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...

I've been tinkering at the edges of this 'introduction to Deleuze on becoming' for a while, and I finally found some free time to whack it all together, so - here is a thing I wrote on Deleuze and becoming. As with all of my posts of Deleuzeian vocabulary, I largely wrote this for myself, as 'becoming' was and is one of those topics that I was struggling to 'put together', and this is one of my attempts to do that for me. Hopefully though, others might find it interesting or useful! This is not comprehensive - I don't really talk about the specific becomings that D&G do, like becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible on so on, but this is already very long! Any suggestions, critiques, corrections, or questions are welcome.                                                 A more accurate, contemporary depiction of the 'tree of life'...

I like to write small reviews - recapitulations, really - of some of the books I’ve read. Here’s one for Grégorie Chamayou’s Manhunts: A Philosophical History : This is my favourite kind of book - enormous in scope, modest in page-count, dripping in historical anecdote, although all approached through a very specific lens: the manhunt. The first thing to be established is just how relevant the manhunt is in our own time. Far from a vestige of a primitive past now left behind, the manhunt today takes its form in the sweep for illegal immigrants, the 'bounties' on abortion and gender care seekers, the murderous buzz of Predator drones, or else the algorithmic hunt for both cybercriminals and whistleblowers. In fact, once acquainted with the workings of the manhunt, its presence becomes impossible to 'unsee’, a form of power - 'cynegetic power' - at work not only in the hunting of the Helots by ancient Spartans, but equally in every other police procedural now beamed i...

Here's a small synopsis and critique of De Landa's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History . A quick word, though, about what De Landa means to me. It's actually been something of a great pleasure to read him again, because I think I can say, without exaggeration, that my chance stumbling upon his other book, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy , among a random library shelf at uni one day, changed my life. I was looking for a different book, and I couldn't tell you for the life of me what it was now. I checked out Intensive Science because it looked interesting and gosh, it was nothing less than an Event for me, something after which almost everything I read now is, in some distant way or another, related to Deleuze. To return to De Landa is to return to the primal scene! Him and Levi Bryant's work on Deleuze, I should mention. With the distance of time - it's been years - I'm heartened by the fact that I can take an equal distance now, to De Landa...