:up:

Right now for me:
Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror - John Ashbery (really really good)
& just starting: Against the Grain: a deep history of the earliest states James C Scott

Anne Sauvagnargues - Deleuze and Art
Anne Sauvagnargues - Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon

@StreetlightX Have you read any James C Scott? Interestingly, he's referenced Deleuze in a few more recent books, though his approach is generally sober academic history re: the history of the State (tho motivated, clearly, by a particular passion.). I wish I had the passage at hand, but he talks about state control in one Asian country (I wanna say Indonesia but not sure) and the way he discusses it (plainly, directly) - I was like, oh shit, this is exactly smooth versus striated space + apparatus of capture. My hunch is that this was before he encountered Deleuze too, but I can't be sure.

Nah, but he's been on my radar since Against the Grain came out last year(?). The bloke you liked to a while back (on Gri Gri magic) wrote a bit about him too, and I read alot of his stuff. Definitely someone I want to look into when I can.

He's really good and fun (lots of juicy historical details that he tells entertainingly) - tho, if you've read Sam[]zdat's 'Uruk Machines' series, you probably know all the central points already. But still worth it for the little things. (I would love to do a post on The Last Psychiatrist/Sam[]zdat/Hotel Concierge, if there were enough posters here who were familiar. I'm very much enamored of their approach and style: (see [ self-referential]). But there's something hard and mean and uncompromising that doesn't sit right with me. I guess they do something with cleverness that parallels what nihilism does with concepts. They take it all the way to the edge, which is great, but then something has to fill that gap.

I picked up AB Dickerson's Kant on Representation and Objectivity -- it's an argument that Kant is a particular kind of representationalist that is unique to his philosophy based upon his reading of the B-Deduction. It's been good so far, especially because the deduction is just so hard to understand.

Evolutionary Biology (Third Edition), by Douglas J. Futuyma. Got it cheap and used, good deal.

Thanks for the recommendation, .

The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Donald Trump by Corey Robin
Satantango by László Krasznahorkai

Ronald Bogue - Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts
Wilfrid Sellars - Science, Perception, and Reality (replacement copy for the last one I lost in the middle of reading!)

Ronald Bogue — StreetlightX

Took a class from him in college. I remember once, hanging around his office talking, I mentioned I had just started reading Deleuze's book on Foucault and he said immediatley -- you know, sort of involuntarily -- "That's a beautiful book!" Then he looked embarrassed. I think he wanted to be careful not to push me in any particular direction, you know?

Lol, that's super cute.

Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
The Trial by Kafka
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

Eight Theories of Religion by Daniel L. Pals. I wanted the third edition - Nine Theories - but someone else had checked it out.

Still reading:

The Meaning and End of Religion by Wilfred Cantwell Smith

On Suicide by Jean-Luc Amery

and lots of Lovecraft's supernatural horror stories. Everything else has been put on hold.

I adore Lovecraft, outside of his casual racism that's thrown into his work. The Color Out of Space is my favorite.

Just finished reading At the Mountains of Madness. I love his ability to create suspense through omission of detail. It's the unknown, the lack of description, that lets the imagination run wild. I am also impressed by his scientific spirit and understanding of the disciplines. The creatures in his stories are still ultimately material beings that conceivably could be studied by science - or at least, we think we could study them, but they are so terrible and too powerful to be studied. Thus human reason is subordinated to raw, primordial horror. I found it particularly interesting how, in At the Mountains of Madness, the protagonist (a man of science) is actively and earnestly trying to prevent a scientific expedition into the Antarctic mountains. We so often associate science and scientists with a triumphant spirit of curious exploration - yet here is a man who wants to limit it. Perhaps some things are not worth knowing - or better left unknown.

Capital volume 1 by Karl Marx (rereading)

A sample of Agamben's "State of Exception". Seems very good. Should I go for the real thing for 15 bucks (to anyone who's read it @StreetlightX, @Maw or anyone else?)

Doo itt. It's among his most accessible and topical works.

Done. :cool:

I haven't read it, but as a rule of thumb, always go with what Streetlight recommends to read.

I'm there, and on the philosophical front I need a break from Zizek, who is a bit addictive but also tiring in his contrariness after a while. It gets predictable that he's going to unpredictably turn everything upside down/inside out so it means the opposite of what it's supposed to roughly every three paragraphs.

Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche by Lev Shestov.

A commentary of the three philosophers by a severely under-recognized philosopher.

"[...] the tortures of Macbeth are not ordained only for those who have served 'evil' but also for those who have devoted themselves to the 'good.'"

"Morality showed itself impotent precisely where men would have been justified in expecting of it the greatest manifestation of its power."

I adore Lovecraft, outside of his casual racism that's thrown into his work. The Color Out of Space is my favorite. — Maw

Color Out of Space is pretty much the best horror story ever written. I always wondered if it would not be the earliest prototype of a zombie story.

Claire Colebrook - Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics, and the Digital
Seb Franklin - Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic

Ahhhhh nooooo I just found out Clement Rosset died earlier this year

Love the only two books of his that were translated to English: The Real and Its Double and Joyful Cruelty

Evil and the God of Love by John Hick.

Giorgio Agamben - Karman: A Brief Treatise on Action, Guilt, and Gesture


If you have to pick one, which would you recommend?

I think you may prefer The Real and Its Double

Aden Evens - Logic of the Digital

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Susan Haack - Philosophy of Logics