Slow Thought

“The invasion of cheap American fast food into the heart of Rome caused a sensation”

“One protester was Carlo Petrini, a Leftist Italian journalist, who initiated a movement called Slow Food. Petrini emphasised locally grown produce, biodiversity and, above all, the enjoyment of authentic Italian taste”

“the idea morphed into Cittaslow, or Slow Cities, part of a broader cultural meme called the Slow Movement”

“the Slow Movement appears conservative, while constructively calling for valuing local cultures, whether in food and agriculture, or in preserving slower, more biological rhythms against the ever-faster, digital and mechanically measured pace of the technocratic society”

“Yet, it is preservative rather than conservative, acting as a foil against predatory multinationals in the food industry that undermine local artisans of culture, from agriculture to architecture”

“the Slow Movement founds a kind of contemporary commune in each locale – a convivium – responding to its time and place, while spreading organically as communities assert their particular needs for belonging and continuity against the onslaught of faceless government bureaucracy and multinational interests”

“In the tradition of the Slow Movement, I hereby declare my manifesto for ‘Slow Thought’”

“the first step toward a psychiatry of the event, based on the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s central notion of the event”

“The three conditions for an event are: that something happens to us (by pure accident, no destiny, no determinism), that we name what happens, and that we remain faithful to it”

“1. Slow Thought is marked by peripatetic Socratic walks, the face-to-face encounter of Levinas, and Bakhtin’s dialogic conversations”

“2. Slow Thought creates its own time and place”

“3. Slow Thought has no other object than itself”

“4. Slow Thought is porous”

“5. Slow Thought is playful”

“6. Slow Thought is a counter-method, rather than a method, for thinking as it relaxes, releases and liberates thought from its constraints and the trauma of tradition”

“According to Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.’ The most famous and radical philosopher of the 20th century did not establish a philosophical system because he wished to cure himself – and us – of philosophy. The reference to therapy is important as Wittgenstein compared the work of philosophy to that of medicine or psychology: ‘The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.’”

“When I say that Slow Thought is a counter-method, I align it with Wittgenstein’s thought, published posthumously in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (1980), where he concludes:

What we find out in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only science does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is enormously difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fact the synopsis of trivialities”

“Systematic philosophers (according to Rorty) and true philosophers (according to Badiou) build systems of thought, often constructing their own materials (methods) for the philosophical edifice. Thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Giambattista Vico and Giordano Bruno, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant and Husserl – they are all systematic philosophers”

“Others address edifying questions (Rorty) or work to undermine established systems of thought (Badiou’s anti-philosophers). Rorty refers to these thinkers as ‘therapeutic rather than constructive’. Badiou’s anti-philosophers include Paul of Tarsus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and his follower Lacan, and Wittgenstein”

“I discern systematic, true philosophers as philosophers of the event, opening possibilities – of thought and of life. Anti-philosophers are the philosophers of trauma and the abyss, closing possibilities”

“There is another group of thinkers whom I call methodologists. These are thinkers who offer us new tools of thought”

“While Badiou sees Wittgenstein as an anti-philosopher, it is clear that Wittgenstein saw himself as the great methodologist who eschewed a philosophical system and, by clarifying language games, cleaned up certain philosophical pseudo-problems”

“Derrida is also best viewed as a methodologist who offers a series of extraordinary insights into language, culture and thought with such notions as the pharmakon, dissemination and iteration”

“Foucault offers a series of methodologies – genealogy, archaeology and problematicisation. Agamben has honed Foucault’s archaeology whose genealogy he traces back to Nietzsche and Freud into a refined methodology that he calls philosophical archaeology”

“7. Slow Thought is deliberate”