Weaponized Joy

I like to write small reviews - recapitulations, really - of some of the books I've read. I'm putting a couple up here as part of my end of year 'round up' of books for 2022. Here's one for Paolo Virno's Deja Vu and the End of History : The concept of ‘potentiality’ has among the most ancient of philosophical pedigrees. Stretching back at least as far as Aristotle - and the Megarians before him - it’s one that’s been as much used as abused, and, in many cases, simply outright confused. It helps then, that Paolo Virno stands today as amongst the most preeminent philosophers of potentiality. And here, in this svelte little book of just under 200 pages, does he make clear, in ways that must be read to be admired, just how deep the stakes go in our need to come to grips with this much contested idea. And not just any abstract reflection on potentiality either, but quite specifically, the temporality of potentiality. For, as it turns out, it’s only from the point of

I like to write small reviews - recapitulations, really - of some of the books I've read. I'm putting a couple up here as part of my end of year 'round up' of books for 2022. Here's one for Badiou's Being and Event : Like all great works of philosophy, Badiou’s  Being and Event  is a wager. A wager on the possibility of Events, of ruptures in the weave of things, both personal and political, staking itself there where the possibility of a better world shines like a light through the crack in things. This much, I think, is known even by those with a passing familiarity of Badiou, whose association with the theme of the Event has been at the heart of the philosopher that he is. Nonetheless, what seems to go often unremarked in glosses on Badiou’s philosophy is the rigor to which devotes himself to the question of - not the break of the Event, but the continuum of Being. Indeed, what is utterly striking in  Being and Event  is the attention given to continuity, and

I've been cobbling together, mostly for my own benefit, a bit of a glossary of Deleuzian terms. This one's on 'multiplicity'. Most definitions of the term start with the distinction between the 'continuous' and the 'discrete', but I'm not convinced this is the best way to go about it. Moreover, the connection between multiplicities and manifolds - which is so vitally important! - sometimes doesn't get as much stress as I'd like it to . So I've tried to foreground that here. Two things that are missing here are a critique of Delanda's influential recasting of multiplicity as 'state space' - something I think is deeply misleading - and a comparison to Badiou's use of 'multiplicity', but I'll leave those for a possible future post. In the meantime, here we go!: Part I: What is Multiplicity? "Multiplicity" is easily one of the most important concepts in Deleuze, whose appearance ranges right across his oe