Rolling Philosophy

looks good! series editor for both that book and the galloway book was my dissertation chair. lots of good books in that series (of course i say that).

given my interest in peirce and george spencer-brown im *very* interested in what his graphs/diagrams look like.

a sneak preview 4 u

http://i.imgur.com/I9ottge.jpg

though there aren't many of his own, it's mostly reproductions of other people's

btw what do you think of chatelet? i saw a talk on him recently that was v interesting and featured this impressive diagram:

https://commonsensecollective.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/the-process-of-formalisation.jpg?w=650

ooh nice. i think im gonna have to read that post-continental book asap.

are you talking about gilles chatelet? i only literally just heard of him the other day. To Live and Think Like Pigs? that's a pretty cool diagram!

"the pulp of the sensible" <<<<>>>>"the wild heart of mathematics."

that's the chatelet yeah. i think that diagram is from (or derived from) his figuring space: philosophy, mathematics and physics

i don't know anything about philosophy but my favourite hyper-nerdy economics blog has a post about an economics paper written by peirce (!), whose name i recognized from lurking this thread

https://afinetheorem.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/note-on-the-theory-of-the-economy-of-research-c-s-peirce-1879/

peirce pops up in the weirdest places! i am not a terribly intelligent person so thinking/writing about any philosopher is hard for me, but peirce is a special case because he was something of a genius in fields that i cannot hope to ever even scratch the surface of.

i'll stop cluttering up the thread with laruelle stuff after this post, but here's a review of the galloway book by John Ó Maoilearca that's a pretty good summary.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/galloways-non-digital-introduction-to-laruelle

one last thought is that the laruellean description of philosophy is incredibly reductive and eurocentric (actually, maybe even franco-centric) to the extent that any claim to "non-standard philosophy" (claims that often boil down to a repeated assurance that this is *not* philosophy, honest!) strike me as re-discovering the wheel. we have plenty of discourses that are not beholden to philosophy or its "sufficiency"--why adopt this one and not another? it's less non-philosophy than an attempt at super-philosophy, that is, modern philosophy through and through, always surpassing and outbidding. (this is incidentally why i think Merdeyeux's intuition that the marxism stuff is most interesting is true because it takes non-philosophy as a particular way of reading philosophy!)

read steven shaviro's "three essays on accelerationism," which was sorta ok but nothing special, but it did make me think this accelerationism stuff is pretty stupid (shaviro is agnostic on it).

does that mean you can tell us what it is now

it is what you think it is, pretty much! let's hurry up and get to the collapse of capitalism, already.

oh i thought they were like some singularity people

human enhancement, that ish

oh yes that does come up as well. i guess in a broader sense it's about taking the effects of modernity (however you want to describe it) and trying your damnedest to encourage those developments in the hopes of an exit from modernity. (modernity being my own term here). "the only way out is through" is shaviro's general description.

so yeah the singularity types fit in as well--rather than hold on to some notion of the human you simply embrace the cyborg you're becoming.

what else is hot shit these days in the philosophy/theory world? let's say im interested in the "contemporary" theoretical scene.

was actually gonna pick up shaviro's other recent book on OOO, but boy i really hate that stuff. feel like his position as a relative outsider will make it palatable.

amazon has really been pushing bernard stiegler, wendy brown, and brian massumi on me. (the massumi i think because he mentions luhmann in passing and im always searching for new books that mention him, haha).

If you're interested, j., #ACCELERATE anthology does a decent job of tracing out the main lines of development in accelerationist thought and its most important precursors, and its table of contents and introduction are available online: http://www.urbanomic.com/pub_accelerate.php. I'm still fairly skeptical of the accelerationist project: given the history of the left since Reagan and Thatcher, I'm not sure the old proposal for "heightening the contradictions" of capitalist modernity is necessarily that useful for socialist or communist organizing.

Benjamin Noys is also worth reading on the topic, I think: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/crash-and-burn-debating-accelerationism/

...or, at least, everything rests on what "heightening the contradictions" means in practice, and the accelerationist version seems bound to an aesthetics of technological novelty in a way that fails to open up new possibilities for the left.

yeah that's just the thing--it's hard to distinguish it from previous "avant garde" positions, really. that's aside from the very dubious assertion that the disequilibrium of a capitalist modernity implies some sort of equilibrium on other side--or if not equilibrium then some pure alternative. i feel like the whole irony of it is that they don't want to get their hands dirty and stake a position that may, in some respect, prop up capital: "if i gotta participate, then im gonna participate so hard the whole things collapses." i think, on the contrary, most measures are half-measures, at best.

nina power's critique of accelerationism nails it imo http://fillip.ca/content/decapitalism-left-scarcity-and-the-state

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/a-marxist-heresy also good (tho you need a subscription)

great links, thanks!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8650728-being-and-time

i've been using goodreads lately again, mostly to see how it works with my kindle. it's interesting to read the community reviews of a book like 'being and time'. i noticed that an eminently qualified friend who does crazy continental formalistic post-badiou metalogic/physics prudently demurred from reviewing it despite loving it, which is maybe the way it is with scholars. so what you get is hundreds of fairly frank non-expert encapsulations and reader-responses that highlight reception issues (difficulty duh) and rely on the most salient takeaways and the readiest secondary-source helpmeets, and aren't ashamed to take a stab at articulating why the book is supposed to be of actual, like, human interest.

i dunno, it kind of feels like overhearing what students could make of things years after school, when the teacher's not in the room to bring out the worst in them / serve his or her suppressive function

some are idiosyncratic

the dynamic of the book is very musical, it seemed to me. drone-like. as if the loooong sounds are repeated and repeated again, creating a texture which changes your "mood" - your "attunement" - making you able to see how a new "ground" is disclosed.

that said, one must appreciate the application of husserlian technique to the ancient rhetoric. that's cool. however: the greasiness of H-bomb opening the entire thing here with the disingenuous lament that 'OH NOS no one ever thought of the problem of Being before me, but got confused by examining mere beings!!1" is kinda gross insofar as every asshole opens with the complaint that no one ever pays attention to what i think is important. (we note that it is a standard refrain in ayn rand's writings, and leads us to diagnose a severe dunning-kruger complex, in addition to the stirnerian proto-fascistic self-oriented kvetching.)

haha those are both great.

B&T maybe a unique case because it's at once a pretty abstruse and technical book and something a philosophical layman will have heard of and be interested in reading. i bet anti-oedipus and being and nothingness have pretty interesting reviews as well.

yes i was planning on trawling thru the thousand plateaus reviews next, expecting to find a bit more enthusiastic partisanship

lol i just did that

anyone have any recommendations for a really good secondary texts on foucault? one that focused on the "later" foucault in particular (biopolitics) would be most appreciated, but all are good.

well, anglo nerds usually reach for the dreyfus and rabinow volume, not sure what its status is nowadays among hedz

i've read and been impressed by arnold davidson's book on sexuality, which majorly features foucault (though iirc more of the clinicalization period stuff than you may want, than on the lectures, tho i can't remember for sure and davidson has been all over the english reception of the lectures anyway)

maybe johanna oksala's foucault, politics, and violence? i haven't read it but i often hear her work mentioned when that period of foucault is being discussed

thanks guys. I will check those out.

the only one i could think of myself was jeffrey nealon's "foucault beyond foucault."

Did you ever read Deleuze's Foucault? It's unsurprisingly dense but consistently weird and provocative. Also, this may be tertiary reading, but Wendy Brown's new book, Undoing the Demos, takes Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics lectures as her starting point for her analysis of neoliberalism. (I haven't read it yet, but the chapters I've heard delivered as lectures were promising.) I've also heard good things about Lynne Huffer's Mad About Foucault, which is supposed to try to rethink Foucault's relation to queer theory on the basis of his early work in his History of Madness.

*Mad for Foucault, that is

ooh those are some good ones! thanks

Oh, and it's a little repetitive from one chapter to the next, and more a text using Foucault than a text on Foucault, but I found Dean Spade's Normal Life useful in drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality to think about the limits of rights-centered approaches to trans politics.

ok just one more: any good secondary texts on agamben?

No problem! Leland de la Durantaye's Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction provides a lucid and reliable overview of Agamben's work (particularly good on Agamben's ongoing mediation between Heidegger and Benjamin), and Kevin Attell's Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction seems pretty exhaustive in treating the implicit dialogue between Agamben's work and Derrida's. (I haven't read all of Attell's book yet, but I've heard him work out most of its arguments in seminar form.)

i don't know about single-authored works dedicated to agamben but http://re-press.org/books/the-italian-difference-between-nihilism-and-biopolitics/ has some good stuff (and is free to download!)

... oh, and Benjamin Noys's Culture of Death and Achille Mbembe's "Necropolitics" are also useful, though they build on Agamben to think about the relation between politics and death rather than confining themselves to his work.

xp

all of those look great! thanks again everyone.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/thinking-about-mindreading-mirroring-and-embedded-cognition/

at least one person here seems not to understand what genre 'interview' is

The interviewer should have used only parenthetical citations in the opening blurb.

'so tell me about your vita'

Anyone happen to have read this? http://www.amazon.ca/Everyday-Aesthetics-Yuriko-Saito/dp/0199575673

It looks like an appealing topic, though hopefully as open to less salutary everyday aesthetic enjoyments as to the "seemingly simple and innocuous."

i've skimmed through it in the past, thinking about how to use it in a course, but now when i look back at it i'm having a hard time seeing what i saw in it. 100% beholden to the boringest of anglo academic aesthetics.

Thanks for the warning. I'm not sure yet if I'm interested in boring analytic aesthetics, so I'll see how this goes. If I have to read about the ontology of art objects I may be out.

nah, mostly the logic of judgment and experience, i think. iirc the author's written on pragmatism; there's a touch of dewey, but seemingly mostly for dialectical purposes

there's a twitter meme going around among academics - try to describe your research using only the 1000 most common words

http://splasho.com/upgoer5/?i=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

i think philosophy might have an edge! except that you can't use the word 'philosophy'.

I don't think there's any way I could do this! will have to try later.

it's funny but the idea of this is essentially what my advisor tried to get me to do on the "dissertation" section of my cover letters. he said "try not to use any of the specialized words you use in the dissertation."