Theoria

The past week has been good for new books: last week Foucault’s lectures on Psychiatric Power arrived and, this morning, Althusser’s Philosophy of the Encounter arrived. Haven’t had the opportunity to look at Foucault yet, aside from reading the index. Based upon the index, it looks far more interesting than I had expected: there are, for instance, numerous references to Kantorowicz, which suggests there are a few ‘new’ nuggets of Foucault’s understanding of sovereignty – something people haven”t bothered putting much thought into.

Here’s a short piece from the new Althusser, about America and trains.

Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher

[290] The man’s age doesn’t matter. He can be very old or very young. The important thing is that he doesn’t know where he is, and wants to go somewhere. That’s why he always catches a moving train, the way they do in American Westerns. Without knowing where he comes from (origin) or where he’s going (goal). And he gets off somewhere along the way, in a four-horse town with a ridiculous train station in the middle of it.

Saloon, beer, whisky. ‘Where d’ya hail from, bud?’ ‘From a long ways off.’ ‘Where ya headed?’ ‘Dunno!’ ‘Might have some work for ya.’ ‘Okay.’

And so our friend Nikos goes to work. He’s a Greek by birth who has immigrated to the USA like so many others before him, and he doesn’t have a penny in his pockets. He works hard and, a year later, marries the prettiest girl in town. He scrapes together a little stake and buys the first cattle in his herd. Thanks to his intelligence and knack for picking out young livestock (horses, cattle), he ends up with the best bunch of animals around – after ten years of hard work.

The best bunch of animals = the best bunch of categories and concepts. He competes with other landowners, but peacefully. Everyone admits that he’s the best and that his categories and concepts (his herd) are the best. His reputation spreads throughout the West, and then the whole country.

[291] From time to time, he catches the moving train in order to see, talk, listen – like Gorbachev in the streets of Moscow. Besides, one an catch the train wherever one happens to be!

More popular than anyone else, he could be elected to the White House, although he started out from nothing. But no, he’d rather travel, go out and walk the streets; that’s how one comes to understand the true philosophy, the one that people have in their heads and that is always contradictory.

This is when he reads the Hindus and the Chinese (Zen), as well as Machiavelli, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Cavailles, Canguilheim, Vuillemin, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and so on. Thus, without having intended to, he comes a quasi-professional materialist philosopher – not that horror, a dialectical materialist, but an aleatory materialist.

He attains the level of classical wisdom, Spinoza’s third kind of ‘knowledge’, Nietzsche’s superman, and an understanding of eternal return: viz., that everything is repeated and exists only through differential repetition. Now he can engage in discussions with the great idealists. He not only understands them, but also explains the reasons for their theses to them! The others sometimes come round to his views with great bitterness, but after all,

Amicus Plato, magis amica Veritas!