Alexander > Recent Status Updates

Read the 'Force of Law' essay. +800 exp

God help me

It's so pleasant to read a more relaxed Derrida doing interviews and so on. But the man could yap my god he's a yapper, no wonder his books turn out they way they do.

There's something spiritual about this book almost.

OK so admittedly I read this once over in a kind of fever dream, realized I was missing some context, read through half the essays in (the Derrida essay collection) Psyche II, skimmed a bunch of secondary reading, and I'm back now. So like sure 70 pages but also like 150 or so page detour in between. Gotta register it all with the big Other.

This could be the most straightforward intro to Derrida's whole deal that I know of (so far).

Ok I actually really liked the strange and wandering essay(?; piece of writing? written performance?) on negative theology in this.

"Marcel Mauss's The Gift speaks of everything but the gift: It deals with economy, exchange, contract, it speaks of raising the stakes, sacrifice, gift and countergift—in short, everything that in the thing itself impels the gift and the annulment of the gift." The audacity! (rules).

This is surprisingly personal. Insightful with respect to how 'deconstruction', as a meditation on language (at the very least!), grew out of a colonial setting (Algeria) where issues of language - whose language? - were anything but highfalutin abstractions, but ones lived directly in the everyday.

The first half of this is a fairly standard excoriation of Hegel's treatment of non-European history - and consequently his treatment of history more generally - but the second half takes a really fun turn by juxtaposing Hegel with the Mahabharata and it's just really cool.

kill the Aristotle in your head

It's not clear that Israel is a country so much as twelve weapons dealers in a trench coat.

I wanna say that this is actually 'just' a critique of temporary migration (and its abuse under capitalism) but as it turns out temporary migration is such an enormously large share of migration that this title is just fine actually.

This is good but sometimes maybe a tinge too clever – the 'multiplication' of labor referenced by the title is a counterpart notion to the - wait for it - 'division' of labor more commonly known. Geddit? Legit it's kinda useful tho.

happy new year

One of those books that explains so much of the dynamics that we see in the present its a wonder it's not better known.

A really fantastic book that's kinda compromised by it's 'why can't we all just get along' politics. Still, I've been convinced that the dynamic of entribalization that it traces - he doesn't call it that - is really really important to understand and study.

"To put Nazism – as opposed to individual Nazis – on trial would have revealed that it was not just a German project but also an American one and indeed a global one; a complex of the nation-state and big business, working toward the aims inherent in themselves".

Wowowow, a history of a thing that did not happen but could have but was actively undermined. Really great, tho *dense*.

Only 1/3 of the way through, but I think this is my favorite of Bergson's books I've read so far. If the earlier works are metaphysical and speculative, this one feels *personal* - as if Bergson has distilled why any of this matters at all. And I dragged my feet on this 'cause i thought ughhh morality. But Bergy's on to something.

Just putting out that this is the best book I've read all year, just in case I don't come around to reviewing it properly later.

This is a rollicking good time. Really a book about Bergson and his influence on Nègritude.