The Notes Taken

A New Look

2012-02-10T12:32:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, we crossed 50,000 visits. Today, we try out a new look.

CFP: The Post-Kantian Poe

2012-02-04T15:55:00.000-05:00

The following is a call for papers for a special edition of The Edgar Allan Poe Review, to be edited by Sean Moreland, Devin Zane Shaw, and Jonathan Murphy. It will have its own permanent page here, so that it does not get lost in the shuffle.

“Theory Mad Beyond Redemption”: The Post-Kantian Poe

A call for papers for a special issue of The Edgar Allan Poe Review, forthcoming in Fall 2012, and guest-edited by Sean Moreland, Devin Zane Shaw, and Jonathan Murphy.

The editors invite original essays that address the influence of German Idealist and Romantic thought upon Edgar Allan Poe. While it has become a critical commonplace that Poe both makes use of and mocks many elements of German Idealism, there has been scant discussion of the specificities of Poe’s complex, and often vexed, treatments of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Poe studies enjoyed a brief revival of the “French Poe” following the psychoanalytic and deconstructive interventions of Lacan and Derrida, but the anti-theoretical backlash of the past two decades has tended to extradite Poe back to his country of origin, restoring his “American Face” at the cost of recognizing the transatlantic influences that indelibly shaped his writing. This collection will focus on Poe’s indebtedness to, as well as his critical distance from, the German Idealist and Romantic writers, but its intent is not to delineate, as Hansen and Pollin (1995) have done, the “German Face” of Poe, so much as it is to reintroduce the theoretical aspect of Poe’s artistry back into the critical conversation.

We especially welcome papers that consider the relationship between Poe’s reception of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy (including Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schiller, and the Schlegels) and that of his American literary contemporaries (including Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, and Melville); articles that examine the role of Coleridge and Carlyle, Cousin and de Stael in disseminating German idealism upon American shores; and essays that interrogate more recent peregrinations of German philosophy in Continental theory, especially as they pertain to a reconsideration of Poe’s literary legacy.

We require a 250 word abstract and a brief bio by no later than April 30, 2012, and the finished paper (Chicago-style, no more than 9000 words including endnotes) by July 15, 2012. Abstracts, papers, and questions should be directed to: theorymad@gmail.com.

Post-Althusserians in Review

2012-02-03T00:00:00.001-05:00

Filed away for future reference, before they get away from me:

Todd May discussing Jacques Rancière's Althusser's Lessons.
Jason Read reviewing Etienne Balibar's Citoyen sujet.
And, Read again, reviewing Pierre Macherey's Hegel or Spinoza.
And, and, before I forget, the post-Middlesex Cahiers pour l'analyse site.

Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800

2012-01-31T14:07:00.000-05:00

Thanks to insistence of occasional contributor Sean Moreland, I've lately taken some interest in British romanticism. The impetus is a co-authored paper that we are writing on Schelling, Coleridge, and Poe. I've already mentioned the fun I've had reading Poe, but my research on Coleridge has increased my interest in the aesthetics and politics of the British romantics, not only STC, but also Wordsworth, and the now lesser-known John Thelwall.

After reading volume one of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, acquiring a copy of Lyrical Ballads seemed to be the next obvious step. But which edition to acquire was not so obvious, since they are numerous. I did some browsing and settled on Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, edited by Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter, and published by Broadview Press. This edition was slightly more expensive than those of Penguin or Oxford, but it is more useful for the academic who finds himself (or herself) a novice in a new field.

The Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, reproduces not just the first two editions, but also an excerpt of Wordsworth's 1802 preface, contemporary reviews of both editions, and numerous appendices including: poems by Coleridge that were originally intended to be published in the LB, correspondence and commentary on the volumes, excerpts from contemporary prose and poetry, and a short section on mapping the locations of the poems.

It's a lot of material, but very useful. For my purposes, I was interested in how Wordsworth's contemporaries received the poems. For I was initially hesitant to make the jump from German to British romanticism because I had understood Wordsworth to be, as he is now often presented, a nature-poet. Reading Rancière in advance of the Lyrical Ballads had challenged that characterization, and the contemporary reviews, reproduced in this volume, confirm that his contemporaries did not miss the political aspect of Wordsworth's concept of nature, from the hints of Rousseau, to the way that his experiments in ascertaining "how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure" undermined the accepted hierarchies of aesthetic, moral, and political attitudes of the time.

I found the 1798 edition to be more compelling, but this could be due to reading the 1800 edition soon after. Nevertheless, I do appreciate the playful aspect of beginning the later edition with Wordsworth's "Expostulation and Reply" and "The Tables Turned," which introduce the Lyrical Ballads by asking the reader not to read it. And I couldn't complete this short review without noting the apt characterization (in the 1800 edition's 'Argument' prefacing The Ancient Mariner) of the mariner's act as a demonstration of "contempt of the laws of hospitality."

Communism and Racial Equality in the South

2012-01-29T19:16:00.000-05:00

We've had an eye on the historian Robin D.G. Kelley since...well, not just since we read his book on Thelonious Monk last year, but since we had first discovered--many years ago--Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism (Kelley wrote the introduction to the most recent edition).

When a few links to an NPR program on "How 'Communism' Brought Racial Equality to the South" popped up in the feeds today (not to mention on I Cite), we figured that Kelley must have been involved in some form. When I thought I'd make a joke about how some Republican hack was going to find this out and turn it into one of those rousing primary non-issues (LOOK! NPR IS PUSHING COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA!), I discovered that the interview is originally from February 2010.

It's a short reminder (in fact a discussion of Kelley's Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression) that the Communist Party played an important role in organizing civil rights struggle in the 1930s, and something to think about as the Occupy movement reorganizes for 2012.

Prof. KELLEY: In 1928, the communist position internationally was that African-Americans in the South have the right to self-determination. Meaning: they have the right to create their own nation in the South. In this position that came out of Moscow, it came from other black communists around the globe.

And with that idea in mind, they sent two organizers to Alabama and they went to Birmingham. And they chose Birmingham because it was probably the most industrialized city in the South. And they went there thinking they would organize white workers. And from white workers, black workers would follow. But no white workers had come forward.

And so, the first two organizers was a guy named James Julio(ph), who was a Sicilian worker who had migrated to Alabama, and another guy named Tom Johnson(ph), and together they went out looking for white workers and black workers came.

And black workers came in fairly large numbers right away because to them, they had a memory of reconstruction, the memory of the Civil War. And in that kind of collective memory, they were told that one day the Yankees will come back and finish the fight. Well, when they saw these white communists, they said, oh, good, the Yankees are here. We cant wait to join.

And it was no small part of the movement:

Prof. KELLEY: Well, theres a couple of ways to think about this. One, in terms of actual dues-paying members, they never had more than 600, 700. But then, if you look at all the other auxiliary organizations, the International Labor Defense, which focused on civil rights issues, they had up to 2,000. The Sharecroppers Union had up to 12,000. You had the International Workers Order. You had the League of Young Southerners. You had the Southern Negro Youth Congress. If you add up all these organizations, it touched the lives easily of 20,000 people.

Finally, the moral:

MARTIN: Hmm. So, what would you hope people would take away from all the work that youve done, documenting this history?

Prof. KELLEY: Well, first what I really emphasize is the fact that these were ordinary people, most of whom could not read or write, who were able to, on their own, form a very strong and productive movement that saw not just black peoples problems, but all peoples problems as connected. They saw joblessness and Civil Rights, and the right not be raped or lynched, self-protection - that all these things are part of one big struggle. And they really did succeed in building an interracial movement. Even if the whites were in the minority, those whites were there with them. And that vision, that ordinary people can make change, was a legacy they left us.

Representing Art Theories

2012-01-26T13:27:00.000-05:00

One of the most, maybe the most, time consuming parts to preparing a lecture for the course "Theories of Art" is searching for decent digital reproductions of paintings and sculptures. Even when you can access a resource like ARTstor, I spend a lot of time considering what images are most appropriate (is an image verging on cliche? if less known, is it still formally interesting? etc.). Note that ARTstor is not complete, which leads to the next paragraph:

If you don't have access to these resources via a library, things get tougher. As long as a work is in the public domain (more or less), Wikipedia is fairly reliable, although you often have to switch between languages to find your way to the more extensive galleries (often this requires going to the page in the artist's native language, where there is often the most interest in his or her work). When the work is still under copyright, things get much trickier. I spent the last two days working on a lecture on Max Raphael's Proudhon, Marx, Picasso, on excerpts from the chapter on Marx. Overall the book was a pleasure to read--too bad it's faded into obscurity (I discovered it while researching Walter Benjamin's sources).

Every lecture starts with an image of the critic if possible. This lead me to MoMA, where I discovered a watercolor by Max Pechstein, Max Raphael, 1910:

But when I wanted to address some of the questions posed by Raphael, and pose them through the interpretation of visual arts, I had some difficulty finding the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Diego Rivera. To save you some time, if you like, and if you would like a source for images for teaching some contemporary work under copyright, here are a few links:

Diego Rivera's murals from 1931-1932 at MoMA are here.
Basquiat, at Potomitan, a resource for créole culture.
And from my research last year, the gallery Latin American Masters. I found the site while looking for José Bedia, whose work figures prominently in Gerardo Mosquera's article "The Marco Polo Syndrome."

Egypt, Revolution, Samira Ibrahim, and Western Paternalists

2012-01-22T16:10:00.024-05:00

In the recent Egyptian elections the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties won the majority of votes. Overrated intellects such as Alan Dershowitz and Thomas L. Friedman will be giving their "I-told-you-so"s to the West and even advice to secularists in Egypt. See Friedman's December 6, 2011 article "Egypt, the Beginning or the End?" in the New York Times. Dershowitz really knows best. On 01/31/11 he wrote a piece for the Huff Post World titled "The Egyptian Revolution May Produce a Lebanon-Type Islamic Regime." He wrote:

I have visited Egypt on several occasions, most recently a few months ago. Compared to other repressive dictatorships I have visited over the years, it was a 5 or 6 on a scale of 10 for the average Egyptian. The hard question is will it get better or worse. "It's too soon to say." My best guess is that it will get better for some and worse for others.

Wow! So much insight. Dershowitz somehow has the ability to judge the scales of repression in undemocratic countries.

I think it is a shame and disgrace that Egyptians or any other country would be expected to defend their revolutions from anyone other than their own. A revolution by its definition is an internal conflict that a given society has to resolve with its self. It is also condescending to tell them what they should do. Egyptians don't need so-called advice from Friedman or others. There is one thing we as Westerners, especially US citizens, can do: We can tell our government to stop sending billions of dollars (coming from US tax payers) of military aid to the Egyptian military. You know, that military that has kept the corrupt regime in power and tortured civilians. I may be wrong on this, but it seems the Egyptian military historically pawned off the job of repression more on the Egyptian police. Initially, when the revolution against President Mubarak began, the Egyptian military attempted to divorce themselves from the dictator and the police. The military posed as guardians of the people and the revolution. Their true colors came out quickly. The military now attempts to control and perhaps sabotage the revolution to maintain the power it always had.

Why do I not mention and criticize groups such as those austere and grim Salafists from the Nour Party that have recently took power in the new government? Because my tax money does not empower them. The US government has helped fund and maintain the long standing regime. The Egyptian state uses state power to repress Egyptians and the US government contributes to that power. Hence, the US is linked to this legacy. Brave activist women like Samira Ibrahim have fought against the US funded tyranny of Mubarak, the police and the military. As a consequence she, along with countless other women, had not only suffered under Mubarak's rule for decades, but currently had "virginity tests" (rapes) from the Egyptian military while incarcerated. (It could have been worse. As Dershowitz pointed out, this was only repression on the scale of 5 to 6 out of 10.)I have posted two youtube clips talking about her and her struggle. She is an inspiration to many and a condemnation to others.

Of course I hope this revolution gets better and transforms Egypt into a prosperous nation. I want to see Egypt have religious equality and gender equality. Egyptians, not I, will do that work. There are plenty of issues for US citizens to take on in our own country. Yet, I should try to get my own government to stop using limited US funds for repression-devices and weapons to be put in the hands of the bad guys in Egypt (and elsewhere).

Courbet and Proudhon

2012-01-18T23:58:00.000-05:00

I've already mentioned the texts that I am teaching in the course "Great Philosophers," but I haven't yet posted about "Theories of Art," which I am teaching for the Department of Visual Arts. The course is organized around three themes, the first being "The Intersections of Art and Politics." We're reading, during this part of the course, Plato, Baudelaire, Proudhon, Zola, and Max Raphael.

Courbet, Proudhon and His Children in 1853 (1865)

Tomorrow, I'll be teaching an excerpt from Proudhon's Du principe de l'art et de sa destination sociale, and next week, we'll look at Zola' rejoinder (to an already dead Proudhon, and not in a metaphorical sense). The debate, as it were, turns on whether the artist or the artwork has some kind of social obligation--and the work of Courbet is right in the middle of it all. Proudhon says yes (in a very moralizing kind of way), Zola says no, and Courbet says, when he rejects being awarded the Legion of Honor in a letter (which was published) dated June 23, 1870:

My opinions as a citizen do not allow me to accept a title that derives essentially from the monarchic order....Honor is neither in a title nor in a ribbon, it is in actions and the motivation for those actions....When I am dead, they must be able to say of me, "That one never belonged to any school, to any church, to any institution, to any academy, and, above all, to any regime except the regime of freedom" (From Letters of Gustave Courbet, ed. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, University of Chicago, 1992).

Courbet demands independence, but not on a purely individualistic basis like Zola. I think at least this much is evident from the fact that Courbet participated in the Paris Commune--and was it not, then, "the regime of freedom?"

In absentia / year in review

2012-01-15T23:03:00.003-05:00

Comrade McLennan here. To my dozen or so faithful readers on this blog, I bid you hearty greetings after a long, long interval.

2011 was an insane year. The parabola dipped pretty low, but the year was seized. I travelled extensively, defended my dissertation, forgot how to play guitar, and had an amazing time teaching. And yes I'm still reading books and caring about politics. So expect me back, with a sporadic vengeance!

Reminders: CFP for Schelling Society Meeting

2012-01-11T17:32:00.001-05:00

Don't forget that the deadline for the submission of abstracts to the first meeting of the Schelling Society of North America is January 15th. For information, see HERE.

Also, for graduate students: the deadline for the "German Idealism: Legacies and Controversies" conference, here at the University of Ottawa, is January 30th. For information, see HERE.

The New Semester is Starting

2012-01-09T11:42:00.000-05:00

I'll be introducing my first course for the winter semester in under two hours. Here's the reading list for the course:

Plato, The Republic, Books IV and X
Aristotle, Politics, Book I
Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part I, and Meditations I, II, IV and (briefly) VI
Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (selections)
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (selections)
Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts ("Alienated Labor" and "Private Property and Communism")
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, chapters 1 and 3
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (as much as we can read in two weeks)

Compared to previous iterations of the course, I've switched from the first few books of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to the Politics, and added Wollstonecraft and Du Bois (who I've previously taught in the course "Fundamental Questions"). In addition, I decided to change things up with Beauvoir. Instead of teaching Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism" followed by the introduction to The Second Sex, we will be sorting out The Ethics of Ambiguity--why absurdity and ambiguity are not the same thing.

Rick Santorum: Christian Nuclear Bombs are Better Than Islamic Ones

2012-01-08T21:43:00.017-05:00

Republican Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum is enthusiastically ready to go to war with Iran if they pursue attempts to go nuclear. According to him, at the Republican debate in Concord, N.H., an Islamic theocracy is more dangerous with a nuclear bomb than a Christian (US), atheist (former Soviet Union), or Jewish state (Israel). He does not explain it explicitly that way, but it is certainly implied. Robin Abcarian, in the January 8, 2012 Los Angeles Times writes:

Moderator David Gregory noted that the United States has lived with a nuclear Soviet Union and a nuclear North Korea. “Why is it we cannot not live with a nuclear Iran?” he asked. “And if not, are you prepared to take the country to war to disarm that country?”

Iran, said Santorum "is a “theocracy that has deeply embedded beliefs that the afterlife is better than this life . When your principal virtue is to die for Allah, then it’s not a deterrent to have a nuclear threat . It is in fact an encouragement for them to use their nuclear weapon.”

He is hinting that Iran has a suicide-bomber mentality: that Islam inclines the use of the nuclear bomb. It should be noted that the US, a mainly Christian state, is the only country to have dropped nuclear bombs (killing over 200,000 civilians). [Updated:] There are debates about the actual reasons and reactions made by the US government during WWII against Japan. The US government's official reason for bombing Japan was because Japan started a war with the US. Japan used suicide bombers, though I don't recall that the Japanese religion promised virgins in the afterlife as a reward by Allah for their mission (side note: The Persian/Iranian word for God is Khoda, although Allah is used at times).

I usually never recommend Wikipedia as a source but its page on the history of suicide attacks gives an interesting perspective to this ignorant Islamophobic statement by Santorum. I would like to make it clear that I'm nuclear-bomb phobic and would like them all to be dismantled. I simply think it is really hypocritical that nuclear powers such as the US and Israel to tell Iran they can't have one. Every nation that attains a nuclear bomb is a "suicide attacker" state.

This video I'm posting, "History of U.S. Intervention in Iran - 1953 Until Present," is a must see. I don't believe there is one point made that is debated by historians.

Poe as Critic: The Drake-Halleck Review

2012-01-04T13:38:00.001-05:00

I've spent the last few weeks reading a variety of works by Edgar Allan Poe (and Coleridge, for that matter), preparing for a paper that I am co-authoring with Sean Moreland on the connections between Schelling, Coleridge, and Poe. Sean is in Seattle, whittling the material down to a twenty minute presentation, to be given on Sunday morning at the MLA conference (see here). If you're in the area, I'd recommend checking it out. At least I've learned a few things from this unlikely line of research.

I've also learned that Poe could be a devastating critic. It's one thing to engage in polemics--something I'm sure we're all familiar with. But Poe takes literary criticism to another level, given that he's unafraid to use his talents to mischievous effect. As in laugh out loud funny, although if I build it up too much you will not laugh, and thus not embarrass yourself by punctuating the silence of a library or the murmur of a café.

In the Drake-Halleck review (in fact, go read it rather than what follows here), Poe attacks the tendency of American critics to inflate the literary value of American authors, noting that we "find ourselves involved in the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American." There are, Poe argues, cases in which American literature measures up to other national literatures (he's thinking particularly of the British), but overestimating sub-par work by authors such as Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz Greene Halleck undermines "the health and prosperity of out literature."

In what follows, Poe argues that Drake's poetry only requires a "moderate endowment of the faculty of Comparision"--the fancy-- rather than a facility with imagination and ideality. After summarizing the plot of the poem the Culprit Fay, he writes (all that follows is from Poe):

It will be there seen that what is so frequently termed the imaginative power of this story, lies especially- we should have rather said is thought to lie- in the passages we have quoted, or in others of a precisely similar nature. These passages embody, principally, mere specifications of qualities, of habiliments, of punishments, of occupations, of circumstances, &c., which the poet has believed in unison with the size, firstly, and secondly with the nature of his Fairies. To all which may be added specifications of other animal existences (such as the toad, the beetle, the lance-fly, the fire-fly and the like) supposed also to be in accordance. An example will best illustrate our meaning upon this point-

He put his acorn helmet on;
It was plumed of the silk of the thistle down:
The corslet plate that guarded his breast
Was once the wild bee's golden vest;
His cloak of a thousand mingled dyes,
Was formed of the wings of butterflies;
His shield was the shell of a lady-bug queen,
Studs of gold on a ground of green;
And the quivering lance which he brandished bright
Was the sting of a wasp he had slain in fight.

We shall now be understood. Were any of the admirers of the Culprit Fay asked their opinion of these lines, they would most probably speak in high terms of the imagination they display. Yet let the most stolid and the most confessedly unpoetical of these admirers only try the experiment, and he will find, possibly to his extreme surprise, that he himself will have no difficulty whatever in substituting for the equipments of the Fairy, as assigned by the poet, other equipments equally comfortable, no doubt, and equally in unison with the preconceived size, character, and other qualities of the equipped. Why we could accoutre him as well ourselves- let us see.

His blue-bell helmet, we have heard
Was plumed with the down of the hummingbird,
The corslet on his bosom bold
Was once the locust's coat of gold,
His cloak, of a thousand mingled hues,
Was the velvet violet, wet with dews,
His target was, the crescent shell
Of the small sea Sidrophel,
And a glittering beam from a maiden's eye
Was the lance which he proudly wav'd on high.

The truth is, that the only requisite for writing verses of this nature, ad libitum is a tolerable acquaintance with the qualities of the objects to be detailed, and a very moderate endowment of the faculty of Comparison- which is the chief constituent of Fancy or the powers of combination. A thousand such lines may be composed without exercising in the least degree the Poetic Sentiment, which is Ideality, Imagination, or the creative ability. And, as we have before said, the greater portion of the Culprit Fay is occupied with these, or similiar things, and upon such, depends very nearly, if not altogether, its reputation.

2011 in Reviews

2012-01-02T12:35:00.000-05:00

With 2012 beginning, what better time to look back at 2011 in reviews:

Thomas Muntzer, Sermon to the Princes (Verso)

by Matt McLennan

"Engels's classic study "The Peasant War in Germany" - where, it should be noted, Engels rides roughshod over the theological aspects of Muntzer's movement and paints him as a crafty political figure using religious rhetoric to push his agenda forward. Certainly there is much politicking to be found in his writings - Cf the scathing attacks on Luther - but reading him I'm not convinced that the theological and political elements can be so easily separated."

Robin D.G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press)

by Devin Shaw

"Given that music criticism is a mixed bag, it's hard not to appreciate a well-acclaimed historian taking on the biography of a complex man so often portrayed as simple, naive, and childlike. Kelley's aim is to dispel precisely that story, first found in William Gottlieb's profile published in Down Beat in September 1947 and popularized through the efforts of Lorraine Lion's press release that accompanied his first record from Blue Note."

David Sedaris, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (Little, Brown, and Co.)

by Matt McLennan

"Animal fables are generally awesome on account of how grown up and gruesome and darkly humourous they can be. One might even say that animal fables are "fucking metal" at the best of times. Cf also Vikram Seth's "Beastly Tales", and raise your hammers high. Humourist David Sedaris has recently thrown his contribution to the genre into the ring, and it does not disappoint."

Lisa Shapiro, ed. The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes (University of Chicago Press)

by Devin Shaw

"I can't always say that I like reading the winding paths of philosophers' correspondence. That being said, I recommend The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes to the reader who is looking for a different and not often noticed side of early modern philosophy and letters."

Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon (Verso)

by Matt McLennan

"Through humour, sadness, love and ire, the force of Badiou's personality shines through in virtually every eulogy, giving body to the austere rigour of his own philosophical work."

Pierre Clastres, Archeology of Violence (Semiotext(e))

by Matt McLennan

"The essays collected expand upon his central argument, which defines "primitive" societies by their refusal of the State. Taking such societies seriously, for Clastres, means recognizing that they are not embryonic or proto-societies, but rather full-blown political totalities which have constituted themselves in a very conscious and deliberate way so as to prevent the rise of inequality, (non-sexual) division of labour and, ultimately, since these are its very substance, the State."

Arthur C. Danto, Andy Warhol (Yale)

by Devin Shaw

"From what I can gather, Warhol represents a world that Danto felt at home in, and, for all its self-obsessed pathos, more than likely the world that he feels nostalgia for. Warhol or not, that's not a world I want to glorify, let alone live in."

Patrik Ourednik, The Opportune Moment, 1855 (Dalkey Archive)

by Devin Shaw

The Opportune Moment, 1855 "tells the story of the failure of an utopian commune founded by Italian anarchists in Brazil. It opens with a letter by one of the protagonists (who I will call the epistolary narrator), to his unrequited love, many years after the failure of the new society. At once it becomes clear that Ourednik is writing, in a way, a historical novel and satire."

Patrik Ourednik, Europeana (Dalkey Archive)

by Devin Shaw

"it strikes me the book is a critique of its own rhetoric and "expressiveness," an 'auto-reductio ad absurdum' of the attempt to quantify historical change and void the subjectivity of historical agents....Nevertheless, those final few pages, with their critique of the smug arrogance of late twentieth century chroniclers of political power, are edifying enough to warrant a trip through the 20th century of Europeana."

John Nichols, The "S" Word: A Short History of an American Tradition...Socialism (Verso)

by Devin Shaw

"Given that the first chapter and the afterword situate the history of socialism within contemporary debates, the book might just be the general starting point for reconsidering the history of American radicalism. Given that the Democrats have largely abandoned many of the concerns that allied them with the working class and the civil rights movement, in favor of a politics of progressive verbiage, it may well be, as Nichols writes, "that the only word of the left that still has any meaning is 'socialism.'" "

A Danzig Winter Solstice

2011-12-22T00:02:00.000-05:00

There you were at Glenn Danzig's abode. You had finished the feast, and had been outside to observe his pet wolves. After numerous goblets of his beer, wine, and mead, which were brewed according to his favorite medieval recipes, the conversation plunged into a moment of silence. You were going to ask about a reference in one of your favorite songs--despite recalling that Samhain celebration when Riki Rachtman was banished for questioning the merits of the cinematic namesake of "Astro Zombies"--when Danzig invited you into his hallowed library.

On Not Apologizing for Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-17T13:54:00.002-05:00

Before we pen any number of tributes to the late Christopher Hitchens, let us not forget that he spent at least the last decade fighting, often in the guise of atheistic polemics, for the spirit of American imperialism. Let us not forget that he could write on why women aren't funny while demonstrating that he didn't have much of a sense of humor, that he could write The Trial of Henry Kissenger but not notice that many of his arguments applied to Bush or Cheney, or that he made a big show about volunteering to be waterboarded just about the time he decided to jump ship on the Iraq War, rather than admitting that he had been wrong all along. A few years ago, I wrote:

It's a lot of work to recreate yourself from something like a Marxist, to G.W.Bush and war on terror advocate, to 'shoot-from-the-hip' atheist.

And if I was wrong about that characterization, I was mistaken on the part about effort: it was easier for Hitchens to recreate himself than it was for him to admit that he might have made an error in judgment concerning his stout endorsement of imperialism.

Travel Reading: Holiday Edition

2011-12-12T22:06:00.001-05:00

(Or, 'On Convincing Myself to Travel Lightly')

I've written a few times on travel reading. Last time, I discussed a number of constraints involved:

there are numerous external limitations to what one can plan on reading: the size of one's luggage or carry on bag, the size of the books, the time of the flight, layovers, etc. Each has their own specific challenge. I find that if I fly early in the morning, or red-eye, novels are probably the best, but no James Joyce or David Foster Wallace.

That post was for a trip to a conference. Since we're going to visit family, I would say that there are a few additional constraints, like the expected amount of time that family members will not be vying for your attention, subtracted by time visiting friends. Or, more importantly, the number of books on departure in relation to the number of books expected to be acquired at destination (or, at least in this case, in Berkeley and San Francisco). Due primarily to that latter point, I've narrowed this trip's selection to four books and on photocopied essay:

David Mitchell, Black Swan Green. Still working my way through Mitchell's novels, still not sure what I think about them, except that they are worthwhile enough that I will have read three of five.
Jacques Rancière, Short Voyages to the Land of the People. As you know, I'm writing a book on JR. If you're wondering why I chose this book for this trip, check the physical dimensions: 4.5 x 7 x .5 inches.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It's the Oxford World's Classics edition, so A Vindication of the Rights of Men and An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution are included as well. I'll be teaching MW in my 'Great Philosophers' course next semester, so I am brushing up on her work now (or so I hope).
Finally, two research selections for my paper with Sean Moreland, "Urged by Schelling": Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka (a critical edition),
and, a photocopy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "On the Prometheus of Aeschylus." I was writing about this essay this evening, and then I hit a wall, and now I'm blogging. If I don't get around to discussing it on a subsequent post, I'd like to underline that this essay deserves a place among the best of short essays in/on German idealism. It's not immediately clear, but on a second read, one discovers that Coleridge is continuing his conversation with Schelling's work, this time with the often-neglected Deities of Samothrace (1815).

A Stiegler Follow Up Post

2011-12-12T02:30:00.000-05:00

Peter Gratton links to my review of Stiegler's For a New Critique of Political Economy and notes:

I would think Devin would question some of the Marxian categories he introduces–the task of some of his current work–but I think he brings them up not to say Stiegler is wrong because he’s fallen afoul of doctrinaire Marxism, but simply that if you’re going to critique Marx, you better get him right.

Discussing Marx--without becoming mired in the numerous debates over Marx and Marxist theory--in the forum of a book review can be challenging, especially in discussions of political economy, where it is quite easy to come off as dogmatic. Peter thankfully points out that this is not what I am doing. And yet, unfortunately, my recent work on Rancière and Marx has yet to see the light of day in published form, which means the reader sees the results of the work, and not the process of critique behind it.

What I am trying to do, in the review of Stiegler, is discuss his work in relation to those aspects of Marx's thought that I think have (or should have) bearing on contemporary debates. If we're going to talk about political economy, then I think we have to talk about expropriation and class within capitalism, and if we're going to talk about neoliberalism, then--following David Harvey--I think it is necessary to discuss aspects of what he calls accumulation by dispossession. Especially if you're going to pay tribute the to the 150th anniversary of Marx's Contributions to a Critique of Political Economy (1859).

But I'm doing more in other parts of the review than using Marx as a heuristic device for criticizing Stiegler. So, when I bring up the distinction between objectification (Vergegenständlichung) and alienation or externalization (Entfremdung or Entäußerung) from the 1844 manuscripts, I'm taking the point very seriously. If you read Marx through French debates (post-Althusser or post-Foucault), the difference between objectification and alienation will not be on your map, as Althusser dismisses, as we all know, much of the early Marx as too humanist--not to mention that Marx's work was dismissed by Foucault as an anthropologizing discourse--think The Order of Things, the sand on the beach, etc. But I came to this problem through Lukacs, or I used to come at these problems after Althusser and Foucault, until Lukacs (and, since he doesn't get enough credit, Karl Korsch) convinced me otherwise.

That aside, I think one of the central problems of the Stiegler's and Agamben's of contemporary philosophy is to mistake the fact that humans produce things with alienation. That is, you make something, or, in Agamben's more extreme moments, use language, then you're already captured in an apparatus, and thus ultimately alienated. The distinction between objectification and alienation is to differentiate between humans mediating, through making things, their relations with each other and with nature, and a historically situated mode of production, capitalism, which expropriates so much of human activity. If you don't, you run the risk of bemoaning cellular phones as the worst and most ubiquitous of apparatuses.

But it's not just the Heideggerian approach that runs into trouble, there's a Sartrean version of the same problem, which causes trouble for Rancière: the question turns on what it means to activate and maintain egalitarian practices without them reifying into inegalitarian institutions. I'm still working this out, but I can say this question is the reason that the problem of objectification and alienation has become one of my concerns.

A Review of Stiegler's "New" Critique of Political Economy

2011-12-10T14:14:00.000-05:00

My review of Bernard Stiegler's For a New Critique of Political Economy is up on the CSCP website. I argue that

Despite his claim of commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Marx’s Contributions to a Critique of Political Economy (1859), Stiegler does little more than replace Marx’s class analysis and revolutionary critique of capitalism with an analysis of how technology leads to short-term thinking.

While you are brushing up on Stiegler, don't forget to revisit a classic piece of criticism, Peter Gratton's review of Taking Care of Youth and the Generations on the NDPR.

Memo: The "S" Word

2011-12-08T13:33:00.000-05:00

To: Joshua and all other interested parties
re: The "S" Word: A Short History of an American Tradition...Socialism (Verso, 2011)

Not so long ago-- before the #occupy movement, but still it was July-- you posted a short piece called "Every time the Left Sins God Sends Another Working-class American to the Tea Party." You argued that the American Left needed to appropriate the American history of radicalism and socialism without leaving it to the right:

Many Leftists articulate American working-class needs by using overly intellectual rhetoric. The Left does not need to dumb down information, just break it down. Many Leftists use other countries' revolutionaries and revolutions as symbols of liberation and outright ignore American equivalents. What about heroes of struggle such as Thomas Paine,John Brown, and Mary Harris "Mother" Jones? What about celebrating movements such as the BOSTON TEA PARTY?

Particular aspects of this kind of discussion always worry me, especially appeals to the War of Independence and the Tea Party. I wrote, in a comment:

We cannot, and should not, attempt to out-jingoize the Right (which isn't your point, but the issue could be lurking there). The radical left has a much stronger history with abolitionism, the IWW and union activism (Eugene V. Debs, anybody?), and the Harlem Renaissance, than the transfer of power from the British to American bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, the symbolic reference points take on gravity from organization rather than the reverse.

Like I said, things were different then. While I never took the Tea Party seriously (which is much easier to do when you're not surrounded by it), that astro-turf bus tour has been quickly forgotten behind the strength of the Occupy movement. But that doesn't mean that our discussion has become academic. What of the American history of socialism and radicalism?

It turns out we're not the only people thinking about it. John Nichols' The "S" Word is an important re-examination of American socialism. The book is structured chronologically, with Chapter 2 dealing with Tom Paine, Chapter 3 with the abolitionism of Abraham Lincoln, Chapter 4 with the successes of socialist governance in Milwaukee, Chapter 5 with the anti-war movement during World War I, and Chapter 6 on the contributions of socialist thought and practice on the civil rights movement.

But let's not make any mistake. Chronological or not, the book opens with two chapters that ought to shame Republicans for their (mis-) appropriations of Thomas Paine or Abe Lincoln, who were much more open minded than contemporary Fox News conservatives, who proposed and considered ideas that were much more socialist than most Democrats would mull over today.

From there Nichols turns to the local electoral successes of socialists, primarily in Milwaukee. But his larger point is that many of the ideals we on the left work with have a much longer history than is commonly assumed.

There is nothing new, nothing "modern," about this understanding of the need to cross lines of race, creed, ethnicity and gender in order to make a fundamental change. Joseph Weydemeyer, the follower of Marx and Engels who advocated "true socialism," organized the American Workers League in 1853 with the stated purpose of uniting workers "without respect to occupation, language, color or sex" (179).

You read the number correctly: 1853. Nichols argues that avowed socialists have worked for over a century and a half toward transforming the lives of Americans against some of the most fierce political opposition (see the chapter on the opposition to World War I).

I don't want to carry on too long, given that this was supposed to be a short memo. Let me say a few more things in shorthand. The primary weakness of Nichols's book can be summarized like this: too much love for Edward Bernstein's followers, and not enough for John Brown. Meaning that Nichols heavily favors electoral action, and does not discuss what the historical significance of revolutionary violence, or non-statist political organization, might mean (which is in part understandable given that the right currently holds a monopoly on extra-state violence). Also, he makes numerous appeals to American socialism as an American tradition and not just a foreign imposition--but we really need to be careful with this kind of rhetoric, for it appeals to many of the shared assumptions of a country built on settler colonialism (though Nichols does not ignore this issue; see p. 70).

However, these criticisms should not overshadow the merits of The "S" Word. Given that the first chapter and the afterword situate the history of socialism within contemporary debates, the book might just be the general starting point for reconsidering the history of American radicalism. Given that the Democrats have largely abandoned many of the concerns that allied them with the working class and the civil rights movement, in favor of a politics of progressive verbiage, it may well be, as Nichols writes, "that the only word of the left that still has any meaning is 'socialism.'"

Two Unrelated Notes: Twitter and Radio

2011-12-06T12:57:00.001-05:00

First, after holding out for however many years, I've created a twitter account, @devinzshaw, where you are sure to find concise observations on the ridiculous and the sublime in 140 characters.

Second, I will be spinning and talking jazz with Ed Staples on the Bew Cocky Salsa show on CKCU at 11pm tonight (update: EST, or here on the web). Timing is important because, from what I can tell, CKCU doesn't archive their shows.

CFP: German Idealism: Legacies and Controversies

2011-12-06T12:36:00.002-05:00

Call for Abstracts

GERMAN IDEALISM: LEGACIES AND CONTROVERSIES

8th Annual De Philosophia Graduate Student Conference
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario

6 - 7 April 2012

Keynote Speaker: Iain Macdonald, Université de Montréal

The conference organizers and the Graduate Philosophy Student Association at the University of Ottawa invite submissions relating to any aspect of German Idealism and its major representatives (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc.). We are particularly interested in projects that explore various appropriations and critiques of this tradition since its height in the early nineteenth century. Our goal is to open up a space for creative engagement with key issues in German Idealism from a wide array of critical (and potentially divergent) perspectives.

Possible approaches include (but are not limited to):

The historical and philosophical foundations of German Idealism
The status of Romanticism
Marxian critiques of Hegel and the Left Hegelians
Nietzschean rejections of ‘systematicity’ and dialectics
Existentialism on freedom and transcendence
Phenomenological concerns with corporeity and subjectivity
Language, ideology, and ‘the ontological turn’ in hermeneutics
The Frankfurt School critique of ‘identity philosophy’
Pragmatist, naturalist, and anti-metaphysical readings

- French and English submissions welcome.
- Abstracts should be no longer than 350 words, prepared for blind review in .DOC or .PDF format.
- In a separate document, authors must include their name, institutional affiliation, e-mail address and the title of their submission.

Successful applicants must provide their completed essays (12-15 double-spaced pages for a 25-30 minute presentation) no later than 6 March 2012.

Deadline for Abstracts: 30 January 2012

Please send abstracts/inquiries to: dephilosophia@gmail.com.

Appel à communications

L’IDÉALISME ALLEMAND : HÉRITAGES ET ENJEUX

8ième colloque annuel De Philosophia
Université d’Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario

Le 6 et 7 avril 2012

Conférencier plénier : Iain Macdonald, Université de Montréal

Pour son 8ième colloque annuel, les organisateurs de la conférence avec l’appui de l’Association des étudiants diplômés de l’Université d’Ottawa invitent la communauté estudiantine à une réflexion générale sur l’idéalisme allemand et ses représentants (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc.). L’objectif est d’ouvrir un espace propice à une discussion sur les points marquants de cette tradition. Nous sommes particulièrement intéressés aux problèmes philosophiques touchant les appropriations et les critiques de la tradition de l’idéalisme allemand.

Est bienvenue toute proposition de communication abordant l’un ou l’autre des thèmes mentionnés ici.

Les fondements historiques et philosophiques de l’idéalisme allemand
Le mouvement romantique relativement à l’idéalisme allemand
La critique marxiste
La critique nietzschéenne des systèmes et de la dialectique
L’existentialisme, la liberté et la transcendance
Le problème phénoménologique de la subjectivité et du corps
Langage, idéologie et le ‘tournant ontologique’ en herméneutique
La critique de l’école de Francfort
Les perspectives pragmatiques, naturalistes et anti-métaphysiques

- Les propositions sont acceptées en français ou en anglais.
- Aux fins d’évaluation, un résumé de 350 mots est nécessaire en format .DOC ou .PDF.
- Veuillez joindre un document dans lequel est inscrit le nom de l’auteur, l’affiliation institutionnelle, l’adresse courriel et le titre de la communication.

Dates limites pour soumettre un résumé de sa proposition : Le 30 janvier 2012

Veuillez envoyer votre résumé (350 mots) à : dephilosophia@gmail.com

Les conférenciers sélectionnés devront soumettre le texte de leur communication (12 à 15 pages double interligne couvrant une communication de 25 à 30 minutes) au plus tard : Le 6 mars 2012.

Dr.Strangelove, Iran, the US, and Israel

2011-12-04T16:27:00.010-05:00

Today, Sunday December 4, Iran claims it has shot down a an unmanned American drone over its eastern territory. David Goldstein of McClatchy Newspapers reports:

The incident comes at a time of rising tension with Iran over its nuclear enrichment program. Tehran insists that the program will be only for domestic use, but Western nations and Israel, in particular, remain highly skeptical and worry that the true purpose is to develop nuclear weapons.

The real concern is not about Iran attacking the US or Israel. The issue is Iran being a nuclear big-shot just like Israel and the US. Israel is so concerned that they might attack Iran with or without US help or approval. The Israeli news source Haaretz shows how Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is drumming up for war. He publicly stated:

"Great statesmen as well as friends of the Jews and of Zionism" warned Ben-Gurion that declaring a Jewish state in 1948 would bring an invasion of Arab armies and a "grave and difficult battle", Netanyahu said.

"He understood full well the decision carried a heavy price, but he believed not making that decision had a heavier price," Netanyahu said. "We are all here today because Ben-Gurion made the right decision at the right moment.”

In other words, even though the US and some Israeli officials are telling him attacking Iran is a bad idea he still may do it. O what a dangerous political game. Who is advocating suicide bombing now?

Since US President Bush, several messages have been received by enemies of the US (and to some of its allies such as Israel). If a country does not possess weapons of mass destruction it can and will be invaded. Iraq knows best. If a country stops its nuclear program and cooperates with the US, along other Western powers, it can still get invaded and bombed. As Qaddafi of Libya learned the hard way. What Iran knows is that it may get attacked with or without nuclear weapons, but it most certainly will not get attacked if it does have them. This is why countries go nuclear. It is supposed to be a deterrent. It's a gamble. Every nation with these weapons of mass destruction play a risky game of "Russian" roulette. The ones that already have them can also get delusional. Netanyahu thinks he is Ben-Gurion ready to take risks and recreate Israel despite all odds. I refer him to Karl Marx's thoughts on Louis Bonaparte:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Netanyahu is a farce. He acts as if he'll keep stability and peace in the region. It looks like he may set off another goddamned war.

I thought a clip from Stanley Kubrick's Dr.Strangelove(1964) would be quite fitting.

Cartesian Egalitarianism: A Follow Up Post

2011-11-30T15:23:00.001-05:00

In a comment on the previous post on Cartesian egalitarianism, Scu raised some important concerns, one that I address in the forthcoming essay, and one which was beyond the scope of the paper, but nevertheless important.

First, to the question of whether Cartesian egalitarianism has any value for anti-colonial or post-colonial theory and praxis, I cite a passage from Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism, which was in many ways the impetus for my reconsideration of Descartes. In this paper I only had a chance to mention this in passing:

Aimé Césaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism, invokes the principles of Cartesianism against the false universality of the colonial legacy (its science, politics, and sociology), which denigrates the non-European to the benefit and “glory” of Western bourgeois society. He argues that “the psychologists, sociologists et al., their views on ‘primitivism,’ their rigged investigations, their self-serving generalizations, their tendentious speculations, their insistence on the marginal, ‘separate’ character of non-whites” rest on “their barbaric repudiation, for the sake of the cause, of Descartes’s statement, the charter of universalism, that ‘reason…is found whole and entire in each man,’ and that ‘where individuals of the same species are concerned, there may be degrees in respect of their accidental qualities, but not in respect of their forms, or natures’” (56).

Second, about the problem of Descartes's account of animals. Here, I completely agree that Descartes is unhelpful and infuriating. But in reading through the replies and objections to the Meditations, I discovered that Pierre Gassendi might be a resource for considerations of the human/animal distinction (not just against Descartes, but against Aristotle as well):

You [Descartes] say that brutes lack reason. Well, of course they lack human reason, but they do not lack their own kind of reason. So it does not seem appropriate to call them ἄλογα [irrational] except by comparison with us or with our kind of reason; and in any case λόγος or reason seems to be a general term, which can be attributed to them no less than the cognitive faculty or internal sense (AT, VII: 270-271) .

Cartesian Egalitarianism

2011-11-29T13:03:00.000-05:00

I am currently putting the finishing touches on an essay entitled "Cartesian Egalitarianism: From Poullain de la Barre to Rancière," which will be published in a forthcoming issue of Phaenex (their site).

We do not typically consider Descartes an egalitarian. He is more often interpreted, in the post-Heideggerian tradition of philosophy, as an epochal figure of the modern destiny of metaphysics. On this account, Descartes introduces the metaphysical ground of technicity by dividing all beings between thinking subjects and objects of a calculable objective world. Or, following Antonio Negri, he is considered an architect of a “reasonable ideology” that expresses the class compromise constitutive of the formation of bourgeois class power after the 1620s: whereas Descartes formulates his philosophy as the production of human significance (and practical utility) in its separation from the world, the bourgeoisie affirms its position in civil society at the same time it accepts a temporary class compromise with absolutism (Negri, Political Descartes, 295-296).

I argue that Descartes's legacy cannot be reduced to either of these interpretations, that there is something more to his philosophy.

As of late, both Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have laid claim to the legacy of the Cartesian subject, but their appropriation is largely programmatic (Zizek, in fact, is more interested in the Kantian/Hegelian subject; and Badiou the use of mathematics to reconceptualize ontology).

With Rancière (just as, I would argue, François Poullain de la Barre and Simone de Beauvoir), the discussion of the Cartesian subject has a specific content: equality. Cartesian egalitarianism pursues the consequences of Descartes's supposition, found in the Discourse on Method, that reason is equally distributed to all human beings (looking, of course, past the ironic posturing of the first sentence):

Good sense (bon sens) is the best distributed (partagée) thing in the world: for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess. In this it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken. It indicates rather that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’—is naturally equal in all men, and consequently that the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more reasonable than others but solely because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things. (AT, VI: 1-2)

This claim, that good sense or reason is equal in all human beings, is fundamental to later Cartesian egalitarians, beginning with Poullain de la Barre. Here's Rancière's gloss of the way that Poullain and Jacotot take up this passage: “there are not several manners of being intelligent, no distribution between two forms of intelligence, and then between two forms of humanity. The equality of intelligences is first the equality of intelligence itself in all of its operations” ("L’actualité du Maître ignorant,” 412-413).

As I said, I'm still putting the finishing touches on the essay, so I can't get into all the details here (or else why would you read the article when it is finally published?). I can provide what I take to be the conditions necessary to count a thinker as a Cartesian egalitarian, as I've given them in the abstract (slightly edited here):

I present an overview of what I call “Cartesian egalitarianism,” a current of political thought that runs from François Poullain de la Barre, through Simone de Beauvoir, to Jacques Rancière. The impetus for this egalitarianism, I argue, is derived from Descartes’s supposition that “good sense” or “reason” is equally distributed among all people. Although Descartes himself limits the egalitarian import of this supposition [restricting the import to the evaluation of epistemological and metaphysical claims], I claim that we can nevertheless identify three features of this subsequent tradition or tendency. First, Cartesian egalitarians think political agency as a practice of subjectivity. Second, they share the supposition that there is an equality of intelligences and abilities shared by all human beings. Third, these thinkers conceptualize politics as a processing of a wrong, meaning that politics initiates new practices through which those who were previously oppressed assert themselves as self-determining political subjects.

No! Not THAT Other!

2011-11-20T13:01:00.000-05:00

Scu (here) and Peter Gratton (here) have opened a discussion about Levinas' concept of the other, specifically regarding the problem of alterity and the human/animal distinction. Peter does a good job summarizing a basic problem with Levinas' account:

He wants to say both that the Other as such is wholly other, unique, and non-subsumable under a form of knowledge, and he wants to say the other is human. But there is no a priori rule one can put into place, given his radical claims for alterity, that would have one always already identify otherness as human, as non-animal, and so on.

In fact, I think it's surprising that more people working on the concept of the other don't acknowledge how conservative Levinas' account is (even after Beauvoir points out how he utilizes the 'Feminine is the other' trope...). Nor is enough attention paid to a very concrete ethical failure (included in The Levinas Reader, on page 294), Levinas' response to Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon. From an interview on September 28, 1982:

[Shlomo Malka]: Emmanuel Levinas, you are the philosopher of the 'other.' Isn't history, isn't politics the very site of the encounter with the 'other,' and for the Israeli, isn't the 'other' above all the Palestinian?

[Levinas]: My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbour, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you're for the other, you're for the neighbour. But if your neighbour attacks another neighbour or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong.

That's a rather circuitous route to say, 'no, that's not the alterity I am talking about,' but I suppose that Levinas didn't want to admit that his concept of the other is not so radical after all. And to think that the volume's editor commends the interview for "its rigour and clarity."

Obama and US Military in Australia

2011-11-19T13:08:00.005-05:00

Nobel Peace Prize winner US President Obama continues to rival former US President Bush in maintaining and expanding US Empire. The US will be committing it's military presence to Australia. According to the news agency Reuters:

The U.S. deployment to Australia, the largest since World War Two, will start next year with a company of 200-250 marines in Darwin...

A total of 2,500 U.S. troops would eventually rotate through the port city. The United States will bring in ships, aircraft and vehicles, as well as increase military training.

For what purpose? The Chinese see this as a provocation. What is certain is that the US views itself as the necessary leader to be involved in economic and political affairs throughout the region. The same article continues:

China claims the entire maritime region, a vital commercial shipping route rich in oil, minerals and fishery resources. It insists that any disputes be resolved through bilateral talks and says Washington has no business getting involved.

"The United States is also trying to get involved in a number of regional maritime disputes, some of which concern China's sovereignty and territorial integrity," a commentary from China's official Xinhua news agency said.

Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei hold rivals claims to at least parts of the sea and tension occasionally flares up into maritime stand-offs.

Obama will make an "anchor speech" outlining the U.S. vision for the Asia-Pacific to the Australian parliament on Thursday before a whistle stop in Darwin. He then flies to the Indonesian island of Bali for the East Asia summit.

So here we have it, the US is overtly the official policeman of the world. While the US economy sinks there will be plenty of US Navy ships keeping float: less bread for more iron and steel. I thought this kind of distorted sense of priorities is what the North Korean government has been accused of doing. I forgot, Kim Jong-il never got the Nobel Peace Prize.

Derrida and Realism

2011-11-13T19:02:00.001-05:00

We've been blogging here at The Notes Taken for several years now, and our contributors have yet to thematically discuss (as I discovered as I was tagging this post) either speculative realism or Jacques Derrida. Both subjects, in a way, have been outside of my range of concerns, even if I occasionally try to keep current on them (bloggingly speaking).* I did, at the recent CSCP conference, mention to Michael of Complete Lies that despite my interest in Quentin Meillassoux, I ultimately find QM to be too Althusserian for my tastes (though let me add: this may sound dismissive, but this a discussion I'd like to engage in more depth later). And I have not read any non-blog writings of the others: Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, or Tim Morton.

At some point last year, they circled the wagons during a period of a few days that many of us know as the Derrida Wars. And I don't want to rehash that debate, but I do want to mention that the issue--roughly, could Derrida be a realist?-- has resurfaced recently. Which leads me to an great post by Peter Gratton on Derrida's Of Grammatology. If you do the SR thing, then you might just find a strong challenge to the typical SR dismissal of Derrida, and if you don't, Peter has at least proposed a number of reasons as to why we should reconsider Derrida's work, in a way (this post has style, that's for sure) that makes Of Grammatology sound a little less forbidding than usual (I mean that as a compliment, since Peter's work on Derrida talked me in to rereading the latter). Here's the main point:

This isn’t to defend Derrida just for the sake of defending Derrida, but it’s to point out that if one wants to critique correlationism (the idea that what is real must be indexed back to the conscious subject, an argument that entails the correlate that what is most real is the consciousness of self, since in the self relation there is not even the distance of a correlation) or the political effects of an idea of nature, well Of Grammatology is a good place to begin.

The latter issue--the political effects of an idea of nature--my guess is that Peter's forthcoming The State of Sovereignty has something to say about that.

The Lone Footnote

*Since I wrote a book on Schelling, the reader might wonder how I would not be concerned with Iain Hamilton Grant's work. To which I respond: I don't consider Grant to be advocating realism alone but a type of Schellingian idealism-realism.

As for Derrida, I would like to work through the Beast and the Sovereign lectures someday.

Democracy's Reconstruction

2011-11-11T01:13:00.000-05:00

As part of my self-education in Africana philosophy, I've taken to teaching portions of W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk in my introductory courses in philosophy. Since I've been keeping note of these things: in the NDPR, Frank M. Kirkland reviews Lawrie Balfour's Democracy's Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W.E.B. Du Bois. Kirkland highlights the continuing relevance of Du Bois' political thought, including his critique of the "American Assumption":

Du Bois does not, for Balfour, historically retrieve the past for the sake of salvaging it, but does so for the sake of delivering it from a stupor and a void threatening to deprive it of any novel role it could assume in a future-oriented present. And she sees the expansion of democracy as requiring a future-oriented present that is at the same time historically redemptive of its past in the fashion just described.

Balfour's example for this point is Du Bois' critique of what he calls in his Black Reconstruction the "American Assumption." This "assumption" is the conviction that affluence is the successful outcome of one's hard work alone and can be the result of each and every one's own effort. It first emerged in conjunction with "King Cotton" predicated on slave labor. The assumption has, however, never been pertinent to the material lives of most Americans. But it subsequently grew steadily in the minds of most of them, steadily separating generations from the wrong of slavery and steadily affirmed that those who profited from that wrong bore no responsibility for it. In effect, Americans have carried this belief in the ethic of individualism and hard work to the current day, despite its longstanding irrelevance to their material lives and despite the fact that it was and continues to be sustained racially (notwithstanding the line of African-Americans running from Booker T. Washington through Herman Cain affirming it) as well as by class.

CFP: Radical Philosophy Association

2011-11-08T23:19:00.000-05:00

CALL FOR PAPERS

THE TENTH BIENNIAL RADICAL PHILOSOPHY ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE AND THE 3OTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE RPA
What is Radical Philosophy Today?
Canisius College, Buffalo, New York

October 11-14, 2012

Call for Papers
The Radical Philosophy Association Conference Program Committee invites submissions of talks, papers, workshops, roundtable discussions, posters, and other kinds of conference contributions for its tenth biennial conference, to be held at the Canisius College, Buffalo, New York, October 11-14, 2012.

In the spirit of collaboration, and in the recognition that radical philosophy is often done outside traditional philosophical settings, we invite submissions not only from philosophers inside and outside the academy, but also from those who engage in theoretical and/or activist work in other academic disciplines – such as ethnic studies, women’s studies, social sciences, and literary studies – and from those engaged in theoretical and/or activist work unconnected to the academy.

We especially welcome contributions from those often excluded from or marginalized in philosophy, including persons of Africana, Latin American (Americana), Indigenous, or Asian descent or traditions, glbt persons, persons with disabilities, poor and working class persons.

Conference Theme
“What is Radical Philosophy Today?” The adjective “radical” is used in many different ways politically and philosophically. It is especially important to explore some of these various meanings as the Radical Philosophy Association looks back on thirty years of intellectual and political activism and advocacy on behalf of justice and liberation and forward to the future through and beyond our current crises.

It seems to many that the world faces several deep problems. How does specifically “radical” philosophy help us to understand and address them? For example, capitalism demands and enforces increasing gaps between the wealthy and the middle class and the poor worldwide. Oppressive systems of class, race, gender, heteronormativity, and able-bodiedness continue to function, defining people and their lives in harmful and de-humanizing ways. Violence continues to deform people’s lives and possibilities by permeating our everyday experience and invading our consciousness, making us both less aware of it and thus more accepting of it.

For these reasons and many more, we invite submissions that answer (or raise) questions about the nature of radical philosophy and its roles in understanding and responding to current crises.

What is radical theory? How can radical theory be made more effective in responding to crises? What philosophies/philosophers are radical?
What is radical practice? What does one have to do/be to be radical? Is being radical important? Do some forms of radical practice need to be criticized?
What is radical identity? How does one think radically about identities of race, gender, nationality, citizenship, able-bodiedness, sexuality, etc.? What constitutes a radical identity? How do individuals in groups historically labeled or excluded by race, gender, nationality, etc., redefine, refute, or revolt against the western histories of those categories?
What radical responses are needed to address the crises in economics worldwide? What place does class (and class analysis) have in discussions of radical ideas, radical politics, or radical critiques of the political economy? How does one radically rethink the concept of class in light of current crises?
How does one think radically about democracy or statehood/nationhood? What is radical political engagement? What does radical philosophy have to say about current protest movements in the US and worldwide?
What is radical art, radical expression, a radical style? How can such aesthetic categories and concerns contribute to changing/transforming the world?
What is radical pedagogy? How can teachers help to radically change the world in positive ways?

We thus invite submissions for the Tenth Biennial Conference of the Radical Philosophy Association: “What is Radical Philosophy Today?”

GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSIONS
In keeping with the spirit of radical thinking embodied by the RPA, we encourage submissions that employ formats and media that challenge the standard conference presentation. For instance, we urge presenters to use formats that allow for greater interaction between participants and audience (e.g. presenting an outline, rather than reading a paper) and that emphasize collective inquiry (e.g. organizing a workshop).

Please note that participants will be selected for at most one presentation (talk, workshop, poster session, etc.) during the conference; submissions should be presented with this in mind. (This limit does not include chairing sessions.)

Please submit all the information requested:

For an individual talk/paper/workshop/poster/performance or other type of individual presentation:

Name, address, email, affiliation (independent scholar, activist, educator, etc.), of presenter
Nature (talk, workshop, etc.) and title of proposal
Abstract of 250-500 words
Equipment needs

For a group panel/workshop/poster/performance or other type of group presentation (note: maximum three panel participants not including chair):

Name, address, email, affiliation of the group’s contact person and of each participant
Nature (panel, workshop, etc.) and title of proposal
Abstract of 250-500 words for group proposal
Titles and abstracts of 250-500 words for each paper (if applicable)
Equipment needs

Panel chairs: If you would be willing to serve as a panel session chair, please indicate this on your submission form. Session chairs are responsible for introducing participants in panel sessions and ensuring that each presenter gets her or his fair share of the available time.

Mailing Address for Submissions:

Please submit paper, workshop, poster, and other proposals as an email attachment (.doc) to rpa2012meeting@gmail.com. NOTE: Please do NOT submit complete papers.

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: MARCH 15, 2012

For further information, contact members of the Program Committee:

Peter Amato: peterama[at]drexel.edu

Melissa Burchard: mburchar[at]unca.edu (chair)

Tommy Curry: t-curry[at]philosophy.tamu.edu

Tom Jeannot: jeannot[at]calvin.gonzaga.edu
Gertrude Postl postlg[at]sunysuffolk.edu
Devin Shaw: devinzshaw[at]gmail.com

Sarah Tyson: sarah.tyson[at]vanderbilt.edu

Scott Zeman: scott.zeman[at]vanderbilt.edu

The local organizer of the conference is Tanya Loughead:
tanya.loughead[at]canisius.edu

War Veterans and the Occupy Wall Street Protest

2011-11-06T20:51:00.006-05:00

I wanted to post the youtube covered by Reuters but the embed is disabled. I decided to post the clip's link. I think the war vets speak well for themselves. With much emotion a young man that served as a US soldier in Iraq chants with other vets: "This is the only occupation I believe in."

See this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L0BzKMmmoI

The Occupy Movement and Property Damage

2011-11-04T11:07:00.002-04:00

Voyou has a good post (here) on the so-called political consequences of property damage in Oakland (I've said my piece about property damage and police violence here):

Liberals complain about property damage during the various marches and actions, but they’re quick to add that it is not they themselves who are disturbed or offended; rather, they are concerned about the effect this property damage will have on others, particularly the cops who will react violently and the media who will focus on images of destruction to the exclusion of whatever else the demonstration achieved. The liberal’s position here is perverse in the Lacanian sense: it expresses itself not as an actual desire, but as a desire to be the instrument of the desire of some fantasized other. Part of what supports this disavowed desire is that the objection to property damage can present itself as neutral, even expert, strategic advice. It’s bad strategic advice, though, and I think in a revealing way...

See that ellipsis? Keep reading HERE.

The Left Field Line

2011-11-03T22:29:00.000-04:00

As if one blog was not enough, I've started writing about baseball over at The Left Field Line--more specifically, the San Francisco Giants. Things won't exactly get started until March or April of 2012, but lately I've been recapping the 2011 season. When, over the summer, I wasn't working on my essay about what I've called "Cartesian egalitarianism," I was watching baseball. Next season, I'll be writing about it.

Middle East and North African Revolutions Continued

2011-10-30T18:24:00.009-04:00

There are many revolutionary events in the Middle East and North Africa. This year has seen the beginnings of what is often called the "Arab Spring." I am posting a 60 Minutes episode on the recap of the Tunisia revolution sparked by the self emulation of Mohamed Bouazizi. This also shows the role of Facebook in the Tunisia revolution. The second video is from Link TV and shows several news clips from various media outlets covering these regions. It starts with discussing the first historic elections in Tunisia since the overthrow of the dictatorship.

The Death of Muammar Gaddafi and Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud: A Tale of Two Obituaries

2011-10-23T16:04:00.013-04:00

Commentaries on the death of Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud (of Saudi Arabia) sharply contrasts with that of the death of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. US/NATO just had to help the people of Libya against his evil rule. We all know how crazy Gaddafi was. He had virgin female body guards, funded international terrorism, claimed he was not the leader of Libya while functioning as absolute leader of Libya, killed his own people and constantly said outrageous statements. This is the standard analysis given regarding Gaddafi's legacy. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud was a wise monarch that prudently built up his country militarily: a good statesman in fact.

Even Al Jazeera favors the late crown prince over Gaddafi. I once read on my former professor As'ad AbuKhalil's blog site (the Angry Arab) an interesting observation. He pointed out that Al Jazeera generally has made severe statements about regimes facing revolutions in Arab republics and near silence, or less severe criticism, towards Arab monarchies. This makes sense understanding that Al Jazeera is located in monarchical Qatar. Al Jazeera wrote this a month ago:

Calling themselves the 'Friends of Libya,' 63 world leaders met in Paris on Thursday to discuss the country's future.

Among them, the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani. Al-Thani admits that Muammar Gaddafi could not have been toppled without NATO, but he did point out the Arab League could have done more.

Qatar was the first Arab nation to support the allied forces and send its jets into Libya; a move praised by Western leaders who said the intervention was a turning point for the region.

Oh!I forgot to mention the Emir's monetary donations to Al Jazeera. This may have added a little bias.

It is notable that France, Britain and the US intervened to topple Gaddafi and simultaneously continue to sell so many weapons to Saudi Arabia. Trevor Mostyn of The Guardian writes:

Sultan created a massive military establishment in Saudi Arabia through arms purchases from the US, the UK and France. He built military cities, largely with US support. However, the massive British-supported defence programme was also crucial.

Telling is also the media silence about what Saudi Arabia does with their military aid in places such as Bahrain.

Was Gaddafi more "crazy" and tyrannical than the current Saudi Arabian Wahhabi rule overseen by the late Sultan? In 2002 The Guardian wrote a story on the more "sane" Saudi kingdom:

Saudi Arabia's religious police stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress, according to Saudi newspapers...One witness said he saw three policemen "beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya".

The Saudi Gazette quoted witnesses as saying that the police - known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice - had stopped men who tried to help the girls and warned "it is a sinful to approach them".

The father of one of the dead girls said that the school watchman even refused to open the gates to let the girls out.

"Lives could have been saved had they not been stopped by members of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice," the newspaper concluded.

I don't see US/NATO zooming in to help Saudi girls anytime soon. Of course it is not clear how NATO's "help" will really help the new Libya just yet. I send all my hopes and wishes to the Libyan people in this post-Qaddafi era and to the Saudis in their continued Wahhabist one.

vs.

Rancière's Latest: "Aisthesis"

2011-10-20T01:07:00.000-04:00

Many different factors play into how a person chooses his or her dissertation topic. When I began my PhD studies, I figured that I would be writing something on recent French philosophy. I had, in the previous few years, been reading lots of Badiou, Agamben, Lacan, and others. And then, in early 2005, I decided to write a dissertation on Schelling's philosophy of art. Not much had been written on the topic, nor, for that matter, on Schelling in general. I don't even know if I had thought about it in those terms--at most, I must have still been in that phase where reading Schelling was one of the more unique (and sometimes more bizarre) experiences I had had in studying French and German philosophy (not to say that this experience no longer happens...). The project would also give me a chance to read up on Kant, Spinoza (and then, to my chagrin, Jacobi), Fichte, and Hegel, and work on my German.

Over the years, explaining my decision would remain a complex task (this ended, incidentally, when I published the book), especially if the person asking knew that I went in thinking about French philosophy. Eventually, I started telling these people that the best reason to work on a historical figure is that he or she would never publish anything new while you were trying to finish your dissertation: so if Schelling leapt out of his grave and presented a new system, we'd have bigger problems than my dissertation.

Since I've been working on Rancière, this joke was the first thing I thought of, when I discovered that he's recently published a new book on the aesthetic regime of art, entitled Aisthesis (Galilée, 2011).

The Nothingness of Equality

2011-10-17T21:49:00.000-04:00

I've been putting the finishing touches on an essay that ought to see the light of day sometime in 2012 (it has already been accepted for publication). If you were in Montréal last April at the Sartre Society conference, you've already heard parts of it. If everything works like I want it to, it will eventually form part of a chapter in my book on Jacques Rancière. Here's an abstract of what you have to look forward to:

The Nothingness of Equality: The ‘Sartrean Existentialism’ of Jacques Rancière

I propose a mutually constructive reading of the work of Jacques Rancière and Jean-Paul Sartre. On the one hand, I argue that Rancière’s egalitarian political thought owes several important conceptual debts to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, especially in his use of the concepts of freedom, contingency, and facticity. These concepts play a dual role in Rancière’s thought. First, he appropriates them to show how the formation of subjectivity through freedom is a dynamic that introduces new ways of speaking, being, and doing, instead of being a mode of assuming an established identity. Second, Rancière uses these concepts to demonstrate the contingency of any situation or social order, a contingency that is the possibility of egalitarian praxis. On the other hand, I also argue that reading Sartre with Rancière makes possible the reconstruction of Sartre’s project within the horizon of freedom and equality rather than that of authenticity.

What Does the Occupy Wall Street Movement Stand For?

2011-10-15T16:30:00.009-04:00

There is this ridiculous chorus about how the Occupy Wall Street movement needs to define itself. For the sake of argument I'll define it right now. Know anyone out of work or underemployed? Know anyone that has lost a home or is struggling to pay their mortgage? Know anyone that is in debt over medical bills and college loans? Those of us lucky enough to still have work or a home may lose both soon. When we do, we know where to find our next residence. Some people talk about taking responsibility for our own actions. Translation: let everyone fend for themselves. Then fend we will! I think the reason some elites are lending public verbal sympathy to the protests is because they know the ironies that come with getting what you ask for.

Why aren't the Tea Party folks joining or lending support? They are the ones that claimed the bank bailouts were evil in songs and media clips early on. I challenge the Tea Party people to come join. If they don't like hippies and the smell of patchouli then let them set up separate camps with large flags and mediocre country musicians. While their at it they should ask the Koch brothers to fund rows of portable latrines. I also invite all the vets to come join. Bush and Obama ask/ed you to occupy other countries. It is time for you to occupy your own. After all you have been through (and I mean this sincerely with all my heart) I know it is wrong to ask you to mingle with not-so-talented musicians and rank patchouli smells, but your country needs you.

I am writing this while in a state of depression. So many things deep within my heart are burning inside me. I will admit that I have been staying at home and working. I have not went out in the streets yet. My own story is personal. The struggles of other individuals (especially in other countries) are worse. Some things are just subjective but others are not. The way our world "works" really does matter. I have a friend that has tried to kill himself twice due to what happened while he served in Afghanistan. He struggled to get health care and a steady job. The majority of people that will meet him will not know this part of his life. He knows many many comrades that also suffer in silence. The economic system and militaristic state of affairs is a state of international decay, spiritual decay. When I say "spiritual" I mean our sense of values about life.

So, what does the Occupy Wall Street movement stand for? The Occupy Wall Street movement stands for an elevated value of life.

:)

A CSCP Roundup

2011-10-13T01:53:00.000-04:00

Over the previous weekend I attended this year's meeting of Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy in St. John's, Newfoundland. Which brought with it a number of firsts, including the first time I had participated in a CSCP conference, and first time I had traveled that far east--at one point I visited Cape Spear--in North America. I found the locals--the organizers and participants from Memorial University--and the CSCP committee to be a welcoming and hospitable bunch, and most importantly, I left the conference feeling that I wanted to dive into more: more reading, more writing. A paper here, a book review there, and an abstract for the first annual SSNA meeting.

The conference ended, on Saturday night, with a panel on the 'Theological-Political Schelling,' featuring papers by Joseph Carew and myself with Sean McGrath and James Bradley of Memorial. Sean likes to say that one of the great benefits of Schelling research is that everybody has their own favored 'period' of his thought, which means a plurality of Schellings (Sean's comment is actually wittier), and this panel was no exception.

Nevertheless, it stands out in my mind as the first time that an important conference event (for instance, a concluding panel on a Saturday night) that I had participated in, at a big tent thing like the CSCP, was oriented around Schelling. It, of course, is not the first time for others, but it provided a stark contrast with those three years during which I was writing my dissertation and later book. During that time, I don't think I ever gave a paper at a conference that had more than one paper on Schelling. This sounds like a complaint, but I would like to stress that it seems that Schelling has slowly become a more prominent figure for those who are interested in German idealism in particular (recall that many of these scholars still say 'German idealism' and mean "Kant or Hegel maybe Fichte") and 'continental' philosophy in general. Until the CSCP I had never received that impression.

Before closing, I must thank Peter Gratton for his hospitality during my stay in St. John's, and also the APTPUO (the part-timer's union at the University of Ottawa) for funding my travel.

CFP: Schelling Society of North America

2011-10-10T20:25:00.000-04:00

CALL FOR PAPERS: FIRST ANNUAL MEETING OF

THE SCHELLING SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA (SSNA)

AUGUST 31 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2012

SEATTLE UNIVERSITY (SEATTLE, WASHINGTON USA)

The SSNA is open to anyone who conducts research on Schelling and Schellingian philosophy in the English language. The SSNA mission is to (1) further research in English, both historical and systematic, on Schelling and related figures (eg., Boehme, Oetinger, Baader, Fichte, Novalis, Hölderlin, Schubert, early Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Oken, Fechner, Coleridge, Bradley, Peirce); (2) organize a stand-alone Schelling conference every other year at a North American University, with proceedings published online, and the best papers published every four years with an academic press; (3) gather data concerning current graduate research in English on Schelling; (4) coordinate translation projects of Schelling into English.

PLEASE SEND ABSTRACTS (500 WORDS) TO

JASON WIRTH (wirthj[at]seattleu.edu) AND

SEAN McGRATH (sjoseph.mcgrath[at]gmail.com)

by 15 JANUARY 2012.

Malalai Joya on the Past Decade of War in Afghanistan

2011-10-07T12:20:00.000-04:00

Since the events of 9/11, terrorism and women’s rights violations have been used to support a decade long war and occupation of Afghanistan. In this short video, Malalai Joya – writer, activist and former parliamentarian in the national assembly of Afghanistan – successfully highlights the obscenity, greed and absurdity of the war in Afghanistan. Who can ignore that the human rights violations perpetrated by armed forces are motivated by economic gain and strategic foreign policy in Asia? Joya denounces the Obama administration for increasing the death tolls, heightening violence and violating the human rights of Afghans. On the 10^th anniversary of NATO’s war in her country, she asks us to speak up to end the occupation of Afghanistan by military troops and to protest to grant Afghans the right to self-determination. In the words of Joya: “…democracy never comes by military invasion, democracy without independence and justice is meaningless.”

Long live freedom and down with occupation!

Jason Wirth Reviews "Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art"

2011-10-06T10:37:00.000-04:00

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has published a review by Jason M. Wirth of my Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art. Read it (HERE) and you will find that Wirth concludes:

Shaw has given us a thoughtful retrieval of the problem of art that invites us into the epicenter of Schelling's project.

The Sci-Fi Flowchart

2011-10-04T00:13:00.001-04:00

I've been working on my presentation for the CSCP over the past few days, at least when I'm not at that hourly wage job that I've got. It's a busy week, but I'm not about to let by the recently published SF Signal's flowchart guide for NPR's list of the Top 100 science fiction and fantasy books. From SF Signal (see here, and the interactive version is here):

Thanks to Caroline for pointing this out.

President Eisenhower and Anwar al-Awlaki: The Death of the US Citizen

2011-10-02T13:16:00.006-04:00

Anwar al-Awlaki, accused of terrorism, has recently been assassinated by the US government from a drone strike in Yemen. Unlike Osama bin Laden, al-Awlaki was a US citizen. Some say his annihilation was a blow to al-Qaeda, others say it was a blow to US democracy and civil rights. Obama has set a new standard for US presidents: The US president is now the judge, the jury and the executioner. But this is Obama, not Bush, so I guess I should feel better. Trials are tedious after all. We are safer now right? Ironically al-Awlaki became anti-American because he thought US foreign policy was terrorizing Muslims. This so-called war on terror has a way of keeping momentum on all sides.

I was contemplating what video clip I wanted to show. I thought a clip from Republican President Eisenhower's farewell speech would be appropriate. He warned of the abuse of power tied to the growth of the US military complex. This is no conspiracy theory. The only conspiracy is that more Americans have not seen or heard him say what he said. This is the same man that helped crush the US veterans protesting in front of the White House (1932) while Hoover was president, that fought the Germans in WWII, and set in motion the overthrowing of democracy in Iran (Operation Ajax: 1953). He was no peacenik and was not leery of using covert operations. Eisenhower's own legacy makes his parting words all the more eery.

Patrik Ourednik's "Europeana"

2011-09-26T12:15:00.000-04:00

Patrik Ourednik's Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (Dalkey Archive, 2005) is an unusual book. It's not quite a brief history of the 20th century, and it's not quite a novel. However, it does discuss the 20th century, and it is told by an unreliable narrator, who sometimes jumbles disparate topics and misreports events.

In fact, this book is all about the narrator, and the rhetoric of the narrator, which is dispassionate, detached, and more concerned (if we could even say "concerned") with accounting for the century in statistics and numbers than recounting a story of the century. I think it's necessary as well to say "the narrator" rather than "Ourednik" because I don't think that the book provides any clue into Ourednik's own stance on the 20th century until the final sentence of the book. And, if I tell you what that sentence is, it will probably deflate the exercise or experience of reading it.

And while you are reading it, you are going to wonder why you decided to. For the Europeana century is marked primarily by war, genocide, and body counts. And statistics. The first few sentences set the tone:

The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 centimeters on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometers. The Germans were tall too, while the tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in the First World War who measured 176 centimeters, and so they were sent into battle on the front lines in order to scare the Germans.

The next 120 pages continue in the same vein--the statistics, the quick leaps between events (in the above, how did we jump from the Second to the First World War?), and detached cynicism. The book is more than a criticism of the idea that human history is a story of progress, it's also a critique--or at least, I think, on the basis of the end of the book that I can't discuss, that it is a critique--of the attempt to "survey" or "look over" history from a standpoint that is able to definitively account for it. As Ourednik states in an interview with Context (also published by Dalkey Archive):

The primary question wasn’t to know what events, what episodes were characteristic of the twentieth century, but which syntax, which rhetoric, which expressiveness belonged to it, in what sense was it redundant, etc.

Thus it strikes me the book is a critique of its own rhetoric and "expressiveness," an 'auto-reductio ad absurdum' of the attempt to quantify historical change and void the subjectivity of historical agents. Sure, your patience will be tested by the statistics, the body counts, and the repeated references to Nazism (which appears over and over and over in the narrative, sometimes leaving the reader feeling as if nothing happened in 20th century Europe other than World War II). Nevertheless, those final few pages, with their critique of the smug arrogance of late twentieth century chroniclers of political power, are edifying enough to warrant a trip through the 20th century of Europeana.

(See also my review of Ourednik's The Opportune Moment, 1855)

Amazon and Print on Demand

2011-09-23T01:33:00.000-04:00

For all the night owls, like myself (via Scu at Critical Animal):

Carol J. Adams, who you might know as the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, has published a post on her blog about Amazon's print-on-demand "service." I've received a few of their reproductions, and of those, a couple have really stuck out due to the cheap materials used, including the cover, the cover ink, the paper, and the binding (wait, what the hell else is there to a book [and I don't mean that in the Derrida 'question the oeuvre' kind of way--that's a topic for another post, perhaps]? Maybe the black ink isn't as glossy either...), and, of course, the barcode on the back page. Now, I'm not necessarily against print-on-demand, especially if it results in the handful of Routledge titles that I am interested in becoming affordable. But, as Adams, points out:

Apparently, it is common to have an agreement with publishers that they can produce copies of a book if it is out of stock. However, Amazon is apparently determining what being "out of stock" means in a very flexible, self-interested way. If they receive an order and they, Amazon, are out of stock of the book, they are producing their own rather than obtaining the book from the publisher's warehouse.

This sounds questionable at best, and as a published author, I would prefer that the copies of my book taking up space in Continuum's warehouses go first before anybody starts printing on demand, so that someday a more affordable paperback can replace the hardcover.

New APPS Interviews Ladelle McWhorter

2011-09-21T11:23:00.000-04:00

If you work on Foucault, and you aren't familiar with Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (Indiana UP, 1999), you should be. It's one hell of a read, providing an interpretation of Foucault that is both personal and political (and it discusses, at one point, line dancing). An interview of her with John Protevi is now available at New APPS. After noting that she was a "queer child in every sense of that word," born in a northern Alabama town in 1960 (and don't forget about segregation), McWhorter states:

What I remember most about childhood was the sense that so many things had to go unspoken—because speaking them might destroy our world or because there just weren’t any words to speak them with. I know that one thing that drove me to philosophy was the deep need to find ways to speak, which involved critiquing how the world was put together so as to preclude speaking so much of what I half-perceived and felt. I had to find my way out of that world in order to survive.

Of course, the whole interview is worth reading.

Now I've got to go to work.

Republicans and Class War

2011-09-18T22:29:00.005-04:00

Today the New York Times published an article titled "Republicans Call Obama’s Tax Plan ‘Class Warfare’" by Brian Knowlton. He writes:

Representative Paul D. Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and a leading proponent of cutting spending on benefit programs like Medicare, said the proposal[Obama's current one]would weigh heavily on a stagnating economy.

On “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Ryan said it would add “further instability to our system, more uncertainty, and it punishes job creation.”

“Class warfare,” he said, “may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics.”

It's funny that the only people that still talk about class war are the ones waging it. Class war is rotten economics and rotten politics. Everyone needs to get out their US history books and study how life was for workers in the US before the advances propelled by the labor movement. The class warrior elites want to reduce us to our slave status we had in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century.

This Semester...

2011-09-12T16:24:00.000-04:00

...is the first semester during which I have no institutional affiliation as either a student or professor since I started my college studies in the mid-1990s. True, I had a year between my Master's and PhD studies, but even then I spent that time taking French and German courses to improve my language skills. I'm not unemployed, however. But I do have to figure out how to balance working 40 hours a week while completing several commitments (publications and conferences, such as the upcoming CSCP meeting) that I took on over the summer under the premise that I would be working at the University of Ottawa.

Just in case you were curious, I do have teaching for the Winter Semester, in the Department of Visual Arts, reprising my "Art Theories" course, although I will be changing up a lot of the material.

Finally, I have been reading Kevin B. Anderson's Marx at the Margins, which ought to be the handbook if you're reconsidering Marx's writings on nationalism, ethnicity, and non-western societies (yes, I pretty much cribbed that from the subtitle), as well as his works on the American Civil War or Ireland. There's a passage from Marx's ethnological notebooks (as cited by Anderson) that is just waiting for Zizek to turn it into a post-Marxist slogan. Marx writes:

the seemingly supreme independent existence of the state itself is only an illusion, since the state in all its forms [is] only an excresence [sic] of society.

September 1, 1939 (WWII), September 11, 1973 (Chile), September 11, 2001 (USA)

2011-09-11T14:53:00.007-04:00

Referring to the outbreak of World War II the Anglo-American poet W.H. Auden wrote a poem titled September 1, 1939. Here are some of the lines:

Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night...

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

The poem invokes an understanding of how violence and war fit into the cycles of human civilization.

On September 11, 2001 when I received information on the news about the terrorist attacks life felt surreal. Never since the War of 1812 did the US suffer an attack on the mainland soil. Unlike the majority of the world, north Americans are not familiar with such experiences. We north Americans bonded with solidarity. There were vigils and touching conversations. There were also increased levels of hate. People of color were targeted for abuse by thugs. In my own Central Vally Californian town I saw, alongside US flags, large Civil War Confederate flags waving on large trucks. Subdued political tendencies became openly pronounced. There were calls for war and calls for peace. More war prevailed and the violent cycle of human civilization continues.

After September 11, 2001 I learned of September 11, 1973. A catastrophic event on the whole of American society. This American tragedy occurred further south in Chile. It deserves to be told on the same day because this September 11 bloodletting was linked to US "pragmatic" strategies of Cold War politics. I leave a clip from a youtube explaining this often overlooked event. To reflect on our own sufferings I invite the reader to merely turn on the news. The US media is covering it thoroughly. All the sad Septembers should be remembered.We should also ask ourselves what we remember them for.

The Question of Palestinian Statehood: Why is it a Question?

2011-09-04T14:07:00.006-04:00

After years of a failed peace policy the Palestinian Authority is unilaterally going to the UN and will apply for statehood. The US government, along with Israel of course, is livid. How dare the Palestinians get their own state without allowing Israel to steal more land under the benevolent approval of the US political establishment.Al Jazzera English reports:

The Palestinians will not be deterred from seeking UN membership, senior officials say in response to a report that the the US is trying to head off their bid.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that the US has launched an attempt to persuade the Palestinians not to seek statehood at the annual UN General Assembly meeting beginning on September 20.

"When it comes to going to the United Nations, I think the train has left the station," Muhammad Shtayyeh, a member of the Fatah committee overseeing the UN bid, said on Sunday.

"We're already on the way to New York. We are very ready for this. All our papers are ready."

The New York Times, citing US officials and foreign diplomats, said the US has tried to restart peace talks with the Israelis in a bid to convince Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to drop the bid.

The Obama administration has made it clear to Abbas that it will veto any request to the UN Security Council to make a Palestinian state a new member outright, the newspaper said.

The US and Israel do not support a two-state solution despite their claims. The PA and many other observers are aware of this. Recall the tremendous flack Obama got for saying that Israel had to return to the 1967 borders. That was the "official" position of Israel and the US. When he said it out loud it made it sound like the US might commit to what it said.

The Palestinians must make such a bid. The Jewish settlers of pre-1948 wanted a state and claimed it; despite the fact it had the majority of the land occupied by Arabs. Palestine must become a state with a majority of Arabs in the land; despite the fact it has been ruled militarily by Israel and occupied by a minority of post-1967 Jewish settlers.

Descartes's Philosophy: "Made in Bavaria"

2011-08-29T12:17:00.001-04:00

Over the last few days, I have been putting the finishing touches on a paper on what I call "Cartesian egalitarianism," which discusses the work of Descartes, Poullain de la Barre, Beauvoir, and Rancière. As you can imagine, getting the connections between these four into focus has been fairly time-consuming, especially the effort of keeping the paper right near the upper limits of the word count (9000 words, if you're curious). Which is why I haven't been posting much.

At some point, while reading and writing about Descartes, I had the vague recollection that Schelling had made an odd 'nationalist in an imagined communities kind of way' comment about Descartes in his On the History of Modern Philosophy. These kind of comments are usually associated with Hegel, but Schelling was not inoculated against them. Turning to page 45, we discover that Descartes's philosophy was "made in Bavaria" (note that it also ends with a reference to Spinoza):

A special peculiarity lies for us in the fact that this beginning of completely free philosophy was, to all appearances, made in Bavaria, that, therefore, the foundation of modern philosophy was laid here. Descartes had, as he says himself in his essay De Methodo, which I take this opportunity to recommend to everyone as a splendid exercise, come to Germany in order to see the beginning of the Thirty Years' War; he had been present under Maximilian I at the battle on the white mountain and the capture of Prague, where, though, he primarily only made inquiries about Tycho Brahe and his unpublished work. In 1619, when he returned to the camp from Frankfurt, from the coronation of Ferdinand II, he had his winter quarters in a place on the Bavarian border, where he, as he says, found no one with whom he would have liked to converse, and there he conceived (aged twenty-three) the first ideas of his philosophy, which he, however, published much later. In the same way as Descartes began to philosophise in Bavaria, he later found in Princess Elisabeth, daughter of the unfortunate Elector of the Palatinate, Karl Friedrich, the so-called Winter King, a great and devoted admirer, just as it was later again a prince from the house of the Palatinate who became Spinoza's protector.

The irony of these kinds of statements is that they provide ample evidence for Marx's sarcastic remark that "we Germans have experienced our future history in thought, in philosophy. We are philosophical contemporaries without being historical ones. German philosophy is the ideal prolongation of German history."

Henry Miller, "Bathroom Monologue"

2011-08-28T19:13:00.003-04:00

In his book Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller wrote, "Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war." I agree. This "Bathroom Monologue" is far from obscene. So many magical things he created surrounding a world of shit.

Congratulations to Dr. McLennan

2011-08-16T13:34:00.000-04:00

We've given numerous panels together, participated in jam sessions and impromptu performances (see below), and now I would like to extend my congratulations to our fellow blogger Matt McLennan, who successfully defended his dissertation "Wild Normativity: Lyotard's Search for an Ethical Antihumanism" yesterday.

The First Review of The Schelling Book

2011-08-15T22:42:00.000-04:00

Symposium has published the first review (to my knowledge) of my Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art (technically speaking I know of another review that has been written but it has yet to be published by the journal that accepted it). The review is by Jeremy Proulx, of Eastern Michigan University, and it is generally positive. In any case, Proulx concludes:

In the end, Shaw’s careful analysis of the various ways in which art is significant for Schelling provides a sorely-needed guide for readers of Schelling’s difficult work.

Charles Bukowski and I Ranting Poems to the Sounds of Riots

2011-08-13T20:39:00.010-04:00

The Arab Spring ignited in Tunisia, demonstrations against anti-union laws in various parts of the US, right-wing violence in Norway, violent neo-Nazis skinheads in Russia, riots in Greece, demonstrations in Israel, riots in London, and massive destitution in Somalia. All these events are linked to the global economic order that can't seem to improve the conditions on the planet the way wealth is being advanced for a handful of people. Actually, conditions are being made worse. Poems and music can get us through these times as they always have.

Here are two poems by Charles Bukowski and one by me:

ground zero

the consensus is that this is a difficult time,
perhaps the most difficult of times:
large groups of people in cities
all over the world are
protesting that they'd rather not be
treated like shit.

but whoever's in control
will not listen.

the suggestion is that, of course, it's
only one power fighting another power
and the real power, of course, is in the hands
of the few who run the nations
and their need is to protect those many things
that belong to them.

it is conceivable that these few rulers
will escape
when the final eruption begins;
they will escape to their safe havens
where they will watch
the eruption to its finish,
and then after a reasonable wait
they will return
again and
will begin building
a new ridiculous and grossly
unfair future.

which, to me, is not a very
happy thought
as I crack open a can of beer
on a hot
July night.

sometimes when you get the blues there's a reason

it only takes 6 or 8 inept political leaders
or 8 or 10 artsy-fartsy writers, composers and painters to
set the natural course of human progress
back
50 years
or more.
which may not seem like much to you
but it's over half your lifetime
during which time you're not going to be able to
hear, see, read or feel that
necessary gift of great art which
otherwise you could have experienced.
which may not seem tragic to you
but sometimes, perhaps, when you're not feeling so
good at
night or in the morning or at
noon,
maybe what you feel that's lacking is
what should be there for
you
but is not.
and I don't mean a blonde in
sheer pantyhose,
I'm talking about what gnaws at your guts
even when she's
there.
---------

(my poem)

Escapist With a Gun

666 governments gone bad.
777 revolutions minus 111 points
After the revolutions get government.
I’ll stay in my room on the internet,
Watch a good amount of headless girls
Dancing on Youtube in panties and tank tops,
Terydactyl porn on weird websites,
And learn the latest news about
Charlie Sheen.
My Bible is next to Marx, next to
Buddhist sutras, next to Lenin,
Next to Dylan Thomas, next to the TV,
Next to the whiskey bottle, next to my rifle
And a great anthology of Gandhi’s works.
My mother always says, “Two wrongs
Don’t make a right.” My mother
Doesn’t like me owning guns
Drinking whiskey or reading Marx.
Truth is, if one is going to own a gun
It is good to know whom to aim at
If the shit goes down.
I’ll load the bullets, get my Bible,
And eliminate every Canaanite
In the Holy Land as it tells me to.
Never mind, I’ll shoot the bourgeoisie.
Never mind, I’ll put the gun away.
I’ll do the Gandhi Path. Never mind,
He made a mess out of creating the split
Between India and Pakistan. Never mind,
I’ll take a drink. Never mind, I’ll take drinks.
“I will not go gentle into that good night.”
The chained masses can join me.
At some point we’ll figure out what to do.

There's a Riot Goin' On

2011-08-09T13:11:00.000-04:00

As I'm sure you've heard, riots have broken out in several neighborhoods in London. In response (to the idiotic elite/media responses) Richard Seymour at Lenin's Tomb has posted a "sarcastic itinerary" of "reactionary birdsong" that's worth reading. In addition, I recommend the analysis of Laurie Penny (of Penny Red, which I've somehow missed up until now):

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.

Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news.

There's clearly a class antagonism aspect to these events--and given the widespread attempt to implement austerity measures within the metropoles of capital (through, for example, bullshit manufactured debt crises) as the latest of tactics in three or more decades of neoliberal governance, this riot might only be the harbinger of unrest to come.

Zizek on Breivik and Antisemitism

2011-08-08T14:00:00.000-04:00

After Joshua wrote a post on Anders Breivik, we started receiving a boost in traffic in google searches for "zizek breivik." Today in The Guardian is that article I suppose people were waiting for, Zizek's "A Vile Logic to Anders Breivik's Choice of Target." Zizek points out a number of hypocrisies in European responses to the rise of anti-immigrant populism, aided and abetted, I might add, by what Rancière calls 'racism from above.' A prime example is the way that some of the more opportunist right-wing sympathizers have tried to use Breivik's attacks as device to introduce the reconsideration of "multiculturalism" or immigration, revealing a clear double standard in the ways that domestic right-wing violence and other acts of violence are treated.

This is what makes certain parts of Zizek's argument so pertinent. He notes that Breivik is antisemitic but pro-Israel, a stance that might seem contradictory, but isn't due to a kind of antisemitic paternalism: "the state of Israel is the first line of defence against the Muslim expansion" (this is similar to the way that some Christian Zionists believe that the state of Israel must exist to fulfill Christian prophecy, but otherwise...). I've emphasized what I take to be the most stinging line in the article regarding this series of hypocrisies:

A key is provided by the reactions of the European right to Breivik's attack: its mantra was that in condemning his murderous act, we should not forget that he addressed "legitimate concerns about genuine problems" – mainstream politics is failing to address the corrosion of Europe by Islamicisation and multiculturalism, or, to quote the Jerusalem Post, we should use the Oslo tragedy "as an opportunity to seriously re-evaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere". The newspaper has since apologised for this editorial. (Incidentally, we are yet to hear a similar interpretation of the Palestinian acts of terror, something like "these acts of terror should serve as an opportunity to re-evaluate Israeli politics".)

This (the discourse that Zizek is criticizing) is an entirely self-serving logic: if one attempts to get at the root causes of Palestinian violence, one is apologizing for or sympathizing with it (right, it could never be that one should criticize the ways that one's own way of life is enmeshed in social relations that dominate others...); however, right-wing violence affords the opportunity to discuss "legitimate concerns"--an opportunity to reinforce imperialist or settler-colonialist prejudices.

Anders Behring Breivik and the Rise of Extremism

2011-07-31T19:51:00.013-04:00

The Oslo massacre by right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik has sent shock waves throughout the world. His motto is "never surrender to cultural Marxism" and he views Islam as a great threat to European Christendom. Most white Christian Europeans do not sympathize with his tactics, but it is naive to assume he does not have a large number of silent sympathizers of his views.

It is interesting how Breivik is often termed a "lone extremist" by US media. Ridiculous Bill O'Reilly claimed that Breivik in no way can be considered a Christian, even though Breivik claims he is and celebrates famous Christian Crusaders from times past. Clearly there is a double standard to his approach when it comes to Muslims committing acts of terror. Right-wing radio goon Glenn Beck did not shy from comparing the victims of the shooting to Hitler Youth. I'll refer to this as a political Freudian slip of where the right-wing's sympathies really are (many of the victims were multicultural socialists).

Yet, make no mistake, demographics in Europe are changing. Popular Egyptian-European Muslim preacher Amr Khaled makes a prediction that Muslims will be the majority in Europe within twenty years. Social tensions will no doubt be exasperated by the global economic crisis. One can argue that Islamic extremism and the rise of right-wing nationalism will only be two out of many "-isms" to surge in growth as a result of destructive global capitalism. Especially with the ongoing dismantling of public institutions.

The second youtube post is Anders Behring Breivik's "Deceleration of European Independence." It reveals a lot.

Wugazi

2011-07-29T14:38:00.001-04:00

Sure I'm a few days late to be in the know, but...

Wugazi • 13 Chambers by WUGAZI

"All Arrighians Now"

2011-07-28T15:02:00.000-04:00

The Los Angeles Review of Books has published a review essay by Joshua Clover, entitled "Autumn of Empire," which considers the relatively recent work of Giovanni Arrighi (Adam Smith in Beijing and the recent edition of The Long Twentieth Century), Robert Brenner (The Economics of Global Turbulence), and Richard Duncan (The Dollar Crisis). I must say, in the company of Arrighi and Brenner, it is difficult to see why Duncan's book is featured in the essay, aside from the way it functions within the rhetorical structure of Clover's essay (or, perhaps, it's there to balance the three books from Verso), but otherwise it's an interesting article that has the merit of dodging a lot of jargon.

Here's the general idea:

Like democracy itself, this official thought [within the predominant strains of economics] presents itself as having subtleties, wings, parties. But the oppositions on offer — NYT vs. WSJ, Krugman vs. Cochrane, saltwater vs. freshwater schools of economics — can’t begin to grasp the fullness of the situation. Whether discovering “green shoots” or hand-wringing over a “jobless recovery,” they think unquestioningly in terms of a return to normalcy, debating only the rate and method: the crisis a mere blink in the long stare of empire.

But the scandalous lesson we learn from heterodox thinkers like Brenner, Duncan, and Arrighi is quite a different one: that the American experience is grand, outsized, but not entirely novel. Industrial growth is bound to undo itself as a profit center, to be replaced by a regime of finance; this regime’s profit mechanism is always the bubble and its total crisis inescapable; and this is how empires end. Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s book on the delusions that accompany bubbles is called, with a wink, This Time It’s Different. Meaning, it never is. We must admit the same about the course of empire, and the current conjuncture. Empires rise and fall.

We live in an epoch in which the great question is how to bid farewell to the U.S.-centered empire, and what the transition to another global arrangement might look like. Whether we know it or not, we are all Arrighians now.

As the title Adam Smith in Beijing conveys, Arrighi paints a picture of a market alternative to capitalism that is too optimistic in its considerations of Adam Smith's work and the Chinese economy (we've talked about David Harvey's take on China here). He doesn't consider extensively (nor does Clover in this article) that alternatives to capitalism that could arise in a place other than the likely site of the next hegemonic power (although to be fair, Arrighi does mention India). This possibility of an alternative is why Latin America and more recently North Africa have received so much Left-leaning critical attention lately.

Cigarettes and Cell Phones

2011-07-25T13:12:00.000-04:00

An interesting passage from William Gibson's Zero History:

She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had one belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones. Human figures, a block down the street, in postures utterly familiar, were no longer smoking.

Until reading this, I had never made an explicit connection between the two. Gibson is on to something given the ubiquity of cell phones, but cigarettes still carry something that cell phones don't (is that due to recent transformations?); that is, they are a marker for sub-cultural group distinction in some situations (think of certain groups who go outside to smoke at concerts) or the way that bumming a smoke or asking for a light can (in very limited instances) have an inter-subjective appeal.

In any case, Gibson's brief observation is more subtle that recent 'philosophical' takes on the problem, such as Giorgio Agamben's well-known rant from What is an Apparatus?, which reads like a bad joke at a conference that doesn't translate to the printed page (the essay also includes the ridiculous-- and historically unverifiable-- claim that our era possesses the "most docile and cowardly social body that has ever existed in history"):

I live in Italy, a country where the gestures and behaviors of individuals have been reshaped from top to toe by the cellular telephone....I have developed an implacable hatred for this apparatus, which has made the relationship between people all the more abstract. Although I found myself more than once wondering as how to destroy or deactivate those telefonini, as well as how to eliminate or at least to punish and imprison those who do not stop using them [which would then give Agamben-land a higher rate of incarceration than the international leader, the United States], I do not believe that this is the right solution to the problem.

He does not then describe the solution, just has he did not advance our understanding of cell phones as an apparatus. We do, however, have a clearer vision of at least part of Agamben's fantasy life.

K'naan: People Like Me

2011-07-24T21:31:00.003-04:00

Somalia is having a severe famine, the global economy is in the poop-house, wars are raging as usual, and racial tensions are building even in quiet places such as Norway. I felt like simply putting up a performance by the Somali-Canadian musician K'naan.

On Free Time

2011-07-22T19:03:00.000-04:00

I am currently reading Michael Perelman's The Invention of Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2000). One of his central theses is that primitive accumulation is a technique of expropriation that continues during the historical development of capitalism, rather than a process that only occurred before, or during the formation of, capitalism.

Part of the process of primitive accumulation, or what, following David Harvey, I prefer to call accumulation by dispossession, requires curtailing free time. Perelman writes, in a striking passage on page 17:

Although their standard of living may not have been particularly lavish, the people of precapitalistic northern Europe, like most traditional people, enjoyed a great deal of free time. [...] Joan Thirsk estimated that in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, about one-third of the working days, including Sundays, were spent in leisure. Karl Kautsky offered a much more extravagant estimate that 204 annual holidays were celebrated in medieval Lower Bavaria. [...] Even as late as the 1830s, we hear the complaint [from the moralizing elite, no doubt] that the Irish working year contained only 200 days after all holidays had been subtracted.

Stuart Elden Reviews Foucault’s Leçons sur la volonté de savoir

2011-07-20T13:12:00.000-04:00

Stuart Elden has published a review of Michel Foucault’s Leçons sur la volonté de savoir-- the 1970-1971 lectures at the Collège de France:

One of the things that is striking about the course is that here we find a Foucault who is deeply engaged with Greek thought. This alone should act as a correction to those who thought his turn to the Greeks was a late phase in his work. It should also be noted that here the project of genealogy is very clearly a complementary analysis to that of archaeology, rather than its replacement, and that genealogy is first brought to bear on knowledge, then truth, and only subsequently to concerns with power. Yet while the discussions of knowledge and truth in themselves are important, it is likely their links to the question of power that will prove the most interesting for readers.

It is in the analysis of juridical and political practices in ancient Greece that perhaps the most striking analyses are found. These include the management of agrarian crises, particularly in terms of fragmented lands and the legacy of colonization; advances in the army, especially in terms of the developments of mining techniques and the use of iron, and the new types of inter-city and intra-city warfare; the emergence of a new class of artisans; and wider political transformations including production, slavery, and the development of urban civilization. There is an important discussion of the development of written legal codes (nomos) and money as an institution, not simply of exchange, but of distribution, allocation and social correction. Foucault also spends a good deal of time discussing popular power, as the reverse side of the plans of Plato, Aristotle and the legislators. As well as the conceptual aspects of this discussion, it is important to link this to Foucault’s own activism, especially the foundation of the Groupe d’information sur les prisons at the same time. Their manifesto was read by Foucault on 8th February 1971; about midway through the delivery of this course.

There is one other aspect of this publication that Elden has mentioned elsewhere, but that he does not develop here: "Unlike the other courses published to date, this volume is based almost entirely on Foucault’s manuscript for the course, rather than transcribed from tape recordings of the actual delivery." In his first thoughts on the text, posted on his blog, Elden writes:

The ‘no posthumous publications’ injunction, previously circumvented by publishing transcriptions of tapes in the public domain, is now being entirely ignored. Might an edition of The History of Sexuality volume four, Les aveux de la chair, now be conceivable?

Senator Michele Bachmann, Gays, and the Christian Gene

2011-07-17T14:58:00.007-04:00

Senator Michele Bachmann is running for the Republican nomination to make a bid for the US presidency. Michele Bachmann and her husband's clinic(Bachmann & Associates) tries to "rehabilitate" gays into straightness. Brian Ross from ABC News reports:

A former patient who sought help from the Christian counseling clinic owned by GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann and her husband, Marcus, told ABC News he was advised that prayer could rid him of his homosexual urges and he could eventually be "re-oriented."

"[One counselor's] path for my therapy would be to read the Bible, pray to God that I would no longer be gay," said Andrew Ramirez, who was 17-years-old at the time he sought help from Bachmann & Associates in suburban Minneapolis in 2004. "And God would forgive me if I were straight."

Senator Michele Bachmann has personally stated:

It isn’t that some gay will get some rights. It’s that everyone else in our state will lose rights. For instance, parents will lose the right to protect and direct the upbringing of their children. Because our K-12 public school system, of which ninety per cent of all youth are in the public school system, they will be required to learn that homosexuality is normal, equal and perhaps you should try it. And that will occur immediately, that all schools will begin teaching homosexuality.” -- Senator Michele Bachmann, appearing as guest on radio program “Prophetic Views Behind The News”, hosted by Jan Markell, KKMS 980-AM, March 6, 2004.

The evidence shows that she wants a theocracy that does not tolerate lifestyle values that conflict with hers.

In honor of such people and their views I'm posting a humorous news parody. It pokes fun at fundamentalist Christians such as Senator Bachmann and her husband. I want to clarify that I'm aware that many Christians do not judge homosexuals and some even allow them as members of their congregations. On the topic of gays and Christianity I recommend the book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) by the historian John Boswell. To my surprise, this book revealed a lot of unexpected information on this subject. Enjoy the clip.

Infighting about Trotsky

2011-07-14T12:57:00.000-04:00

It was amusing to read (at Lenin's Tomb) of some recent infighting occasioned by a damning scholarly review of Robert Service's Trotsky: A Life (Harvard, 2009), involving a pair of fellows from the same nook of the anticommunism industry, the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution, and Peace. While Service's book has been criticized by several leftist reviewers, it had generally been well-received in academic circles. This changes with Bertrand M. Patenaude, who writes, in The American Historical Review (see here):

In his eagerness to cut Trotsky down, Service commits numerous distortions of the historical record and outright errors of fact to the point that the intellectual integrity of the whole enterprise is open to question.

By the end, he concludes (but read the whole review, it's worth it):

Harvard University Press has placed its imprimatur upon a book that fails to meet the basic standards of historical scholarship.

At Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee puts the review in context and requests comments from the author, the review's author, and Harvard. Service's response is to accuse Patenaude of being a 'Trotsky romantic.' From Harvard, McLemee gets no response.

The Trouble with Titles

2011-07-13T15:40:00.000-04:00

I'm not very good at giving my work good, let alone catchy, titles. Take, for instance, the title of my book on Schelling: long ago in the dissertation proposal process, I had a series of clumsy titles that ended with my advisor crossing out whatever I have proposed, and writing underneath, "Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art." As we all know, the name stuck.

For my tentative project on Rancière, I've struggled as well--what would capture the unity of the various chapters, ranging from discussions of Descartes, Marx, Schiller, and many others (one must allow for a few surprises...)? At the moment, I think this does it: Political Aesthetics: Reading Philosophy after Jacques Rancière. This is, of course, subject to change.

Julian Assange, Slavoj Žižek, and Amy Goodman: What is Truth?

2011-07-10T14:12:00.007-04:00

I hate to overly saturate my blogs with Žižek, but I swear he is always around the places I want to refer. If we take the Socratic question, "Is he popular because he is insightful, or is he "insightful" because he is popular?" I argue that he is popular because he is insightful. It is not that I always agree with him or understand him, but his ideas are often outside the box. When I say "box" I mean the Leftist one. He was a fitting complement to a presentation with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. After watching this, the truth of the matter became much more clear; the issue is the Truth. For Žižek the Truth does not exist as a real asset until it is contextualized: Assange and WikiLeaks wielded by a revolutionary philosopher. This approach to knowledge is the difference between Žižek and Noam Chomsky. To know is of little value unless one understands.

No! No! No! We Need the Elite!

2011-07-08T18:10:00.000-04:00

Peter Gratton has found an exemplary specimen of reactionary republicanism. Today's Der Spiegel has an article by Herfried Münkler entitled "Democratization Can't Save Europe." Münkler argues that:

In light of this failure of the elites, it is hardly surprising that we are hearing renewed calls for the democratization of Europe. Suddenly, the people are expected to fix what the elites have botched. Since they are already being asked to pay for the problems caused by the elites, many believe that the people should have more say in how and by whom Europe is controlled.

As reasonable as this might sound, by no means does it make as much sense as it seems at first glance. Even after the democratization of Europe, the elites in Brussels and Strasbourg will still be in charge. The only option available to the European people, to the extent that they can be referred to as such, would be to react to obvious failure by voting their leaders out of office -- and to vote an opposing elite to take their place. Whether this would fundamentally change anything is open to question. [...]

Pushing for the democratization of Europe is akin to playing a reckless game that can quickly lead to European disintegration. Those who see democratization as a logical reaction to the crisis may not even be aware of this risk. They see democratization as an automatic reflex in response to the crisis. But democracy needs the kinds of conditions that do not exist in Europe today.

Not convinced? Me neither. Peter points out that Münkler has recycled all the usual arguments as to why democracy won't work outside of the Western world, and turned them toward Europe itself. But these claims aren't the only howlers. Without any irony, Münkler points out that Europe has always been run by elites (which is why, apparently, it can't ever change...):

Europe was a project of the elites from the very beginning, but with the proviso that democratization would happen at the next available opportunity.

Of course, all promises of democracy have really been a "proviso" (read "noble lie") to legitimate the European project in the eyes of the people. And yet he concludes with the same promise he's just deflated:

The key step is a political reconstitution of Europe, a reconstitution in which democratization would be a real option and would not pose the threat of decline and disintegration.

This is the world of austerity: the elites fail but don't really fail, finance capital crashes but people's benefits, mortgaged homes, collective bargaining, decent wages and job security are blamed and attacked.

Zizek's Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle

2011-07-07T13:56:00.000-04:00

My first publication, in 2005, was a book review of Zizek's Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (Verso, 2004), entitled "The Step Outside: The Act, Democracy, and Its Discontents." It was published in Critical Sense (a graduate student journal at UC Berkeley that seems to have been discontinued), Volume 8, number 1. I've decided to try something new and post the PDF directly to this blog HERE.

Like any first publication, perhaps, this one has a story. I don't know why exactly I chose to review a book by Zizek first, although its topicality was probably the impetus. I started writing it in summer 2004, which is around the same time I moved to Ottawa. This move ended up interrupting the review in more than one way; somehow I managed to save the file incorrectly (or it was corrupted at some point), meaning I had to rewrite the entire thing. After some searching, I found a printed draft, which I could use to recover about 70% of the document, but the printed draft ended up in my book bag next to a container of Indian food that leaked, producing a review curry (which, for some reason, I stored in the refrigerator in case I absolutely had to reference it--otherwise, it just sat in there on one of the shelves). I ended up rewriting the entire thing...in the end producing about two and a half reviews (there's also an original ending that is much more strident, but it wouldn't work for a review).

The reader will see a few things of note. It starts with a bang. The first few sentences read:

Zizek’s Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle picks up the thread from his previous book focused on the war on terror, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, somewhere between the months leading up to the war in Iraq and the exposure of torture at Abu Ghraib. So, while we miss an encounter between Zizek and the torture scandal—which unfortunately, in the minds of many Americans, is just another scandal—he has nonetheless been constant in criticizing all “musings” about whether torture should be used in the war on terror as a soft step to its legitimation. And who knew— legitimate torture and you too could become Attorney General!

The reader will also note that I don't stray far from Lacanian reference points. At the time, I was trying to work out a kind of account of those who I called 'event theorists,' Zizek, Badiou, and others, and it shows. Today, of course, I'm doing something very different.

Another Schelling Reference: Flaubert

2011-07-05T12:36:00.000-04:00

Bouvard and Pécuchet decide to become writers, but inevitably they run into trouble and hit the books:

They labored to relate these vague concepts to things provided by memory, removed, added. Pécuchet was interested in feelings and ideas, Bouvard in images and colors. And they began to argue, each on amazed at how obtuse the other could be.

Perhaps the science called aesthetics could help them through their differences. A friend of Dumouchel, a philosophy professor, sent them a list of works on the subject. They worked separately, communicating their reflections to each other.

First of all, what is beauty?

For Schelling, it is the infinite expressed by the finite; for Reid, an occult quality; for Jouffroy, an integral fact; for de Maistre, something that pleases virtue; for Father André, what suits reason....

Given that I've suggested before that Schelling's contemporaries, near and far, understood his philosophy of art to be, as he once said, the "keystone" to the system, it's always pleasing to find references to his work along these lines.

(I am reading the Dalkey Archive's translation, which can be found here.)

The Weekend in Reviews

2011-07-04T12:53:00.000-04:00

Sure, it's a long weekend in the US and Canada. But don't let that get in the way of checking out a few notable book reviews.

First, here's Hasana Sharp, author of the forthcoming Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (see here) reviewing Michael Mack's Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (Continuum, 2010). One of the highlights:

As a Spinoza scholar, I was most interested in Mack’s interpretation of Spinoza’s principle of conatus, the striving by which each being aims to preserve and enhance its life. He suggests that the conatus gets taken up by later thinkers not only as a doctrine of self-preservation, or as the ultimate source of all human (and nonhuman) motivation, but also as a critique of how self-preservation can be narrowly construed so as to yield self-destruction (and, in his concluding discussion of Freud, a “loss of reality”). Mack reads Spinoza’s conatus as a principle of self-sustainability that can only be actualised by virtue of a contribution to the well-being of the other forces with which one is intertwined (Chapter 2).

And the verdict:

Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity highlights a number of fertile connections to Spinoza and adumbrates modern thought and culture in new ways. It suggests several avenues for future research and goes some way toward correcting the false portrait of Spinoza as an uncompromising rationalist who has little appreciation of the imaginative fabric of cultural life.

Then, at Marx and Philosophy, Mirko Hall reviews Uwe Steiner's Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Work and Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2010):

There are many critical introductions – e.g., from Cambridge, Polity, Routledge, and Totem – available on Benjamin. What makes this book particularly valuable is the discussion of people, texts, and contexts that are sometimes relegated to the periphery of Benjamin Studies. Steiner does not fetishize later canonical writings (such as the artwork essay, the notes on the Parisian Arcades or the theses on the philosophy of history). He also explores lesser texts that involve Benjamin’s earliest investigations into the essence of language and the practice of literary translation and criticism. These fields are extremely important, because they allowed him to recognize the continued afterlife of cultural artifacts. Steiner also emphasizes the importance of occasionally marginalized thinkers, who are invaluable for understanding Benjamin’s intellectual outlook: Germanist Norbert von Hellingrath, essayist Carl Gustav Jochmann, art historian Alois Riegl or author Paul Scheerbart. There is a strong interest in Scheerbart, who provided Benjamin with significant political impetuses for his techno-utopian visions.

And don't forget my review of Rancière's The Politics of Literature here.

Every Time the Left Sins God Sends Another Working-Class American to the Tea Party

2011-07-02T13:22:00.011-04:00

The Left in the US must blame itself for its weakness and inability to draw in lager numbers of working-class Americans into its fold. Walter Benjamin wrote that, "behind every fascism is a failed revolution." The growing popularity of the Tea Party movement in the US is the resulting failure of Leftists to address righteous popular anger over corrupt politics. I think there are several reasons for this.

Many Leftists articulate American working-class needs by using overly intellectual rhetoric. The Left does not need to dumb down information, just break it down. Many Leftists use other countries' revolutionaries and revolutions as symbols of liberation and outright ignore American equivalents. What about heroes of struggle such as Thomas Paine,John Brown, and Mary Harris "Mother" Jones? What about celebrating movements such as the BOSTON TEA PARTY? What is so amusing about the right-wing using the Boston Tea party, as a symbol of their movement, is that its very history undermines much of their political positions. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 sabotaged commerce, destroyed private property, and broke the rule of law, for the greater moral value of actual justice, opposed to legal injustice. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 fits more into the tradition of progressives than so-called conservatives. On a more extreme level,one could argue that the Boston Tea Party has more similarities with the Earth Liberation Front than it does with the Republican Party or the twenty-first century Tea Party.

I argue that the Tea Party is not truly conservative anyway. Two of the most popular politicians in the Tea Party movement are Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Both are women. Women being involved in politics and having the right to vote is not a conservative value, if "conservative" means going back to the proverbial good ol' days. The Founding Fathers, limited in their wisdom, would have told them to stay home, make babies, and cook for their husbands. It was liberal women and radical women that fought the law to get the right for women to become active members of politics. Liberals and leftists are accused of breaking with tradition: for picking and choosing ethics opportunistically. That is exactly what the right-wing does. When there was prayer in public schools there was legalized racial segregation and children working in sweat-shops: most right-wingers do not openly claim to want all of those things, hence they are not truly conservative, they are right-wing liberals.

A large portion of the Tea Party's constituency rightly are disgusted with the bank bailouts that Bush started and Obama continued. Somehow the Tea Party has convinced working Americans that this is socialism. Big finance manipulates the government to save capitalism at the American public's expense and this is socialism? No my fellow Americans, this is the natural outgrowth of Capitalism. The saddest naivety is the belief that big business is a better alternative to big government. The world is not marching into global one-world-order-socialism, it is crashing into disaster neo-liberal capitalism. Why is Republican Congressman Ron Paul viewed as a fringe politician and not fully endorsed by the financial sector? Because he has faith in the "free-market." Big capitalists do not want a free-market, they want Government to intervene on their behalf: in favor of capitalists and against the working-class or any other obstacle. Big business favors its international agenda at the expense of America or any other country, NAFTA is a good example. These are some of the points the Left in America should be exposing to the public at large. This great country is falling apart, is being ripped apart, and the actual creators of this destruction need to be stopped.

I picked two music videos. One is an official Tea Party Video and the other appears to be an average American musician. The lyrics in their songs demonstrate much of what this blog discussed.

Politics of Literature Review

2011-07-01T12:58:00.000-04:00

My review of Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Literature, which I wrote during our sojourn in Paris, is now available at the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books here.

Patrik Ourednik, The Opportune Moment, 1855

2011-06-29T16:51:00.000-04:00

It was a late night hyperlink clicking session that led me to Patrik Ourednik. I don't know exactly where it started, but it ended with me acquiring two of his books: The Opportune Moment, 1855 and Case Closed, both translated by Alex Zucker and published by Dalkey Archive Press. Here's some brief background on Ourednik, which I've taken from Context (a journal published by Dalkey Archive as well):

Patrik Ouredník was born in Prague‚ but emigrated to France in 1984‚ where he still lives. He is the author of eight books‚ including fiction‚ essays‚ and poems. He is also the Czech translator of novels‚ short stories‚ and plays from such writers as François Rabelais‚ Alfred Jarry‚ Raymond Queneau‚ Samuel Beckett‚ and Boris Vian. He has received a number of literary awards for his writing‚ including the Czech Literary Fund Award.

I started with The Opportune Moment, 1855, which tells the story of the failure of an utopian commune founded by Italian anarchists in Brazil. It opens with a letter by one of the protagonists (who I will call the epistolary narrator), to his unrequited love, many years after the failure of the new society. At once it becomes clear that Ourednik is writing, in a way, a historical novel and satire. Here are the opening lines (also from the DA website), which convey that 19th century epistolary mood:

Madam, however strong my distaste at the thought of deferring to your whim after so many years, I have not found within myself the courage to resist it, and am left with no choice but to submit, albeit I do so at the expense of my repute. To oblige you means to confess to my love for you, that transient conflagration, that involuntary clouding of the senses, which renders less persuasive all that I have professed and proclaimed; and as much as you know it, in your selfishness you ask of me a sincerity which I could not show anyone else. For if in life I have resisted your God and his depraved demands, if I have resisted unfreedom and shallowness, if I have faced ridicule and human baseness always with calm and determination—I have lost my struggle with love; and what is more, my love has been embodied by you, a woman unworthy of true emotion. Still today, when I find in you nothing which would be worth attention, when I marvel at the fact that I ever could have loved you, still today a word from your mouth knocks me defenseless to my knees, returning me to the days of immaturity and youthful fumbling, to days past and past perfect, to the juvenile schoolboy who carried out directions and instructions he did not understand. But the schoolboy in the end revolted and made up his mind to submit only to that which appeared sensible and good to him, whereas the aging man takes pen in hand and hastens to satisfy your vanity.

The narrator then recalls the desires and reasons to attempt to create a new society in rural Brazil, his conflicted feelings over his paramour, and the shortcomings of the commune and his youthful enthusiasms. This particular participant is the founder that searched out its location and returned to Europe to propagandize for its creation, who nevertheless fails, due to his delay at sea, to arrive before the settlement self-destructs. All that is left, aside from the deserted settlement, is a journal that is given him by the Brazilian policeman.

The journal takes the reader back to 1855, and is told by an Italian anarchist named Bruno (who is not the same as the epistolary narrator, who, as far as I can tell, is referred to by Bruno as "Older Brother"). The journal is split into two parts, the first describes Bruno's trip across the Atlantic, the second of the decline of Fraternitas settlement. During the trip across the Atlantic, Bruno captures the hopes and anticipations of the voyagers, their squabbles, and, unwittingly, their exploitation at sea by the ship's captain (for example, when the captain chooses to land temporarily at Cape Verde rather than the Canary Islands, one of the voyagers "didn't see why we hadn't filled up on fresh water when we were in the Canary Islands, where it was free"). In the squabbles, many of the limitations of their enthusiasm are revealed: the group argues over whether non-Europeans should be admitted to the group, they seem oblivious to the problems of being settlers in relation to indigenous peoples, etc.

After this section, there is a six month gap in the journal, and it resumes as the Fraternitas settlement collapses, and narrator becomes completely unreliable (that's all I can say without spoiling anything).

With novels such as The Opportune Moment, 1855, I find it impossible to ignore considering the political subtext. A story of a failed utopian project suggests, of course, that Ourednik views all political change with cynical eyes, meaning that all attempts at change end in defeat (but, then, why translate the book? We've got plenty of cynics and conservatives in the English language).

Or, it could accent the importance of the hopes opened by such a project despite their flaws. If the epistolary narrator is any indicator, Ourednik opts for the latter possibility. In his letter, the narrator rejects the smug liberalism of his former lover, choosing to resign himself to the absurdity of life rather than to the absurdity of bourgeois world.

De Beauvoir: Participating in Political Life

2011-06-27T11:49:00.000-04:00

Last summer, I spent some time reading through Capital, volume 1. This summer, my reading list is in large part organized around preparing for the Rancière book, which includes a cover-to-cover read of the Borde/Malovany-Chevallier translation of The Second Sex (I've already linked to some criticisms of this text, raised by Toril Moi, here).

I've only read through Parts One and Two thus far. But it's a relief to read and not have to worry about omissions à la Parshely. I've also had some fun rediscovering passages such as these (see 146): in the final chapter in the "History" section, de Beauvoir notes that after Germany's defeat in World War I, that women "obtained the right to vote and participated in political life." As for the former, she notes that the "majority of women chose the party of order." But regarding participation in political life, she gives Rosa Luxemburg as an example: "Luxemburg fought next to Liebknecht in the Spartacus group and was assassinated in 1919."

De Beauvoir is often treated as a liberal, politically speaking-- and perhaps sometimes for good reason: I am thinking here of her discomfort with the essay by Sartre, "Élections, piège à cons" (1973; translated as "Elections, A Trap for Fools," which doesn't quite capture the French). Nevertheless, passages such as the one above, wherein the participation in political life is revolutionary struggle, should remind us that she can still be read outside of--or at least not be reduced to--these liberal confines.

Why a Man Robbed a Bank for One Dollar

2011-06-26T14:09:00.007-04:00

This week a story about a man robbing a bank for one dollar became widely circulated. KTLA News reports:

A reportedly unemployed, uninsured man robbed a bank for $1 in order to get thrown in jail and receive medical attention.

Richard James Verone, a 59-year-old man who reportedly suffers from a growth on his chest, two ruptured disks, and a foot injury, walked into RBC bank unarmed earlier in June and handed the teller a note that read "This is a bank robbery. Please only give me one dollar." After handing over his note, the man said quietly on a couch while the teller called 911.

Verone, a man with no criminal history according to reports, figured that once he was thrown in jail he would receive the medical attention that he was unable to afford on his own.

The way right-wingers have been responding to this story is predictable.

Many commentators scoff at the man and claim that this story is liberal media ultra hyped-up sensationalism: After all, no one is denied healthcare in the US and the real problem is that medical costs are too high due to Medicare and other interfering government programs. This is a frequent argument by fiscal conservatives: The US should not provide universal healthcare and those that think we need it should stop complaining because we already have it. There is some truth in this argument. If a person calls 911 and gets sent to emergency that person will be cared for even if they are not covered by insurance. Although, can one say that that person will get the same quality healthcare as one with insurance? A few years ago my friend's young daughter broke her arm. She came home with it tied to a board. The the insurance my friend had would not cover giving her a cast until the doctor under his plan would be available. She had to wait to get it properly fixed. This was "healthcare" with insurance! Furthermore, this argument that the government needs to stop interfering with medical care is not honest. Does anyone really think the medical industry will go out of its way to provide cheap affordable healthcare inspired by ethics or the benevolent equalizing forces of the "free market"? I pose a question: Does anyone think an eighty year old grandma with no savings or insurance, who is soon to die anyway, be denied medical attention because she has no money? If you think she must be cared for you believe in universal healthcare. If you don't think she should be cared for you are,to put it in a vulgar term, a dick.

I know, I know, there is a financial crisis. Thomas Donnelly wrote in the Weekly Standard that perhaps even the US military getting socialized healthcare is too much of a social burden. He writes:

Well, if there is a lesson for society writ large, it’s that a universal, single-payer system is a bankrupting system, to the point where the killing-people part[of the military] is in danger of falling by the wayside. Over the past decade, the Defense Department’s spending on health care has tripled, approaching an estimated $51 billion per year. It continues to rise even faster than health care costs in the civilian world, and will push to about $65 billion by 2015 – probably more than 10 percent of the baseline (that is, excluding war costs) Pentagon budget.

He then points out some more "insight" by US officials:

Departing Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been trying to include defense health reforms in his money saving “efficiencies.” This week, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the defense health system is “not sustainable” without higher fees from troops, their families, and the retirees who benefit from very lost-cost programs like “TRICARE for Life.” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed that military health care costs are “eating us alive.”...Arnold Punaro, a retired Marine general and member of the Defense Business Board, a group that advises the Pentagon on its finances, recently summed the problem:

We in the Defense Department are on the same path that General Motors found itself on. General Motors did not start out to be a health care company that occasionally built an automobile. Today, we’re on the path in the Department of Defense to turn it into a benefits company that may occasionally kill a terrorist.

So, the practical thing to do is cut back or cut off medical care to US military. As Donnelly points out, healthcare for soldiers is not important, "The end, the larger purpose, is killing our enemies." Another question I ask is directed to our US military: Is Thomas Donnelly your friend or enemy? With the global class-war being waged from the top against the majority of humanity, there is one important question I direct to the majority of humanity: Who is our real enemies?

Notice these "wise" pundits:

On The University in Ruins

2011-06-22T12:39:00.000-04:00

Doc Nagel discussing the relevance of Bill Readings' The University in Ruins (Harvard, 1996):

It's the book I've been waiting for, examining the contemporary situation of universities, basically through a Situationist lens, with a good dose of Lyotard. I’m amazed that this book is 15 years old, and yet none of the current discussion of university crisis in the US refers to it. Perhaps I shouldn’t be amazed, since this book makes almost all of the current debate absolutely pointless.

Readings discusses how the term "excellence" is used as an empty qualifier for administrative decision-making. Now, as the Doc notes, substitute "student success" for "excellence" and Readings' analysis becomes contemporary:

What the use of excellence to name the activities of universities achieves is provide a bureaucratic rationale for managerial decisions. Since it is precisely not a criterion for judgment, but an empty qualifier, it can be used rhetorically in any situation to provide what looks like a justification for any decision. Since universities have no purpose, every managerial decision is essentially an arbitrary exercise of power – the power of the administrator (as Readings says, in the contemporary university the major figures are the presidents and provosts), or of market capitalism.

Recent Thoughts and Efforts

2011-06-21T14:31:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

The Rise of Turkey

2011-06-19T14:15:00.007-04:00

A few years ago I could not find one Arab friend that had anything good to say about Turks. One Jordanian man told me, "The Turks used to be the top of the Muslim world. Now they prefer to be the lowest of the Western world." Forgive my slip into the anecdotal, but I think my analysis will stand. However, Arab opinion about Turkey has thoroughly changed. It is a safe bet that Turkey is currently the most popular nation in the region.

The Turks did rule most of the Middle East, the Balkans, and part of North Africa for centuries. The Ottoman Empire lasted from the thirteenth up until the early twentieth century. Arabs became discontented with their Turkish rulers. The British and French Empires (mainly the British) in the early twentieth century utilized this discontent and rising Arab nationalism as a way to to help weaken Ottoman hegemony in the region. This was done to actually bring in the West as the new hegemonic force at Turkey's expense. Enigmatic characters such as Thomas Edward Lawrence aka "Lawrence of Arabia" was one British soldier that was sent to do such instigation. NPR's Jacki Lyden stated:

"Lawrence did not change the map of the Middle East — the spheres of influence had been drawn up secretly between Britain and France in 1916,"...

"By 1922, he was advisor to Winston Churchill, and it was then Britain installed the adroit Faisal as King in Iraq," Lyden says, "And later, when it was already a fact on the ground, Abdullah as Emir in Jordan." Of all the other British officers in the Middle East, Lawrence was one of the few urging independence and self-rule for the Arabs.

Even if Lawrence truly fought for Arab independence the British Empire would not give it freely. As the Ottoman Empire fell apart Turkey set it's own course favoring a Western orientation as opposed to an Eastern one.

In 1919 Mustafa Kemal "Atatürk" led a nationalist revolution in Turkey. He transformed Turkey into a modernized secular country. He even abolished the the Sultanate and use of the Arabic script for the Turkish language, in exchange for the Latin. The military became the vanguard of his reforms keeping Islamists in check. Turkey was the first Muslim majority country to recognize Israel in 1949. Israel and Turkey also developed a militarily strategic relationship. A few years later Turkey joined NATO. In light of this history, the question is: What has changed to make Turkey become popular with Arabs now?

In the early twenty-first century Turkish leaders started drastically changing the direction of Turkish foreign policy. They created a "zero-problem with neighbors" policy. Turkey has worked cooperatively with Arab dictators, without appearing to support them (unlike the US). The Turkish government has shown solidarity with the Arab revolts against those Arab dictators, without being perceived as a fomenter of those revolts. Turkey has been one of the only states in the Middle East (on good relations with the West) to really stand up to Israel and condemn it for its atrocities against Palestinians. Turkey's economy is growing and it is currently ran by an Islam friendly government that still maintains a secular approach to governance(showing that Islam in politics does not necessitate a Saudi or Iranian style theocracy). Turkey is on the rise with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the helm and the backing of his Justice and Development Party. It will be interesting to see what other developments will ensue.

Douzinas on Greek "Outrage"

2011-06-16T10:59:00.000-04:00

Costas Douzinas (one of the editors of the recently published The Idea of Communism) writes in the Guardian UK about recent popular Greek resistance to measures proposed by the IMF, EU and the European Central Bank:

A motley multitude of indignant men and women of all ideologies, ages, occupations, including the many unemployed, began occupying Syntagma – the central square of Athens opposite parliament; the area around White Tower in Thessaloniki; and public spaces in other major cities. The daily occupations and rallies, sometimes involving more than 100,000 people, have been peaceful, with the police observing from a distance.

Thousands of people come together daily in Syntagma to discuss the next steps. The parallels with the classical Athenian agora, which met a few hundred metres away, are striking. Aspiring speakers are given a number and called to the platform if that number is drawn, a reminder that many office-holders in classical Athens were selected by lots. The speakers stick to strict two-minute slots to allow as many as possible to contribute. The assembly is efficiently run without the usual heckling of public speaking. The topics range from organisational matters to new types of resistance and international solidarity, to alternatives to the catastrophically unjust measures. No issue is beyond proposal and disputation. In well-organised weekly debates, invited economists, lawyers and political philosophers present alternatives for tackling the crisis.

(I must be reading to much Rancière lately, because I can't help but think that Plato would be outraged: people drawing by lots to speak, speaking without qualifications...)

Congratulations to Peter Gratton

2011-06-14T14:02:00.000-04:00

Via Philosophy in a Time of Error, Peter Gratton announces some big moves:

I’ll be moving this summer over to Memorial University’s Philosophy Department. I’m quite excited by the changes. Memorial is about to begin offering a Ph.D. in philosophy (it already has a strong MA program), specializing in Continental, and I join an exciting department headed by Jim Bradley and includes Peter Trnka, Sean McGrath, and others known on the continental circuit. They are a busy department, with weekly reading groups (even going during the summer), with faculty and students all joining in. [...]

While I’m at it, I’ll honored to be in Australia for part of next Spring/Summer on a research fellowship at Australia National University’s Humanities Research Centre. The theme of the fellowship is on ecology and my focus will be on connecting my work on time to other fellows’ work on ecology—so look for more here next year on that point.

Congratulations, Peter!

The Bonus Army/Marchers : America's Tiananmen Square

2011-06-11T15:50:00.009-04:00

In 1932 US war veterans were struggling to feed their families and needed their government promised bonuses in order to eek out a living. They marched to Washington D.C. with their families and set up camp until their demands were met. Elected officials denied their request. President Hoover sent in troops to squash them. Men who served and fought in WWI would find themselves suppressed. Their suppression was coordinated by some of America's most famous military heroes: MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Patton. When times get tough economically all Americans can rest assured that the US government is capable of doing whatever it takes to keep stability. Even that entails taking down disgruntled veterans with tanks and bayonets.

On Plato's "Historical" Rejection of Art

2011-06-09T13:16:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading Plato's Republic for my current research project on Rancière and philosophy (parts of which, I hope, will appear in print sometime soon...). In Book X, after banishing the poets from the city, Socrates admits that it is still possible that the poets could return from exile if its defenders, speaking "in prose on its behalf" show "that it not only gives pleasure but is beneficial both to constitutions and to human life" (607d).

Rereading this passage reminded me of the way that Schelling, who often had neo-Platonic moments, deals with Plato's rejection of art (in the lectures on The Philosophy of Art from 1802-1804). Schelling argues that Plato's stance is merely historical and not philosophical, and that, historically speaking, contemporary philosophy is in a much better position to give a "more comprehensive understanding and construction of poesy."

Yet aside from this merely historical, not philosophical, opposition, an opposition philosophers readily admit, what is Plato's rejection of the poetic arts -- compared particularly with what he says in other works in praise of enthusiastic poesy -- other than a polemic against poetic realism, a foreboding of that later inclination of the spirit in general and of poesy in particular? That judgment could be applied least of all to Christian poesy [especially Schelling's favorite, Dante], which on the whole just as decisively displays the character of the infinite as the poesy of antiquity as a whole displays that of the finite. [...] The Christian religion, and with it a sensibility directed toward the intellectual and ideal...created its own poesy and art in which such sensibility could find satisfaction (V, 346-347).

But, as I argue in my book, Schelling's philosophy of art and idea of the new mythology does not end with Christian mythology (which he speaks of as a living form in the past tense), rather he announces the possibility of an art and mythology that overcomes the limitations of both ancient and Christian mythology, a new mythology which, incidentally, has its roots in naturphilosophie.

Jason Read on Jameson's Representing Capital

2011-06-08T14:11:00.000-04:00

We've all, I know, been waiting for the publication of Fredric Jameson's Representing Capital. Though I have not yet acquired a copy, I should be getting it soon, while reading his Hegel Variations is still on my mind. In the meantime, Jason Read has posted (on my birthday no less, not that he knew that...but I digress) some thoughts on a few of the central themes: separation, unemployment, alienation, and extinguishing (auslöchen). This passage caught my eye, though the whole post is worth reading:

The interest in this extinguishing of history can perhaps be read as an explanation of Jameson’s most often cited remark, the one about how it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. History is effaced not just in the commodity but also in the eternal present of the precarious employment situation, where all those years worked do not add up, or they do, but in the form of an increasingly alien capital, in machinery and the wealth of the company. Separation and extinguished are ultimately terms that make it possible to make sense of both Capital and capitalism.

Syria, Freedom, and Lessons In Hypocrisy

2011-06-04T16:32:00.024-04:00

It is being reported that over 100,000 people in the Syrian town of Hama are mourning the loss of activists recently killed by government security forces. The town of Hama is no stranger to state brutality. The notoriously pro-Western Middle East historian Bernard Lewis wrote in his book The Crisis of Islam (2003)about the Syrian government's 1982 slaughter of it's citizens and the morally problematic role of the US government. He writes that the Syrian government cracked down on the town of Hama after an uprising initiated by the Muslim Brothers. The Syrian government:

Attacked the city with tanks, artillery, and bomber aircraft, and followed these with bulldozers to complete the work of destruction...The number killed was estimated, by Amnesty International, at somewhere between ten thousand and twenty five thousand...The massacre did not prevent the United States from subsequently courting Assad...Hafiz Al-Assad never became an American ally or, as others would put it, puppet, but it was certainly not for lack of trying on the part of American diplomacy (pp 108, 109)

Lewis also points out that this event got very little press compared to the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps a few months later by Israel's Lebanese Christian militia allies.

Syrians, not just from Hama, have faced the heavy hand of the authoritarian Bashar Assad,son and successor of the late dictator Hafiz Assad. Reported in HuffPost World :

A 13-year-old Syrian boy detained by government forces has been brutally killed, his wounds displayed in a shocking video. The boy, identified as Hamza al-Khateeb, was shot, burned, and had his penis cut off when his body was returned to his family.

Syrians, like Tunisians, Egyptians,Yemenis, Bahrainis, Libyans, and Palestinians (more to add), are fighting for their freedom from such barbarism. All these people deserve international solidarity (that does not necessarily mean military intervention).Humans cannot and should not endure such horrors. Freedom loving people are in awe of these incredible revolutions spreading, but I think it is important to examine the geopolitical forces at play. A brief look at how ordinary citizens are being used by these forces is needed.

Lebanon's Hezbollah helped Lebanon become free of Israeli military occupation, yet now they support Bashar Assad's oppression of his people because they get aid from Syria. Iran expresses rage at Bahrain's repression of the Shiites by the Sunni monarchy while it represses it's own people and supports dictatorship in Syria. The US has a large Navy fleet in Bahrain and watches, if not supports, the unarmed citizen protesters being slaughtered (along with medical professionals tending to the injured) by the Bahraini monarchy because it is an enemy of Iran. Yet, the US and NATO bomb Qaddafi's forces in Libya to "protect" armed civilians from Libyan government attacks. The US supports the unpopular dictator Saleh in Yemen because he claims to help repress al-Qaida. Turkey stands in solidarity with Palestinians while they treat Kurds in Turkey in a similar way Israelis treat Palestinians. Israel talks about suffering from Palestinian terrorism and brazenly oppresses Palestinians with ample military aid from the US government. I can go on and on. My point is that solidarity in support of freedom needs to mean freedom for everyone: not tied to the hypocrisy of cold narrow political ends masked in the name of humanitarianism.

Here is a video posted in honor of the Syrian Revolution.

Israel Always Wants More Palestinian Land

2011-05-21T23:15:00.009-04:00

US President Obama was considered radical, by right-wing Israeli supporters, for merely stating the obvious conditions necessary for a viable two-state solution: two countries based on the pre-1967 borders. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demands that the Jewish settlers in the West Bank--along with the territory they continue to steal--become incorporated into Israel. Mazal Mualem wrote in Haaretz:

After two days packed with meetings and peaking with his confrontation with President Barack Obama, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has emerged stronger within Likud and became a uniting force for the Israeli right.

Netanyahu's adamant rejection of Obama's "1967 borders" speech restored calm to the right-wing coalition he heads; even the leftmost pole of his government, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, sent him a message of support Saturday...The rightmost poles of Netanyahu's coalition government, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai and Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon, saw to it that the political front remained calm.

"Israel cannot permit itself to return to the 1967 borders, which are indefensible, or to a process in which it is giving more territory to the Palestinians," Ya'alon said.

Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon sounded a reassuring note Saturday. Like Barak, said he did not interpret the interchange between Obama and Netanyahu as a confrontation. "Obama's speech was positive for Israel, since he remained committed to Israel as a Jewish state and even demanded that the Palestinians explain the reconciliation agreement with Hamas," Ayalon said.

What Israel wants is what it has always wanted: more and more Palestinian land. Since the beginning of the so-called "Peace Process" the settlements have continued to increase. Even when the Gaza pullout occurred,the choice portions of the West Bank were being grabbed. And who are these settlers? Many are religious fanatics that believe that God gave them the land. Some ideas by settlers were inspired by Ze'ev (Vladimir)Jabotinsky (1880-1940). He is the spiritual father of Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party. In 1913 he wrote an article “On Race." He stated, “We are entitled then to say that generally speaking almost every nation has a specific racial component, which is common to each individual within it. In this sense (and not, of course, in a political or juridical sense), nation and race overlap each other.” He then adds:

Let us draw for ourself the ideal “absolute nation.” It would have to posses a racial appearance of marked unique character, an appearance different from the racial nature of that nation’s neighbours. It would have to occupy from times immemorial a continuous and clearly defined piece of land; it would be highly desirable if in that area there would be no alien minorities, who would weaken national unity. It would have to maintain an original language, which is not derived from another nation…

Race relations were also inherently antagonistic in his world view and could only be resolved by one race dominating the other. Jabotinsky wrote an imaginary dialogue called Exchange of Compliments. The topic was about superior and inferior races. The colonialist mentality of Jabotinsky articulated in this work becomes more pronounced. In it is stated:

The Bushman, when he will meet a white person: ultimately, and despite everything, he will be impressed by the white man’s supremacy. Both believe in their own superiority, but in the white man’s heart it will not be impaired, while in the Bushman’s feeling it will be contested and destroyed and will finally disappear. Ultimately, the white man will rule the Bushman not only by force, but his domination will also be that of spiritual superiority.

These writings on race reflect his approach to politics and the way he interpreted Jewish colonization into Palestine. These writings also reflect the way the Israeli government operates in regards to its conflict with the Palestinians currently.

DSK and the Socialists

2011-05-18T09:14:00.000-04:00

In my previous post on BHL and DSK, I stated that if Dominique Strauss-Kahn is the champion of the French left, then I would hate to see its enemies. Like many other parties of the Left in the last thirty years, the French socialists have largely abandoned any reference to working class solidarity without a clear idea of what their mandate would be. At Counterpunch, Diana Johnstone has a brief account of the decline of the Socialist party from the election of François Mitterand to its turn to celebrity driven politics (there's a pun in there, as part of the article has to do with the 'DSK posing with a porsche' scandal). In sum, Johnstone writes,

But the real scandal for the Socialist Party is the one it does not even begin to recognize: that it was pinning its electoral hopes on a leading champion of global capitalism, the president of the IMF. Whatever the outcome of the New York proceedings, the bursting DSK bubble marks the total degeneration of the Socialist Party in France, for reasons that have nothing to do with his sex life.

Before finishing this post, I will also mention that Counterpunch also has two articles (here and here) about Strauss-Kahn's attempts to reform the IMF, and how his fall marks the end of that tendency. Although lamenting reforms within the International Monetary Fund seems to me to concede too many premises for analysis (which risk turning the reader into somebody like BHL, who echoed the same sentiments), they are worth reading as a counterpoint. We should keep in mind, before shedding tears for DSK, that the reforms could have failed on their own without a scandal erupting, just as the French Socialist Party would/could have faced electoral difficulties without it.

BHL Loves DSK 4ever

2011-05-17T12:39:00.001-04:00

Never a man to let ethical experience get in the way of media presence, Bernard-Henri Lévy has published a defense of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

I understand the whole 'innocent until proven guilty' part of law, but BHL uses the innuendo of opportunism to impeach the accusations of sexual assault against his old buddy and IMF director DSK. Instead of my usual habit of sardonic and mocking commentary, I'll let him dig his own hole.

This is a convoluted way of blaming the victim:

I do not know—but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, and without delay—how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a “cleaning brigade” of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.

And this is a red herring:

I hold it against all those who complacently accept the account of this other young woman, this one French, who pretends to have been the victim of the same kind of attempted rape, who has shut up for eight years but, sensing the golden opportunity, whips out her old dossier and comes to flog it on television.

Apparently these techniques are worth it, because BHL is worried about the political fallout:

The French left that, if Strauss-Kahn were really out of the arena, would lose its champion.

If this is true, and DSK is the champion of the left, I'd hate to see its enemies.

The "Civilized" West vs. the "Uncivilized" Arabs

2011-05-14T14:51:00.010-04:00

It is very easy for Westerns to look at the carnage in Libya, the slaughter in Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen as distinctly Arab proclivities. What about Islamic terror against Christians recently enacted in Egypt? Putting the violent legacy of colonialism, military invasions, occupations, and imperialism aside, Europeans and Americans must not forget the barbarism we have enacted on ourselves. World War I and World War II somehow are viewed as mere aberrations of lost-soul aristocrats or non-human men such as Hitler and Stalin. The horrors of these wars can not be simply explained away to a few individuals. We must see that all humans can embark on heartless campaigns of carnage. It serves us well to take note of some poets responses to these events. Maurice Nadeau points of in The History of Surrealism(1965) that after WWI many surrealists became disillusioned with Western civilization:

They had fought in it by obligation and under constraint.They emerged from it disgusted.; henceforth they wanted nothing in common with civilization that had lost its justification, and their radical nihilism extended not only to art but to all it's manifestations.

André Breton,poet and one of the founders of surrealism, commented sixteen years after the Armistice:

I say that what the surrealist attitude initially shared with Lautréamont and Rimbaud and what definitively linked our destiny to theirs was the DEFEATISM of war.(45)

To illustrate by way of example episodes that lead to this cynicism,we must not forget the infamous 1916 Battle of the Somme that resulted in the death of nearly 60,000 British troops in one day.

I am posting two poems read on Youtube. The first is a reading from W.H. Auden's "SEPTEMBER 1, 1939" and the second is "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen.

Note:

DULCE ET DECORUM EST - the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean "It is sweet and right." The full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country.

(See http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html)

Why I am not a New Atheist

2011-05-10T06:52:00.000-04:00

I'm much more of an 'old' atheist, committed to social justice and to thinking about religion dialectically (as an institution that can at different times reinforce or challenge the inequalities of social relations). I've often complained that the new atheists lack both of these commitments, broadly aligning themselves with Western imperialism, neoliberalism, and a patronizing dismissal of religion that reaches a fever pitch when it comes to discussing Islam.

Concerning Richard Dawkins, Lenin's Tomb has (screen) captured how the latter position opens a number of problems that they can't resolve--but about which feel compelled to 'raise' questions:

The Socialist Tour of Père-Lachaise

2011-05-09T09:16:00.000-04:00

The only really touristy thing that my wife and I have done in Paris so far is a visit to the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise (the rest of you can take the virtual visit here). Just so that my street cred isn't damaged, I want to make it clear that I did not go to visit Jim Morrison's grave. We did, however, take a non-sectarian socialist tour of the cemetery.

Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881)

Saint-Simon (1760-1825)

Nestor Makhno (1889-1934)

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) with, unfortunately, graffitti

A Memorial for the Communards (some of whom were shot at this wall)

Paul Lafargue (1842-1911) and Laura Lafargue (née Marx, 1845-1911)

Paul Éluard (1895-1952)

Adrien Lejeune, the last communard (1847-1942)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

And I feel that we can't leave out a few non-socialists:

Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), with a reproduction of The Raft of Medusa

And, finally, Richard Wright (1908-1960)

When Zbigniew Brzezinski and His Friends Loved Osama bin Laden

2011-05-08T19:31:00.009-04:00

It is Mother's Day. Mothers are important. We should never forget our good mothers and we should not forget our history. What history? As I watched my fellow Americans dance in the streets over the death of Osama bin Laden several days ago I thought about the many ironies over the past few decades. My mother used to read me Romans 12: 19 from the New Testament. It reads:

Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord (NIV).

I've become a little lost in figuring out how this fits into the Christianity of some of these dancing Americans. Another question is the role the US has had in the past with the people and nations we now invade and kill. I'll print some excerpts from Le Nouvel Observateur (France),Jan 15-21, 1998 of an interview with former United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter,Zbigniew Brzezinski(1977 to 1981):

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

Brzezinski: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalists, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

Do most Americans recall this? They should go ask their mothers if they do. And who is that former CIA Robert Gates guy mentioned by Brzezinski in the beginning of the interview? His name sounds familiar.

Links and News from Paris

2011-05-06T12:29:00.000-04:00

Although I don't want to get into the routine of starting posts with apologies about not blogging more frequently, here are a few autobiographically related thoughts and links:

I should be writing more frequently now that the fog of jet lag has dissipated, but I'm also working on my keynote address for a conference, entitled "Dialectical Models: Reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit after Schelling's Philosophy of Art." I updated the title a bit to reflect the theme of the conference, which is "In the Aftermath of German Idealism." If you just happen to be in Germany, and more specifically Wuppertal, from May 12-14, I recommend attending. The schedule, which looks very strong, is available here (scroll down to find the PDF).
I also noticed that New APPS has an interview, by John Protevi, of François Raffoul. Although it's not mentioned, he used to teach at CSU Stanislaus (over a decade ago, while I was an undergraduate there--to be clear, I didn't expect that this parenthetical part would be mentioned). I can't say I knew him very well, but I took his course on responsibility and action (Heidegger, Sartre, Lévinas) while I was in my fourth year. It was an impressive course, even if he couldn't convince me to keep reading Lévinas. On an unrelated note: I heard that he used to do the reverse commute to CSUS; while most commuters drive from the Central Valley to the Bay Area, he apparently used to drive from Berkeley to Turlock when he had to teach.

What in the Hell is NATO? (It Will Even Take On Climate Change)

2011-04-30T15:25:00.009-04:00

The US State Department's website explains the background and role of NATO(North Atlantic Treaty Organization). It states:

Formed in 1949 with the signing of the Washington Treaty, NATO is a security alliance of 28 countries from North America and Europe. NATO's fundamental goal is to safeguard the Allies' freedom and security by political and military means...Article 5 of the Washington Treaty -- that an attack against one Ally is an attack against all -- is at the core of the Alliance, a promise of collective defense. Article 4 of the treaty ensures consultations among Allies on security matters of common interest, which after 60 years have expanded from a narrowly defined Soviet threat to the critical mission in Afghanistan, as well as peacekeeping in Kosovo and new threats to security such as cyber attacks, and global threats such as terrorism and piracy that affect the Alliance and its global network of partners.

It is interesting how NATO has conveniently expanded its role over the last several decades. The raison d'etre of NATO is as stated in Article 5 "that an attack against one Ally is an attack against all -- is at the core of the Alliance." Currently,with the wave of a magic wand, NATO views Article 4's "security matters of common interest" to mean, literally,whatever it wants to make it mean. It echoes the essence of the statement by Former Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes that "the Constitution is what the judges say it is." In other words, NATO is what NATO says it is.

In 1999 NATO bombed Serbia due to the way it was dealing with it's internal conflict with Kosovo. A NATO member was not attacked. NATO decided it needed to intervene in the crisis regardless. Now, led by President Obama, NATO is involved in Libya's civil war (a significant distance away from the North Atlantic). What is the role of NATO?

I'm posting three short youtubes. One comes from a group promoting the "new" role of NATO. The two others are the opinions on the same topic by President Clinton's former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and President Obama's Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. What is noticeable is the blatant ambiguity of everything they are saying. There are no real concrete answers given.Madeleine Albright is even asked what role NATO has in dealing with climate change. NATO is now fighting wars dealing with environmental issues? The official NATO website has a most peculiar way of defining itself on the link "What is NATO?" It invites you to "Discover NATO." The viewer hears the sound of birds and forest water for a brief moment.There is a picture of teenagers jumping excitingly in the air. Juxtaposed to that picture is a couple laying down in the grass romantically. A computer animated flower is next to the guy. He stares at the girl while she is lazily reading. The definition reads:

We want to be sure that we can walk around freely in a safe and secure environment. Security in all areas of everyday life is key to our wellbeing, but it cannot be taken for granted.

Perhaps NATO will further expand by intervening in the global economic crisis? Would members be willing to bomb banks and send drones to assassinate corrupt CEOs? Even if such a surreal occurrence were to take place, in all likeliness, NATO would be on the other side of that war: "securing" markets. Or is that part of it's role already?

Unemployed Negativity on Treme and Negri

2011-04-26T16:21:00.000-04:00

I've been catching up with my blog subscription/RSS feed list over the last few days, and imagine my surprise when, searching through Jason Read's Unemployed Negativity, I found his recent remarks on Treme while I was looking for his review of Antonio Negri's recent Spinoza et nous (his third book on Spinoza). I thought the latter would be of some interest, as I've been thinking about reading something by Negri again (this always falters due to the amount of Rancière/Sartre/Marx/Hegel that I've stacked in the 'to read' pile). Read writes:

Negri’s little book, a series of essays on Spinoza covering democracy, Spinoza and Heidegger, and a sociology of the affects, is presented as both a defense of his particular interpretation of Spinoza, which began with The Savage Anomaly, and of what is stake in the general turn to Spinoza. With respect to the latter, Negri argues that the return to Spinoza should be given the conspicuous date of 1968. This is its date in intellectual history, following the publication of Matheron and Deleuze’s studies, but it also places it within the post-68 crisis of Marxism and transformation of capital. As Negri argues, the crisis of Marxism opened the turn to Spinoza.

While you are there, check out his remarks on the first season of Treme. I recently watched Treme (after, surprise, surprise, watching The Wire), and I think it is a remarkable portrayal of tragedy and joy, which is not something I often say about television shows. By the first episode, which a few of my friends found to be a bit long, I was hooked by the music, which is front and center in the narrative. Here's Jason again:

Treme is very much about New Orleans, about its cultural, geographical, and historical specificity. [...] the first show was bleak, tragic even, in its outlook. While the second has preserved much of Simon’s skepticism [from The Wire] of American government and capital, illustrated by the massive failure of every institution that became synonymous with Katrina, it has moments of pure joy, culinary and musical, the likes of which are never seen on television.[...]

[He continues:] Treme is mostly about people who are outsiders, who function outside of institutions, at least official ones. The police, politicians, and reporters are still there, but they have become part of the background. What has moved to the foreground are musicians, “Indian chiefs,” chefs, and professors, all of whom are not so much outside of institutions, but outside of those institutions that are central in deciding the fate of post-Katrina New Orleans. We might argue that they are outside of institutions, but central to culture.

Arthur C. Danto," Andy Warhol"

2011-04-22T00:31:00.000-04:00

Arthur C. Danto's Andy Warhol (Yale, 2009) is a philosophical biography of the most famous representative of American pop art. A biography is more than appropriate for the pop artist who was himself an icon, because, as Danto notes, Warhol "invented, one might say, an entirely new kind of life for an artist to lead, involving music, style, sex, language, film, and drugs, as well as art" (47-48). Nevertheless, Danto avoids the temptation of filling the book with lurid prose, focusing on Warhol's philosophy of art.

Perhaps it has something to do with Danto's own intellectual/biographical trajectory, but Warhol stands out for him as the artist who reconfigured the central questions of the philosophy of art. In brief, Danto's account goes like this: the long-standing and traditional question of the philosophy of art was "what is art?" The question, and more importantly, the solution (art has something to do with beauty) had been largely unchallenged until modernism and the avant-gardes, and more specifically the anti-aestheticism of Dadaism. Modernism turned the question into an aesthetic self-interrogation, and Dada used their art to ridicule the decadence of the ruling classes who had led Europe into the first world war.

Modernism and Dada, according to Danto, only challenged the solution to the question 'what is art?', while Warhol transformed the question:

The new form of the ancient question was this: given two objects that look exactly alike, how is it possible for one of them to be a work of art and the other just an ordinary object (62)?

Enter the Brillo Boxes, and drumroll, please:

Andy's various challenges to what philosophers and others have said that art is pale in comparison with the grocery boxes. Since he has found an example of a real object and a work of art, why can't anything have a counterpart that is a work of art, so that ultimately anything can be a work of art? That means at the very least a new of era of art in which artworks cannot be discerned from real things, at least in principle--what I have called The End of Art (65-66).

Danto immediately answers the obvious challenge that Marcel Duchamp's readymades caused this kind of havoc for art by arguing that the "one thing that has to be said about the Brillo Boxes is that they are beautiful" (66). The irony, though, is that choosing Warhol over Duchamp gives us a new question, but the old answer: the line might not be drawn in principle, but the work of art still has something to do with beauty.

That, however, might not be as important as the politics that Danto derives from Warhol's work. Warhol, he says, "celebrated ordinary American life" in his work (of course, one would have to exclude much of the underground film work, but I digress). Warhol the painter, celebrates "what every American knows." His genius, in Danto's view, rested in his ability to pick potent images that reflected what was on the American mind:

He represented the world that Americans lived in by holding a mirror up to it, so that they could see themselves in its reflection. It was a world that was largely predictable through its repetitions, one day like another, but that orderliness could be dashed to pieces by crashes and outbreaks that are our nightmares [...] It is a world of little people--us--with the imperfections that gnaw at us and explain why we are not loved the way we would like to be, but imperfections that afflict even the stars and celebrities who take their own lives, even though we envy them for their beauty, their success, their supposed success (126-127).

From what I can gather, Warhol represents a world that Danto felt at home in, and, for all its self-obsessed pathos, more than likely the world that he feels nostalgia for. Warhol or not, that's not a world I want to glorify, let alone live in.

NASS 2011 Conference Schedule

2011-04-16T13:49:00.001-04:00

In a few weeks, from April 27-29, the North American Sartre Society will be meeting in Montréal. The schedule for the conference is up here (PDF). As you will see, I will be giving a paper on Thursday, the 28th, around 2:15. For those who have looked, I'd like to clarify that I'm giving the paper entitled "The Being and Nothingness of Equality: Sartre’s Influence on Rancière," and not the one listed on Michel Henry (I would suppose that this talk will be delivered by the other panelist, Ian Coleman).

This paper has been, unlike a few others over the past few years, fun to work on. I had a fairly clear idea of what I wanted to do when I submitted the abstract, and the process of writing has fleshed out the connections that I thought were there. However, I say that now, having established the transition from Disagreement to Being and Nothingness--but I still have to write something about the latter.

NDPR Review of DFW's Fate, Time, and Language

2011-04-13T16:47:00.000-04:00

Daniel Speak reviews for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews David Foster Wallace's Fate, Time, and Language, which is a posthumous edition of DFW's undergraduate thesis in philosophy. Like Speak, I've felt a few reservations about the way that people have, after DFW's death, sought to

"Reissue! Repackage! Repackage!"

his writings, and an undergraduate thesis surely suggests that somebody was looking to cash in. However, as Speak notes (I've emphasized those concerns, and his reassuring verdict):

Frankly, however, I had my worries that the publication of his undergraduate thesis was a purely opportunistic endeavor under these circumstances. I convinced myself that accepting the invitation might nevertheless have at least two positive results. First, I could use it as a provocation and motivation to tackle Wallace's supposedly mind-bending Infinite Jest (1000+ pages!). Second, an honest and negative assessment of the philosophical merit of the volume, I told myself, might cast some useful light on the opportunism I was afraid was behind its publication. Having confessed my antecedent suspicions, I now publicly repent them. Fate, Time, and Language contains a great deal of first-rate philosophy throughout, and not least in Wallace's extraordinarily professional and ambitious essay --

I've read DFW's book on infinity (Everything and More), and I highly recommend it for somebody who wants to tackle mathematics in a serious but humorously self-reflexive series of discussions on infinity and set theory (it was so much fun that I kind of wish that I blogged during the time that I read it, so that I could write about it.)[1]. It concludes before, as we might say, the "Cohen-event," but there's plenty of Cantor. Speak has convinced me that I should give Fate, Time, and Language a shot.

[1] Maybe I will in the future.