Rolling Philosophy

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."

for research like that, the hardest part may be that even if you can give a good basic paraphrase of a more sophisticated idea, you can't even stipulate its name once you explain it, so you have to be able to repeatedly keep things in basic terms

yeah and it certainly shows how big fancy words are developed in many cases to make ease of communication greater between academics. (if certainly not for outsiders)

if it had "math" this'd be easy for me

I hate philosophical jargon

next time someone uses math in a conversation with me: "spare me the jargon!"

nah just the word "math"

nah just the word "math"

you mean "stuff with numbers and such."

numbers are so passé

anyway just pick a word in the 1000 yr not gonna use and say "let 'blah' be ..." And then you can use jargon

haha but there's no jargon for the jargon of 'let … be…'

this discussion between david m. berry and alexander galloway struck me as particularly "of the moment." I hope this link works:
http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Galloway-and-Berry-TCS-Interview-2015.pdf

crossing my fingers on the formatting here:

ARG: We must forget Deleuze. It’s troubling to admit, given how influential Deleuze has been on my own thinking. But it’s imperative today that we forget Deleuzianism in all its many guises. First, we must forget the Google Deleuzians, those who see the world as a vital assemblage, proffering untold bounties of knowledge – and riches. From clouds, to humans, to molluscs, to molecules, the world is nothing but systems. Lines of flight slice through assemblages, creating Berry and Galloway 7 Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on June 18, 2015 new living landscapes. Systems are open, dynamic, and robust. Networks produce value. These are some of the many mantras of the Google Deleuzians. We must also forget the Carl Sagan Deleuzians. Remember Carl Sagan and his awestruck odes to the ‘billions and billions of stars’? Carl Sagan Deleuzians are those who think that ontology is about producing a sense of sublime grandeur in the mind of the thinker. These kinds of Deleuzians assume that ‘nature’ and ‘human nature’ coincide, and that the world is there ‘for us’ or, more specifically, to ‘impress’ us. For the Carl Sagan Deleuzians ontology means awesome-ology. Finally, we must forget the Wet Diaper Deleuzians, or those who, in an endless restaging of the 1960s, think that being political means liberating one’s desires. (Let’s not forget that Facebook’s entire business plan is based on the liberation of desire.) For the Wet Diaper Deleuzians, everything is a desiring machine driven by an endless reserve of polymorphous perversity. They giggle and cry, suckle and shit, fall down and get back up. The world is a giant sandbox, filled with toys. Everyone they meet is a potential Father or Master that might threaten their desire, someone to be dethroned, debased, even killed. Each act becomes a doll house revolution – off with their heads!

lol

Lines of flight slice through assemblages, creating Berry and Galloway 7 Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on June 18, 2015 new living landscapes

ha! what's sad is that im pretty sure i read through that and didnt even notice.

in any case that's at the bottom of page 7.

im pretty bitter at the moment but if all of that interview doesn't strike me as a whole lot of nothing.

some dudes should tape record themselves

it reminds me of that portlandia skit: "networks are ovah!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGqN3AKOsA