Translating Transclass: Or Teaching Eribon in America

Since this is a post about class, family, and returns

I thought that I would illustrate it with pictures illustrating

the fact that I now live in the same neighborhood my mother lived in, 

but the neighborhood has changed except this old fishing/gun store

 

I have often considered teaching to be a kind of translation and not just because much of the history of philosophy is written in different languages. Part of what one does in teaching is try to take the questions and concerns of a different time and figure out some way to bridge that gap, while at the same time being faithful to its original sense and meaning (just like translation). These thoughts occurred to me again when I decided to teach Didier Eribon's Returning to Reims.

Team Transindividuality: on Vittorio Morfino and Bernard Aspe

 

Jeremy Gilbert and I sometimes joke about TOP, the Transindividual Oriented Philosophy. The reference is obviously to the phenomenon of OOO (Object Oriented Ontology) in the early part of the millennium. As much as our joke has to do with sort of doctrinaire and polemical way the former arrived on the scene and our lack of interest in any such thing. (I should say in a parenthetical that is way too late, one of the things that always troubled me about OOO is that it emerged and thrived on blogs, but blogs with their intersection of the social and the technological seemed the last thing that the last thing that the crowd wanted to think about. Part of what makes me irredeemably a historical materialist is that I think the question of understanding where one is thinking from is paramount even if a bit quixotic--one can never see the ground that one speaks from). Despite this joke transindividuality, at least in terms of contemporary writers who use the concept, less a school of thought than a series of intersecting critiques and articulations. Or, if one wanted to be clever about it, the collection of writers who work on transindividuality are all part of a general orientation that is individuated differently in each of their specif philosophical articulations. I would say more about this but I feel like this is something that I tried to say with the examination of Balibar, Stiegler, and Virno in The Politics of Transindividuality.