Weaponized Joy

I like to write small reviews - recapitulations, really - of some of the books I've read. Here's one for Pheng Cheah's  Spectral Nationalism: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation: It is entirely unfair that Pheng Cheah can write an entire book on German Idealism, and then write another entire book on Indonesian and Kenyan post-colonial literature, and then put them together and call it one book. But that, of course, is just what they have done. And if this disjunction of themes did not already seem broad enough, what binds them together is yet more extraordinary: an intensive exploration of theme of the ‘organism’ and how this organismic metaphor came to underwrite these disparate efforts to theorise the very foundations of freedom and nationalism. Still, we’re not done. Underlying all this, is a broadly Derridian methodology that seeks to look at how this invocation of the organism never quite succeeds; or, more accurately, succeeds desp