Alexander > Recent Status Updates

This is a really refreshing reading of Deleuze. Colebrook is keen to emphasize - against the popular image - the Platonic and even Cartesian(!) strain of Deleuze, which is super unusual. Her targets are those who read Deleuze as a philosopher of embodiment, self-organization, and organic life. She leans instead into what Deleuze called 'inorganic life', which is something I've always been confused by. I'm getting it!

I'm really mad at this book. It's like, 90% correct about things, and Hallward's ability to synthesize and draw connections between disparate elements in Deleuze's work is really something to behold and learn from. But then he veers off wildly everytime he tries to drive home the conclusion that Deleuze is a thinker of extra/other worldiness. It's like a frustrating tease!

Reading this just after Barber's 'Deleuze and the Naming of God' is really interesting. Hallward and Barber draw diametrically opposite normative injunctions from Deleuze: for Hallward, Deleuze leads one 'out of this world' (into the virtual, etc); for Barber, Deleuze calls for a *more* intense experience of the world. Barber is more convincing - he doesn't confuse the virtual with intensity, as Hallward does.

Back to roots (rhizomes?)

Very cool. We need to think less in terms of commodities than in terms of assets re: our contemporary economies. This in turn means we have to rethink class - less the means of production than the means of rent and interest become key class markers. Also displaces the big emphasis on 'debt' that, say, Graeber and others focus on (assets are illiquid, not just a number to be paid off). And barely a few pages in!

I could read about negative theology all day and I still wouldn't know anything about God.

I read this 10 years ago and it stands as one of my favourite ever books - super keen for a reread :D

This book = Kant avec Darwin

This is an extraordinary book. Who knew that both 'life' and 'will' were basically co-emergent concepts, late-born in the throes of modernity? And no one warned me that this basically a reading of German Idealism from Kant onwards, but I am totally hooked. Pairs with two of some of my favourite books ever - Eugene Thacker's After Life and Catherine Malabou's Before Tomorrow. Plan to demolish this.

Man, I know Agamben is something like a persona non grata recently, but his little essays are just such joys to read.

Me in 2022, in Sydney, reading about the financial state of France on the eve of the 1789 Revolution: "the real estate boom perhaps also reflected the still limited opportunities for profitable investment within the productive sectors of the French economy". Hmmm.

This is it! This is the one! After reading up and down on the history of capitalism and trying to figure out wtf happened, this is the clincher. Happily plowing through.

The perfect follow-up to Ellen Wood's The Origin of Capitalism - something I've been searching for for a while.

Look, I like Keynesians. They're generally good people, smart, heart in the right place. But for the life of them they seem incapable of even mentioning the word 'profit' - just a complete and total absence of it in their vocabulary. Unfortunate for someone so clearly switched on as Blyth.

"The freedom of the market from state interference... is not a state of nature but is and needs to be politically constructed, publicly instituted and enforced by state power. The depoliticized condition of a liberal economy is itself an outcome of politics. It is a political construction that must be politically defended against the possibility of authority falling back into the hands of [non-market] social forces."

So much gold! (1) "As a loose definition, Left and Right populists share a profound hatred of indigenous social elites. Right populists in addition hate at least one other, 'foreign' group of people" - this reads like a Dn'D spell; (2) "The sacrosanct nature of dreams, never to be critically assessed, may be the most powerful impediment to political radicalization and collective action". Kill your dreams!

The Invisible Committee are more my jam, but this ain't bad.

For anyone who associates capitalism with "free markets" and "government non-interference", this book is licence to kick them in their (metaphorical) faces. It has always been regulation, planning, and government help for me (capital), and free markets for thee (workers). "Too big to fail" wasn't just a 2008 thing - its been around since the 80s! (I didn't realize...).

The most interesting thing about this book so far is that it really shows how the triumph of capitalism on a global scale really was a *project*. Not a blind, organic outcome of individual capitalists doing their own thing, but a concerted, willed, and agent-driven process - often at the state level and often politically fraught. A proper 'denaturalization' of capitalism.