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Museum of Accidents

Museum of Accidents
Expanding collections of on-line texts from the most important philosophers and theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Original sources, no paraphrasing. All content, no editorial. Passionately collected, happily shared.

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text: Gilles Deleuze, "Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Desire-Pleasure-
2007-05-18 04:29:00
from Contretemps Online Journal of Philosophy; vol. 2 May 2001.http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/2 may2001/deleuze.pdf (link opens directly into pdf)excerpts:The body without organs, the desert, is fundamentally populated. ...I have here a text by an old schizo, it’s very beautiful, this text. It’s made up of tales: “I love to invent people, tribes, the origins of a race; and to imagine other behaviours, a thousand other ways of being. I have always had a complex for exploration and I only like to count on very fantastic explorations. For example, my deserts are like diversions, desert-diversions, for whomever can imagine these strange simulators of ****, these kind of oneiric songs. I let myself go; I have the tendency to put my guilty experiences on my characters, to mistreat them”—you see it is a matter of populating the desert—“to use mental cruelty against them, by provocation. Flows are necessary—and indeed this is a thought in terms of flows—the feminine fl...
More About: Text , Sure , Pleasure , Dual , Gill

text: Alain Badiou, "The Subject of Art".
2007-05-17 09:50:00
http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/ba diou.htmlFrom Online Journal The Symptom; Issue Six, Spring 2005.excerpts:... Something of art is a joy forever, for example. What are we saying? I begin by a fundamental distinction between three levels of the signification of being. First, when I say something is, I just say something is a pure multiplicity. 'Something is' and 'something is a multiplicity' is the same sentence. So, it's a level of being qua being. Being as such is pure multiplicity. And the thinking of a pure multiplicity is finally mathematics. The second level is when we are saying something exists. It is the question of existence as a distinct question of the question of being as such. When we are saying something exists we are not speaking of a pure multiplicity. We are speaking of something which is here, which is in a world. So existence is being in a world, being here or, if you want, appearing, really appearing in a concrete situation. That is ‘som...
More About: Text , Alain Badiou , Subject , Adio

text: Paul Virillio, "Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!", English.
2007-05-05 15:30:00
http://www.ctheory.net/printer.aspx?id=72 #bioexcerpt:........The big event looming upon the 21st century in connection with this absolute speed, is the invention of a perspective of real time, that will supersede the perspective of real space, which in its turn was invented by Italian artists in the Quattrocento. It has still not been emphasized enough how profoundly the city, the politics, the war, and the economy of the medieval world were revolutionized by the invention of perspective.........Cyberspace is a new form of perspective. It does not coincide with the audio-visual perspective which we already know. It is a fully new perspective, free of any previous reference: it is a tactile perspective. To see at a distance, to hear at a distance: that was the essence of the audio-visual perspective of old. But to reach at a distance, to feel at a distance, that amounts to shifting the perspective towards a domain it did not yet encompass: that of contact, of contact-at-a-distance: t...
More About: Information , English , Text , Paul , Speed

documentary video: Slavoj Žižek, "The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema," Eng
2007-05-05 05:56:00
I doubt this will last long; the rumor is that it may be a copyright infringement--I recommend watching sooner, rather than later.
More About: Video , Cinema , Documentary , Guide , Guid

Roland Barthes, "Elements of Semiology"; English.
2007-05-04 11:02:00
http://gfdl.marxists.org.uk/reference/sub ject/philosophy/works/fr/barthes.htmFrom Elements of Semiology, 1964, publ. Hill and Wang, 1968.excerpts, Chapter II - "Signifier and Signified", part II - "The Sign":.......The sign-function bears witness to a double movement, which must be taken apart. In a first stage (this analysis is purely operative and does not imply real temporality) the function becomes pervaded with meaning. This semantisation is inevitable: as soon as there is a society, every usage is converted into a sign of itself; the use of a raincoat is to give protection from the rain, but this use cannot be dissociated from the very signs of an atmospheric situation. Since our society produces only standardised, normalised objects, these objects are unavoidably realisations of a model, the speech of a language, the substances of a significant form. To rediscover a non-signifying object, one would have to imagine a utensil absolutely improvised and with no similarity to an e...
More About: English , Roland , Barth , Bart

Friedrich Nietzsche, "Twilight Of The Idols, Or How One Philosophises with
2007-05-04 10:41:00
http://users.compaqnet.be/cn127103/Nietzs che_twilight_of_the_idols/index.htmexcerp t; "Morality as Anti-Nature", section three:.........I reduce a principle to a formula. Every naturalism in morality--that is, every healthy morality--is dominated by an instinct of life, some commandment of life is fulfilled by a determinate canon of "shalt" and "shalt not"; some inhibition and hostile element on the path of life is thus removed. Anti-natural morality--that is, almost every morality which has so far been taught, revered, and preached--turns, conversely, against the instincts of life: it is condemnation of these instincts, now secret, now outspoken and impudent. When it says, "God looks at the heart," it says No to both the lowest and the highest desires of life, and posits God as the enemy of life. The saint in whom God delights is the ideal eunuch. Life has come to an end where the "kingdom of God" begins.
More About: Nietzsche , Idol , Fried , Hilo , Idols

Jean-Francois Lyotard, "The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge"; E
2007-05-04 10:22:00
http://users.california.com/~rathbone/lyo pmc.htm(Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi; 1993 edition from U. Minnesota Press.excerpt, Chapter 1-- "The Field: Knowledge in Computerised Societies":............The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation. It can fit into the new channels, and become operational, only if learning is translated into quantities of information." We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language. The "producers" and users of knowledge must now, and will have to, possess the means of translating into these languages whatever- they want to invent or learn. Research on translating machines is already well advanced." Along with the hegemony of computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain ...
More About: Report , Condition , Jean , Condi

text: Jacques Derrida, "Sur La Grammatologie"; French.
2007-05-04 09:41:00
http://hudsoncress.org/html/library/weste rn-philosophy/Derrida,%20Jacques %20-%20De %20la%20grammatologie.pdfexcerpt, Chapter One: "la fin du livre et le commencement de l'écriture":L'être écrit. ...........Ici, en radicalisant les concepts d'interprétation, de perspective, d'évaluation, de différence et tous les motifs « empiristes » ou non-philosophiques qui, tout au long de l'histoire de l'Occident, n'ont cessé de tourmenter la philosophie et n'avaient eu que la faiblesse, d'ailleurs inéluctable, de se produire dans le champ philosophique, Nietzsche, loin de rester simplement (avec Hegel et comme le voudrait Heidegger) dans la métaphysique, aurait puissamment contribué à libérer le signifiant de sa dépendance ou de sa dérivation par rapport au logos et au concept connexe de vérité ou de signifié premier, en quelque sens qu'on l'entende. ..........La lecture et donc l'écriture, le texte, seraient pour Nietzsche des opérations « originaires 9 » (nou...
More About: French , Text , Gram , Logi

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Righting Wrongs"; English.
2007-05-04 09:24:00
http://pdfdownload.tsone.info/pdf2html.ph p?url=http://roundtable.kein.org/files/ro undtable/spivak_righting_wrongs.pdf&i mages=yesexcerpt, pages 96-97: ..... ... [T]here is no connection in this absurd education (to memorize incomprehensible chunks of prose and some verse in response to absurd questions in order to pass examinations; to begin to forget the memorized material instantly) with the existing cultural residue of responsibility. (In metropolitan theoretical code, this lack of connection may be written as no sense at all that the written is a message from a structurally absent subject, a placeholder of alterity, although the now-delegitimized local culture is programmed for responsibility as a call of the other--alterity--before will. ..... Thus education in this area cannot activate or rely on ``culture'' without outside/inside effort.) For the suturing with enforced class-subalternization I had to chance upon an immediately comprehensible concept-metaphor:when there ...
More About: English , Wrong , Ayat , Krav

text: Jean Baudrillard, ""; English.
2007-05-04 08:56:00
http://pdfdownload.tsone.info/pdf2html.ph p?url=http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mpost er/books/Baudrillard,%20Jean %20-%20Select ed%20Writings_ok.pdf&images=yesLinks directly to pdf text.This KICKS ASS, by the way.excerpt, from "Fatal Strategies":........Prior to being produced, the world was seduced. A strange precession, which today still weighs heavily on all reality. The world was contradicted at its origin: it is therefore impossible ever to verify it. Negativity, whether historical or subjective, is nothing: the original diversion is truly diabolical, even in thought. The vertigo of simulation, the Luciferian rapture in the eccentricity of the origin and the end, contrasts with the Utopia of the Last Judgement, the complement of original baptism. Which is why gods can only live and hide in the inhuman, in objects and beasts, in the realm of silence and objective stupefaction, and not in the human realm, that of language and subjective stupefaction. A human-god is an absurdity. A...
More About: English , Text , Jean Baudrillard , Drill

text: Claude Lévi-Strauss, "Structural Anthropology"; English.
2007-05-04 06:46:00
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject /philosophy/works/fr/levistra.htmExtensiv e selection from original text (version publ. Allen Lane/Penguin, 1968).excerpts; Chapter XVI:I do not postulate a kind of pre-existent harmony between different levels of structure. They may be - and often are - completely contradictory, but the modes of contradiction all belong the same type. Indeed, according to dialectic materialism it should always be possible to proceed, by transformation, from economic or social structure to the structure of law, art, or religion.But Marx never claimed that there was only one type of transformation - for example, that ideology was simply a "mirror image" of social relations. In his view, these transformations were dialectic, and in some cases he went to great lengths to discover the crucial transformation which at first sight seemed to defy analysis.If we grant, following Marxian thought, that infrastructures and superstructures are made up of multiple levels an...
More About: English , Text , Anthropology , Ology , Ural

text: Jacques Derrida; "De l'Esprit: Heidegger et la Question". French.
2007-05-04 00:30:00
Link opens to downloadable pdf file. http://s2.quicksharing.com/v/2298462/Derr ida,_Jacques_De_l_esprit,_Heidegger_et_la _question.pdf.htmlFrom page 101:. Heidegger le dit, la destitution est un mouvement propre à l'esprit, il procède de son dedans. Mais il faut bien que ce dedans enveloppe aussi la duplicité spectrale, un dehors immanent ou une extériorité intestine, une sorte de malin génie qui s'introduit dans le monologue de l'esprit pour le hanter. Il le ventriloque et le voue ainsi à une sorte de désidentification auto-persécutrice. Heidegger nomme d'ailleurs, un peu plus loin dans ce même passage, le démonique. . Ce n'est évidemment pas le Malin Génie de Descartes (en allemand, pourtant, boîse Geist). L'hypothése hyperbolique du Malin Génie, au contraire, céde justement devant cela même qui figure le mal pour Heidegger, celui qui hante l'esprit dans toutes les formes de sa destitution : la certitude du cogito dans la position du subjectum ...
More About: Question , French , Text , Esprit , Sprit

text: Louis Althusser, " 'Lenin and Philosophy' & Other Essays". Englis
2007-04-10 09:32:00
http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/LPOE70.html From Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation), page 181: God is thus the Subject, and Moses and the innumerable subjects of God's people, the Subject's interlocutors-interpellates: his mirrors, his reflections. Were not men made in the image of God? As all theological reflection proves, whereas He 'could' perfectly well have done without men, God needs them, the Subject needs the subjects, just as men need God, the subjects need the Subject. Better: God needs men, the great Subject needs subjects, even in the terrible inversion of his image in them (when the subjects wallow in debauchery, i.e. sin). Better: God duplicates himself and sends his Son to the Earth, as a mere subject 'forsaken' by him (the long complaint of the Garden of Olives which ends in the Crucifixion), subject but Subject, man but God, to do what prepares the way for the final Redemption, the Resurrection of Christ. God t...
More About: Philosophy , Louis , Lenin , Text , Essays

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