Recent Thoughts and Efforts

I'll admit, we haven't been posting as much lately: though Joshua has been quite consistent, Matt's in the finishing stages of his PhD, but what have I been doing?

1. Book reviews. These are ostensibly what our blog is about, and yet the last one that we posted, back in late April, was my review of Danto's Andy Warhol. As per my new year's resolution, I have written two reviews since then, but both are destined for journals, one of them on Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Literature, the other on Bernard Stiegler's For a New Critique of Political Economy. The Rancière review should be up soon. This leaves, for the next few months, one more review to which I have committed, on Miguel Abensour's Democracy Against the State. For those of you who are curious, it was not a programmatic decision to take on three books recently published by Polity Press.

2. The Rancière book. For the moment we'll call it The Aesthetics of Equality. The book will range from discussions of Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Sartre/de Beauvoir, Marx and recent Marxism, to Schiller and maybe even F.T. Marinetti (adding Marinetti to the list surprises me as well). As I've mentioned before, I've already presented talks on Rancière in relation to Marx and in relation to Sartre (with a dash of Fanon, for that matter), and I hope to see these essays through to print relatively soon (in academic terms). Perhaps my blogging has slowed down, though, because I'm spending a lot of time reading through Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes.

3. Revisiting Schelling. On the heels of my keynote address to the "Aftermath of German Idealism" conference in Wuppertal, I will be giving a talk in October entitled "Pure Contingencies: A Critique of Markus Gabriel's Formal Ontology," and a talk, co-authored with our own Sean Moreland, in January, entitled "'Urged by Schelling': Schelling's Philosophy of Art and Poe's Critical and Fictional Practice." More on these soon.

4. And, of course, reading. The highlights include books by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chinua Achebe, Gonçalo M. Tavares, and Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant's In Praise of Creoleness.