Weaponized Joy

The following is written in memory of Jonathan Lear, whose writings live on as a remainder of his own life, come to an end a week before this. This is a small book with themes writ large. At just under a 170 pages of main text, the title alone gives a good idea of what’s in store, although it’s worth taking a moment to pause and really sit with the grouping: happiness, death, and life (the remainder of). Is this not the range of philosophy itself? And I want to say: it is, and Lear covers it all, making good on the promise of what what it means to ask: what is it to live? And where, if anywhere, is the promise of happiness among this thing we call living? Taking as his loadstars the writings of Aristotle and Freud - the inaugural philosopher and the inaugural psychoanalyst - Lear explores how each, in their adventures to trace the shape of human life, stumbled upon a certain remainder that they never were quite able to square with their quest for principles, a reminder in whose excess ...

I wrote this some time ago as a kind of primer to Deleuze's understanding of immanence. I'm still pretty happy with it, although I'd add two things. First, I'd suggest reading this together with the pieces on univocity  and ' non-ontology ', both of which I wrote some time after this. Together, I think they form a nice triptych of Deleuze's philosophy as trying, fundamentally, to get at the same thing in a few different ways. An 'overthrowing' of ontology in favor of a thinking of 'life', the stakes of which, beyond mere labels, have to do with a primacy of ethics. Univocity in particular is that which 'cashes out' the promise of immanence: to think Being under the demand of immanence transforms it into a thinking of Life. Second, I wish I qualified a little better the 'comologizing of thought' I mention in Part II, which risks a strong pan-psychic reading of Deleuze. I think this ought to be avoided, but a proper eng...

Been a while since I've done one of these! So here's a bit of a review of  Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí's  The Invention of Women: Making African Sense of Western Gender Discourses: If feminism at large has taught us anything, it has taught us to look for the woman: the woman in history, the woman in art, the woman in society. In each case where women have been erased, the work of feminism has laboured to put her back into the picture, picking her out from the depths of patriarchal overwriting, and returning her to the light where she belongs. But what if, in our zeal, we've begun to look for woman where she never existed? What if the woman - as we know her - has been an invention all along, an imposition even, not only from the West (onto the Rest), but on the West itself, and anything but a naturally given category from which analysis and action would flow?  That, at least, is the argument given here in this tremendous work of sociology, which, by running 'We...

I capped off 2024 by reading Mamdani's Neither Settler Nor Native , which was a fantastic romp, so I figured I'd get around to the little book that came before it, his 2012 Define and Rule . Here's what I thought of it. Define and Rule is something like the skeleton key to Mahmood Mamdani's more recent and elaborate Neither Settler Nor Native . As the smaller, more focused work however, it packs an undeniably larger punch. Its objective is straightforward: to get at the specificity of how imperial 'indirect' rule worked (particularly under the British), as distinct from the earlier 'direct' rule of Roman empire. The answer too, is relatively straightforward. If the Romans ruled over subjects whose identities were already largely defined and given, the British (and Dutch) took this one step further and intervened in the very shaping of the identities of those they colonized. Such was the distinction between the Roman 'divide and rule', a...

Here's my review of Nandita Sharma's Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants. This was really a perfect follow-up to the Mamdani that I just read . Where Mamdani tracks the distinction between 'settler' and 'native', Sharma extends the analysis to the 'migrant' and the 'native'. A real nice paring. Interesting that they were both published in the same year! What I like about this book the most was the way in which it captured an entire arc of history that began with slavery and, frankly, still hasn't ended. This kind of contextualizing of the present is incredibly useful in orienting things, and I'm super grateful that I read this book, actually. A good way to start the year. Anyway, here's the review proper: If politics everywhere is now marked by ascendant 'nativisms' and outpourings of aggression directed at migrants and 'foreigners', Nandita Sharma's Home Rule has got to b...

My last blog post for the year! A review of Mahmood Mamdani's Neither Settler Nor Native: the Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. This is one of those books that I learnt so much from, but still found it wanting. Plan is to read alot more Mamdani after this! This is a fantastic book. World-spanning, epoch-capturing, but let down, ever so slightly, by a certain political naïvety. But first, the good stuff. More than anything, what Mamdani has shown here is the specificity of our post-colonial present: that the colony and its afterlives are, in fact, a present , and not just a long forgotten past, swamped over by the march of a homogenising globalisation. Which is to say: even as we live in an age characterised by the “end of colonialism”, what has been reproduced everywhere are the dynamics of colonialism in conditions other than directly colonial ones. Despite having wrested self-determination for themselves, many ex-colonies have nonetheless been left with the...