Symposium

Looking back at June, I see that posting here has dropped dramatically. I'm going to pin that on the various projects that I've taken on over the past year, several of which have (or were supposed to have deadlines) in June and July.

Nevertheless, I didn't write this post to provide excuses or reassurances (if you needed them...). Instead, I'd like to announce that I've take over as the book review editor for Symposium, the journal for the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy. 

For the readers of The Notes Taken, this means that I will periodically be posting links to the book reviews that will be published in Symposium. The journal's policy is to publish their book reviews online in advance of publication. I think this should be the default position of any academic journal. In a sense, a review offers the reader both a preliminary discussion of the book in question and, perhaps, some motivation for reading it. If it's tucked away in a journal that either isn't online, or barricaded by a pay wall, it could be overlooked for a more accessible review. And for the author, let's face it: hardly any academic prestige accrues for book reviews, so you may as well have a readership.

That being said, the first review here fulfills some of the functions I just described. Rachel Loewen Walker's review of Paola Marrati's Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy makes the case that

it is within the Cinema books that we find the most developed politics of Deleuze’s work, a politics which refuses modernity’s obsession with agency as the freedom and action of the subject, and instead foregrounds movement and perception as contributors to the agency of thought. Hence cinema, as discussed through the movement-image and the time-image, becomes a primary frame of reference for the development of such a politics. 

While I'm not a Deleuze-and-politics kind of person, Walker's review left me with the impression that I ought to reconsider my view. If she talked me into reconsidering Deleuze's work on cinema, I'd say Walker makes a strong case for considering Marrati's book.