Dread, Walking.

Nice to see a post again, robin! and good work with the translation. t'is awesome.

right.

Is MBK actually K-Punk or what? lol!

Hmmm, I think for this dude to appreciate the full force of suicide he needs an epicurean moment. Anyone got a boat?

Plus he likes talking himself up, doesn't he? Perhaps that is just the french way... 'I've read it all...'

ok, enough of the derisory comments.

re his discussion of the virtual, I find it weird he heads towards the imaginary, it is far too humanist. in Deleuze's thought, isn't the virtual an intensive temporal manifold enveloping the actual? what the hell has that got to do with the imaginary? maybe he has some other conception of the virtual... hmmm or maybe I need to return to d&r!

hi glen – I find his attempted reconciliation of the virtual very strange too - definitely too neo-lacanian for it to constitute any recuperation of what is lost in the transition from deleuze to badiou. But I thought the interview (which I came across entirely by accident) was intriguing enough to disseminate (especially 'becoming turnip'!) btw, if he comes across as a bit of a superstar, bear in mind that MBK is apparently a movie actor as well as a philosopher...

I agree with the point about depression though - a walk down Oxford Street will confirm that for you any day of the week. It's probably not so bad in the antipodes....

An interesting and rather jolly interview, it has all the best and worst aspects of the characters who haunted the semiotext(e) issues of the 70s and 80s. The most extraordinary thing is perhaps the way in which he does not recognize the levels of privilige that haunts the people and discourses he mentions... for example to understand why Heidegger was a fascist - merely read the recent biographies of Karl Jaspers and Gadamar --- it makes perfect sense. And the virtual is strange reclaimed in the way that Levy does I think...

s

he doesn't suggest that Heidegger's fascism is incomprehensible though – or do you mean that discussion of his fascism at the philosophical level is otiose given the biographical predisposition...?

brief discussion of this over at my place....welcome back u/c!

No not that - merely that to understand Heidegger's fascism seems easier if you read his construction through his class bound existence. On a more serious note - I've been reading some Michele Le Deouff recently and the masculinity of his world makes me nervous.

That was interesting, thank you. I hadn't ever read anything that somehow put all philosophers on almost the exact same level (from this amateur at philosophy's point of view), even though he compares them all in a brutal way from which he seems to derive intense pleasure. Somehow I wish English was his native language, because even translated he sounds loud, vulgar and bumptious so that it is hard to pay any attention except when he talks about Deleuze and trivializes Heidegger. 'Becoming-turnip' and 'becoming-rat' were indeed good, because that might have something to do with masochistic taste too, especially if you've had past attractions to squalid moments of vermin. I had tended, for practical purposes, to veer towards 'becoming-horse' and 'becoming-woman,' for example, or even 'becoming-pregnant' through non-reproductive sexual acts, so that at least not all of mine sound snooty (surely the math, but I've not yet been forced...) I'm not going to worry about class-bound things when I hear such things, and will attempt to run and hide if it becomes too oppressive.

Worthwhile to read, because I haven't feared that I was a masochist like I used to for many years. With this, I was sure I was not, because I became very aware of a sensation of 'desire WITH lack' which seemed to make a nice dissonance for moments of 'desire without lack' that I think I had better consult him about first, I guess he'd think so 'if he had the time'. It was very pleasant knowing one's appetites could be controlled by reading this personage. It may be the mathematics, but it looks like plenty of people are taking care of that. We have all learned that to be unconvinced is the secret to something (that might be math too, what the hell, as long as I can remember something else that I won't tell.)

You are a tireless yeoman, u/c. One can now go ahead with art and literature (he did remind me of a few of those I ought to tarry with)without worrying that it has been proven to be a kind of spin-off of some science project that makes even the advanced young persons sound slightly posthumous.

LOL!
I have to admit a part of my interest in this was extra-philosophical in so far as it fascinates me that people in the 21st century speak so assuredly as if philosophy is a hugely important tradition that is still alive and kicking and has great relevance. Elsewhere in the interview MBK salutes Badiou as 'his master' with no trace of irony. Yes, there is a (un)healthy dose of masculinity in there too. Basically, for someone accustomed to the anglo-american 'philosophy world' there's a hallucinatory quality about it all. The riddle is, whether philosophical reason fares better in a disenchanted, deterritorialized, self-deprecatory english mode which suspects the best is already far behind it; or in this undeniably positive, muscular climate of pederastic heredity subtended by a mostly unquestioned well-preserved bourgeois establishment and culture. And here we come back to s's comments re Heidegger...

Afterthought : Try reading MBK's discussion of the virtual against Manuel de Landa's ('Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy')– now there's a measure of the breadth of possible interpretations of Deleuze.

“Nietzsche and Badiou, fighting the same battle, contrary to appearances. What is important is atheism.”
Think this is a nice point with relevance for the threatened eruption of idiotic dualisms and pointless philosophical gang-warfare in Badiou's wake (romantics vs rationalists...bundle!) as well as recent discussions on dread,walking.

'The riddle is, whether philosophical reason fares better in a disenchanted, deterritorialized, self-deprecatory english mode which suspects the best is already far behind it; or in this undeniably positive, muscular climate of pederastic heredity subtended by a mostly unquestioned well-preserved bourgeois establishment and culture.'

That's one of the two or three best, cleanest sentences I've read in the last eight or nine months. People should note it well if they wish to kill off the proliferating weeds in an increasingly competitive and dwindling market.

Disagree about 'atheism is what is important.' Think Baudrillard's 'whether God exists or not is of no importance' is much better for going about one's own business--and 'He' gets a lot less publicity that way, too. The other way makes me keep vaguely imagining banners atop marching bands playing 'Onward Christian A-the-ists, Marching off to War...'

It *is* hallucinatory! Great interview.

In the interview you mention Castel's work on transsexuality... Do you know if anyone has translated Castels into English? I'd be very interested to read some, if it is.