• Streetlight
    9.1k
    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.
  • Maw
    2.7k
    A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
    The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James

    Toni Morrison180 Proof

    I met her several years ago she was very lovely.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    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.
  • Pantagruel
    3.4k
    R.G. Collingwood - The Idea of History
    A compilation of his later essays on the subject
  • I like sushi
    4.8k
    Nationalism - Rabindranath Tagore
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    Self Christmas gift(s) arrived :D

    v0jk46iw0wqhblv2.jpeg
  • Maw
    2.7k
    Origin of Capitalism so good!
  • SophistiCat
    2.2k
    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."
  • Pantagruel
    3.4k
    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.
  • Pantagruel
    3.4k
    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...
  • 180 Proof
    15.4k
    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.
  • Per Chance
    21
    The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought, Mark Johnson180 Proof

    MJ is bae.

    Origin of Capitalism so good!Maw

    Looking forward to reading it :D
  • SophistiCat
    2.2k
    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.)
  • Janus
    16.3k
    Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change William Catton

    Read it and weep!
  • iceblink luck
    3
    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.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    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 :)
  • David Carroll
    4
    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.
  • Maw
    2.7k
    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:
  • 180 Proof
    15.4k
    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:
  • Maw
    2.7k
    Depends on what month it was, but I was either in my mother's womb or shitting in my crib :monkey:
  • 180 Proof
    15.4k
    :snicker: :up:
  • Maw
    2.7k
    One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse
  • Maw
    2.7k
    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
  • Wheatley
    2.3k
    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
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    one book at a timeWheatley

    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
  • iolo
    226
    Reading a book about how to face death. In the world of Trump and Johnson it seems the only subject worth exploring.
  • Pantagruel
    3.4k
    "Quantum Field Theory Demystified" by David McMahon
    "The Open Universe" by Karl Popper
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    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
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