There are probably more stories about the history of the Venture Inn at 255 S Camac St. than about any other gay bar in Philadelphia. The stories run like this: “It was the stable of the house owned by the Barrymores,” “It was part of the Underground Railroad,”   “It was already a popular eating and drinking spot by the time of the 1876 Centennial.”

What’s the truth?

HAZEL ALLEY

For some reason, the two block length of Camac Street running from Walnut to Spruce was developed by about 1800, much earlier than the surrounding blocks. About 1813, the street appears in directories as Hazel Alley, then a bit later as Dean’s Alley and by the end of that decade as Dean Street. It would remain Dean Street for most of the 19th century, until about 1898, when the hodge podge of street names  in Philadelphia were regularized. It was then…

Fields afford and constrain what a thing can do, the capacity of a thing to effectuate its powers, potentialities, or capacities– its affects, in the Spinozist sense of the term –but are also folded into things.  We have a tendency to abstract things from the fields in which they dwell, to think them as independent; yet, as I’ve been trying to argue, all things are dividual, rather than individual.  The minimal unit of being is not the thing, but the thing and its field.  There is no being that is not a being-between, and there is no thing that is not a pleat between thing and field.  That’s the working hypothesis, at any rate.

We see this clearly in the case of our own bodies– though perhaps we don’t see it clearly until we’re able to situate our bodies in very different fields.  At the naive, common sense level we…

Masked warriors departing rally site in North Dakota, Sept 27, 2016.

By Sara Berlinger, KFYR TV, September 27, 2016
ST. ANTHONY, N.D. More arrests were made Tuesday at a Dakota Access Pipeline protest. This time because protesters were creating a road block on Highway 6 near St. Anthony.

The Morton County Sheriff’s Department says the obstruction was to help people drive to the protest near a Dakota Access construction site.

man opening curtains in the morning

A few days ago I suggested that psychoanalysis poses a fundamental challenge to Epicurean and Spinozist frameworks of ethics.  Some responded by pointing out that perhaps we can establish a consistency between psychoanalysis and Spinoza on the ground of inadequate ideas.  The symptom, says Lacan, is a sort of unknown knowledge.  As he remarks in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, “…it is not certain that knowledge is known…” (30).  The symptom expresses a knowledge that is not known.  Drawing on Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, Jonathan Redmond gives a nice example of this in Ordinary Psychosis and the Body:

in…the case of Fraulein Elizabeth von R. shows how a conflict concerning the emergence of erotic ideas was pivotal in the development of conversion symptoms.  In this particular case, Freud states that Elizabeth’s conversion symptom– a localized pain to her right upper thigh…

Lacanian discourse theory defines a discourse not by the content of, for example, a discipline, but in terms of a formal structure defining a relationship between an agent and an other.  Here I’m following Paul Verhaeghe closely.  It is not what a discourse is about that defines it, but the structure of the relation.  This is part of the importance of Lacan’s use of mathemes.  In his discourses– 24 in all, as I’ve argued elsewhere –Lacan deploys four mathemes:  S1, S2, $, and a.  It’s all quite abstract, but that’s its advantage.  Just as an “x” in algebra can be any number, we can place any number of things in the place of the matheme.  As a consequence, the abstraction of the matheme allows us to discern common structure behind a variety of things that initially seem quite different.  Thus, for example, S1 or the master-signifier could be any…

A short post as I attempt to get myself back into the habit of writing here.  I would like to get back to the place where I’m writing here daily or at least a few times a week, though I confess that I’ve become a bit jaded by online writing and what it often brings and that, in terms of time and responsibilities, my life is quite different than when I was writing frequently here.  Right now my New Centre seminar on Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is reading Deleuze’s magnificent study Nietzsche & Philosophy.  The reason for this is two-fold:  First, Nietzsche & Philosophy provides the groundwork for understanding Deleuze’s particular conception of critique and, in particular, his concept of “total” and “immanent” critique, both of which will be important for the project of Anti-Oedipus.  Second, the dynamics of ressentiment, bad conscience, and the ascetic that Deleuze…

About halfway through Mahendra Singh’s American Candide, our omniscientish (yet beguiled) narrator slows down for a moment to offer an internal critique (and useful summary) of the novel thus far:

If Candide could address the reader right now, he would probably apologize for both the breakneck pace and pixelated tenor of his adventures so far. Modern literature evolved beyond that sort of thing long ago, and an easy-to-swallow plot enlivened with a soupçon of ironic handwringing is all the rage today. The idea of a fictional hero running afoul of angry fathers, jihadi terrorists, secret police, corporate mercenaries, a cable TV network, and a secret cabal of global warmers simply boggles the reader’s mind, an authorial fate worse than death.

And yet of course many readers enjoy a good mind boggling every now and then.

I do, anyway.

Our narrator’s little condensation of the novel thus far reminds…

John D. Caputo, world-renown author, theologian and philosopher, will be spending a day in Springfield, MO to share about life and faith from the perspective of a philosopher. Dr. Caputo is professor of theology and philosophy emeritus at both Villanova and Syracuse and is largely regarded as one of the most important and creative theologians alive today. Participants will be able to meet and talk with Dr. Caputo throughout the day, as well as join him for dinner in the evening. Special thanks to Homebrewed Christianity and Fortress Press for sponsoring the event. Register here — Use the code “Brentwood” to receive a 50% discount

Date: November 4

Time: 12:00-6:00pm

Location: Brentwood Christian Church, Springfield, Missouri

“By helping us reimagine the very way we conceive of religion, John D. Caputo writes for those of us who live our lives somewhere between belief and doubt yet feel overcome by an unconditional call…

” The interest in Nietzsche and Bataille was not a way of distancing ourselves from Marxism or Communism. It was the only path towards what we expected of communism…We were looking for other ways to that utterly different reality we thought was embodied by communism” Michel Foucault