tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34448282532394147122024-03-05T11:50:42.163-05:00The Notes TakenBook reviews on politics, philosophy, art and fiction.D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.comBlogger514125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-78537521127340513632021-04-08T04:27:00.003-04:002023-05-07T02:07:03.239-04:00The Philosophy of Antifascism: Resources<p>I no longer blog thanks to Twitter, teaching and other commitments. However, I will dedicate--and hopefully continue to update--this post as a resource guide to my writings on antifascism around and related to the core contribution to the project, <i>The Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy</i> (<a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786615572/Philosophy-of-Antifascism-Punching-Nazis-and-Fighting-White-Supremacy" target="_blank">Rowman and Littlefield, 2020</a>).</p><p><b>Last update: May 6, 2023 </b><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq1DMfTTt5NgaLOKqlvSN8wMWKSVB57r93GukFm0urCA0ZcWxrOoFhVMyZPgk8AWKIToAnuCnCTgTQTbzwzfZqvF3wImgxPHyBL1ZwdRys-GIredfpgqgYV0zp3v_cQZjPMpyFWY3OXcI/s2048/PhilosophyAntifascism.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1325" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq1DMfTTt5NgaLOKqlvSN8wMWKSVB57r93GukFm0urCA0ZcWxrOoFhVMyZPgk8AWKIToAnuCnCTgTQTbzwzfZqvF3wImgxPHyBL1ZwdRys-GIredfpgqgYV0zp3v_cQZjPMpyFWY3OXcI/s320/PhilosophyAntifascism.jpg" /></a></div><i><span>On January 20th, 2017, during an interview on the streets of
Washington D.C., white nationalist Richard Spencer was punched by an
anonymous antifascist. The moment was caught on video and quickly went
viral, and soon “punching Nazis” was a topic of heated public debate.
How might this kind of militant action be conceived of, or justified,
philosophically? Can we find a deep commitment to antifascism in the
history of philosophy?<br /><br />Through the existentialism of Simone de
Beauvoir, with some reference to Fanon and Sartre, this book identifies
the philosophical reasons for the political action being enacted by
contemporary antifascists. In addition, using the work of Jacques
Rancière, it argues that the alt-right and the far right aren’t a kind
of politics at all, but rather forms of parapolitical and paramilitary
mobilization aimed at re-entrenching the power of the state and capital.<br /><br />Devin
Shaw argues that in order to resist fascist mobilization, contemporary
movements find a diversity of tactics more useful than principled
nonviolence. Antifascism must focus on the systemic causes of the
re-emergence of fascism, and thus must fight capital accumulation and
the underlying white supremacism. Providing new, incisive
interpretations of Beauvoir, existentialism, and Rancière, he makes the
case for organizing a broader militant movement against fascism.</span></i><p></p><p><span>Purchase <i>Philosophy of Antifascism</i> at leftwingbooks.net (<a href="https://www.leftwingbooks.net/book/content/philosophy-antifascism-punching-nazis-and-fighting-white-supremacy" target="_blank">here</a>) and receive a free copy of the pamphlet <i>The Politics of the Blockade</i> (Kersplebedeb, 2020) (see <a href="https://www.leftwingbooks.net/book/content/politics-blockade" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://kersplebedeb.com/posts/the-politics-of-the-blockade-by-devin-zane-shaw/" target="_blank">here</a>).<br /></span></p><p><b><span>Reviews (open-access) or Discussions:</span></b></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span>Donovan Irven, "The Three-Way Fight and Antifascist Philosophy," <i>Erraticus</i>, January 18, 2021 (<a href="https://erraticus.co/2021/01/18/antifascism-antifa-fascism-jason-stanley-devin-shaw-liberalism/" target="_blank">link</a>).</span></li><li><span>Shane Burley, "Antifa Academics," <i>Full Stop</i>, April 5, 2021 (<a href="https://www.full-stop.net/2021/04/05/reviews/shane-burley/antifa-academics/" target="_blank">link</a>).</span></li><li><span>Robert Luzecky, <i>Symposium</i>, June 17, 2021 (<a href="https://www.c-scp.org/2021/06/17/devin-zane-shaw-philosophy-of-antifascism-punching-nazis-and-fighting-white-supremacy" target="_blank">link</a>) </span></li><li><span>Craig Fowlie, "American Antifascism Comes of Age," May 13, 2022 (<a href="https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/11/1/article-p139_6.xml" target="_blank">link</a>). <br /></span></li><li><span>Red Menace: Neither Liberalism nor Reaction: Centering the Three-Way Fight, August 31, 2022 (<a href="https://redmenace.libsyn.com/three-way-fight" target="_blank">Podcast link</a>)<br /></span></li></ul><p><b><span> Related Writings:</span></b></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>With Stanislav Vysotsky, "Conference Report: Antifascism in the 21st Century," <i>Three Way Fight</i>, February 7, 2023 (<a href="https://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2023/02/conference-report-anti-fascism-in-21st.html" target="_blank">link</a>).</li><li>"Where Do We Go Next? A Review of Shane Burley's <i>Why We Fight</i>," <i>Three Way Fight</i>, November 3, 2021 (<a href="https://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2021/11/where-do-we-go-next-review-of-shane.html">link</a>).<br /></li><li><span>"Seven Theses on the Three-Way Fight," <i>Three Way Fight</i>, August 1, 2021 (<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2021/08/seven-theses-on-three-way-fight.html" target="_blank">link</a>); in pamphlet form from 1312 Press (<a href="https://1312press.noblogs.org/post/2021/08/19/new-zine-seven-theses-on-the-three-way-fight/" target="_blank">link</a>).<br /></span></li><li><span>"From German Communist Antifascism to a Contemporary United Front," Preface to T. Derbent, <i>German Communist Resistance 1933–1945</i> (Paris: FLP, 2021), 1–17 (<a href="https://foreignlanguages.press/new-roads/the-german-communist-resistance-t-derbent/" target="_blank">link</a>).</span></li><li><span>"'Command that Does Not Command': Reconsidering Rancière's Opposition of Politics and Policing,"<i>Parrhesia</i> 33 (2020), 83–112 (<a href="https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia33/parrhesia33_shaw.pdf" target="_blank">link</a>: it's an early version of chapter 3 of <i>Philosophy of Antifascism</i>) <br /></span></li><li><span>"On Toscano's Critique of 'Racial Fascism,'" <i>Three Way Fight</i>, December 30, 2020 (<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2020/12/on-toscanos-critique-of-racial-fascism.html" target="_blank">link</a>).</span></li><li><span>Review of Ajith (K. Murali), <i>Critiquing Brahmanism</i>, <i>Marx and Philosophy Review of Books</i>, December 9, 2020 (<a href="https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/18560_critiquing-brahmanism-a-collection-of-essays-by-k-murali-ajith-reviewed-by-devin-zane-shaw/" target="_blank">link</a>).</span></li><li><span>"Between System-Loyal Vigilantism and System-Oppositional Violence, <i>Three Way Fight</i>, October 25, 2020 (<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2020/10/between-system-loyal-vigilantism-and.html" target="_blank">link</a>).</span></li><li><span>Review of Jason Stanley, <i>How Fascism Works</i>, </span><span><span><i>Marx and Philosophy Review of Books</i>, May 13, 2020 (<a href="https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/18021_how-fascism-works-the-politics-of-us-and-them-by-jason-stanley-reviewed-by-devin-zane-shaw/" target="_blank">link</a>).</span></span></li><li><span><span>"Fighting Fascism with Feminism: A Review of Petronella Lee's <i>Anti-Fascism against Machismo</i>," <i>Social Justice Centre</i>, January 5, 2020 (<a href="https://www.thesocialjusticecentre.org/blog/2020/1/5/fighting-fascism-with-feminism-a-review-of-petronella-lees-anti-fascism-against-machismo" target="_blank">link</a>).<br /></span></span></li></ul><p><span><b> Interviews and Book Events</b><br /></span></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span>With Revolutionary Left Radio, August 16, 2020: "A Philosophy of Antifascism: Existentialism, Decolonization, and the Three-Way Fight" (<a href="https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/antifascism" target="_blank">link</a>).</span></li><li><span>With The Howard Zinn Book Fair's podcast <i>Books to the Barricades</i>, August 2020 (<a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-831306647/philosophy-of-antifascism" target="_blank">link</a>).</span></li><li><span>Join Book Launch with J. Moufawad-Paul, December 10, 2020 (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_0akJsi-Tk" target="_blank">link</a>) </span></li><li><span>Rad Reads, "End Table Book Chat" January 8, 2021 (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK1dh3wzksE" target="_blank">YouTube</a>)<br /></span></li><li><span>With Revolutionary Voices, "Antifascism and Philosophy," January 22, 2021 (<a href="https://www.buzzsprout.com/1260581/7436833-antifascism-and-philosophy-w-devin-z-shaw" target="_blank">link</a>). <br /></span></li><li><span>With Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, "Philosophy of Antifascism in a Settler-Colonial Society," January 31, 2021 (<a href="https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/devin-z-shaw-on-a-philosophy-of-antifascism-in-a-settler-society" target="_blank">link</a>).</span></li><li><span><i>Brotherwise Dispatch </i>vs. Devin Zane Shaw, <i>Brotherwise Dispatch</i>, vol. 3, issue 13, June-August 2022 (<a href="https://brotherwiseinterviewsexclusives.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-brotherwise-dispatch-vs-devin-zane.html" target="_blank">link</a>).<br /></span></li><li><span>With What's Left of Philosophy, "Antifascism and Emancipatory Violence," March 6, 2023 (<a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/79625849" target="_blank">link</a>) <br /></span></li></ul><span>Bonus: Rad Reads reviews <i>The Politics of the Blockade</i> January 26, 2021 (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMRmwthe6YQ" target="_blank">Youtube</a>). <br /></span>D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-62582202127374108512016-10-26T16:17:00.000-04:002016-10-26T16:17:00.168-04:00Talk at MUN: Rancière and Clastres<div style="text-align: justify;">
Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk at Memorial University in St. John’s, titled "The State and the Police: Considerations on Jacques Rancière and Pierre Clastres." In the talk, I examine the problem of command and coercion through the work of Clastres and Rancière. The argument of this talk has three parts. First, I show <i>that</i> command is a problem conceptualized by Rancière, and then, <i>how</i> the command-obedience relation functions to both reinforce and, when it is politicized, undermine the inequalities of a given police order. Then, I examine Clastres’s critique of the Eurocentric biases of anthropology and ethnography that reduce societies <i>against</i> the state to societies that lack a state. To show how societies refuse coercion and state power, I contend that Clastres proposes debt as both the origin of state power and the reason for the discontinuity and heterogeneity between societies against the state and societies with a state. I conclude with a series of critical remarks aimed toward evaluating Clastres’s identification of coercion with state power and Rancière’s categorization of command as policing. </div>
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The talk is at <span class="text_exposed_show">Science 2101, 4:30 to 5:45.</span> </div>
D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-2233086227032068322016-09-26T15:32:00.003-04:002016-09-26T15:32:54.414-04:00Schelling's Anthropocentrism: A Short Presentation<i>The <a href="http://notes-taken.blogspot.ca/2016/09/book-launch-rethinking-german-idealism.html" target="_blank">book launch</a> for Rethinking German Idealism was probably as successful as can be for a book in a prohibitively priced hardcover: a good turn out, lots of questions, free food (as you'll see below), decently priced drinks, et cetera. I've decided to post my short presentation here (minus the footnotes and references supplied in the published version).</i><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Part of the renaissance in Schelling studies is due to his work in nature-philosophy. His criticisms of modern concepts of nature suggest that his work could be fertile ground for thinking about nature non-anthropocentrically and for undermining the anthropocentric corollary that humans are the masters of nature and exercise dominion over it. Were that true, it might also be fertile ground for articulating normative claims supporting animal rights. We need only consider his claim that ordinary concepts of nature view it as a receptacle for a quantity of objects</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> as not only anticipating Heidegger’s critique of technicity, but also Tom Regan’s critique of Peter Singer’s utilitarianism. The utilitarian approach to giving equal consideration to the interests of sentient beings considers these beings as if they are ‘</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">mere receptacles</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">’ for ‘quanta of pleasure and pain.’ </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">However, things aren’t that straightforward. Schelling is, of course, a sharp critic of modern concepts of nature. He argues, for example, that due to its dependence on mechanistic explanations of natural phenomena, modern philosophy since Descartes ‘has the common defect that nature is not available for it and that is lacks a living ground.’</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From the vantage point of nature-philosophy, there is no justification for the Cartesian reduction of animals to mere natural machines that act ‘according to the disposition of their organs.’</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Yet the problem becomes more complicated when we consider Descartes’s justification for the mechanistic explanation of animals: animals lack of their ability to use </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">logos</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> (that is, speech, reason, discursive thought, and language).</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> This philosophical anthropocentrism exhibited by Descartes is not merely a modern failing; it encompasses a much broader tradition stretching back to Aristotle, a tradition that Schelling does not escape. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Schelling repeatedly claims that animals, while not necessarily mere mechanical automatons, lack language (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">logos</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">) and freedom. In the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> (1799), he maintains that animals are ‘selfless objects’, meaning that ‘all ways of thinking a rationality in animal activities fail us.’</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Later, in the ‘Aphorisms as an Introduction to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Naturphilosophie</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">’ (1805), he claims that animals are ‘incessant somnambulists’ who do not act of their own accord, but rather act insofar as their natural ground acts through them.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Then, in the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> (1809), he argues that animals can never emerge from the dark ground of nature, and thus lack the possibility for ‘absolute or personal unity’ (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">HF,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> 40).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The reason, though, that Schelling’s anthropocentrism is of interest, is that it didn’t have to be that way. On Schelling’s account, animals fall outside of moral consideration; humans owe them no direct obligations. Descartes formulates the problem with characteristic perspicuity: anthropocentrism is ‘indulgent to human beings […] since it absolves them from the suspicion of crime when they eat or kill animals.’</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Along with a critique of Schelling, though, I try to show that certain parts of his work could lay the theoretical groundwork for a non-anthropocentric nature-philosophy. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Schelling phrases his anthropocentric claims in moral terms in the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. When discussing the emergence of the self-consciousness of practical reason, Schelling avers that, given that self-consciousness emerges through the acknowledgement of others, it is only through this act of recognition that individuality acquires moral purpose: ‘my moral existence only acquires purpose and direction through the existence of other moral beings’ (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ideas</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, 39). If we raise the ‘curious question’ as to whether these others include non-human animals, ‘whether animals also have souls,’ Schelling responds with the following: </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">a person of common sense is at once taken aback, because, with the affirmation of that, he would consider himself committed to something, which he has the right and authority to assert only of himself and those like him. (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ideas</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, 39–40; trans. modified)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">After this appeal to common sense, Schelling drops the topic. What are we to make with his curt dismissal of the problem of animal others?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s problematic in Schelling’s case because he sets a ‘natural history’ [</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Naturlehre</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">] of the mind as the task of nature-philosophy, in which the philosopher traces the emergence of consciousness within nature (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ideas</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, 30). In the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ideas</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> he demands that, philosophically speaking, ‘Nature should be Mind made visible, Mind the invisible nature.’ I mention this feature of Schelling’s philosophy since it ought to have some bearing on the status of animals. If </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Geist</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> (mind) proceeds along a continuum from simple to more complex forms, this progression should suggest that, even though humans possess faculties relatively more advanced than animals, that these distinctions are differences of degree rather than kind. A distributive continuum of intelligence or </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Geist</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> would undermine the absolute exclusion of non-human animals from ethical or moral consideration.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Instead, Schelling builds a systematic case against including animals in moral considerations. He contends that the only external beings who merit moral consideration as ‘spiritual’ equals (that is, beings possessing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Geist</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">) are those beings, ‘between whom and myself giving and receiving, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">doing and suffering</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, are fully reciprocal’ (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ideas</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, 39; my emphasis). But Schelling should not, at this point, be able to appeal to the principle of spiritual equality of beings, when precisely this principle is in question. The boundaries that he establishes between those beings who act and who suffer like us, and those who do not, affirms a much more pernicious boundary: those beings with whom we share no reciprocity do not act and do not suffer because they do not act or suffer </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">like we do</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. To dismiss the ‘curious question’ of whether animals are owed any moral obligations absolves humans, as Descartes writes, of ‘the suspicion of crime,’ when we humans assert our dominion over animals and exploit them to our ends. Unfortunately, I cannot address here how Schelling's anthropo-centrism plays out in his subsequent work. However, at least, you now know why the food was vegan.</span></div>
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<i>In the talk I was unable to address how Schelling's anthropocentrism remained consistent through 1809. I've included some comments about absolute idealism in what follows:</i><br />
<i><br /></i></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’ve noted claims from Schelling’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ideas</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> that would establish that differences between humans and animals are differences of degree and not kind. On this account, these differences of degree could be mapped onto the continuum leading from simple to complex acts of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Geist</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. This approach has the advantage of accepting the differences between humans and animals, while acknowledging that the less complex dynamics of intelligence and their modes of relating to the environment would be shared by humans and non-human animals. However, if this were Schelling’s position, he could not categorically exclude non-human animals from the sphere of moral existence. It would remain possible, given the shared features of human and non-human </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Geist</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, that humans would owe some form of moral consideration to non-human animals, or at least </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">some</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> non-human animals. I suggest, in the conclusion to the essay that Schelling’s absolute idealism could converge with what, from the standpoint of critical animal studies, Matthew Calarco calls indistinction theory, an approach that no longer takes ‘distinctions between human beings and animals as the chief point of departure for thought and practice,’ which – unlike the utilitarian approach of Singer or the deontological approach of Regan – considers not only animals like us, but also the ‘fate of animals and other beings who lack the key capacities that would establish the grounds for basic ethical consideration.’</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Perhaps, then, the critique of anthropocentrism provides an unlikely vindication for Schelling’s absolute idealism.</span></div>
<i></i>D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-18912728154141663882016-09-13T10:29:00.000-04:002016-09-13T10:29:16.430-04:00Book Launch: Rethinking German Idealism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd9nCBJhnp-WNIO0EWk8bgnk5MTkM2ZKmfk-F3N6YqJ4HpgZXizk4qamthLLpk04gwfhNuWIGsNVNWgONHzTn_b9bLBlI8Q4ej3-u33uwziv2cIiBOSNYkTpC_vRnMmahuAcUtbbRdvoE/s1600/RGI.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd9nCBJhnp-WNIO0EWk8bgnk5MTkM2ZKmfk-F3N6YqJ4HpgZXizk4qamthLLpk04gwfhNuWIGsNVNWgONHzTn_b9bLBlI8Q4ej3-u33uwziv2cIiBOSNYkTpC_vRnMmahuAcUtbbRdvoE/s320/RGI.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>
<br />
From <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/384843378306635/" target="_blank">Facebook</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="_4n-j fsl">It is with great pleasure that I invite you to
the book launch for Rethinking German Idealism (edited by Sean McGrath
and Joseph Carew, Palgrave Macmillan 2016), which will take place at
Room 404, Thomson House, 4:30-6:30, September 16.<br /> <br /> Drawing
together new and established scholars from German Idealist Studies, the
volume is an attempt to reconceive various figures in the tradition,
with an emphasis on ways in which their fundamental concepts still have
contemporary purchase. Three authors from the volume will be in
attendance: Joseph Carew, Wes Furlotte, and Devin Zane Shaw.<br /> <br />
Vegan-friendly snacks will be served. For those interested, the articles
by each author appearing in the volume can be made available by
request.<br /> <br /> Feel free to invite others.</span> </blockquote>
D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-28188432642151777352016-07-14T13:10:00.002-04:002016-07-14T13:10:22.370-04:00On Rancière and Clastres (and Todd May)In <i>Society against the State</i>, Pierre Clastres writes,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
from its beginnings our culture has conceived of political power in terms of hierarchized and authoritarian relations of command and obedience. Every real or possible form of power is consequently reducible to this privileged relation which a priori expresses the essence of power. (16) </blockquote>
I've been working on a paper that compares Rancière and Clastres to understand their respective projects. I've completed a rough draft of the section on Rancière, which responds to what I consider to be an undertheorized point in the literature: Rancière's account of command and obedience. I argue that Rancière's politics, at least as he outlines it in <i>Disagreement</i>, has two features (two features also relevant to his concept of the police): politics involves both the symbolization of equality (the aesthetics of politics) and the enactment of equality, which more specifically means <i>the disruption and subversion of relations of command</i>.<br />
<br />
By emphasizing the latter point, how equality disrupts relations of command, I think we not only gain a greater appreciation of Rancière's work, but we also gain an analytic distinction that contributes to understanding debates in Rancière scholarship. At the moment, we're only going to look at an example of the latter point.<br />
<br />
As some of you know, <a href="http://Clastres attempts to outline a genealogy of political power, and his hypothesis is that the social division, which is the State, between command and obedience precedes all other hierarchical distinctions. " target="_blank">I recently reviewed</a> Martin Breaugh et al.'s <i>Thinking Radical Democracy</i>. In that review, I discuss Rachel Magnusson's chapter on Rancière. I think it's a great and incisive essay, and I follow her discussion through a critique of the work of Todd May, who, she claims, interprets Rancière's work in terms too close to liberalism. There certainly are passages in May's work where it seems that he does verge to close to liberal accounts of equality, despite, of course, his distinction between passive and active equality. Magnusson's judgment, however, has continued to bother me. After working out the analytical distinction between symbolization and command, I now know why. Todd May is cast as both too liberal (by Magnusson) and too anarcho-purist (by Samuel Chambers) because May and his critics emphasize different features of Rancière’s politics: May focuses on the enactment—in his words, the “activation”—of equality <i>against command</i>, while Magnusson and Chambers interpret May as giving an account of political <i>symbolization</i>. Indeed, one of the virtues of May's work, in distinction to much of the literature, is to think Rancière's politics against relations of command.<br />
<br />
Next up is to deal with Clastres, who attempts to outline a genealogy of political power, and his
hypothesis is that the social division, which is the State, between
command and obedience precedes all other hierarchical distinctions. Then I will argue that Rancière's concept of the police, is a critique of this vertical model of political power.<br />
<br />D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-60522158694799458052016-07-07T13:47:00.002-04:002016-07-07T13:47:59.991-04:00Book Exchange: McLennan and ShawThese days, the time I used to spend blogging has been expended on being managing book review editor for <i>Symposium</i> and the CSCP. That does not mean that Matt and I have ended our philosophical back-and-forth. Over at <a href="http://www.c-scp.org/2016/07/07/book-exchange-mclennan-and-shaw.html" target="_blank"><i>Symposium</i></a>, we have reviewed each other's books:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Symposium inaugurates a new series, Book Exchanges, with Matthew R. McLennan’s <a href="http://www.c-scp.org/2016/07/07/devin-zane-shaw-egalitarian-moments.html">review of Devin Zane Shaw’s <i>Egalitarian Moments</i>: <i>From Descartes to Rancière </i>(Bloomsbury, 2016)</a> and Shaw’s <a href="http://www.c-scp.org/2016/07/07/matthew-r-mclennan-philosophy-sophistry-antiphilosophy.html">review of McLennan’s <i>Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy</i>: <i>Badiou’s Dispute with Lyotard</i> (Bloomsbury, 2015)</a>.
Book exchanges put contemporary scholars into dialogue through mutual
review and critique of their recent publications with the aim of
establishing intersections and points of reinforcement between works
that speak from different standpoints or different disciplines; in the
case of McLennan and Shaw, both authors aim to outline a radical and
militant philosophical approach informed by Badiou, Lyotard, and
Rancière. Such an exchange is apposite, given that McLennan and Shaw are
currently co-authoring a book on the political thought of Miguel
Abensour. –Eds.</blockquote>
D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-64225525469091286282016-05-05T14:36:00.001-04:002016-05-05T14:36:12.368-04:00Reviewing "Split Season 1981"<div style="text-align: justify;">
I not only review books in philosophy, but also about baseball, strikes, and labor. <i>The Hardball Times</i> has <a href="http://www.hardballtimes.com/the-1981-split-season-still-speaks-to-us/" target="_blank">published my review</a> of Jeff Katz's book <i>Split Season 1981: Fernandomania, the Bronx Zoo, and the Strike that Saved Baseball</i>. I can't shake the feeling that, as a longtime Giants fan, that the photograph of Fernando Valenzuela that heads the review is subtle trolling by the folks at THT...but then again, part of the book's subtitle is <i>Fernandomania</i>. But about Katz, I say:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Another way to convey Katz’s storytelling skill is to note, because I’m
too young to remember it, that the split season had always been to my
mind a statistical anomaly or a turning-point in labor relations, but
not really a <em>season</em> like I remember 1987 or 1989. However, by
the end of the book, I cursed myself for caring whether the Dodgers or
Yankees would win the World Series, I could feel how Reds fans or
Cardinals fans might dismiss the results of 1981 with an asterisk or
two, I felt indignation at the possibility that Boone was sold to, and
DeCinces traded to, the Angels at the end of season as retribution for
their efforts on behalf of the union. Finally, I grinned with pleasure
when Katz notes that an Angels team packed with union leaders—DeCinces
and Boone, but also <a class="player" href="http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=1006308&position=OF" target="_blank">Reggie Jackson</a>, <a class="player" href="http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=1000700&position=DH/OF" target="_blank">Don Baylor</a> and <a class="player" href="http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=1010835&position=P" target="_blank">Steve Renko</a>—made it to the playoffs in 1982.</blockquote>
D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-59128377744267103672016-03-16T11:29:00.000-04:002016-03-16T11:29:40.707-04:00Baseball and Intersectionality, or, A Belated Reply to Rian Watt and Craig Calcaterra<style>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria;">Intersectionality</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria;">In a pair of recent essays, both Rian Watt
(in <a href="http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=28379" target="_blank">“Life at the Margins”</a>) and Craig Calcaterra (in <a href="http://mlb.nbcsports.com/2016/02/06/stick-to-sports-never-the-intersectionalist-manifesto/" target="_blank">“The Intersectionalist Manifesto”</a>) challenge the idea that baseball writing ought to, as it’s often
said, stick to sports. Watt’s specific interest, which initiated the
discussion, was to ask what kind of baseball writing comes after Sabermetrics.
He notes that among readers and writers there is a sense that
sabermetrically-inclined analysis has reached a point of saturation, in which
much of the recent writing has been dedicated to tinkering with a well-established paradigm. Watt
proceeds to argue that discontent within the baseball writing community signals
that a paradigm shift is underway. “The best baseball
writing,” Watt notes, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">this year has been about more than baseball.
It’s been about politics, and race, and gender, and sexuality, and money, and
power, and how they all come together in this game we love. It’s placed the
game in its social context, and used it as a lens to talk about ideas that are
bigger than the nuts and bolts of a box score.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria;"></span></div>
</blockquote>
</div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">He then refers to
this approach as intersectional writing, which, as Calcaterra notes, captures
the sense in which baseball intersects with broader social dynamics such as
race, gender, and economics. Much of the pushback against intersectional
writing is premised on the claim that sports journalism ought to stick to sports
(a claim which is itself questionable, as will become clearer below). An
additional dimension of the pushback to which Calcaterra responds is the
mistaken idea that intersectional writing is merely a fancy name for licensing
a writer to introduce his or her particular “social justice” concerns into
analyses of the game, or that it is cultural writing with baseball as a focus.
The response offered by Watt and Calcaterra is, in Watt’s words, that “</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">all baseball writing is culture
writing,<i>”</i> namely, that all baseball writing is immersed in broader
cultural dynamics and norms that may or may not be explicitly analyzed by the
writer.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">I’d like to offer a few belated comments on these essays. It’s true that, while
I watch baseball and read about baseball, that I don’t usually write about it.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"> What I
find interesting, in this case, is the use of the term <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">intersectionality</i>, and how it found its way outside of the academic
contexts in which we usually talk about it, to become the name for a new
paradigm of baseball writing. In what follows, I will argue that
intersectionality means something more than cultural or socio-political
baseball writing. I think that if intersectionality names a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">new</i> paradigm of baseball writing, that
it should explicitly confront both the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">norms</i>
that orient how the game is played and the <i>norms</i> that guide the conceptual choices that writers make. That sounds abstract, but
I think the recent debate over the so-called unwritten rules of baseball
will illustrate what I mean.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"></span>However, I’d like to take a brief
detour through the article that introduced intersectionality as a concept:
Kimberle Crenshaw’s “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black
Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and
Antiracist Politics.”* I think this detour is warranted because Crenshaw makes
a crucial point about how an uncritical approach to social norms produces
biases in the way we think about discrimination, social activism, and social
change (among other things). Crenshaw argues that the dominant approaches to
problems of discrimination “treat race and gender as mutually exclusive
categories of experience and analysis.” To treat discrimination as the result
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">either</i> gender <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">or</i> race distorts and marginalizes the experiences of those who are
adversely affected by both gender and racial discrimination. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">For our purposes, we should note
that the uncritical adoption of these “single-axis” frameworks introduces
theoretical and practical norms that undermine the social agency of
marginalized groups. Crenshaw’s interest is in how these single-axis theories
marginalize black women. She argues that black women are marginalized because
feminist theory is largely shaped by the experiences and struggles of white
women.** In a similar fashion, antiracist struggles are largely shaped by
African-American men. This places African-American women in a double-bind: there
are ways in which their consciousness as women conflicts with their
consciousness as members of the African-American community, and there are ways
in which their consciousness and experiences as African-Americans conflict
with their experiences as women. This is, undoubtedly, a very schematic
summary. But it is enough to introduce Crenshaw’s critique of the normative
failures of single-axis frameworks:</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">These problems of
exclusion cannot be resolved simply by including Black women within an already
established analytical structure…the intersectional experience is greater than
the sum of racism and sexism…. (140)</span></div>
</blockquote>
</div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">Thus for Crenshaw,
intersectionality is a direct attack on the presumed norms that guide
single-axis frameworks.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">The
Unwritten Rules</span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">The response to the
recent comments by Bryce Harper and Goose Gossage about the unwritten rules of
baseball will illuminate what I mean by reconsidering the social norms that
guide our thinking about baseball. Though I will not recount those comments
here, I will point to a recent post concerning the racist undertones of policing
the so-called “unwritten rules” of the game. Sam Adler-Bell <a href="http://samadlerbell.com/baseball-and-fugitive-joy/" target="_blank">writes</a>:</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">These flare ups of
concern about the erosion of baseball values—translation: that baseball players
occasionally act like they’re having fun—almost always center on non-white
players’ perceived violations of baseball etiquette. Gossage’s comments are
plainly racist.</span></div>
</blockquote>
</div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">If what I am saying
about intersectionality is correct, then criticizing the so-called unwritten
rules requires doing more than merely condemning the comments themselves. It involves,
as Adler-Bell notes, reconceptualizing how those comments are understood. Here
are the ways that we could consider the context of players enforcing the
unwritten rules.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">1) Stick to sports: The unwritten rules are part of the game.</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">On this
view, the fact that (white) American players evoke the unwritten rules to
police the behavior of Latin American players is accidental. The proponent of
this view looks for an exception and finds that in 2012 Cole Hamels
deliberately hit Bryce Harper with a pitch so that Harper would get a better
idea of his place—so it’s not all Latin Americans who are on the wrong side of
the unwritten rules. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">Obviously, this
approach is incompatible with an intersectional approach. There is a fine line
distinguishing the next two possible ways to interpret the norms of the unwritten
rules.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">2) The unwritten rules as applied by Player X are socially unacceptable.</span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">It is possible to
begin by looking at the unwritten rules through the lens of broader social
dynamics. Then, given that many of the off-field complaints involve (white)
American players policing the behaviors of Latin American players (most
recently, it’s Gossage criticizing José Bautista’s</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">—</span> admittedly awesome and jubilant, I say</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">—</span>playoff bat-flip), we can
conclude that policing the unwritten rules displays racist undertones, or at
least, some degree of white privilege. The problem, however, is that proof that
race is a factor often turns on whether or not a particular player (our Player X) who has
decided to police the game has racist motivations or not. Once it becomes about the player's intent or attitudes, we've lost sight of the system of social norms.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">3) The unwritten rules allow (white) American players*** to set the norms
of the game.</span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">The standpoint of
the second view starts with a particular practice (the unwritten rules) and
then introduces broader social dynamics into the equation. However, the
unwritten rules are not rituals that have existed since time immemorial. As
Adler-Bell writes, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">Enforcing
traditional codes of conduct is the primary way that whiteness continues to
exert its authority over the game. When baseball old-timers talk about the
“right way” to play the game, they mean the “white way.” And in this, I see
less a genuine loyalty to the game’s existing norms, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">than an attachment to the privilege of
defining what those norms are</i>. (My emphasis)</span></div>
</blockquote>
</div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">Thus when white
(American) players claim that they are policing who plays the game the right
way, they are claiming the privilege of defining the norms of baseball.
Moreover, we could suggest that the reason (white) American players continue to
enforce the unwritten rules (that is, define the norms for how the game is
played) is that they derive a competitive advantage—as a group—from the
unwritten rules. This point, of course, has been noted by historians of
baseball’s integration, but it is still relevant today. If even Bautista, in
his essay in <a href="http://www.theplayerstribune.com/jose-bautista-bat-flip/" target="_blank"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Players' Tribune</i></a>,
appears obligated to note that his famous bat flip doesn’t represent disrespect
for the unwritten rules of the game—“</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It wasn’t out of
contempt for the pitcher. It wasn’t because I don’t respect the unwritten rules
of the game. I was caught up in the emotion of the moment</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">”—what of
the lesser-known Latin American player who is on the bubble of a major league
(or even minor league) roster? Could we conceive of these players, for example, modifying their
behaviors to avoid incurring the physical violence of Law and
Order Ball (what Dave Zirin suggested on Twitter we call “Ball and Order”) by
standing off the plate to avoid potential injuries—thus putting themselves at a
disadvantage as batters.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">The
Politics of Unwritten Rules</span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">By focusing on how
norms arise in baseball, and by focusing on who claims the privilege of setting
those norms, we undermine the idea that it is possible to just merely stick to
the game. What the intersectional approach demonstrates is that social norms are themselves
social forces. To phrase this in different terms, we could call the
second approach reformist: it aims to reform the game by halting a bad
practice or correcting what player attitudes we consider acceptable. That is an admirable goal in itself, and I’m not condemning that.
However, the intersectional approach aims to show how different practices
within the game reveal the privilege that (white) American players have on and
off the field, and perhaps</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">—I raise this as a possibility because this is a question we should seek to answer</span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">—</span></span>the competitive advantage they gain by having this
privilege. Perhaps this is precisely what Calcaterra’s critics believe is
“social justice” advocacy. So be it. The entire point is to make the normative
structure visible so that we can interpret it, rather than treating social and
political dynamics as if they are magically rebuffed by the chalk on the field.
When we say that the Goose Gossages, the Jonathan Papelbons, and the Bud Norrises of
baseball play “Ball and Order,” it’s a reminder that the unwritten rules of the
game are themselves never neutral.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">Footnotes</span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">* This article
appears in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The University of Chicago
Legal Forum</i> (1989), 139–167.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">**Crenshaw, p. 154:
“When feminist theory attempts to describe women’s experiences through
analyzing patriarchy, sexuality, or separate spheres ideology, it often
overlooks the role of race. Feminists thus ignore how their own race functions
to mitigate some aspects of sexism and, moreover, how it often privileges them
over and contributes to the domination of other women.”</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-font-kerning: .5pt;">*** Or, to
paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates, players who believe they are white.</span></div>
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D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-49832619684638707692016-03-03T14:51:00.002-05:002016-03-03T14:51:49.434-05:00Latest Arrivals<div style="text-align: justify;">
My reading lists are probably at their most diverse when I'm not in the midst of a book project. While some of the major features of the next project are coming into focus, I've been reading a variety of books that won't have any direct bearing on it. (Then again, who knows for sure?)</div>
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The Abensour stuff is for a long-term project that Matt McLennan and I are working on. I've written a book review of <i>Split Season 1981</i>, though it's ultimate venue is unconfirmed. And, yes, it's taken me this long to get a copy of Coates's book. What can I say? I'm backlogged:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfMTdMOG9vvewgWzovLm180M2wojirCZF59TbMEaiyX_gDosYxh5EFLmhs10VyX6iVvNADMPtaxPzq3SZojPR2BFWwTKtZPneahD9FF8KrJMavLd5S7HK0u5zhM0f3PAT6RizxJAIgg54/s1600/IMG_0469.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfMTdMOG9vvewgWzovLm180M2wojirCZF59TbMEaiyX_gDosYxh5EFLmhs10VyX6iVvNADMPtaxPzq3SZojPR2BFWwTKtZPneahD9FF8KrJMavLd5S7HK0u5zhM0f3PAT6RizxJAIgg54/s400/IMG_0469.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Next, a stack from a Verso book sale. Geras probably looks like the odd title out, but it's a follow up for our reading group for Feuerbach's <i>The Fiery Brook</i>. Behind that stack is another stack of recent acquisitions; some are part of a self-education in indigenous studies to find essays/chapters to include in introductory courses in philosophy:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc38Rwywdnhyphenhyphen9g-uL-4Dtie_E0E3de-_nHbLvBdiqmrACTA1bMOXNCKf9cM3_qf0GPloHiIa2BsN2h1JnuQKn1F6idxnpjxtz9s7pvzgTrjFNgI-7hyphenhyphenDbxn5vaEHthlUtkfRhOv4ISUEU/s1600/IMG_0503.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc38Rwywdnhyphenhyphen9g-uL-4Dtie_E0E3de-_nHbLvBdiqmrACTA1bMOXNCKf9cM3_qf0GPloHiIa2BsN2h1JnuQKn1F6idxnpjxtz9s7pvzgTrjFNgI-7hyphenhyphenDbxn5vaEHthlUtkfRhOv4ISUEU/s400/IMG_0503.JPG" width="400" /> </a> </div>
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Then, catching up on Derrida and Honneth for future (shorter) projects, plus two more baseball books to read before the season starts:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibAN6Y40g52GjbzxNioMwvg0QlBKkelJ0CD-nHaLoaSgUH1r4Vijm_kCn1rMns-KGnyJ6MwkJwUk4NojCIH-fFmJgb8II1PHz3WYEeX3CU3ZHWTZhL82FguWIbd1rBP4vde7BJBSYyT1U/s1600/IMG_0520.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibAN6Y40g52GjbzxNioMwvg0QlBKkelJ0CD-nHaLoaSgUH1r4Vijm_kCn1rMns-KGnyJ6MwkJwUk4NojCIH-fFmJgb8II1PHz3WYEeX3CU3ZHWTZhL82FguWIbd1rBP4vde7BJBSYyT1U/s400/IMG_0520.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Not pictured: five or six other books that are somewhere waiting to be delivered.</div>
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D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-14438223949668784332016-02-25T16:23:00.000-05:002016-02-25T16:23:24.355-05:00The "Oriental Idea": Feuerbach and Schelling<div style="text-align: justify;">
I'm part of a Feuerbach reading group, and I'm attempting to give his work more time than I did when I read <i>The Essence of Christianity</i>. I've only gotten as far as the first paragraph of Feuerbach's "Towards a Critique of Hegel" and I'm struck by an undercurrent of ambivalent orientalism that reminds me of a passage from Schelling's <i>Philosophy of Art</i> (University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Presented, without further ado, as a kind of call-and-response:</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Feuerbach</b> <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
By German speculative philosophy, I mean that philosophy which dominates the present—the philosophy of Hegel. As far as Schelling’s philosophy is concerned, it was really an exotic growth—the ancient oriental idea of identity on Germanic soil. (<i>The Fiery Brook</i>, Verso, 2012, p. 53).</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Schelling</b></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
From Pythagoras onward, and even further back, down to Plato, philosophy perceived itself as an exotic plant in Greek soil, and this feeling expressed itself among other places in the universal impulse leading those initiated into higher teachings—either through the wisdom of earlier philosophers or through the mysteries—back to the birthplace of the ideas, namely, the Orient. (4-5)</div>
</blockquote>
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D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-86468069597865580562016-01-26T14:35:00.001-05:002016-01-26T14:35:21.734-05:00Review of Thinking Radical Democracy<i>Symposium</i> has <a href="http://www.c-scp.org/en/2016/01/26/martin-breaugh-et-al-thinking-radical-democracy.html" target="_blank">published my review</a> of Martin Breaugh, Christopher Holman, Rachel Magnusson, Paul Mazzocchi, and Devin Penner (eds.), <i>Thinking Radical Democracy: The Return to Politics in Post-war France</i>. A well-edited volume has to avoid numerous pitfalls: issues of consistency, varying quality of contributions, and overall coherence. Breaugh et al. have done an excellent job in avoiding those potential problems. My overview:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The essays collected in <i>Thinking Radical Democracy</i> aim to situate
the political thought of Rancière, Abensour, and Balibar within a
tradition of radical democratic thought in postwar France that
conceptualizes democracy as divisive and emancipatory. The book includes
chapters on the “forbearers” of the return to radical democracy (the
“French” Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Clastres), the critics of
totalitarianism (Lefort, Castoriadis, and Debord), and concludes with
essays concerning Rancière, Balibar, and Abensour. Despite the many
differences between these figures, the authors and editors of the
present volume argue that the radical democratic tradition is defined by
its threefold exploration of “politics, division, and democracy.”</blockquote>
It's longer than most reviews for <i>Symposium</i> but there's a reason. One of my goals in reviewing the book was to bring to the forefront how there is an important distinction between politics (<i>la politique</i>) and the political (<i>le politique</i>). I think that, in general, the attempt to foreground the possibilities of politics through first defining the political also opens the possibility that definitions of the political could come to police politics. I outline this problem in the review, so read all the way to the end.D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-14630847274258299582016-01-12T16:30:00.001-05:002016-01-12T16:30:33.122-05:00Review of Todd May's Friendship in an Age of Economics<div style="text-align: justify;">
My review of Todd May's <i>Friendship in an Age of Economics</i> has been published by <a href="http://anarchist-developments.org/index.php/adcs_journal/issue/view/9" target="_blank"><i>Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies</i></a>. You might already know, given that I briefly recounted the story in the acknowledgements of <i>Egalitarian Moments</i>, that it was preparing for a talk given by May that sparked my interest in the work of Rancière. Here's the gist of the <a href="http://anarchist-developments.org/index.php/adcs_journal/article/view/119/117" target="_blank">review</a>:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
May’s discussion of the politics of friendship provides an account of micropolitical resistance unforeseen by Rancière. Although Rancière considers aesthetics as a form of micropolitics, he does not claim that it is the only possible form of micropolitics. And while May does not explicitly situate <i>Friendship in an Age of Economics</i> through Rancière’s work until Chapter 7, his account emphasizes how friendship, especially what he calls deep friendship, is a relationship between equals. (It should also be noted, given May’s anarchism, that his argument could be formulated as a claim that friendship is a rudimentary form of free association.)</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In retrospect I'd probably add that Montaigne is underrepresented in and La Boétie is absent from the book, but that comment has more to do with my current interests than May's.</div>
D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-90794210158510536882015-12-17T14:59:00.002-05:002015-12-17T14:59:59.681-05:00On Veganism and Animal Rights<div style="text-align: justify;">
I am probably not the only person who
has noticed that there are a greater than normal amount of critical
articles about vegans and animal rights floating around on social media
sites lately. Even among vegans and animal rights people, these articles seem to get more clicks and more comments (again, on the highly particular set of people in my social networks) than essays that try to set out a positive program of social/animal justice.</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In any case, as it turns
out, there are vegans and animal rights activists who harbour attitudes
that are consciously or unconsciously racist, sexist, ableist, and/or
classist. This does not surprise me, given that we live in a white
supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society. </div>
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Before get to what I want to say, there's part of this debate or critique that seems counter-productive, because there are some people who are fighting about <i>who</i> has x,y or z biases or prejudices, when the best critical work focuses, in ways that are necessarily self-reflexive, on systems and institutions and how they produce individuals--in some way here, with more necessary caveats that I assume I need not list, I mean "produce us as <i>us</i>,<i> </i>whoever that may be"--with prejudices and privileges. </div>
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All this to say, here's what I think: the case for animal rights entails a commitment to human rights. If that sounds too liberal or Kantian, I don't mind saying that the case for animal emancipation entails human emancipation. That's much closer to what I believe. But, if you've come to animal rights and you don't see how the two are connected, <i>and</i> that articulating the two together requires formulating demands for animal rights through dialogue with those who struggle as historically marginalized peoples, and that this will make the process of formulating demands and principles both messy but concrete, then you're an asshole.</div>
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But if you're not vegan and you care about animal rights, it turns out that I think that the case for human rights and commitment to the struggles of historically marginalized peoples also, somewhere down the line, entails a commitment to animal rights, and more specifically, direct duties to animals. </div>
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So if you are committed to human rights or human emancipation (and what I'm about to say counts even more if you're one of those people who has been revelling in the that-will-show-those-santimonious-vegans schadenfreude), and you've read your Aristotle, and you know that in defining what makes us <i>human</i> rather than <i>animal</i>, </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
the dominant trends in our culture have never been toward respect for the species as a whole but rather for what is considered to be <i>quintessentially</i> human--and this privilege and subject position have always been available only to a small subset of the human species (Matthew Calarco, <i><a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25640" target="_blank">Thinking Through Animals</a></i>, p. 26),</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
and that this has made you conscious of how the so-called anthropological criteria for so-called species inclusion is at best politically fraught, tendentious, and contingent, and you don't see how this applies to animal rights, then you're an asshole, too.</div>
D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-62344193660622458892015-11-21T18:36:00.001-05:002015-11-21T18:46:39.767-05:00Book Review: The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror by William Sloane(New York: NYRB Classics, 2015)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY-5wwV7m57PbwqMk60m-rUSgJH0rcupiMomCmkE0U9UPE5k7iy_Q2oCKnpAA0fdW9_IzLhtKYpK3KUtgXpiXhn6mMkDID2CVtyq6gZpcQCPsEcFvCw-bzAKFgLmkSE_r3j3JA_49_LUQ/s1600/index.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY-5wwV7m57PbwqMk60m-rUSgJH0rcupiMomCmkE0U9UPE5k7iy_Q2oCKnpAA0fdW9_IzLhtKYpK3KUtgXpiXhn6mMkDID2CVtyq6gZpcQCPsEcFvCw-bzAKFgLmkSE_r3j3JA_49_LUQ/s1600/index.jpg" /></a>A quick scan of William Sloane's biography reveals that he contributed more to the literary
world as an editor and publisher than as a novelist. Sloane's only two
novels, recently collected by NYRB Classics as<i> The Rim of Morning</i>, were<i> </i><i>To Walk the Night </i>(1937) and <i>The Edge of Running Water </i>(1939). The latter was adapted into a Boris Karloff movie, <i>The Devil Commands </i>(1941). Both are genre-blending narratives which borrow elements of horror, hardboiled mystery, and science-fiction (then a burgeoning genre in its own right). The novels stand out not so much by their narratives - which today seem rather formulaic and too obvious, even if at the time they were inventively reworking the existing formulae. They stand out rather on account of their not inconsiderable literary qualities. Sloane's novels are a perfect storm of pulp sensibility and overall good writing. To this end, NYRB Classics did well to secure Stephen King's short introduction to the text. King nicely puts the novels in literary context, for instance playing them off against the acknowledged giant of 1930s American horror, H.P. Lovecraft. As King drives home, Sloane captures much of the same horror as Lovecraft - horror of a "cosmic" type - without the oft-tortured prose.<br />
<br />
<i>To Walk the Night </i>is a mystery centred on a grisly unexplained death, blending themes of alien minds, advanced physics and psychic projection. Unquestionably the greatest aspect of the book is the self-construction of its narrator, the protagonist's best friend, as a drunken Oedipal mess. The novel is many things, but most of all a character study. Sloane is something of a psychologist, which is precisely what makes him a literary writer (see Iris Murdoch on this point, for example in <i>The Sovereignty of Good</i>). For its part, <i>The Edge of Running Water </i>is a "mad scientist" story set in rural Maine. An electrophysicist, with the help of a shady medium, constructs a dangerous and terrifying machine to communicate with his dead wife (the film adaptation inexplicably - though predictably - adds a mentally disabled manservant to the mix). Here again, the narrator is an outsider looking in - a former colleague from the university who was once also in love with the dead woman. He now sets his eyes on her recently grown-up younger sister (to whom he was once an "uncle" - here Electra resonates more than Oedipus). With its blend of mystery, love interest and rural American gothic, <i>The Edge of Running Water </i>reads precisely like an old movie. This explains its swift adaptation but it also, to my mind, makes it the more pleasurable of the two novels by a long shot. <br />
<br />
The payoffs of the two narratives are unfortunately slight. To a jaded 21st Century reader like me, there is no great mystery in Sloane's horror/sci-fi mysteries. The pleasures of reading them lie elsewhere - certainly in the aforementioned quality of the writing and the neat genre-blending, but also in the theme of cosmic horror itself. As Devin has mentioned here on the blog, a new cosmic pessimism is in vogue in philosophy, and its purveyors (such as Thacker) have made the connection to horror explicit. What Sloane offers up is above all the chilling possibility (and historically recurrent philosophical theme) that everyday reality is an ephemeral gloss on a limitless, meaningless chaos. His books channel the strange, the unthinkable. But they do it through the eyes, and the limited understanding, of the middle-class professional who would like very much to get on with the business of his love interests etc. To this extent, Sloane does not plumb very deep when he suggests great depths - doing more with less. Put this book on your reading list if you'd like a few good cosmic chills. Keep looking if you want to go deeper. Matt McLennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18213312904444928876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-91600028148830177142015-11-16T14:05:00.001-05:002015-11-16T14:05:09.182-05:00Sartre Society Wrap<div style="text-align: justify;">
Today's my first full day back from the North American Sartre Society. Lately, since Storm Heter specifically asked me about this, the blog writing process proceeds as follows:</div>
<ol style="text-align: justify;">
<li>Brainstorm. In this case: good conference, good people.</li>
<li>Read material for teaching. Why did I put this off until today?</li>
<li>Three weeks later.</li>
</ol>
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So I'll write this now. I don't promise any literary quality. Notice how most of these sentences are structured as subject/verb/predicate. Only the second using any recursion?</div>
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As it turns out, the Sartre Society meetings are my favorite conferences. The papers that I attended were great, and ranged over a diverse set of topics. For a field that probably seems to outsiders to be fairly narrow, the papers ranged from politics and critical race theory to the meaning of groove, and in many ways Sartre himself formed the background point of reference but not always the immediate focus. I moderated the panel on jazz, and only one panelist made an explicit reference to Sartre.</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
If you're interested in tweets and pictures, we even tried the hashtag thing, <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/SartreSociety2015?src=hash" target="_blank">#SartreSociety2015</a>, which was temporarly derailed my comments about our attempt to absorb the nightlife in Bethlehem.</div>
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Finally, I left feeling motivated to reread Sartre and write more. I also with a strong idea of what my next Sartre Society paper would be about. My paper started like this:</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This talk is the first part of a larger
project that is currently entitled <i>Negative
Philosophy</i>: <i>Extinction, Humanism, and
Animal Rights</i>. While I cannot outline the entire project, I can indicate
how today’s talk fits within the whole project. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[The talk was dedicated to a response to the thesis of extinction as defined by Eugene Thacker, who himself picks it up from Ray Brassier, who in a sense picks it up from Lyotard, Nietzsche, et cetera. Sartre also maintains that there is no ultimate--transcendent, teleological, ontotheological--meaning, but does not embrace (and for good reason) the pessimist aesthetic or the mysticism that Thacker endorses.]</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In the second chapter, I will
argue that <i>Existentialism is a Humanism </i>is
a performative text, in which Sartre nihilates the anthropocentrism and human
triumphalism present in traditional accounts—such as those of Pico della
Mirandolla and Feuerbach—of humanism. The final chapter asks whether or not it
is possible for a nihilist or pessimist to defend animal rights, and I will
contend that it is possible to hold a position that sounds like a nihilistic
Tom Regan.
</blockquote>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Most of the questions I got during later, informal discussions had to do with the part about a nihilistic Tom Regan. People wanted to know what the hell that meant. Given that I also want to know, I'll be writing that up for 2016.</div>
D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-70798739124185564392015-11-09T13:59:00.000-05:002015-11-09T13:59:13.983-05:00Schedule for NASS 2015<div style="text-align: justify;">
The final schedule is now available for the North American Sartre Society meeting happening this weekend. It is available <a href="http://tstormheter.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/NASS-2015-PROGRAM-final.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>. I'll be giving a talk during the first session on Friday (2:00–3:45), and then I'll be moderating this panel:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYrRrN6WLU7jPNr1Kyhw6bKR-RVFZzzyMVSBZWcA5tpq2IEW_eTypEbIm687ePnOom2ffGRC5kkmb7NdEA-V6l4pl6b4ur-M33nTztBR8NAJnaNwG3GKwYgUnOIGxsZgjPysVo-oE2YU8/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-11-09+at+1.55.13+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="89" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYrRrN6WLU7jPNr1Kyhw6bKR-RVFZzzyMVSBZWcA5tpq2IEW_eTypEbIm687ePnOom2ffGRC5kkmb7NdEA-V6l4pl6b4ur-M33nTztBR8NAJnaNwG3GKwYgUnOIGxsZgjPysVo-oE2YU8/s400/Screen+Shot+2015-11-09+at+1.55.13+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Perhaps I'll gain a better picture of whatever it is that my friend Storm Heter has been working on. I know it has something to do with authenticity and aesthetics, and, at least at one point, it discusses Jean-Michel Basquiat. That is probably where our last face-to-face discussion had left off. Since then he's tweeted tantalizing clues:<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
My working title = "black noise" <a href="http://t.co/1iA1w2WrE7">pic.twitter.com/1iA1w2WrE7</a></div>
— T Storm Heter (@Storm_Heter) <a href="https://twitter.com/Storm_Heter/status/564801852127313920">February 9, 2015</a></blockquote>
<br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> </div>
</div>
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From what I can tell, he takes his coffee black, but I want to know about the rest of it.</div>
D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-35128543530755272492015-11-06T16:40:00.000-05:002015-11-06T16:40:38.877-05:00Poster for NASS 2015Here's the poster for the upcoming Sartre Society meeting. The organizers are still finalizing the schedule, but last I looked I'm giving a talk on an existentialist response to Eugene Thacker's cosmic pessimism and Ray Brassier's nihilism on Friday afternoon. It looks like I'll be name-dropping Bataille, Beauvoir, and Nietzsche along the way.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2nDHcuI6y4wQF1a0EDnm-LI_YS4IuJG2XUDZn2kQclJJSfPZT0DKlZuRS8i-JkTox7Dj6bj2NWkd5WCi4WsornxfcqsaJLt9FDSQF3UqZs8G08kcHKB8cN6sV81AXl_rgcYXOu0yCP6M/s1600/CS_khVOW4AAUJWd.jpg_large.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2nDHcuI6y4wQF1a0EDnm-LI_YS4IuJG2XUDZn2kQclJJSfPZT0DKlZuRS8i-JkTox7Dj6bj2NWkd5WCi4WsornxfcqsaJLt9FDSQF3UqZs8G08kcHKB8cN6sV81AXl_rgcYXOu0yCP6M/s640/CS_khVOW4AAUJWd.jpg_large.jpeg" width="492" /></a></div>
<br />D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-49917444744726805082015-10-26T15:18:00.004-04:002015-10-26T15:19:46.099-04:00Books Received: Egalitarian Moments<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_iI-TaeDNPHYTYXik7WLvbbGJ2cJZnIi7E5qWcxUHcuRhEkoiEWdzjlBUeIVHEvyy8fXJ5OenzJWO7EUMHWtHWmsB-oxzDI1mJLYY0eYfho2CQVvqtsCpdeWNMcZY_yt2YPr0vxJE-Xo/s1600/IMG_0284.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_iI-TaeDNPHYTYXik7WLvbbGJ2cJZnIi7E5qWcxUHcuRhEkoiEWdzjlBUeIVHEvyy8fXJ5OenzJWO7EUMHWtHWmsB-oxzDI1mJLYY0eYfho2CQVvqtsCpdeWNMcZY_yt2YPr0vxJE-Xo/s400/IMG_0284.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Last time we were on the phone, I discovered that even my own mother didn't know
the book would be available soon, so I must have been remiss in mentioning it: <i>Egalitarian Moments</i>
is available on November 5th, 2015. I've received, in three separate
shipments, my author's copies. One of those I'll be exchanging for <i>Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy</i>.
The others, with the exception of my copy, I'm open to exchanging for
other recently published, prohibitively expensive titles.</div>
<br />D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-27392301411373069382015-10-24T12:49:00.001-04:002015-10-24T12:49:19.082-04:00Available Now: Philosophy, Sophistry, AntiphilosophyMatt McLennan's first book, on Badiou and Lyotard, is now available in <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/philosophy-sophistry-antiphilosophy-9781472574169/" target="_blank">hardcover</a>.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5fPG1BLi67ZHuJ-o5_yN4KBF28NLuJQToVEW7-G3RDkHD-uUSM_c-j0sv-rZiAsdScxEJBiZsK_KkeGkUOQt8jLXND7nthuDRIuHkGeNBNNtAgkYyEZSC2BQsdLuMZseJ2Yt8zNRrOdM/s1600/9781472574169.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5fPG1BLi67ZHuJ-o5_yN4KBF28NLuJQToVEW7-G3RDkHD-uUSM_c-j0sv-rZiAsdScxEJBiZsK_KkeGkUOQt8jLXND7nthuDRIuHkGeNBNNtAgkYyEZSC2BQsdLuMZseJ2Yt8zNRrOdM/s320/9781472574169.jpg" width="204" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
I said "first book" because Matt and I are planning on co-authoring and completing a book entitled "A Hermeneutics of Emancipation: A Critical Introduction to Miguel Abensour" within the next few years. I also hear that he's got some other project on the go as well.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
We'll be swapping our recent books during reading week, so I hope to be able to say something about <i>Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy</i> either on the blog or in actual review form sometime soon. From what I know about Matt's work, his argumentation style is both merciless and sympathetic. I'm not quite sure how he does it, but it makes for good reading.</div>
D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-29023694869763361842015-09-01T12:34:00.002-04:002015-09-01T12:34:43.665-04:00It's Out of My Hands<div style="text-align: justify;">
I got word today that <i>Egalitarian Moments</i> has gone to press. It's completely out of my hands now. But this post isn't so much about <i>EM</i> as it is about another book. One of the other long-time contributors to the blog also has a book coming out, and I don't think he's used this space for shameless self-promotion (yet). So, I'll tell you that Matt McLennan's first book, <i>Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy: Badiou's Dispute with Lyotard</i> <a href="http://bloomsbury.com/us/philosophy-sophistry-antiphilosophy-9781472574169/" target="_blank">will also be published by Bloomsbury</a> this fall. Here is the blurb:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Alain Badiou's work in philosophy, though daunting, has gained a receptive
and steadily growing Anglophone readership. What is not well known is
the extent to which Badiou's positions, vis-à-vis ontology, ethics,
politics and the very meaning of philosophy, were hammered out in
dispute with the late Jean-François Lyotard. Matthew R. McLennan's
Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy is the first work to pose the
question of the relation between Lyotard and Badiou, and in so doing
constitutes a significant intervention in the field of contemporary
European philosophy by revisiting one of its most influential and
controversial forefathers.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Badiou himself has underscored the
importance of Lyotard for his own project; might the recent resurgence
of interest in Lyotard be tied in some way to Badiou's comments? Or
deeper still: might not Badiou's philosophical Platonism beg an
encounter with philosophy's other, the figure of the sophist that
Lyotard played so often and so ably? Posing pertinent questions and
opening new discursive channels in the literature on these two major
figures this book is of interest to those studying philosophy, rhetoric,
literary theory, cultural and media studies.
</blockquote>
</div>
D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-32542956125913879572015-08-13T14:42:00.000-04:002015-08-13T14:42:27.930-04:00Voluntary Servitude (Continued)As a follow up to the previous post: the course on the history of social and political philosophy also gives me a chance to catch up on some secondary literature that I've been meaning to read:<br />
<ul>
<li>George Caffentzis, <i>Clipped Coins, Abused Words, Civil Government</i>: <i>John Locke's Philosophy of Money</i> (<a href="http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&cPath=20&products_id=19" target="_blank">Autonomedia</a>, 1989).</li>
<li>Quentin Skinner, <i>Hobbes and Republican Liberty</i> (<a href="http://www.cambridge.org/ca/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/history-ideas/hobbes-and-republican-liberty?format=PB" target="_blank">Cambridge</a>, 2008).</li>
<li>Frédéric Lordon, <i>Willing Slaves of Capital</i>: <i>Spinoza and Marx on Desire</i> (<a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/1602-willing-slaves-of-capital" target="_blank">Verso</a>, 2014).</li>
<li>David Munnich, <i>L'art de l'amitié: Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la servitude volontaire </i>(<a href="http://www.sens-tonka.net/auteur/munnich-david" target="_blank">Sens et Tonka</a>, 2012). </li>
<li>Bruce Campbell, <i>If Chins Could Kill</i>: <i>Confessions of a B Movie Actor </i>(<a href="http://www.bruce-campbell.com/pilot.asp?pg=if-chins-could-kill" target="_blank">St. Martin's Press</a>, 2002)</li>
</ul>
D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-12472337329335800842015-08-05T14:30:00.001-04:002015-08-05T14:30:31.459-04:00Teaching Voluntary Servitude<div style="text-align: justify;">
In Fall 2015, I'll be teaching PHIL 3330A: Topics in History of Social and Political Philosophy, at Carleton University. The purpose of the course is, loosely speaking, to familiarize students with political thought from the early modern period to the 19th century, while covering some of the big names in political theory, such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Probably J.S. Mill, too, but he didn't make the cut for reasons that may or may not become clear below.</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
My first impulse was to arrange the readings as a debate about the valences and vagaries of consensus and dissensus, but I opted not to, since that distinction seemed to look backwards at a project I'd just completed. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but I would prefer to teach without knowing the theoretical trajectory of the course in advance.</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
I chose, then, to use the course as a chance to investigate some of Miguel Abensour's work on what La Boétie calls voluntary servitude. It forms part of a larger project on Abensour's critico-utopian philosophy. If you happen to be familiar with Abensour's <a href="http://www.c-scp.org/en/2012/02/19/miguel-abensour-democracy-against-the-state.html" target="_blank">only book translated into English</a>, and are somewhat surprised by this, he was involved in bringing a critical edition of <i>Le discours de la servitude volontaire</i> to press in 1976 (<a href="http://www.payot-rivages.net/livre_Le-Discours-de-la-servitude-volontaire--Etienne-de-La-Boetie_ean13_9782228896696.html" target="_blank">reissued by Payot & Rivages in 2002</a>), which includes essays by Abensour and Marcel Gauchet (before they became enemies), Claude Lefort, and Pierre Clastres. He's revisited La Boétie's "contr'un" in more recent work, and that will, in part, guide the readings for the course.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Here's the course description:</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
According to prominent accounts of the topic, the goal of political philosophy is to elaborate the conditions that make it possible to protect individual liberties and distribute goods fairly. The history that tracks the development of this task of political philosophy leads from John Locke to John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Without necessarily disputing the democratic ideal of this approach, we will study another persistent problem in social and political philosophy: the concern that social institutions emerge not from procedures of consensus and well-reasoned debate, but as forms of voluntary servitude. We will examine this other tradition of philosophical inquiry—which includes La Boétie, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx—in order to consider the following questions:</div>
<ul>
<li><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"></span></span></span><span lang="EN-US">What is voluntary servitude?</span></li>
<li><span lang="EN-US">Is it significant that
democratic institutions might have arisen from institutions originally
dedicated to policing society?</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"></span></span></li>
<li><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"></span></span></span>Are there forms of democracy
that do not involve voluntary servitude?</li>
</ul>
<span lang="EN-US"></span><div style="text-align: justify;">
And the readings:</div>
<ul>
<li>John Locke, <i>Second Treatise of Government</i>. Ed. C.B. Macpherson
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980). ISBN: 978-0-915144-86-0. </li>
<li>Etienne de la Boétie, <i>Discourse on Voluntary Servitude</i>. Trans. James B.
Atkinson and David Sices (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2012). ISBN: 978-1-60384-839-8.</li>
<li>Miguel Abensour, “Is There a Proper Way To Use the Voluntary Servitude
Hypothesis?” Journal of Political Ideologies, 16/3 (2011), 329–348. </li>
<li>Thomas Hobbes, <i>Leviathan</i>. Revised Student Edition.
Ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). ISBN:
9780521567978. </li>
<li>Baruch Spinoza, <i>Theological-Political Treatise</i>. Trans.
Samuel Shirley. Second Edition (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2001).
ISBN: 978-0-87220-607-6. </li>
<li>Jean-Jacques Rousseau, <i>The Social Contract and
The First and Second Discourses</i>. Ed. Susan Dunn (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2002). ISBN: 9780300091410. </li>
<li>G.W.F. Hegel, <i>Elements of the Philosophy of Right</i>. Ed. Allen W. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Preface (pp. 20–23);
§182–208; §230–249. </li>
<li>Karl Marx, <i>Capital</i>, Volume
1. Trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990). ISBN: 9780140445688.</li>
</ul>
D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-62122079879068870382015-07-22T13:38:00.001-04:002015-07-22T13:38:21.983-04:00What's Next?In the last two weeks, I've completed two major writing projects. The first task was copy-editing <i>Egalitarian Moments</i>. Rereading the text reminded me that I should get more efficient at following up on suggestions that I make in the footnotes, but that I don't pursue in the text itself--those claims preceded by the caveat that pursuing such a claim is beyond the scope of the present study.<br />
<br />
Which takes me to the second project, that I haven't really discussed on the blog (though I haven't really discussed much at all this calendar year): a chapter for a forthcoming volume on <i>Rethinking German Idealism</i>, edited by Joseph Carew and Sean McGrath. In <i>Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art</i>, I suggest, on page 54, that in the <i>Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature</i>, Schelling denies that humans have any moral obligation to animals. My contribution to Carew's and McGrath's volume focuses on Schelling's anthropocentrism as an impediment to the recent renaissance in studies concerning his nature-philosophy.<br />
<br />
It's an important article to me, not just because it bridges my work on Schelling with some of the material on animal rights that I teach, but also because it's the first time I've completed an extensive essay on Schelling that either (1) concerns a topic beyond the scope of his philosophy of art or work on mythology*, and (2) that tackles, with some detail, the <i>Human Freedom</i> essay, which has always been (for me) a difficult text to work with. More specifically, a difficult text to write about from a standpoint that traverses the text instead of becoming absorbed in it. Elaborating a critique of Schelling's anthropocentrism allowed me to extricate a critical standpoint from Schelling's dense (and rigorous) argument.<br />
<br />
Finally, from a different angle, completing these projects means that I don't have any outstanding deadlines to meet. I've got some ideas for the next book, but for now, I'll be looking at different avenues for bringing them to fruition.<br />
<br />
<br />
*There are a few that I've started but I've left for whatever might be the 21st century equivalent of the gnawing criticism of mice.D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-80546496381567309092015-03-05T13:13:00.000-05:002015-03-05T13:15:21.487-05:00Anti-Humanism and Public Ethics ProgramSomething that Matt and I will be participating in next week:<br />
<br />
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<i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Thursday, March 12<sup>th</sup></span></u></b></i></div>
<i>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><br /></span></span></u></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Morning</span></u></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span>
</div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">09:30 – 10:00 <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Registration
/ Coffee</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">10:00 – 10:05<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Welcome,
by Chantal Beauvais, Rector of Saint Paul University </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="FR-CA" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: FR-CA;">10:05
– 11:05<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Marc
De Kesel (Saint Paul University):</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Between Sade and Labre: Modernity’s
Impossible Humanism</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>Respondent: Andrew Pump
(University of Ottawa) </span></div>
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<span lang="FR-CA" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: FR-CA;">11:05
– 11:15<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Coffee Break</span></div>
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<span lang="FR-CA" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: FR-CA;">11:15
– 12:15<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Hélène
Tessier (Saint Paul University): </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 2.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span lang="FR" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Humanisme et
Démocratie: le rationalisme esthétique de Thomas Mann</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Respondent: Anna </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Djintcharadze </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">(Dominican University College)</span>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">12:15 – 13:30 <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Lunch</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Afternoon</span></u></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">13:30 – 14:30<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jean-Pierre
Couture (University of Ottawa):</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 2.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span lang="FR-CA" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: FR-CA;">Le posthumanisme de Peter
Sloterdijk: du berger génétique à l’athlète anthropotechnique</span></div>
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<span lang="FR-CA" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: FR-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>Respondent: Marc
De Kesel (Saint Paul University)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">14:30 – 15:30<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Mark
Salter (University of Ottawa): </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">Global Ethics:
Sovereignty and New Materialism</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>Respondent:
Michael Hijazi (Saint Paul University)</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">15:30 – 15:45 <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Coffee
Break <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">15:45 – 16:45<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Devin
Z. Shaw, (University of Ottawa and Carleton University): </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Curmudgeonly Humanism: From Sartre to
Vonnegut</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>Respondent: Matthew R. McLennan
(Saint Paul University)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in center 3.25in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">18.00 <span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>Conference
Dinner<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Friday, March 13<sup>th</sup> </span></u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><br /></span></span></u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Morning</span></u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">10:00 – 11:00 <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Christopher
Sauder (Dominican University College): </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 2.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span lang="FR" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: FR;">De l’existence à la logique : le
système hégélien et les origines de l’antihumanisme français</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="FR-CA" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: FR-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Respondent: Joshua Lalonde (University of
Ottawa) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">11:00 – 11:15<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Coffee Break</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">11:15 – 12:15<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Deniz Guvenc (Carleton
University): </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 2.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Locating Anti-Humanism within Contemporary Anarchism</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>Respondent: Martin Samson (Saint Paul
University)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">12:15 – 13:15<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Erica Harris (McGill University): </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 2.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Ethics of Transgression: The Perverse Human Condition
and Anti-pornography Legislation</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>Respondent: Iva Apostolova
(Dominican University College)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">13:15 – 14:00 <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Lunch</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Afternoon</span></u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">14:00 – 15:00 <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Geraldine
Finn (Carleton University): </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 2.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Of all Things Man is the Measure: It is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">no longer</i>, but it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">still</i> a Science of Man</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Respondent:
Naomi Goldenberg (University of Ottawa)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">15:00 – 15:15<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Coffee Break</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">15:15 – 16:15 <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Matthew
R. McLennan (Saint Paul University): </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 2.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Medical Humanism: Putting the Ghost into Language</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span><span lang="FR-CA" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: FR-CA;">Respondent: Monique
Lanoix (Saint Paul University)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -1.5in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">16:15 –16:30<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Closing Remarks by Sophie Cloutier (Director of Public
Ethics, Saint Paul University)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">16:30 – 17:00<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Closing Discussion</span></div>
</i>D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3444828253239414712.post-42542600645432106852015-01-13T12:26:00.000-05:002015-01-13T12:26:22.464-05:002014: Writing in Review<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1JWPmqo2pHbm4ACH6aBjYsIhQt9cy3K_vq_VPHdIFr09qnMm2tBPGyS8snJPAUw66gXPosw-zeMTzyZJr2jh61ujHpvkxnI8ye7uoJ3Ezrif-t1nlouA1VSDLAQx9XfmajGR_bLGYIZM/s1600/IMG_1790.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1JWPmqo2pHbm4ACH6aBjYsIhQt9cy3K_vq_VPHdIFr09qnMm2tBPGyS8snJPAUw66gXPosw-zeMTzyZJr2jh61ujHpvkxnI8ye7uoJ3Ezrif-t1nlouA1VSDLAQx9XfmajGR_bLGYIZM/s1600/IMG_1790.jpg" height="242" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
A bulk of my writing on the blog in 2014 was dedicated to recounting or posting matters related to my next book, <i>Egalitarian Moments</i>. This reflected that most of time that involved writing in general--especially once we subtract writing slides and notes for the two courses that I had to prepare last fall ("Ethics and Social Issues" and "Topics in European Philosophy")--was dedicated to the book as well. I wrote almost all of Part II and the conclusion to the book last year. As a consequence, I rarely found the time to jot down other stray or incomplete thoughts on the blog. I also neglected to mention a few things that I wrote in 2013 that were published in 2014:</div>
<ul>
<li>Two entries for <a href="http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9780748695560" target="_blank"><i>The Meillassoux Dictionary</i></a>, edited by Peter Gratton and Paul J. Ennis. Those entries are for Descartes and Fichte.</li>
<li>A chapter for <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/the-palgrave-handbook-of-german-idealism-matthew-c-altman/?k=9781137334749&loc=uk" target="_blank"><i>The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism</i></a>, edited by Matthew C. Altman. To be more specific, the chapter, "The 'Keystone' of the System: Schelling's Philosophy of Art," is a concise account of what I've argued are the three fundamental features of Schelling's philosophy of art, as elaborated in <i>Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art</i>. </li>
</ul>
I also began two projects that will occupy parts of 2015:<br />
<ul>
<li>A talk at Saint Paul University <a href="http://notes-taken.blogspot.ca/2014/09/call-for-papers-public-ethics-after.html" target="_blank">here</a> in Ottawa where I will be defending something called "curmudgeonly humanism." That term seems to be the only way I could figure out to describe the work of Kurt Vonnegut, so it shouldn't then be a surprise that the talk is about Vonnegut and Sartre. Concerning the latter, I've adopted the term humanism to oppose to a set of assumptions about political agency made by the New Atheists and the field of 'political theology.' (A belated Google search reveals that the term "curmudgeonly humanism" has been kicking around the internet--13 hits--but no one claims it as a developed philosophical position). It looks like this discussion might form the basis of my next book.</li>
<li>A paper about Schelling, anthropocentrism, and speciesism, for a book on German idealism edited by Joseph Carew. More details on this project will be forthcoming.</li>
<li>This isn't exactly a project, but I've also decided to write at least one scholarly book review in 2015 as well.</li>
</ul>
D. Shawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08598034752112505284noreply@blogger.com0