From Baruch to Benedictus and Back Again: On Gilah Kletenik's Sovereignty Disrupted

 

Oleksander Roitburd, Spinoza in Tuscany

from The Gallant Age of Enlightenment

Michael Hardt's Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy was a formative book for me in graduate school. Formative in the sense that it shaped my reading of Deleuze, but also in that it shaped my idea of what a book on a philosopher could or should do. What impressed me about Michael's book way back then is that he did the necessary work to excavate some of the concepts underlying Deleuze's books, not just Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, but also Dun Scotus and Hegel, while at the same time recognizing that Deleuze's work is not pointed towards the past, to its history, but to debates with such philosophers as Althusser and with such movements such as autonomy. It is rare to find a book that is equally comfortable discussing scholastics and Nanni Balestrini. 

Being Singular Plural: Between the Ingenium of the state and the Ingenia of Individuals in Spinoza

 

Mysterious Island

When I was in undergrad at Hampshire College one of my professors, Meredith Michaels would refer to certain books as "worker bee" books. The term was not pejorative. Worker bee books were the books that did the work, traced the development of a philosophers thought, or the connection between different philosophers. They were patient and methodological. They were not the kind of books to be read on a whim, but they were the books that you were very glad existed when you did your research. The work they did laid the foundation for other claims and ideas. Incidentally they were the kind of books that were primarily bought by research libraries, which is to say as we lose research libraries, or as their budgets are cut or put towards online co-learning centers, we are losing some of the basic infrastructure of thought. The worker bees build the hive. 

The Becoming Real of Abstractions: In Memory of Paolo Virno

I just learned this morning that Paolo Virno has died. Virno's work has been a huge influence on both my writing and my teaching. In my class on work we regularly read the chapter "Labor, Work, Intellect" from Grammar of the Multitude for the way it updates both Arendt and Marx for the late twenty-first century. Of all of the post-autonomist turns to the transformations of labor, his is the most engaging. His influence on my writing is even stronger. His investigation of the concept of transindividuality is second only to Balibar's in getting me to write a book about it. What follows is an excerpt from that book. 

The Affective Constitution and Reduction of the Political

 The following is the text from a presentation at the Radical Philosophy Hour. It also takes up a question that I posted about years ago. 

You Would Make a Great Cop: On Lezra's Defective Institutions

I had the opportunity to respond to Jacques Lezra's book Defective Institutions: A Protocol for the Republic at SPEP's virtual conference this year.  There is much to talk about in the book, but I decided to focus on his discussion of the police, partly because it allowed me to stitch together some thoughts about the police in the current political moment. My remarks are below.

Interpreting a Changing World: Labor Power in Virno and Macherey

 At first glance, the only thing that Pierre Macherey and Paolo Virno have in common is that they are, in my opinion, underrated as philosophers. They are both the less well known member of a school, or orientation that is primarily identified with other figures more often discussed; Macherey is often seen as one of the names associated with Althusser, but not referenced as much as Etienne Balibar or even Jacques Rancière and Virno with autonomia or post-operaism, but less famous than Antonio Negri and less infamous than Mario Tronti. Macherey is barely translated into English, but thanks to Seagull books, most of Virno's work is available. The other, more interesting thing that they have in common, is that they have both turned to the concept of labor power as a philosophical concept. 

Profane Existence: Capital Goes from Woke to MAGA

 In the US every presidential election is treated as a transformation of the nation, of the zeitgeist, like Brecht's line about the government electing itself a new people made true. This is especially true of the chattering pundit class who have greeted every election from Obama to Trump as a transformation not just of government but the nation. There is no small irony in this given low voter turnout, small margins, and anti-democratic institutions like the electoral college. What is often a small shift in numbers is treated as a major shift in values and ideals.

Capitalist Dogs II: Or, What Habit Makes in Smith and Marx

I remember a friend in graduate school saying that our task, at least when it came to writing dissertations, was to write something that a database could not produce. He was a bit ahead of the curve, this was sometime around the late nineties early two thousands. Databases could not write books then, but they are getting closer to it. Or, more to the point, a particular kind of academic monograph, the sort the traces the development of a concept in a single author oeuvre or a comparison of two thinkers, seems to be increasingly the kind of thing that a machine could write. That is the bad news. The good news, is that such monographs seemed useful to write, but never that fun to read in the first place. What if we could leave such books to the machines that generate them and consume them. What kind of writing should we do in the age of (seemingly) intelligent machines?

Fighting for Infection as if it were Wellness: On the Anti-Vax Moment

There was a moment in the beginning of the COVID pandemic when I thought to myself that surely this would be the end of the anti-vaccination movement. It is one thing to be against vaccines when diseases are rare, and pandemics a distant memory, but another to be against them in the midst of a pandemic in which tens of thousands were dying each week in the US alone. The anti-vax position always seemed like a luxury position, a position of privilege, an individual refusing vaccines is taking advantage of the fact that others are vaccinated around them and cases are rare. Like many things in US politics and culture, individual autonomy is made possible by the existence and occlusion of collective action. It is for that reason that I thought such a position would collapse in the face of an actual pandemic.

Everything is a Weapon if You Hold it Right: On Weapons

 

The titles of Zach Cregger's films are more riddles and interpretations than descriptions. One could conclude that the "barbarian" of the first film's title refers to the character of the mother, after all she is the one that smashes heads, but, as I said earlier, I think that misses the point that the film is a far deeper reflection on barbarians and civilization. In a similar way, we could conclude that the word "weapons" in the title of the recent film refers to the weaponization of the hypnotized individuals, as is stated in the dialogue.  (Oh, yeah, spoiler alert)