Aadi Arya Karthik looked forward to time at Oxford University. Even when Arya’s health raised questions about the wisdom of going to Oxford, the rigor and the structure of the classes at Oxford were a big draw for Arya.
As exemplified through the short life, Aadi Arya Karthik excelled at everything and that included all the work at Oxford University as an A student there. St. Catherine’s college was kind enough to hunt down some of the submissions and bind it into a book for us as a keepsake.
Some of the excerpts below from the submissions across terms in no particular order.
Hegel and Arbitrariness [Willkür]
Hegel says: “To comprehend what is is the task of philosophy, for what is is reason.”‘ For him it is not a particularly controversial claim: what, after all, is given to us with which to think, but for what is? The contention is certainly not that philosophy cannot speak of what ought to be; for, really, it is not clear how there is any philosophy or need for philosophy except as an articulation of what ought to happen, what ought to be: the imminent self-consciousness of the spirit brought definitely closer with each word Hegel writes. And insofar as Hegel’s kallipolis seems to have much more to do with schemata which, at the time of his flourishing, were only on paper (i.e. never-enacted liberal reforms) than with the architecture of any contemporaneous state; insofar as Hegel, not willing to abide the liberal’s constant …
Hegel and Progress
The (phenomenologically) primal question is: what should I do now? One is led to other questions only in their contributing to this question’s lasting resolution: equivalently, insofar as the posing of them is one of the question’s momentary resolutions. It is worth noting that the question must have a lasting resolution if it is even to be answerable, there otherwise being no finite mechanism of explanation (this mechanism constitutes the lasting resolution) to enable and mediate our contact with the momentary resolutions: that is, if each of the infinitely many moment-possibilities called for the application of its own logic in deriving out the proper action, I would need an infinitely large meta-logic to decide from the nature of the moment which action I would take, and such a meta-logic is not humanly navigable. The question not having a lasting resolution would then imply a theory of time quite far removed from time as we experience it: a …
On the Lord-Bondsman Model
What is perhaps most immediately remarkable about Hegel’s lord-bondsman toy model is
the explicit presence of a third party fixing the interaction: Hegel names it a thing,! and it is presumably to be understood as the physical object with which or in whose context the bondsman labors, which he “forms and shapes,” exerts his will upon. I say fixing the interaction: I do think it precisely to be the presence of such a “good object” upon which the proper functioning of the interaction hinges. For given the object Hegel is able to rather lucidly-too lucidly, I would say—describe the lord and bondsman into their respective positions: the lord as he who for lack of an “independent opposition”—a co-resident of the way-things-are free to engage him in a combat, a “life-and-death struggle” (it is indicative that Hegel here resorts to a martial metaphor, as is standard for those wishing to smuggle a certain measure of received idea into their thought by which the former and latter might come to the truth of …
Finitude and Infinitude
There is an obvious and immediate inconsistency in treating the finite and the infinite as two poles standing against each other, two ends of a continuum: to do so is to strip the infinite of its infinitude. Every something is definitionally finite, bounded in both time and space: comes to be at its birth, and comes to be at its edges. To set the finite against the infinite as something against something else is thereby to bound the infinite, to make it “just another finitude,” so to speak—to render it an untruth, a “bad infinity.” And “bad infinity” is that infinity which is proximally understood: the infinity of the ad infinitum, the interminable. For to declare that a given process does not terminate is to note its repeating of the same (finite) algorithmic steps in a manner that will not lead to termination, and so to represent infinity as a stack of finite blocks …
What, For Hegel, Is Dialectic?
It seems to me that, in Hegel, for a philosophical construct to be true, it must be self-similar: for the presence of a substructure within the whole but not structurally congruent to it is exactly an opposition between part and whole, a crisis which until resolved discredits the entire apparatus. As such, an account of the dialectic is an account of negation in all its generality. In the sequel, I will argue that this negation can be understood as critique as the Enlightenment thinkers practice it, but, pace Jaeggi, is not reflected in psychoanalytic procedure. I will conclude with a brief point on the difficulty of chaining together negations, as it were, in the manner which Hegel understands as dialectical. …
Hegel’s Idealism With Respect To That of Kant
I offer two characterizations of Hegel’s idealism, both as situated in metaphysics generally and as situated relative to Kant’s critical philosophy: a more orthodox account of its emergence out of a critique of Kant’s everywhere-mediation, and a slightly odder account involving Roman Jakobson’s metonym-metaphor dyad. The positions that (a) Kant was a thinker whose radicalism was missed by Hegel and (b) Kant was radicalized by Hegel are in the orthodox account suggested to be mutually exclusive; I would like to suggest that both are in fact true, that Hegel comes to his properly radical critique of Kant by eliding what is more subtly radical in Kant—what in Kant deviates from what one ought to expect of an idealism
Fear of Men
What is ultimately always at stake is legitimacy-a notion which unfortunately has nothing to do with mathematical correctness. For in this modern age our legitimacy-schemata are all statistical, rational: what matters is not truth but on which side the arguments, the reasons fall, and a reason is in each case a reason rendered-tendered and taken up.’ That is: my proofs amount to nothing if you simply choose not to consider them—-not to listen.
Derrida says: “This law reinscribes the unforgivable, and error itself, at the heart of the forgiveness asked for or given.” To ask forgiveness pardon, rather-is to ask to be legitimized, an act which is revealed here to itself constitute a delegitimization: the asking betrays one’s illegitimacy, and at that one’s unfitness for legitimization. To ask to be …
Truth Is Not The Thing
In analysis, of course, truth is the thing: healing, that which is presumably the whole reason one seeks out analysis, is no more nor less than an “added benefit”; and what but truth and healing — truth and contentment, truth and the papering-over-the-gaps which is called happiness — truth and untruth, unconcealment and concealment (which only present as opposites to the idiot child who obviously spuriously indicts the king for public indecency, who misunderstands the bit and in doing so ruins it) — figure anywhere at all? Knowledge, one rather intelligently posits, language, the Symbolic, that sort of thing; but the problem is that knowledge does not figure: knowledge is that in the presence of which or around which figuration takes place. Reality, one may also posit, less intelligently, for when I ask the one what exactly such a real consists in, they are unable to do anything but point: if they venture a saying they will simply be imparting a knowledge which purports to be of the real but is not; if they venture an acting they will simply by figuring a truth which purports to be of the real but is not. That is: reality, being unlike truth and knowledge trivially, stupidly transmitted — your Umwelt is become mine when I simply walk over to where you are standing, crane my head a little — has its transmission just as trivially and stupidly denied: one shuts oneself up in one’s room and refuses to leave; or one simply scuttles off into the elsewhere into which the rest of the family dares not venture. In that one has perhaps turned into a bug, perhaps a crab.
In any case, we are merely left with, as Pound puts it, “Truth and Calliope / Slanging each other sous les lauriers,” an opposition which only runs as deep as the pronouncing of a four-letter word or two being …
L’envers de Mallarmé
Derrida says: “Mallarmé reads.”‘ And he means it: Mallarmé’s answer to Platonic mimesis is said to be the establishing, for each of his texts, of a heritage of cribbing — of intertextuality, I suppose — that stretches back to the dawn of philological-historical time, and then somehow even further past it. The text itself is finite but from it—”a double that doubles no simple” — the intertext radiates out unboundedly; and, crucially, the way Mallarmé would interact with the texts that he alludes to is by reading them, not writing them. More generally, if there is to be anything significant to the text outside what is actually written, then the author’s mode of interaction with the text cannot be that of the writer, not homogeneously.
This is, I think, a crucial point: for there is something lacking in the readerly interaction with the work, some responsibility abnegated. What the reader encounters is always already present-at-hand, just as what the visitor to an art-gallery encounters is present-at-hand, just as any artifact the archaeologist encounter is present-at-hand: for the artifact to be an artifact, it must have entirely renounced its tool-nature, its capacity to stand in a position relative to its user that is not that of an object relative to its subject. Insofar as I am writing a text, I am dealing with something that, while certainly perfectly individuated, is known to be unfinished, unpresentable as-is: something explicitly fragmentary. Insofar as I am reading a text, I am forced to contend with the fact that what I have in front of me is both material that is, presented as a …
On “Before the Law”
The law is a cephalopodal organism whose concern is the doling out of legitimacy to those whom it has appropriated to itself. It consists of such institutions as: the law of embodiment (expressed so pithily by Althusser: “the trouble is, there are bodies and, worse still, sexual organs”‘); the law of reference (that every talking is a talking about something; that poetry, contra Mallarmé, is written with ideas and not with words); and the law of equivalence (specifically, the association of all that is human-shaped with the ideal-ego once misdiscovered in the mirror: with a self; and in this the establishment of a nobility-of-what-is that might tend to the law, administer it, as in “The Problem of Our Laws”). It may be observed that these are only the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary under other names: the law is the complex which the three registers fill out, the tangle of tentacles as which one encounters them.
Insofar as the I does not really fit into this regime (for the I is not the self, the subject, the body, nor any weighted summation of the three, the law is a squeezing of the I out of the world. One of the clearer accounts of this squeezing-out is given in, of all places, the Epistle to the Romans: “Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all …
“The Testimonial Problem of tExyn”
There is a motif common to several Balkan folktales, most prominently the Greek “The Bridge of Arta” and the Serbian “The Building of Skadar”: a prince or master builder is forced to immure his beloved young wife within the foundations of a large construction project to put an end to its repeated collapsing. Perhaps “The Building of Skadar” is most exemplary: in it, the motif is elaborated by the presence of three brother princes, each married, and a master builder who is told by a mountain-spirit that the fortress upon which he is laboring will not stand without the sacrifice of one prince’s wife. The three brothers agree to determine by chance which of their wives is to die, but the older two renege and warn their wives, leaving the youngest’s wife the only one with child to be sent to her death. Wher she realizes what is being done to her, she demands that a hole be made in the foundations so that she may continue to nurse her child.
Aadi Arya Karthik 