Latest Arrivals

My reading lists are probably at their most diverse when I'm not in the midst of a book project. While some of the major features of the next project are coming into focus, I've been reading a variety of books that won't have any direct bearing on it. (Then again, who knows for sure?)

The Abensour stuff is for a long-term project that Matt McLennan and I are working on. I've written a book review of Split Season 1981, though it's ultimate venue is unconfirmed. And, yes, it's taken me this long to get a copy of Coates's book. What can I say? I'm backlogged:

Next, a stack from a Verso book sale. Geras probably looks like the odd title out, but it's a follow up for our reading group for Feuerbach's The Fiery Brook. Behind that stack is another stack of recent acquisitions; some are part of a self-education in indigenous studies to find essays/chapters to include in introductory courses in philosophy:

  

Then, catching up on Derrida and Honneth for future (shorter) projects, plus two more baseball books to read before the season starts:

Not pictured: five or six other books that are somewhere waiting to be delivered.

Voluntary Servitude (Continued)

As a follow up to the previous post: the course on the history of social and political philosophy also gives me a chance to catch up on some secondary literature that I've been meaning to read:

• George Caffentzis, Clipped Coins, Abused Words, Civil Government: John Locke's Philosophy of Money (Autonomedia, 1989).
• Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008).
• Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire (Verso, 2014).
• David Munnich, L'art de l'amitié: Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la servitude volontaire (Sens et Tonka, 2012).
• Bruce Campbell, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor (St. Martin's Press, 2002)

Travel Reading: Holiday Edition

(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).

Reading List 2011

Years ago, during my summers, I used to keep a reading list of the dates for books that I managed to both start and finish. Since summers were the only times that weren't organized around a semester schedule, these lists would give me an approximate idea of what I did to pass the time. Though I eventually fell out of the habit, I still write the dates that I start and finish most books on one of their cover pages. While this keeps a record of when I read a book (I also write down when and where I acquire it), I can't often remember what else I was reading at the time unless I had kept notes about it.

At the start of January, I decided to keep a reading list for the year 2011, because I want to know how much I can read at different times during the year, and so that I can plan my readings more accurately. As so many of us in the academic world know, when you are teaching three courses as I am this semester, it is much easier to stack up books that you want to read than it is to read them.

Just looking at the month of January (through the 30th) here's the verdict: if I'm working on a conference paper that has to be polished enough to be read by other attendees before the conference, and teaching three courses,  and keeping up with a reading group on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, I won't get much other reading finished. Over the month I read, for my own interest, Robin D.G. Kelley's book on Thelonious Monk (which I reviewed here), José Saramago's The Elephant's Journey, Thomas Muntzer's Sermon to the Princes (Matt reviewed this here), Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (what can I say, I was writing on Marx's critique of the bourgeois Crusoades), and W.E.B. Du Bois's The Negro. 

The rest of 'free' time to read involved material related to either my courses or the Rancière/Marx paper-- which included completing Foucault's lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, which is mostly about neoliberalism. I should have something to say about my ambivalence about these lectures sometime soon, as I've been waiting to see if my initial responses would wear off or if I could cast them in a different, more positive light.

For now, back to marking.

Holiday Reading

While most everybody is acclimating to holiday mode, I'm working on my presentation for the Society for Social and Political Philosophy's Roundtable on Marx's Capital (see here), at the end of February, though for which they want an advance draft in January. That still seems very possible, despite having to create course outlines for two courses starting in January. I'm also catching up on some light reading, including:

• Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, (here) since I'm reading the early Walter Benjamin these days.
• Jacques Rancière, Short Voyages to the Land of the People. (here) Do I need a reason?
• Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, (here) because he's the keynote for the conference.
• Michael Löwy, The War of the Gods, (Verso) brushing up on Liberation Theology, probably again because I'm reading the early Benjamin.
• And since it seems like the season, I might try to get to one of a few xmas presents: Verso's Revolutions! series edition of Thomas Muntzer's Sermon to the Princes, or, if I feel more ambitious, Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life.

Quick Update: if the whole thing falls apart for some reason, I'll probably just push the books I haven't started off to next year and read William Gibson's Zero History.

Fall Semester is Around the Corner

Or, more accurately, the start of the fall semester here at the University of Ottawa is less than 24 hours away. To follow up on my previous post on my employment situation: between then and now I took on another section of "Reasoning and Critical Thinking," bringing my course load for the semester to two. The optimistic way to look at this situation is to say that I've never taught more than a 1/1 course load, and so a 2/1 (and there's still a chance that I will pick up a course in the winter...such is the life of the sessional professor) still leaves plenty of time to work on my new project. Before getting to that project, however, I've got to write up two abstracts for upcoming conferences (still at the CFP stage, not post-acceptance), and finish What Is To Be Done?, the final text in my summer reading selection of essential texts in the history of Marxism (from 1860-1923).

Aside from teaching, I've set a fairly ambitious working schedule for fall semester: I'll be working on my conference presentation on Agamben for the RPA, the chapter on Lukács for the aforementioned 'new project,' and participating in a reading group dedicated to The Phenomenology of Spirit and its influence-- that is, readings of Hegel by Hyppolite, Kojève, Lukács, and Althusser-- not to mention keeping up with the blog.

If Bill Martin is Banned...

Last month, Bill Martin, professor of philosophy at DePaul University, and Bill Martin, Jr., author of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? were recently confused by the credulous and intellectual-curiosity-averse (or curiously intellectually averse?) Texas State Board of Education. The cause for the mix up is the search engine at Border's, or more than likely, the fact that the Board's members were satisfied with the results of the list resulting from the search (see the articles at the Chronicle of Higher Ed and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram).

As a result, Bill Martin, author of Ethical Marxism (the offending title), Humanism and Its Aftermath: The Shared Fate of Deconstruction and Politics, amongst other titles (including two books on prog rock) has endured a bit of minor celebrity (note to B.M: I don't mean this as an insult), which included being rightly identified by the Board itself as the author of books containing "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system." Which of course they'd rather ban than refute. (Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? has apparently suffered a bit of banishment.)

All of this misses the larger question, however. With Bill Martin and Bill Martin banned, we have yet to consider what the children read will read in their stead. My suggestions:

Marx for Beginners
This is Bill Martin's own suggestion. No qualms here. I read this one some time ago, back when I used to work near a corporate bookstore/personal-lunch-break-library. Lots of pictures, a bit of the essentials and a sense of humor.

Howard Zinn, A People's History of American Empire
My friend Santi has been trying to convince teachers in California's education system to teach this book, and he says two have taken him up. Let's hope they don't mess with Texas. As I wrote with Zinn's passing:

Zinn took history and stood it on its feet. Chronicles of war and great deeds become a constant series of attempts to oppress or calm the fires of social struggle, but the guiding thread is the resilience of people acting from the basic conviction that their rights and their justice won't be realized because these things have been written down on a few dusty documents. They have to be fought for. Zinn was right their in midst of it: like Vonnegut, he learned the right lessons from war's injustices, at Spellman he was radicalized by the growing civil rights struggle at the cost of his job, and then wrote on of the earliest books critical of the Vietnam War, VietNam: The Logic of Withdrawal, published in 1967; A People's History of the United States followed in 1980. He stayed involved, kept writing, kept pissing off other people in his profession and academia for a refusal to be a specialist and to keep to a small academic niche.

Bill Martin, The Radical Project: Sartrean Investigations
Damn! How did this end up back on the reading list?! Well, you can't stay under the Board's supervision for your whole life, and if Martin is going to receive a bit of attention, we should not allow this moment to go by without talking about his work. After meeting Bill at the most recent North American Sartre Society meeting in Memphis, I discovered that my own interests in Sartre bear some resemblance to subjects covered in his work. So when I found a copy of The Radical Project I picked it up for the personal library.

Many of the essays, especially the one dedicated to overcoming "Sartrophobia," show how Sartre's legacy remains important to contemporary political and philosophical problems. Martin identifies several points of reproach between the post-structuralists and Sartre to show where the latter's work is still relevant. This often rests on the ethical aspect of Sartre's work, because Martin's problem with the reception of post-structuralism in North America is that it has often been accompanied with the de-politicization of the work of the post-structuralists, which is the case, especially, he argues, with Derrida. In addition, Martin's arguments regarding the relationship between Sartre and Marxism, and what they offer to each other, are both clear and conversant in the debates between Leninism and Maoism. I've found the book to be very engaging and thought provoking. The only discouraging part of these Sartrean Investigations is that many of the problems discussed in the book (published in 2000) are still problems today.

Nevertheless, I look forward, as I develop my own work on the relationship between Maoism, Sartre and Badiou, to engaging Bill at future conferences on the merits of Ethical Marxism, Derrida and this other Sartrean legacy with which I am engaged.

Travel Reading

Traveling imposes its own kind of reading schedule, being that 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. Nabokov works sometimes (I read Laughter in the Dark on a red-eye), so does Michel Houellebecq (just read one though; my friend Mark reports that he's crossed parts of The Possibility of an Island and Whatever, because he read them on the round-trip from Ottawa to Glasgow for a conference) but I've probably read more Vonnegut novels on airplanes than I have any other author. That includes parts of Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Timequake, and maybe also parts of A Man without a Country. For my morning flight to Memphis, I've decided to try Jailbird. It's not that my decision is based on ease. It's based on organization: Vonnegut's short chapters and sections make for a good read when there are constant interruptions to one's attention span.

I'm also taking Zizek's First as Tragedy, Then as Farce for my flight back (in the afternoon), and Michael Lowy's Fire Alarm (on Walter Benjamin), so that I can try, unrealistically, to work a bit on an abstract about Benjamin's concept of history.

And then, of course, there's the whole Sartre conference...which is why I'm going in the first place.

Tomorrow, I will have a post up about Nepal, thanks to Blogspot's ability to schedule the publication ahead of time.

Reading List Endurance Test

There is something about finishing a thesis that makes you just want to grab all those books you've been putting aside for just after you finish that last chapter, paragraph, or abstract, and start catching up on reading. And then you end up with this:

• Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment. I've been reading this in the morning. I don't know what possessed me to make that arrangement, but it has stuck. I'm only on the second Excursus, but I can say that I now remember how strident Adorno's work can be.
• Annie Cohen-Solal, Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life. Sartre writes that "my life and my philosophy are one and the same." He also writes that "I have always considered quantity a virtue," so it's nice to have a good biography to put his thousands and thousands of pages of work into perspective.
• I just finished Roberto Bolano's, The Skating Rink. Bolano's first novel, although in English, it's his most recent. It's funny how the order of translations can alter the reception of an author's work. I should have a review up by the end of this week.
• Ronald Aronson, Living without God. Another read for the Sartre and New Atheism paper at the Sartre Society conference. Aronson will be there, so I suppose if I have questions for him...
• For my course, I will be reading parts of Rousseau's The Social Contract. I haven't read it in over eight years, (or more?) but lately he seems to keep coming up in conversation. I also noticed a section on 'Civil Religion,' which might tie in with some of the work I did on what Schelling called 'new mythology.' We will see, and by 'we' I mean myself and 120 members of the captive audience called PHI 1104.
  
• From the previous reading list: I mentioned Ulysses, but I didn't even manage to start it. (see above) Regarding the rest, I did. Still working slowly on the Benjamin, and I liked Pynchon's latest.
  

Reading Lists

Now that I have submitted my dissertation, I can return to all those non-dissertation-topic-based books that have been piling up. I thought a good feature for this site would be for us to post our reading lists, and eventually, our readers can give us recommendations in the comments. So here we go.

1. Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice.

Just started this one. Pynchon's writing style is fairly singular. This time he's playing with sixties and seventies lingo in what seems to be a send up of a detective novel. I'd like to imagine that he had fun writing this book, but I suppose that would be like imagining that he had a paranoid time writing The Crying of Lot 49.

2. James Joyce, Ulysses.

Those who know me, know the story: I have the 75th anniversary hardcover edition of Ulysses, but have refused to read it until my thesis is submitted, because it is the kind of book that derails academic research.

3. Sartre, Being and Nothingness.

I am reading this for part of a paper about Sartre and New Atheism that I am giving at the North American Sartre Society's conference at the University of Memphis. Which is why I am reading:

4. Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great.
At least he won't be in attendance.

5. Walter Benjamin, various Selected Writings.
Matt seems to think I might have something interesting to say for a panel at the CPA next year. I've got all of the selected writings, and the Arcades Project, so I should be able to find something to say about Benjamin, whose essay "Author as Producer" ended up playing a prominent role in a paper I gave at the RPA's conference in November 2008. When I was setting up my library in the study, through some coincidence, these books ended up sitting conveniently to my left, so that I don't even have to get up to look for them.