Alexander > Recent Status Updates

An alternative title to this might be: a history of flows. Flows of rocks, of water, of populations, of genes, of energy, of food, of wind, of money, of goods, of disease, of animals. What does history look like when flows are front and centre? Then: use the mechinery of dynamic systems theory - which deals with flows! - to treat said history.

So frustrating. Delanda treats history like a video-game: there are a couple of invariable pre-set mechanisms which can be triggered after hitting the right levels of development, and history is just a bunch of variables being beeped and booped this way and that, triggering or not triggering said mechanisms. Completely emptied of politics and power. But so interesting nonetheless!

So far, this is Johnston's attempt to cultivate a "Society of Materialist Friends of the Johnstonian Dialectic" - one which includes Hegel, Engels, Marx, Althusser, and Lukacs.

(The reference is to the "Society of Materialist Friends of the Hegelian Dialectic", which is the name of the little club Benjamin, Brecht, and Lukacs gave to themselves).

This is an enormous undertaking already but there is a giant, gaping hole of a much needed chapter on class warfare and power to supplement it all. Review to come if I can cobble together my thoughts. In the meantime - a bit torn because while I have a thousand and one quibbles with this book, if we could implement even a third of the limited vision within, the world would be an infinitely better place.

OK now I have the vocabulary to grumble about why I feel Hagglund's book so stifling.

Having been the only person in the world to have read this once, the plan now is to be the only person in the world to have read this twice (according to Goodreads).

Part I of this book really could have been just a nice 40 page essay.

This is very good and I disagree with all of it.

"To bluntly summerize alot of scholarly texts: contemporary art is made possible by neoliberal capital plus the internet, biennials, art fairs, parallel pop-up histories, growing income inequality. Let's add asymmetric warfare - as one of the reasons for the vast redistribution of wealth - real estate speculation, tax evasion, money laundering, and deregulated financial markets to this list".

Agamben can trace the metaphysical destiny of art as the absolute splitting of the spectator and the artist into two irreconcilable spheres but does this without once - so far - mentioning the commodity status of art. Not sure if impressed or thoroughly bewlidered by this.

Still have no idea what is called thinking, but Heidegger assures me - I'm on the way!

Ok I'm only half way through but I can authoritatively pronounce that the essay on dance here is the best one in this book and cannot be topped: "Dance is the prime mover: every gesture and every line of dance must present itself not as a concequence, but as the very source of mobility... dance is the body devoted to its zenith".

This could not be a more different book from Agamben's one on Paul, in matter of composition and substance.

This is a book about Heidegger. Or at least, Badiou's response to Heidegger. Don't let any description or review tell you otherwise. Heidegger left right and centre.

Book II, complete! Alot of conniving and conspiring between July and August, and not much Revolutionizing. Trotsky ends book II with the provisional government in shambles, and the Bolsheviks champing at the bit to finally launch the revolution they've been crowing about for so long...

"Philosophy is like the attic where, in difficult times, one accumulates resources, lines up tools, and sharpens knives. Philosophy is exactly that which proposes an ample stock of means to other forms of thought. This time, it is on the side of affirmation and infinity that philosophy must select and accumulate its resources, its tools and knives."

There's something very touching - I think this is the right word - about Badiou's absolute concern and commitment to the vocation that is philosophy. It's clear that more than just 'doing' philosophy, at every point he wants to also think about what this thing called philosophy *is*, and it's clear that this question conditions his practice of philosophy from top to bottom.

Hijacking my reading progress to wish everyone a Merry Christmas! May you divest bodies of all your organs in time for the New Year!

This is very hard and my brain hurts but the flashes of grokking that I get are pretty damn cool. Eg: synthetic a priori propositions are actually analytic propositions except we're too finite to recognize that. An infinite being would, but we only catch glimpses of the analyticity of judgements on account of our finitude. How cool is that? (OK yes my standards of cool are ... to be desired).

Duffy doesn't fuck around. You -will- understand the difference between pure and impure a priori intuition and how they relate to the distinction between arthimetic and geometry or else you will never understand Deleuze, ever.

Jk jk!

Unless....

Whatever can be said of Badiou, it is undoubtable that reading him is an *education*. To read Badiou is to embark on adventures with him, intellectual, yes, but no less wonder filled and even precarious!

Basically done! Just have to get through the technical appendices at the end. What a fascinating, bold, and properly novel endeavor of philosophy.

First book done! Basically, from the lead up to the February Revolution to the overthrow of the Tsar, to the wobbly grip of the bourgeois government up until July. Two volumes to go. But so far, an absolutely riveting and thoroughly entertaining read. Trotsky is a dramatist of historical writing, as much as he was an actor among it.