Friday, February 17, 2012

Locus Solum Reading Group: A Proposal

Would anyone out there with a bit of background in logic (or who's otherwise just tenacious) be interested in putting together a slow-moving reading group on Girard's "Locus Solum" monograph? Wonderful, brilliant and terribly dense material. Really ideal for this sort of thing.

Here's the text: http://iml.univ-mrs.fr/~girard/0.pdf

 If you're not already hooked by the epigraph, I don't know what to tell you:

 "Go back to An-fang, the Peace Square at An-Fang, the Beginning Place at An-Fang, where all things start (...) An-Fang was near a city, the only living city with a pre-atomic name (...) The headquarters of the People Programmer was at An-Fang, and there the mistake happened: A ruby trembled. Two tourmaline nets failed to rectify the laser beam. A diamond noted the error. Both the error and the correction went into the general computer." 
- Cordwainer Smith, The Dead Lady of Clown Town, 1964.
If you are interested, please leave a comment.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Das Gute liegt ausserhalb des Tatsachenraums.

What I want to say about the Good can be understood in relation to Wittgenstein’s remark, “The Good is outside the space of facts.” It turns out that there is no space of facts, that the facts do not make a space. But it turns out that way at a particular point of real spacetime – where the Good diagonalizes out. In this way, the sacrificed totality of facts, and its floating subject, are both transfixed and opened. They are converted into relation with what is above and beneath participatory facticality – existence and the One – as these enter their disjunctive alignment.

(x-posted to http://metalogike.wordpress.com/ -J.)