One of the greatest comedians of our time: Slavoj Žižek
I’m serious: the marxiste célèbre and #Occupy Wall Street avuncular philosopher Slavoj Žižek is really a funny man. Case in point, this excellent coffee table book containing a collection of the jokes he spices up his impenetrable prose with (complete with references to the original texts).
Žižek employs jokes like Plato resorted to myths as heuristic devices designed to convey a logical meaning. Thus, they are used iteratively — the Marx Brother one-liners about self-identity or refusal of choice, the Rabinovitch anecdote about realism, the skeptical paradox about the fiancée who’s late for a rendez-vous…
Find a selection of the best scanned pages on the publisher’s website, and discover the maieutic value of laughter. (Also discover that this is a project of the Mickey Mouse Club ft. the norwegian artist Audun Mortensen, and that the book is actually printed in a very limited edition of 1…) Read more
The sociology of Chatroulette
by Antonio A. Casilli (Centre Edgar-Morin, EHESS) [1]
By now, you might have heard of Chatroulette, if you are hip and tech-savvy if those two things at the sides of your face are your ears. By the way, I hope you did not click on the link. It’s not safe for work. And by that I mean you will be sucked into a world of sheer immorality which will challenge all your values and potentially wreck civilisation. Or (but this is simply my own guess) it will lead you to yet another overhyped internet chat service designed to put you in touch via webcam with random strangers.
Of course, "random" may be synonymous with "dressed like an idiot".
A few facts
So, bottom line, Chatroulette goes something like: you log in, you bump into someone, you evaluate, you click on « next ». Basically, each time you connect you have to ask yourself « Do I like this person? ». If you do, just go on chatting. If you don’t, just « next » him/her and the service puts you in contact with someone else, anybody else. It might be a teenage boy making faces, or a beautiful girl with a generous cleavage, or an old pervert doing whatever it is that perverts do on-screen. Read more
Slides séminaire « Quelle amitié en réseaux ? » Institut Télécom
Un autre jour, un autre séminaire. Cette fois-ci c’est à l’Institut Télécom (Télécom & Management SudParis) d’Evry, et il s’agit d’une variation sur le thème de l’amitié en ligne (le friending dont parle danah boyd), que j’ai déjà développé ici et ici. Enjoy !
L’amitié dans le Web 2.0 : le powerpoint de mon séminaire à l’Institut Telecom
Violà le powerpoint de mon intervention dans le cadre du cours Quelle éthique dans la société en réseaux de l’Institut Télécom & Management SudParis, coordonné par Pierre-Antoine Chardel. Un merci à tou(te)s les étudiant(e)s pour leur questions et leur attention !
Live streaming from Porquerolles: Corbis and the arts (eng) (fr)
This week, I’m gonna try to stream live from the Conference Pratiques des images dans la société de l’information. This morning it’s Corbis, ou la démesure de l’archive by Estelle BLASCHKE, art historian from the university of Duisburg-Essen.
Just in case you missed it, here’s the online archive.
« Why is there art rather than nothing? »: new book by French art critic Raphael Cuir now out
Between 1999 and 2002, French historian and art critic Raphael Cuir hosted a web-TV show called Memoires Actives on Canalweb. His guests were prominent personalities of European art – curators, philosophers, writers and artists. Each of them was invited to answer this simple yet « monumental » question : “Why is there art rather than nothing?”
The answers are now collected in a volume going by the same title (Pourquoi y a-t-il de l’art plutôt que rien?, Paris, Archibooks + sautereau éditeur, 2009). The book is, of course, in French, as is this short video-interview with the author:
“All in all”, Cuir writes in his introduction to the book, “by rephrasing the famous question, the ultimate metaphysical question, I asked the art world the question that Leibniz, for instance, posed to the world as a whole: ‘why is there anything rather than nothing?’ and Heidegger to existence itself: « Why is there the being instead of nothing?’ »
The diverse and stimulating contributions to this book range from claims of the nihilistic nature of art (J. Baudrillard) or of art as a manifestations of the void (C. Millet), to meditations on art as the innermost essence of humankind (G. Lista) which at the same time transcends human existence (T. Todorov) and paradoxically escapes nothingness by creating value out of « almost nothing » (Orlan). Despite the seriousness of Cuir’s enquiry, the book manages to strike – thanks to its aphoristic format – the right balance between readability and depth.
Support Prof. Horacio Potel!, or a portrait of the philosopher as a pirate
Addendum, Nov 14, 2009: As of today, we salute the recent decision of the Argentinian court dropping the charges against Prof Potel. Read more about this here (in English). Download court’s sentence here (in Spanish).
Argentinean professor charged criminally for promoting access to knowledge
By the CopySouth Research Group
A philosophy professor in Argentina, Horacio Potel, is facing criminal charges for maintaining a website devoted to translations of works by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. His alleged crime: copyright infringement. Here is Professor Potel’s sad story.
Prof. Potel usually puts his pirate patch on *before* lecturing in philosophy at UNLA
“I was fascinated at the unlimited possibilities offered by the internet for knowledge exchange”, explains Horacio Potel, a Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de Lanús in Buenos Aires. In 1999, he set up a personal website to collect essays and other works of some well-known philosophers, starting with the German Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Potel’s websites – Nietzsche in Spanish, Heidegger in Spanish, and Derrida in Spanish – eventually developed into growing online libraries of freely downloadable philosophical texts. Nietzsche in Spanish alone has already received more than four million visitors.
Hidden track #2: Cartoon philosopher fustigates reductionism
It’s a sad, sad world, one where we have to rely on Richard Linklater’s innocuous films to express unpopular opinions. Like for instance this one:
« Believing that biology and physics can explain all of human behavior is nothing short of a reductionistic fallacy, as they do not take into account culture, individual choices – and ultimately free will ».
But don’t take my word for it. Here is a short excerpt from Linklater’s movie Waking Life (2001), where philosopher David Sosa (University of Texas, Austin) discusses determinism in a…ehm, cartoon interview.
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What’s this blog about?
I'm an associate professor of Digital Humanities at the Paris Institute of Technology (ParisTech) and a researcher in sociology at the Edgar-Morin Center (EHESS, Paris). Bodyspacesociety offers regular updates about my ongoing research, publications, and teaching. If you want updates on media features and conferences, please click here.
The views presented on this blog are solely mine and do not represent the positions of my institutions of affiliation.
New books out now!
The special issue of the journal 'Communications' Cultures du numérique is out. Also, you might want to check my latest book Les liaisons numériques. Vers une nouvelle sociabilité?. Both published by Editions du Seuil, both available in bookshops and online.
» Buy Liaisons numériques
» Visit the companion website
» Buy Cultures du numérique (Communications, n. 88)
All blog content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 France License.
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