Alexander > Recent Status Updates

This book is exquisite. It's a political economy of - of all things - biology and biotech, in a way that really, concretely sheds light on what it means to speak about a 'biopolitics'. Not grand metaphysics but policy analysis and socio-economic tracking that puts meat on the bones of Foucault, Agamben, and others.

If statistics alone could cut, Wacquant's book would be a weapon.

Wacquant writes with a glowing, radiant rage equal to not only the barbarism of his subject matter, but also his utter mastery of both the literature and the sociology it bears upon.

Butler back at it again, confounding the psychoanalytic terms of Symbolic intelligibility and Hegelian recognition, with Antigone as her muse.

Interesting exercise so far - an attempt to rewrite Capital by treating securities as Marx treated commodities; i.e. as alienated social relations. Curious as to the payoff, but enjoying it so far.

The deeper I get into this the more stunning it becomes. Cooper moves seamlessly between economic history, social policy analysis, and juridicial and legislative commentary, all while keeping her eye on the evolving discourses of neoliberalism and social conservatism with respect to the family. And this to say nothing of her ability to continually track gender, race, and class concerns throughout.

Didn't think I'd be so taken with social and economic policy analysis from 1960s USA but here I am.

Geuss brings out, more than any other commentator, the human dimension of politics: desires, motivations, needs, wants, judgements, actions and fears - it's these and more that populate the field of political activity, over and above rules, reason, the Good and the True; Thucydides over Plato, Nietzsche over Rawls. And no Kant. Never Kant.

Geuss brings out, more than any other commentator, the human dimension of politics: desires, motivations, needs, wants, judgements, actions and fears - it's these and more that populate the field of political activity, over and above rules, reason, the Good and the True; Thucydides over Plato, Nietzsche over Rawls.

In which the fiery grandeur of Brown's prose finally hits upon a subject equal to it's zeal. Also, if I don't read Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics lectures in the next year or so, I'm dead to me.

I've been looking for the essay 'What Is Freedom'? all my life I think.

Political Arendt is best Arendt.

aghhh I left this book in a bag which I lost yesterday D: Hoping against hope I can recover it.

Coming back to this now, years after I first read it, but armed this time with an appreciation for Arendt, which I didn't have back then. This was a formative work for me back then, and I'm super excited to reread it, after a long detour through philosophy.

Wendy Brown is the most fun one can have while reading political science with clothes on.