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...