The Joy of Philosophy

I realized last night (about 8.30pm) just how impoverished my work was - just a superficial apologia for the Washington consensus manifesting itself as microeconometrics- following a brief but intense study of leading French philosophers. Some quotes below will help you understand my conversion to a more humanistic philosophy.

Jacques Lacan,
…human life could be defined as a calculus in which zero was irrational.. When I say “irrational”, I’m referring not to some unfathomable emotional state but precisely to what is called an imaginary number . The square root of minus one doesn’t correspond to anything real - in the mathematical sense of term- and yet, it must be conserved, along with its full function. (1959)

Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance [i.e. pleasure,joy], not in itself, or even the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to √-1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restored by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1). (1977)

Julia Kristeva
It is therefore impossible to formalize poetic language using the existing logical (scientific) procedures without denaturing it. A literary semiotics has to be made starting from a poetic logic in which the concept of the power of the continuum, would encompass the interval from 0 to 2 , a continuum where 0 denoted and 1 is implicitly transgressed (1969)

Luce Irigaray
What is left uninterpreted in the economy of fluids – the resistances brought to bear upon solids, for example – is in the end given over to God. Overlooking the properties of real fluids – internal frictions, pressures, movements and so on, that is, their specific dynamics, leads to giving the real back to God, as only the idealizable characteristics of fluids are included in their mathematization. (1985)

Jacques Derrida
There’s so much I don’t know about astrophysics, I wish I’d read that book by that wheelchair guy. (2000)

Deleuze
In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogenous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable but rather metastable , endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed…In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to an extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate …(1990)

Régis Debray
Ever since Gödel showed that there does not exist a proof of the consistency of Peano’s arithmetic that is formalizable within this theory, political scientists have had the means for understanding why it is necessary to mummify Lenin and display him to the “accidental” comrades in a mausoleum, at the Center of the National Community. (1980)

Jean Baudrillard
There is no better model of the way in which the computer screen and the mental screen of our brain are interwoven than Moebius’s topology with its peculiar contiguity of near and far, inside and outside, object and subject within the same spiral .(1993).