Devin's Picks

Whatever the rules for choosing one's favorite books of the year, the first is probably not to begin with self-reflexive commentary. Nevertheless, I want to start by explaining how my choices were made. I usually try to keep up on recent literature in both fiction and philosophy, but this year I was largely constrained by sacrificing my desire to read widely in order to complete my dissertation. This means that I basically missed the stand-out titles this year, and they remain unread on my bookshelf for next year. This includes The Signature of All Things, The Enemy of All, the Second manifeste pour la philosophie, and about 100 books that aren't as recent. Of the books I did read, I've excluded those that we've already reviewed (they get plenty of attention here) and tried to narrow the rest (including 2008 titles that appeared in paperback in 2009) down to only a few. Minimalism is the order of the day today. In 2010 it will be otherwise.

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2009)

In The Invention of the Jewish People (the original Hebrew title could be more literally translated as 'When and how were the Jewish people invented?') Shlomo Sand argues that the Jewish 'people' is not a nation long ago forced into exile by the Romans but, like other nations, a creation of the 19th century. In large part, Sand's book is a challenge to the accepted historiography of Israel, which has remained untouched by the recent work on nationalism, which include Benedict Anderson's classic Imagined Communities and the work of Ernest Gellner. Instead of assuming the uniqueness of Jewish history, he shows how the idea of a unique people created the Jewish people as a nation exiled from a homeland, even if many of these people are descended from North African, Mediterranean and Khazar converts. Were his book only an academic affair it would not have generated such a controversy (many of the reviews of his book are posted on his website; I highly recommend Gabriel Piterberg's in the New Left Review). Many of his negative reviewers are willing to grant much of the historiographical side of his argument (in the sense that "we've known all along about these converts, nevertheless...") in the same way that Americans are willing to acknowledge the history of the institution of slavery (or the genocide carried out on Native Americans): without contemporary political consequences such as reparations.

However, Sand's concluding chapter argues that the future of Israel is dependent on redefining what it means to be an Israeli. As he notes, Israel is an "ethnocracy with liberal features-- that is, a state whose main purpose is to serve not a civil-egalitarian demos but a biological-religious ethnos that is wholly ficticious historically, but dynamic, exclusive and discriminatory in its political manifestation" (307). His solution is to redefine Israel as a territorial state that includes all of its citizens regardless of their ethnos. As Piterberg points out, "The demand that a modern state be a normally territorial nation-state is, of course, not at all radical or dramatic, but in the context of Israeli and American Zionism, it is heresy." And yet counter-hegemonic texts wager that hegemony can be changed. As Sand writes, "I don't think books can change the world, but when the world begins to change, it searches for different books."

Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American (Picador, 2008)

Hustvedt is a remarkable writer, able to capture the sense of loss that comes with the death of a close relative or friend. In The Sorrows of an American, the narrative follows Erik Davidsen as he discovers a mysterious incident in his recently deceased father's life, which he attempts to solve. Through the use of her own father's journals, Hustvedt tells both the story of Erik and his father, which stretches from New York City to rural Minnesota. Along the way Erik comes to grips with his own urban solitude and his memories of life long forgotten in the bustle of the big apple.

Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (Penguin, 2009)

Pynchon's latest follows Doc Sportello, a private investigator and connoisseur of mind-altering substances, as he pursues the disappearance of an ex-girlfriend and a powerful developer from the Los Angeles area. It all seems to turn around a mysterious group and ship that share the name Golden Fang, and we just might figure it out if Doc could just lay off the drugs. Both a send up and tribute to an era that saw the higher ideals of the 60s give way to the power-hungry cynicism of the neo-liberalism/neo-conservatism (amongst the same people no less), Inherent Vice combines humor and paranoia in a way unique to Pynchon.

Ronald Aronson, Living Without God (Counterpoint, 2008)
If you only read one book, published in the last few years, about atheism, I recommend Living without God. I will admit that it isn't one of the controversial texts of the New Atheists, such as Dawkins, Dennett or Hitchens, but it's much more compelling. Like Sartre, from whom Aronson derives much of the philosophical framework for this book, Aronson emphasizes human freedom to show how atheists and secularists can live morally and politically within our complex world. What Aronson shares with Sartre on the idea that this freedom should give us courage to act (in fact, what is Being and Nothingness, if not a distended manual on courage?). Compared to the New Atheists, Aronson is much more politically astute (being a student of Marcuse can do that to you) and attuned to the idea that for atheism and secularism to be convincing as a way to live (and not just a lifestyle, wearing the shirt, all that…), it has to inspire some sense of courage and hope that is not just personal but collective.

2009 in Books

We're going to break with tradition this week and post the material planned for the Sunday Review on Saturday, so that you have all weekend to look over the material: 2009 in book reviews. We've already dealt with our exceptional essays of 2009, not to mention some bookcase eye-candy, now it's time to consider our raison d'être.

Paul Mason, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed (2009)
by Devin Zane Shaw
The first review for the site, and written in haste for this reason. In retrospect, I should have been a bit more effuse with praise for this book, which allows us to view the financial crisis from the kind of sharp and critical perspective that we have come to expect from Verso.

Anna Powell, Deleuze and Horror Film (2005)
by Sean Moreland
Sean writes that "Deleuze and Horror Film represents a welcome departure from the re-circulated Psycho-analyses and incessant generic re-situations which continue to dominate theoretical approaches to horror film. This makes it recommended reading for both critics and aficionados of horror cinema, and students and scholars of Deleuzian philosophy."

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (2009)
by Matt McLennan
Matt writes that the "book is a fascinating read. Not just because it's an urgent, honest, somewhat compelling call for DIY change, but because it's quintessentially French in its radicalness."

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991)
by Jason Smith
Jason, following Lefebvre, "argues that urban designs developed in the epoch of capitalism hinder the functioning of a more egalitarian world model. Lefebvre asserts that wholly new spatial coding would be necessary for the implementation of a socialist utopia."

Guy Debord, Panegyric: Volumes 1 & 2 (2004)
by Devin Zane Shaw
"The two volume Panegyric presents both a literary and pictorial representation of Guy Debord’s life, the first providing a brief literary account, while the second is comprised of “iconographical evidence,” which, according to Debord, was to “illustrate and comment on the essential” already found in the first volume."

Hugo Chavez Presents Simon Bolivar: The Bolivarian Revolution (2009)
by Matt McLennan
"As for Chavez presents Bolivar, this should be required reading for anyone with a remote interest in American politics."

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (2000)
by Jason Smith
"While a confluence of technologies coupled with new forms of economic behavior became available to Europeans, New World resources, stolen from native Americans, abolished the land constraints experienced in Europe."

Roberto Bolano, The Skating Rink (2009)
by Devin Zane Shaw
"Bolano tells a tale of small town intrigue, surrounding Remo Moran, Gaspar Heredia, and Enric Rosquelles. The story takes place in a town near Barcelona called Z, whose rhythm corresponds to the tourist season, and is told, alternately by these three, the first a businessman, the second a writer and drifter (whose story is modeled somewhat on Bolano's life) and the third a civil servant. The story converges on their interest in a young woman named Nuria Marti, who is an ice skater."

Alberto Gualandi, Lyotard (1999)
by Matt McLennan
Matt writes that "Alberto Gualandi, in my view, does an admirable job where many others have failed. He reads Lyotard against the ancient distinction between the philosopher and the sophist, ultimately concluding that Lyotard occupies an ambiguous position between - or rather, that he shows how the distinction is perhaps drawn a bit too neatly in the history of philosophy. This reading, fleshed out by Gualandi, helps ease the reader into the strangeness and originality of Lyotard's corpus."

Cathrine Hall, Civilising Subjects (2002)
by Jason Smith
"Within this framework [Hall] asserts that binaries of savagery verses civilization were set up as cultural productions to keep the two, the pole and the periphery, apart from one another. She concludes of this stratagem that theorists of colonialism need to disrupt this binary and to produce more elaborate, cross-cutting ways of thinking about the processes of colonial exploitation."

Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: the Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (2005)
by Jason Smith
"Though it’s not official the job of an academic to right wrongs or prevent tragedies, perhaps this work can aid in the prevention of such carnage in the future. What else is knowledge for if not to change the trajectory of humanity?"

Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009)
by Matt McLennan
"Slavoj Zizek's new book examines the current world financial crisis and attempts to delineate a coherent Leftist response. The book is relatively accessible, and readers frustrated by his unruly and largely redundant previous effort In Defense of Lost Causes will find Zizek back in top critical form."

Waltraud Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj: the European Insane in British India, 1800 – 1858 (1991)
by Jason Smith
"Ernst sums her goal in writing this work as a twofold endeavor to elucidate the relationship of the mental asylum to colonialism and to develop a theoretical framework in which to understand mental health in its socio-political context."

Walter Benjamin, On Hashish (2006)
by Devin Zane Shaw
"Typically, one’s journals never face the scrutiny of broad readership, but apparently hashish should not be left to specialists. As such, On Hashish takes the form of a light-hearted chapter in what is often considered as Benjamin’s pensive, and terminally tragic, biography."

Natacha Merrit, Digital Diaries (2000)
by Matt McLennan
"Now, having been awash in constantly updated, rotated and manipulated facebook vanity pictures for more than two years, the book tells me something different. I see Merritt as a relatively high-tech, arty and more explicit version of what millions of other 21-year-olds (and to be sure, some 30 and 40 year olds) are also doing; inserting their glossy pouts or bored, carefully poised expressions into every place and event they photograph."

Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto (2008)
by Devin Zane Shaw
Linebaugh's latest book "follows the use and abuse of the Magna Carta, and the practical erasure of its companion-charter, the Charter of the Forests, from their declaration in 13th century England to our contemporary times. The two charters address what may be artificially divided into formal rights and economic justice. I say 'artificially' because Linebaugh's entire argument-- and a forceful and correct one at that-- is that what we now call formal rights cannot be guaranteed without the accompanying rights of economic justice, the latter of which require transforming the relationships between people and the means of production."

Terrence Kissack, Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States 1895-1917 (2009)
by Matt McLennan
As Matt writes, Free Comrades "not only serves as a good introduction to the American movement and its major figures, but also drives home the following, in my opinion important points: First, the anarchists were the first to offer a thoroughgoing public critique of homophobia and a defence, if often ambiguous and troubled, of queer desires and lifestyles; second, anarchist politics of homosexuality were rooted in a revolutionary political movement and a devastating critique of marriage."

2009 in Essays

We're at the point where we are going to start wrapping up 2009. We're going to start with our best essays. Each produced a spike in our readership, so if you've missed any of them, I recommend catching up.

The Personal is Still Political: The Status of Women in Philosophy
by Josh Kurdys, November 12
I highly recommend Josh's response to a spate of articles and blogs on the status of women in philosophy. This includes discussion on the philosophical canon and on current professional practice. Click to find out why

The absence of women from philosophy classrooms and the professoriate is already a political issue that many current members of the profession have ignored, promoted, misrepresented or resisted.

RIP Claude Lévi-Strauss

by Matthew R. McLennan, November 3
Matt's personal reflection on the meaning of the work of Lévi-Strauss, which makes me regret that I've put off reading it for so long. Read it and find out why, as Matt writes,

My own experience with his texts and ideas as an undergraduate was immensely gratifying; I got the impression that at bottom, he wished to include the whole variety of ways of human being in the same family.

The Politics of Student Debt
by Devin Zane Shaw, October 14
A gentle reminder as the Fall semester ends and the Winter (or, for you in warmer climates, the Spring) Semester nears. As you might expect from my writing, I conclude that

this situation is political: the transformation of the university to a semi-private and pro-business institution, insofar as it emaciates the schools and faculties that encourage the cultivation of critical thinking skills, has a definite bias toward the neo-liberal status quo.