Second Draft for Summer Reading
November 3, 2009
The Signature of All Things: On Method | GiorgioAgamben (addition)
Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics |Jacques Rancière (addition)
The Coming Insurrection | The Invisible Committee (addition)
Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy | Hannah Arendt (addition)
On Ideology | Louis Althusser
Being Singular Plural | Jean-Luc Nancy
Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction | Leland de la Durantaye
The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality | Todd May
The Politics of Aesthetics | Jacques Rancière
Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience | Giorgio Agamben
Metapolitics | Alain Badiou
Zoographies | Matthew Calarco
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 | Karl Marx
(God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought | Zachary Braiterman
Early Medieval Philosophy: (480-1150) | John Marenbon
Disagreement | Jacques Rancière
The Ignorant Schoolmaster | Jacques Rancière
The Human Condition | Hannah Arendt
Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language | Daniel Heller-Roazen
Oppression and Liberty | Simone Weil
The Open: Man and Animal | Giorgio Agamben
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 1 | Walter Benjamin
Violence: Six Sideways Reflections | Slavoj Žižek
Infinetly Demanding | Simon Critchley
Politics and the Other Scene | Étienne Balibar
The Trial | Franz Kafka
Metamorphosis and Other Stories | Franz Kafka
Fear and Trembling | Søren Kierkegaard
The Critique of Judgement | Immanuel Kant
Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction | G. W. F Hegel
Forthcoming – The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida)
October 26, 2009
The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 1
Description from Amazon.com
When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, the University of Chicago Press inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English.
The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract.
Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal.
Looking forward to this one!
Žižek on Democracy Now!
October 16, 2009
Draft for Summer Reading
October 14, 2009
While no doubt my wife will have a grand list of chores for me to do over the summer break, I’ve prepared a draft of books to read over the summer break. It’s only a draft so far, as I doubt I’ll be able to get through all of them, but it shows roughly what and who I’m interested in philosophically. In no particular order:
On Ideology | Louis Althusser
Being Singular Plural | Jean-Luc Nancy
Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction | Leland de la Durantaye
The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality | Todd May
The Politics of Aesthetics | Jacques Rancière
Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience | Giorgio Agamben
Metapolitics | Alain Badiou
Zoographies | Matthew Calarco (This is one book I will definitely be reading. The book arrived a littled too late for me to get into the discussions over at The Inhumanities, so I’ll have my own commentary and questions here)
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 | Karl Marx
(God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought | Zachary Braiterman
Kant’s Critical Philosophy | Gilles Deleuze
Early Medieval Philosophy: (480-1150) | John Marenbon
Disagreement | Jacques Rancière
The Ignorant Schoolmaster | Jacques Rancière
The Human Condition | Hannah Arendt
Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language | Daniel Heller-Roazen
Oppression and Liberty | Simone Weil
The Open: Man and Animal | Giorgio Agamben
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 1 | Walter Benjamin
Violence: Six Sideways Reflections | Slavoj Žižek
Infinetly Demanding | Simon Critchley
Politics and the Other Scene | Étienne Balibar
The Trial | Franz Kafka
Metamorphosis and Other Stories | Franz Kafka
Fear and Trembling | Søren Kierkegaard
The Critique of Judgement | Immanuel Kant
Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction | G. W. F Hegel
Philosopher’s Voice: Philosophy, Politics, and Language in the Nineteenth Century | Andrew Fiala
The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism | Manfred Frank
There are a lot of texts here, but this is my starting point. I’ll also be looking at a number of articles to read, starting with the Parallax issue on Rancière and the Critical Horizons issue on Critchley’s ‘Infinitely Demanding’. I’ll try and make available all texts and articles that make the final cut
If you have any suggestions that you think I might want to read, add them in the comment box or email me: nathanaeverson [at] gmail [dot] com. I’m especially interested in any suggestions on Deleuze, religious mysticism, architecture, post-secular/post-religious thought.
Digitize This Book!
October 12, 2009
Via #openhumanities (twitter)
Hall, Gary. Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2008. http://bit.ly/46JnpQ
Here we have book arguing for open access media and yet we still have this:
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Isn’t the above an integral part, legally or illegally, of the open access phenomenon?
A letter to Alain Badiou
October 12, 2009
At the last plenary session held on October 6th, the students were informed that the famous French philosopher Alain Badiou, who was supposed to come to Zagreb and meet with the students on October 16th, has fallen ill and will not be able to come after all. The plenum has decided to write a letter to Mr Badiou wishing him to get well soon and expressing desire to welcome him in Zagreb some time in the future. This is their letter.
Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity
October 4, 2009
New from re.press
Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity
Download book as PDF (Open Access)
Description
Walter Benjamin is universally recognized as one of the key thinkers of modernity: his writings on politics, language, literature, media, theology and law have had an incalculable influence on contemporary thought. Yet the problem of architecture in and for Benjamin’s work remains relatively underexamined. Does Benjamin’s project have an architecture and, if so, how does this architecture affect the explicit propositions that he offers us? In what ways are Benjamin’s writings centrally caught up with architectural concerns, from the redevelopment of major urban centres to the movements that individuals can make within the new spaces of modern cities? How can Benjamin’s theses help us to understand the secret architectures of the present? This volume takes up the architectural challenge in a number of innovative ways, collecting essays by both well-known and emerging scholars on time in cinema, the problem of kitsch, the design of graves and tombs, the orders of road-signs, childhood experience in modern cities, and much more. Engaged, interdisciplinary, bristling with insights, the essays in this collection will constitute an indispensable supplement to the work of Walter Benjamin, as well as providing a guide to some of the obscurities of our own present.
Contents
Introduction
Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity
Andrew Benjamin and Charles Rice
Aesthetics and Philosophy
Booking Benjamin: The Fate of a Medium
Henry Sussman
On the ‘Vital Significance’ of Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of ‘Bad Taste’
Winfried Menninghaus
Modernity as an Unfinished Project: Benjamin and Political Romanticism
Michael Mack
Violence, Deconstruction, and Sovereignty: Derrida and Agamben on Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’
Robert Sinnerbrink
Graves, Pits and Murderous Plots: Walter Benjamin, Alois Riegl, and the German Mourning Play’s Dreary Tone of Intrigue
Joel Morris
Benjamin’s Critique of Aesthetic Autonomy
George Markus
Framing Pictures, Transcending Marks: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Paintings, or Signs and Marks’
Andrew Benjamin
Cities and Images
Interiority, Exteriority and Spatial Politics in Benjamin’s Cityscapes
Peter Schmiedgen
Time Without End: Exploring the Temporal Experience of Wong Kar‑Wai’s 2046 Through Walter Benjamin
Jo Law
Experience and Play: Walter Benjamin and the Prelapsarian Child
Carlo Salzani
Experimental Set-ups: Benjamin on History and Film
Tara Forrest
Banksy in Palestine
September 29, 2009
The first video is a news segment on the work Banksy did in Palestine and the second video capture Banksy at work.
Forthcoming – The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations
September 20, 2009
Forthcoming by Zone Books, November 2009
The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations by Daniel Heller-Roazen
Description from Zone Books
The pirate is the original enemy of humankind. Before humanitarian organizations, human rights, and the establishment of international law in the early modern period, the Roman statesmen already made this point perfectly clear. As Cicero famously remarked, there are certain enemies with whom one may negotiate and with whom, circumstances permitting, one may establish a truce. But there is also an enemy with whom treaties are in vain and war remains incessant. This is the pirate, whom the ancient jurists considered to be “the enemy of all.”
Departing from Cicero’s account of foes, The Enemy of All reconstructs the shifting place of the pirate in legal and political thought from the ancient to the medieval, modern, and contemporary periods. Antiquity already encountered the sea thief in politics as in the law. Classical letters from Homer to the end of the Roman Empire contain ample accounts of pirates of various sorts. The Roman jurists assigned to the pirate as a legal person an exceptional position in civil and international law. Their theory was to be the point of departure for the Christian jurists of the Middle Ages, who defined the pirate as “the enemy of the human species.” Later, the thinkers and statesmen of modernity went one step further. Elaborating a new international code of law and ethics, the writers of the Enlightenment represented the pirate as the ultimate “enemy of humanity.” Today, as Heller-Roazen argues, the pirate furnishes the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe. This is a legal and political person of exception, neither criminal nor enemy, who inhabits an extraterritorial region. Against such a foe, states may wage extraordinary battles, policing politics and justifying military measures in the name of welfare and security.
Drawing on the diverse materials of several disciplines, from law and history to political theory and literature, The Enemy of All brings to light a single paradigm that defines the act of piracy. This “piratical paradigm” consists in the conjunction of four traits: a region beyond territorial jurisdiction; agents who may not be identified with an established state; the collapse of the distinction between criminal and political categories; and the transformation of the concept of war. Whenever we hear of regions beyond “the line of the law,” in which acts of “indiscriminate aggression” have been committed “against humanity,” we must begin to recognize that these are acts of piracy. Long said to be a person of the distant past, the enemy of all is closer to us today than we may think. Indeed, he may never have been closer.
* I think it will be interesting to see how Heller-Roazen treats more contemporary acts of piracy (if at all), discussed by Graham Harman from Object-Oriented Philosophy (here and here) and Scu from Critical Animal (here), and previously over at Scars of Différance (here)
Religion for Radicals: An Interview with Terry Eagleton
September 20, 2009
Here is an interview with Literary critic Terry Eagleton by Nathan Schneider for MRzine. Eagleton discusses his new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, which argues that “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens “buy their rejection of religion on the cheap.” He believes that, in these controversies, politics has been an unacknowledged elephant in the room.
