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Tom Vandeputte

@tomvandeputte.bsky.social

520 followers 260 following 96 posts

Philosophy and critical theory | Professor at Sandberg Institute Amsterdam | Working on catastrophe, pessimism and utopian imagination | Books-in-progress: Benjamin, Anders, Weil

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Nov 20

A piece that came out in New German Critique sometime between leaving Twitter and rejoining this place: "Continuity as Catastrophe: Origins of a Thesis in Walter Benjamin."

read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-c...

Unfortunately no longer open access, but feel free to PM for a copy.

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Reposted by Tom Vandeputte

Jacob Wren @jacobwren.bsky.social · Aug 12

“Official history is believing murderers at their word.”
- Simone Weil

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Aug 6

Eighty years since Hiroshima – I remember the strangely superficial terms in which the event was discussed in history classes: as a curious moral dilemma, an exercise in moral reasoning and the calculus of human life/death, quick to pass over its monstrosity

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Aug 6

“The absurdity […] that the human being can desire – and does desire – more from the world than it offers.” (GA)

Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Aug 4

An outline for a genealogy of the category of progress from 1940/41 (discussed in his letters with Arendt and included in the collected correspondence between them)

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Aug 4

Anders traces this back to the fantasy of a self independent from the world: a genealogy that passes through alchemical attempts at forging an artificial human being (homunculus) through the bourgeois ideal of the self-made man and, finally, the “I” of German Idealism – a “transcendental homunculus”

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Aug 4

Günther Anders’ writings from the early 1940s refer to a primordial, “extreme” concept of freedom that repeats itself in the modern: a “freedom without consequences” - the liberatory experience of unaccountability and impunity that he may have recognised in fascism

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Aug 1

“Nothing dies as slowly as a category” – Günther Anders, writing in 1940-41, on the persistence of the category of progress (which, in turn, testifies to the slow death of the category of providence)

Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jul 23

“Unreadable rhythm betrayed the socially marginalised who no longer spoke to anyone, not even to themselves; unmotivated inversions became the symptom of a bad consciousness; the wrongly inserted clause in a government address the circumstantial evidence for an excuse, and he predicted betrayal.”

Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jul 23

Günther Anders’ one-page eulogy to Benjamin focuses entirely on his conception of language and its critique: “The distinction between the truth of the matter and the correctness of syntax left him cold; so deeply was he convinced that, also in language, the untrue could never find the right syntax.”

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jul 13

Anders to Adorno: “Through the absence of fermatae [musical pauses] in your texts, through the principled avoidance of new paragraphs, you resentfully disallow the reader to breathe. […] You seem to want to punish your reader for always being inferior to you, for basically being the wrong reader.”

Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jul 12

Anders’ sharp critique of Adorno is a critique of form: “I believe I detect a tone of revenge, of contempt, of violation in your style. […] Because you forgo political action […] you attempt, with linguistic means, to produce something resembling action, to at least inflict something on the reader.”

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jul 9

The correspondence between Bloch and Anders – this quote is from the letter of August 12, 1959

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jul 9

Bloch recognises the impetus of Anders’ “book of mourning” on the antiquated human being while pointing out that this mourning “is not [his] own”: “precisely because it testifies, as an inverted utopia, to that which does not age – not because it was never there but because it is not yet”

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jul 7

Of all the thinkers in the orbit of the Frankfurt School, the most careful reader of Anders seems to have been Bloch, who was deeply impressed by his “book of mourning” (the first volume of The Obsolescence of Mankind) and especially the Hiroshima journals, which he called Anders’ “book of peace”

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jul 6

Günther Anders writing to Ernst Bloch in 1959: “Adorno […] regards me as an unpleasant piece of furniture, an uncontrollable one – we don’t make use of each other”

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jun 20

Summer reading from years ago that is back on this year's reading list: early 20C histories/theories of depression

Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jun 11

On protest and demonstration:

Sam Menefee-Libey @sml47.bsky.social · Jun 10

These are not “protests,” they are demonstrations. We’re not asking them for anything other than to fuck off.

It’s a demonstration of resistance, of counterpower, of the threat of ungovernability, of the emergent/potential backlash against exploitation and abuses by the ruling class.

Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jun 6

Minima Moralia: "In the hasteful sleepless night, duration causes unendurable dread. The human being's life becomes a moment [...] waking to its own futility in face of the bad eternity of time itself. [...] What is revealed in such contraction of hours is the reverse of time fulfilled."

Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jun 6

The Adornian take: we are deprived of the capacity to dream of a world where we can sleep. Us hovering between sleeplessness and dreamless sleep only provides a negative image of a different sleep – we cannot grasp what that such sleeping and dreaming would feel like, only that this isn't it.

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jun 6

There are of course traces of this proposition in the history of utopian imaginaries: the idea that sleep would take on a radically different significance and quality in a transformed world

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jun 6

The need for sleep is connected to a double fear/ anxiety: the necessary defencelessness when sleeping lies at the origin of politics; but sleep is, for Alain, also the source of a fear of death and, in particular, ghosts – the return of the dead – that lies at the origin of religion

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jun 6

Alain, who taught a generation of philosophers including Canguilhem and Simone Weil, argues that "sleep is more tyrannical than hunger" – the human being's "first worries likely stem from this need; it begins to organise sleep and waking"

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jun 6

A striking theme in early 20C French thought that never seems to have been developed: the attempt to base a materialist account of the origin of human societies / social forms not on the need for food and shelter but the need to sleep

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Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jun 5

Even at its most saturated, our apocalyptic imagination pales in comparison to that of a random fifteenth-century monk

Tom Vandeputte @tomvandeputte.bsky.social · Jun 5

Spinoza would certainly disagree