Weaponized Joy

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...