant status upon themselves. At the EGS one IS encouraged to experiment and to actually think things through. Here (i.e. in Toronto, where I'm doing a second and concurrate doctorate), one's whole day is occupied with doing nothing, almost an active willing of nothing.
And where else, besides the EGS, can you spend two weeks (with class every day) with Zizek & Badiou, one after the other? Would you rather an intensive thing like this for two weeks, or 8 months of non-sense in Anglo-America?
Choice is pretty clear to me.
And the tuition is a fraction of non-state university America, where you might find ONE of the EGS faculty hanging out, and where, for that money, one is forced to actively will nothing.
No thanks.