Alexander > Recent Status Updates

Not since reading Zourabichvili has anyone seemed to have such an intimate grasp of Deleuze. Sauvagnargues is really on another level.

Finished EPM. And have promptly left this book somewhere and am not sure if I'll be able to get it back. Bah.

Alright, on to Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind. *gulp*.

Tough slog as I'm essentially reading each essay twice. But gosh it's good stuff.

This is some seriously impressive philosophy. That said, Sellars writes in a way that gives very little away about where the book is headed, which makes it super hard to orient oneself in his writing. It's step by step in a way that almost philosophical pointillism, but maybe it's just a trait of (older) analytic philosophy more generally.

The clearest exposition of 'the plane of immanence' yet. Cool.

Ruyer doesn't quite write with the majesty of Merleau-Ponty, but what's facinating is that he deals with the same issues from an almost entirely different point of view, even using, sometimes, the very same resources. So cool.

Sometimes Grosz is a little too slick a writer. I often find myself agreeing with her, but at the level of abstraction at which she writes, it's not hard too. What's missing is... a sense of traction, of teasing out, rather than the headlong plunge (brilliant as it always is) into ramifications and possibilities. And I'm still uneasy about Irigaray, who is here, as ever, one of Grosz's champions.

Dorion Sagan's 40 page introduction here is a rambling, inchoate mess, though I sure as hell wasn't expecting the references made to Deleuze, Derrida, and even Blanchot in it (Dorion Sagan??). The Uexkull itself is magnificent.

170 pages of talking about phenotypic robustness, without once using the word 'robustness'. I'm both insulted and impressed.

Sticking it to both Richard Dawkins and evolutionary psychology. These are a few of my favourite things.

"The revelation of an aesthetic mechanism of female sexual autonomy in waterfowl is a profoundly feminist scientific discovery. It is not femenist by accommodating the science to any contemporary political theory or ideology. Rather, it is a feminist discovery in that it demonstrates that sexual autonomy *matters* in nature... Sexual autonomy... is a natural concequence of ... evolutionary sexual interactions".

The essay here on the Ideas and the Sayable is easily one of the finest things Agamben has ever written. Almost - almost - redeems Plato for me, and clarifies so, so much that I found obscure in some of his previous work.

"And what is thinking if not the capacity to give possibility back to reality, to belie the false claim of opinion that it is founded only on facts? To think means first and foremost to perceive the demand of what is real to become possible again, to do justice not only to things but also to their tears"