Alexander > Recent Status Updates

Americans substituted the Dutch word "boss" for "master" - then used to refer to employers - because "master" had connotations too close to 'slaveowner' - even as the terms are more or less equivalent. Similarly, white domestic workers much prefered the term 'the help' over 'servant', for much the same reasons. In all cases, social stratification required distancing from the (black) slave.

A book on improvisation that reads improvised.

This is the slowest pace I've read a book all year, but I take solace in the fact that the new edition of this book, published just last year, managed to slap another 260 pages onto the page count - so it's not just me, this is literally dense! It is also magnificent, which makes the pace thing a non-issue tbf.

Beginning to understand how a Paolo Virno functions.

Speed run reread.

The wretchedness of slavery was more than its being an insitution of unfreedom: it transformed, contaminated freedom itself; turned freedom into an instrument of yet greater submission; desire, will, body, passion, responsibility - harnessed against themselves, turned inside out, seized to throw the slave back upon their own capacities: a social body-horror, grotesque topology of nominally cherished.

This takes a little while to get going - after a bit of a dizzying introduction - but once it does, it becomes a furious, blistering teardown of the politics of multiracialism in the US. A cautionary tale of what happens when the drive to get 'beyond race' becomes itself reproductive of racial schemas.

Book 2 - Against Paranoid Nationalism - down. Less tightly focused than the first, but more exploratory for it: reflections on economies of hope, suicide bombing, 'mutual obligations' in social welfare, multicultural aesthetics, etc. Still great.

Finished 'White Nation', the first of three books collected here. It is astonishing. Because although seemingly about multiculturalism in 90s Australia, this is equally a book about the loss of entitlement, and the social pathologies spawned in response. And to read this is to come to recognize those same pathologies now multipling across the globe at breathtaking pace. Portentous doesn't even begin to describe this.

Pretty extraordinary book that asks: what are the costs of immigration control, not (just) on immigrants, but on natives? And in fact, what even is a native anyway?

At the end of his book on global slums, published in 2006, Mike Davis makes the point that with the explosive growth of city ecology all across the planet, urban counter-insurgency as a mode of governance will likely blossom in prevalence. This book, written 12 years later, shows exactly how Davis' prophecy has been made good on.

Good news is that my urban geography is now becoming excellent. Bad news is literally everything else.

A far more forgiving book than Walia's (which is not to say better).

When I started this I thought it'd be like that Rick and Morty meme: 1 week adventure, in and out in no time, just a little bit of reading about borders and migrants. Now every step I take I'm convinced I'm walking on a marsh of planetary blood whose continually engineered spillage sustains every single aspect of contemporary life. Not devastating, apocalyptic.

This is the hardest book I have ever read and it has nothing to do with the writing and everything to do with the unfathomable depths of state and corporate cruelty.

There is an incredible amount going on in this book, and it's all great: looking at how the turn to 'the organism' solves some problems in Kant's conception of freedom and nationhood, while giving rise to new ones; then tracing the development of these pathologies in Fichte, Hegel, and Marx; and then how they are taken up, in turn, by postcolonial writers; all undergirded by a Derridian deconstruction of 'life'.

It's so nice to read a book that doesn't just 'explore the ethical implications of x and y' but is just like 'no this is bad, this is all very bad, here are lots of arguments for why this is bad and lots more for why those who think otherwise are wrong please stop this very bad thing'.

OK so this is like Homo Sacer if Agamben decided to look even one square foot outside of Europe even for a single moment.

Slowly coming round to the idea that all non-fiction should be written by, at minimum, one sociologist and one historian.

It is so grossly maddening that these magnificent, luminous intelligences have to find themselves exercised across the minutiae of biology, the vastness of history, and finesse of philosophy all because of something so damningly stupid as racism. A wrenching mix of absolute necessity and utter waste. The most virtuosic among us compelled to deal with this monstrousness, all the more so -because- of that fact.

OK admittedly the section on syntax kinda did me in, but at least now I know what a middle voiced verb is so that's nice.

This looks super dry on the surface but really Benvensite is a rampaging monster in here. Oh you think the relation between signified and signifier is arbitray? Lol, wrong, it is necessary. You think philosophers uncover the general categories of Being? Lol, wrong, they are just reflecting local grammatical forms. Freud thinks the unconsicous reflects ancient languages? Lol, study langauge more, dweeb.

OK Hjelmslev really meant it when it called this a prolegomena: it's filled with definitions, principles, setting out of nomenclature, and desperately sparse moments of exemplification. Still, its interest is in circumscribing the specificity of this nascent science of language, linguistics, such as it was in Hjelmslev's time, taking up and exceeding Saussure.

Increasingly convinced that some of the best scholarship on Deleuze has been written out of the sheer frustration and exasperation over how catastrophically wrong other people have been about his project. Jon Roffe's "Badiou's Deleuze" is one such book, which, in its effort to explode Badiou's reading of Deleuze, produced a masterpiece of secondary reading. This book belongs in that proud tradition.