Highly. It's Zizek's metaphysics without the fluff, and the way in which it triangulates Kant, Schelling, and Spinoza is just incredible. A seriously good work of philosophy.

Re: Steigler, I have the first two volumes of Technics and Time sitting under my bed, I just need to get round to them.

:up: :cool:

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James

Toni Morrison — 180 Proof

I met her several years ago she was very lovely.

Maurizio Lazzarato - Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity
Paolo Virno - Deja Vu and the End of History

A couple of Italians to round off the year.

R.G. Collingwood - The Idea of History
A compilation of his later essays on the subject

Nationalism - Rabindranath Tagore

Self Christmas gift(s) arrived :D

Origin of Capitalism so good!

Capping off the year with Time Regained. Took me most of the year to get through all of A la recherche... (though I read other things in between).

Thinking of tackling Ulysses at last. I've read Dubliners and Portrait, but for this one I'd like to find a good annotated edition. Problem is that the text is in the public domain, which means that the ebook market is flooded by cheap crappy editions that often can't even get typesetting right, let alone supporting material. One of Amazon's pricier offerings (among dozens) boasts a "functioning table of contents!" and "annotations" in the form of a short New York Times review (from the same year, and presumably also in the public domain). One proudly lists the title in all caps as "ULYSSES - BY JANE AUSTEN."

Reading a just-defended dissertation entitled "Into the Heart of Systems Change" by Anneloes Smitsman. It's over six-hundred pages but is very readable. Available as a PDF if anyone is curious.

Capping off the year with Time Regained. Took me most of the year to get through all of A la recherche... (though I read other things in between).

Thinking of tackling Ulysses at last. — SophistiCat

Ulysses I found a bit of a mountain to climb. Proust has been on my to do list forever, but I fear it will be even steeper than Ulysses...

• From Sorrow's Well: The Poetry of Hayden Carruth, e.d. Shaun T. Griffin
• The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought, Mark Johnson
• Creating Wealth: Growing Local Economies with Local Currencies, Gwendolyn Hallsmith & Bernard Lietaer


re-reading

• Last Poems, Hayden Carruth
• Sitting In, Hayden Carruth

Toni Morrison
— 180 Proof

I met her several years ago she was very lovely. — Maw

Likewise. I'd attended a few readings / lectures she'd given in the late 1980s and met her in 1990 at a private dinner given in her honor by William Kennedy (I crashed that party as Hayden Carruth's last minute wingman (HC was invited, I wasn't)), which, for me, had turned out to be an incredible evening, especially Ms. Morrison, who was by turns easily charming & brilliant, down home funny & regal.

The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper.

The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought, Mark Johnson — 180 Proof

MJ is bae.

Origin of Capitalism so good! — Maw

Looking forward to reading it :D

Ulysses I found a bit of a mountain to climb. — Pantagruel

Yeah, that's why I am looking for a helping hand :) I might just end up plowing through it unassisted, but from what I have heard about this book, I fear I'll miss too much this way.

Proust has been on my to do list forever, but I fear it will be even steeper than Ulysses... — Pantagruel

Proust may be a stretch in terms of shear length (of everything, down to individual sentences that can run for pages), but in form and style the books are not a long stretch from the classic 19th century Bildungsroman. It is the subject, which alternates minutely detailed observations of the outside and the inner world, and ruminations on the nature of memory and (at long last) art, that may present a challenge if you are not receptive to it. (It does not help that his self-absorbed alter ego is not all that sympathetic.)

Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change William Catton

Read it and weep!

Reading/using:

Levinas - Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority
Ricoeur - Symbolism of Evil
Derrida - "Violence and Metaphysics," in Writing and Difference
Husserl - Cartesian Meditations & Ideas I
Anonymous - The Cloud of Unknowing
Lacan - "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud"

Want to revisit:

Klossowski - The Baphomet

I'm very stop-and-start with the way I read, but usually I manage to finish most if not all of a given book/essay. Getting really into phenomenology but also trying to find ways to connect it with theology, psychoanalysis, critical theory, etc. Any recommendations for phenomenology would be appreciated.

End of year reading summary! 42 books, which is a little less than last year, but was definitely slowed down by the Cavell readings - The Claim of Reason alone took me two months. Was worth it though. Three themes that I revolved around - Wittgenstein and math, Deleuze, and a bunch of politics/political theory (especially regarding debt). Still working on getting a decent gender balance. Bold indicates favourites.

Wittgenstein(ish) + Math

Jose Bernadete - Infinity: An Essay in Metaphysics
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Also got 2/3s of the way through the Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, but DNF, so it doesn't count!).
Henry Staten - Wittgenstein and Derrida
Noson Yanofsky - The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us
Stanley Cavell - The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy
Stanley Cavell - Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays
Stanley Cavell - Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism: The Carus Lectures, 1988
Sara Ellenbogen - Wittgenstein's Account of Truth
Peter Winch - The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy
G. E. M. Anscombe - Intention
Hanna Pitkin - Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought

Deleuze (Logic of Sense reading)

John Sellars - Stoicism
Carlo Rovelli - The Order of Time
Piotrek Swiatkowski - Deleuze and Desire: Analysis of "The Logic of Sense"
Gilles Deleuze - The Logic of Sense
Andrew Culp - Dark Deleuze
Eleanor Kaufman - Deleuze, The Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being
Slavoj Zizek - Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences
Gilles Deleuze/Leopold von Sacher-Masoch - Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs (two books in one, technically!)

Political Economy / Debt / Neoliberalism / Political Theory

Michel Feher - Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age
Christian Marazzi - The Violence of Financial Capitalism
David Graeber - Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Maurizio Lazzarato - The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition
Maurizio Lazzarato - Governing by Debt
Maurizio Lazzarato - Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity
Wolfgang Streeck - Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
Yanis Varoufakis - The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy
Yanis Varoufakis - And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability
Wendy Brown - In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West
Patchen Markell - Bound by Recognition
Hanna Pitkin - The Concept of Representation
Jodi Dean - The Communist Horizon
Jodi Dean - Crowds and Party

Misc

Natasha Lennard - Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life
Jane Goodal - The Politics of the Common Good: Dispossession in Australia
Matthew Warren - Blackout: How is Energy-Rich Australia Running Out of Electricity
Joseph Carew - Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism
Giorgio Agamben - Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (reread)
Thomas Moynihan - Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History
Giovanni Maddalena - The Philosophy of Gesture: Completing Pragmatists' Incomplete Revolution
Paolo Virno - Deja Vu and the End of History
Henry Staten - Nietzsche's Voice

--

Still reading the Virno book, but will probably start the new year catching up on some Judith Butler books, before going back to political economy again. So to prempt:

Judith Butler - Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
Judith Butler - Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone :)

The Monadology by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. I'm trying to play devil's advocate while reading it. I'm trying to see if he really succeeded in proving the existence of his Monads.

Likewise. I'd attended a few readings / lectures she'd given in the late 1980s and met her in 1990 at a private dinner given in her honor by William Kennedy (I crashed that party as Hayden Carruth's last minute wingman (HC was invited)), which, for me, had turned out to be an incredible evening, especially Ms. Morrison, who was by turns easily charming & brilliant, down home funny & regal. — 180 Proof

Excellent, very jealous, although I doubt you want to know where I was in 1990 :razz:

Excellent, very jealous, although I doubt you want to know where I was in 1990 :razz: — Maw

I was gainfully slinging drinks (with my homie Dave, who happened to be HC's son), unpublishably scribbling, tramping around (south of the border or across the pond) whenever I was flush and, when I wasn't, killing time with sundry sordid side-hustles :zip: ... just to put off going back to grad school. Anyway. Your turn, Maw - what no good were you up to way back when? :smirk:

Depends on what month it was, but I was either in my mother's womb or shitting in my crib :monkey:

:snicker: :up:

One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse

Let's see in 2019 I read:

Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Non-Fiction by Brian Dillion
The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative by Mark Fisher
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Crime and Punish by Michel Foucault
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson
Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials by Malcom Harris
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century by Alex Gourevitch
Capital In the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty
Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) by Elizabeth Anderson
White Identity Politics by Ashley Jardina
The Prince by Machiavelli
Grundrisse by Marx
Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon by Marx
Theses on Feuerbach by Marx
The Limits of Capital by David Harvey
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino
The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 by Peter Brown
Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism by Charles Mills
In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West by Wendy Brown
The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel
A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Gibney
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James
One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse

A few a weeks ago I decided to implement a couple of rules. No electronics near my bed, (except a book light) and one book at a time (I don't start another book until I'm finished with the first one). I created a bit of a reading habit, lying in bed with nothing else to do. I found out that I can read, after all.

In the past few weeks I read (in chronological order):

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Atomic Habits by James Clear
A Long Way Gone: memoirs of a boy soldier

one book at a time — Wheatley

This is the most important thing! Makes all the difference.

CR (one after the other, of course...):

Judith Butler - Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
Judith Butler - Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
Isabell Lorey - State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious

Reading a book about how to face death. In the world of Trump and Johnson it seems the only subject worth exploring.

"Quantum Field Theory Demystified" by David McMahon
"The Open Universe" by Karl Popper

Jerome Roos - Why Not Default?: The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt (SO GOOD; ESSENTIAL READING)
Ellen Meiskins Wood - The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View
Ellen Meiskins Wood - Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism