A ghost in the machine. I study philosophy.Žižek: “I am generally opposed to wisdom”.

When someone asks “what’s the use of philosophy?” the reply must be aggressive, since the question tries to be ironic and caustic. Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful. Its only use is the exposure of all forms of baseness of thought. Is there any discipline apart from philosophy that sets out to criticise all mystifications, whatever their source and aim, to expose all the fictions without which reactive forces would not prevail? Exposing as a mystification the mixture of baseness and stupidity that creates the astonishing complicity of both victims and perpetrators. Finally, turning thought into something aggressive, active and affirmative. Creating free men, that is to say men who do not confuse the aims of culture with the benefit of the State, morality or religion. Fighting the ressentiment and bad conscience which have replaced thought for us. Conquering the negative and its false glamour. Who has an interest in all this but philosophy? Philosophy is at its most positive as critique, as an enterprise of demystification.Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

I write, and exceedingly rarely post, theory. I work, on the one hand, from an antihumanist, structuralist, materialist perspective, and various other imperfect euphemisms for revolutionary-critical theory; and, on the other, from the standpoint of free-spiritedness, flourishing, and other manifestations of the concern for living our lives qua individuals. Previously I’ve mostly written on political subjects tout court, chiefly regarding socialist transition and the dictatorship of the proletariat. I’m currently working on a long-term project on the problematic of good living, nominally pursued under Adorno’s paradigm of the melancholy science. In this vein, I have particular interests in the critique of value theory, especially the question of moral eliminativism and the status of hedonism as a theory of prudential value.

Symptomatic works: