Weaponized Joy

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...

Deleuzian Terms: Univocity This is probably the longest (and most technical) exposition of a Deleuzian concept that I've written on. I've been tinkering at it for an incredibly long time now, writing, forgetting, and returning to it a few times over literal months. Really, alot of this is a (non-comprehensive) exposition of chapter 1 of Difference and Repetition , with insights from alot of disparate secondary reading thrown in to help. While I don't think univocity is 'the most important' concept in D&R (is there one?), I do think that it is maybe the one which illuminates the stakes of what is going on that book the best. Hence why both the opening chapter and closing paragraphs frame everything between precisely in terms of the quest for the univocal. Hopefully this is helpful in explaining why! Part I: Univocity, Equivocity, Analogy Q: What is univocity for Deleuze? A: Univocity answers the question of how to think ab...

Here's my review Donna Jones' The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: N é gritude, Vitalism, and Modernity. As a quickie: I adored this book, it's easily among my favorites that I've read this year. This is one of those books that, although about a very specific topic, branches and sprawls out about itself in such a way as to detail an entire culture of thought, one which still persists today, and whose relevance has anything but waned. The topic is this: the work of Henri Bergson and his relation, or, better to say, his uptake among the writers of the Négritude movement. But if this is the narrow prism though which the book's light is reflected, that light itself blankets the entire noon of modernity stretching from Ezra Pound to Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein and D. H. Lawrence - so many stars among others in the constellation of modernity through which not just Bergson, but Bergson ism , would wind its way through. A meditation on life and race, and the ways in ...

This post started off as a handful of lines banged out on my phone's notepad as I was working my way through Henri Bergson's Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Literally this: I thought I might elaborate a little bit, and that's how I ended up with much too many paragraphs of mostly overly-excited connection drawing. Some of this is a little caricatural, but if they capture something of a spirit, or at least incite some to read some of the authors mentioned, then they will have done their job! Alain Badiou I'm stretching my bow a little to start, but what Bergson shares with Badiou is the latter's 'anti-constructivist' bent. For Bergson, there are, as it were, two kinds of moralities - open and closed. 'Closed' morality is just that which is built up, habit by habit until one reaches its limit in 'society'. But this social morality is always partial, always distinguished from the morality of other societies. By contrast, 'open' mo...

Here's my review of Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological . An old book, but deserving of new love. This is a lovely and humane book which takes as its starting point the advent of something new in the empire of nature: the presence of pathology among the living. For if neither the hurricane nor the waterfall can fall sick or recover, strictly speaking, then the arrival of life-which-falls-ill marks a break in the continuity of things, the eruption of an interruption in the cosmic order. While what counts as the ‘living’ has been the subject of much healthy debate (the inclination to ‘finality’, the work of the gene, the capacity for reproduction, to list a random few), Canguilhem’s wager is to look for the singularity of life in the presence of exactly what threatens it: illness and disease. Accompanying life as its ever-present shadow, it’s just in plumbing the recesses of pathology that the living itself comes into relief. Trained as both a physician and a...

Finished reading Lara and Stephen Sheehi's Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (2021) yesterday, and wrote up a little recap and review: This book is a few things, but what immediately stands out is its archiving of testimony. Testimonies less of patients - although there are a few here - than of clinicians, the practitioners of psychoanalysis who, in issuing the ‘talking cure’, have to do so under conditions of brutal, unspeakable violence: a violence that, as I write, continues to murder and maim Palestinians in the most horrific genocide this side of the 21st century. Symptomatic is the fact that Gazan voices remain largely absent from this book, on account of the authors having been barred from entry by Israeli authorities. This gaping testimonial void, acknowledged and apologised for, speaks, nonetheless to just those very conditions whose effects and responses are charted out in the writing: those of trauma, occupation, and silencing:...