The audio version of Catherine Malabou's inaugural address at Kingston University. Malabou presents a hypothetical dialogue between the Continental philosopher( Foucault) and the cognitivist Thomas Metzinger. She reads Foucault's "What is Enlightenment" against Thomas Metzinger's Being No One: The Self Model Theory of Subjectivity. Malabou uses her signature concept of 'plasticity' to argue for a renewed engagement between continental philosophy and the neurosciences. While the concept of plasticity seems almost voluntaristic when compared to the Metzinger's radical destabilizing of the subject, Malabou ends with showing the paradoxical link between "being no one" and "plasticity.

For Malabou
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/02/catherine-malabou-continental-philosophy-and-the-brain-towards-a-critical-neuroscience/

For Metzinger

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mthDxnFXs9k

Begun reading Animal Philosophy:Ethics and Identity. First set of readings-- Nietzsche and a supporting piece on Nietzsche by Alphonso Lingis. Excerpts of Nietzsche taken from Thus Spake Zarathustra, Genealogy of Morals and Human All Too Human. Points to take away- 

1. " All Socratic virtues are animal" The entire phenomenon of morality is animal.
2. Man faced with the burdensome prospect of "bearing themselves"... reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, coordinating, cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures reduced to their consciousness, their weakest and most fallible organ. ( On the Genealogy of Morals)
3. The nobility of man thus resides in the ability to heed to the demands of the physis. ( The Gay Science) Does N transform the anthropomorphism of morality to a theriomorphic one? The demands of physis is borne from a complex ethology. 
4. How does this essay help me think about animal ethics. In attempting to bypassing the human 'man' it privileges the 'animal'. Why does it want to bypass ''man'? In that attempts to locate a "strong" thought, as Lingis points out, does it not reinforce something like a humanism? It is in its 'rejuvenating' thought that it seems humanist?

On Hunger strikes

So the spate of hunger strikes that animated Indian politics provided the context for this article that was published in Outlook Magazine.

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?277553

So here are some poems...all dutifully trashed by certain critics. So they appear here in all their shunned glory:)

House Proud

My houseproud mother

Flings

her disgruntled thoughts on this bed

This bed piled

High

with boxes and mattresses

This little island of

Untidiness

Between their beds

While my father sleeps with the

conviction

Of a life lived well

“Your mother will vouch for that”.

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2)

Apocalypse

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

---- W.B.Yeats

The metropolis

The new Bethlehem

While in the hinterland

A shrill scream, a clenched fist

A finger on the trigger.

I await the tide

A second coming

The lash and their

Judgment.

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No one/place remains the same

Once you are gone

Moves on

On your returning

Even a ‘hello’

Unhomes you.

Private

On a public toilet…

graffiti

‘Im sory, I mis u

Pls get bck’

Etched on a public monument

The answer.

“bye, Wil love you 4ever”.

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Rajnandgaon

On a train

The radio

Crackles the-

NEWS

The poised

Sophistication

Of words that are state-sponsored,

“Naxalite ambush kills 26 policemen”

The words slide over

Us, settle around

us. Conversations

Resume.

A stone thrown in a pool,

No ripples.

No war of words here,

No action that speaks louder than words.

Ideas in the Oven

Just completed a short piece on the hunger strike as a category of political protest. Will put it up here if it finds no takers. Also thinking of something along the lines of Barthes' , "Lover's Discourse" with a nihilistic edge to it. Again very difficult to find someone to publish it! Lets see....

Love is a little microcosm

As an experiment I loved a man who had nothing in common with me. We attempted to live and let live. His ideas were to be his ideas and my ideas were to be my ideas. However, I soon discovered that we could not exist simultaneously. His ideas were antagonist to mine. He was an adversary.In the interest of debate he sparred with me and told me I was totalitarian if I could not recognize his right to have his views. I tried to explain to him that his views were only sustainable if I annihilated myself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJPhA9TGRls

Heavy-ness

The Hindi dramatist is weighed down by ideology-I am told. English is the language of a new lightness. "The unlive-able weight of conviction", I thought. These are indeed tough times for the fate of that word.