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My favorite kind of reading: someone super well versed in two subjects, bouncing them off each other and illuminating both in the process.

Alternate title: "shut up Chomsky".

This is the single most satisfying reading of Deleuze I've read since Zourabichvili's marvellous one. This is like, necessary reading.

Having realized - after the fact - that Bogue's "Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts" was effectively a close reading of a couple of chapters out of ATP, I'm pretty sure - looking at the contents page - that this is too. And if it's anywhere near as good, well - I'm in for a good time.

Notes on the Postcolony:

1. Mbembe does not fuck around. Chapter 1 reads like a gauntlet thrown, and if you're unable to keep up, it will leave you in the dust.
2. This book is totally misadvertised: this is (so far) hardcore political economy with an eye on political theory that's deeply sociologically and anthropologically informed. This is so, so rare, and so, so good.

I don't like this translation but not even that can get in the way sometimes:

"I was made to give and they prescribe for me the humility of the cripple. When I opened my eyes yesterday I saw the sky in total revulsion. I tried to get up but the eviscerated silence surged toward me with paralyzed wings . Not responsible for my acts, at the crossroads between Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep".

This is a very different book to what I thought it would be - in a good way. I'd not given much thought to the societal distribution of R&D finance, nor to distinctions between risk assessment considerations by venture capital and government investment, nor indeed the sources of technological innovation in general. Ridiclious amounts of research in this book. Impressive for that alone.

This starts off with a slow burn but rockets off into a really incredible - and terrifying - portrait of the modern economy. Alot of what I'd only heard of and about in the ether of media - share buy backs, private equity, high frequency trading - is all made sense of here within a broader framework and laid bare for proper evaluation. Super impressive middle section so far.

I don't think I've ever read a book so slowly in my life.

Infuriating, brilliant, exhausting, infinitely ambitious, stifiling, explosively energetic... one chapter to go *breathes*.

The day I picked this up, quite a few years ago, I blitzed through about a 150 pages of this in the space of a couple of bewildering hours. I remember nothing of the book. Although the bookmark I used, a red paper bus ticket, the kind they don't make anymore, was still slipped in-between the pages I stopped at. I'm taking longer now, but my gosh, I kinda think I know what's going on!