There is a strong argument against the idea of the nostalgic sublime. If the sublime leads to a drive to act in new ways, due to the enthusiasm released by simultaneous feelings of terror and attraction to a strange and inexplicable event, then the backward looking and stultifying qualities of…
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Metaphysics: Deleuze│Spencer-Brown
Some philosophers, struck with the recent discovery that no one set of metaphysical assumptions is necessary to communication, have fallen into the fallacy of thinking that we can communicate without any metaphysics at all… It is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of discoveries in 2000 years to…
Continue ReadingManifest Destiny and the Sublime – Part 3: Necessarily Dangerous
In this final blog on the sublime and manifest destiny I will argue that the sublime is always at risk of leading to the violence of manifest destiny. I’ll also give more precise definitions and respond to a series of objections, referring back to the connection of manifest destiny to…
Continue ReadingManifest Destiny and the Sublime – Part 2: Reversing Perspectives
Having made the case for the connection between the sublime, fascism and imperialism in Arnold Fanck’s film SOS Eisberg, Lill-Ann Körber reverses perspectives and considers ‘sublime icebergs today’ in the Greenlandic film Nuummioq. These icebergs do not fit the conventional sublime of overawing size and power, sought out by the…
Continue ReadingManifest Destiny and the Sublime – Part 1: Manifest Destiny Returns
Following Donald Trump’s bluster about buying Greenland, the idea of manifest destiny had another resurrection: ‘There we get a sense of motion, as in…Manifest Destiny. Admittedly, Manifest Destiny is not a PC phrase. Yet trendy pieties aside, it’s hard to argue with the long-term logic of national expansion as key…
Continue ReadingMessi is not sublime (nor is Ronaldo)
My book on the egalitarian sublime has almost no sport in it. I avoid it for political and philosophical reasons. Politically, as entertainment, sports are the bread and circuses of our age, culminating in the sportswashing beloved of kleptocrats, monopolies and repressive governments. The problem with sport runs deeper than…
Continue ReadingDeleuze and the Time for Non-Reason
Recent IAI discussion contribution on reason and unreason
Continue ReadingDeleuze’s Philosophy of Time: Time as Dimensions, Syntheses and Problems (Vilnius, Lithuanian Philosophical Association, May 2019)
Expanded text to my keynote talk on Deleuze and time given to the Lithuanian Philosophical Association, May 2019
Continue ReadingTruth as the fullest: on journalism in the age of fake news
This paper on truth and process philosophy follows from my talk at The Politics of (Post) Truth conference at Cumberland Lodge in October 2018 https://www.jamesrwilliams.net/the-politics-of-post-truth/ It is also a reflection on truth and the process philosophy of signs. Truth as the fullest: on journalism in the age of fake news
Continue ReadingIs There (Still) a Continental – Analytic Divide in Philosophy?
My answer (pp 148-9) and many others to this question in Gavagai philosophy journal
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