Alexander > Recent Status Updates

Can't believe I'm only just familiarizing myself with Zerilli. She's just fantastic.

I've been looking for a book like this ever since I've started reading democratic theory. Stunningly good so far.

I've come to kind of grinding halt on this - partly because I've been busy, but mostly because I simply do not care about 'the will' - at all. I've just never found it an intelligible concept, and for all of Arendt's efforts - and they are considerable - the whole notion remains entirely vacuous for me. It's not her fault tho.

Done with 'Thinking' - on to 'Willing'....

I don't think I've ever read anyone so deeply yet casually acquainted with the Western philosophical canon as Arendt. Merleau-Ponty is here spoken of alongside Kant, Aquinas and Plato as if old friends, partners in a modest conversation that just so happens to bear on the essence of thought. Put otherwise - Arednt knows everything and I know nothing D:

Been itching to read more Arendt ever since I made it through The Human Condition a while back. Mucho excitement.

A lot more 'Deleuze' than 'the political' right now, but we'll see how we go...

"One task of democratic theory is... to prepare us, to help us identify or imagine or attune us to the openings and solicitations and limits of sovereign power. Democratic theory identifies obstacles to such openings, like the work of logics that seem to clarify matters but actually or also freeze action."

Reading this is like putting on a old, memory-strewn sweater again - it's the stuff that got me into philosophy <3

There's a beautiful essay here on 'Europe as a Special Area for Human Hope'. Reading it now just over a decade after it's publication is almost an exercise in despair. Ferrara's vision of an exemplary European civitas to-come reads now as dream from another time, it's optimism barely recognisable. But then, perhaps that's just what we need.

Arendt + Aesthetics + Politics + Kant - Rawls = <3

"The question is not "What is music?" but, rather, "What is musical?". ... The musical is a more worthy quest, for it refers not to the territory of music but to the limit at which sound becomes musical ... The musical is what we listen for in music, what we attempt to engender in music, what we long to hear, what is satisfying about music."

So much yes.