These are some book I intent to review and summaries over the next few weeks. I will aim for at least one review of 2000 words per week, but that might be a little optimistic.
Graham Harman ‘Tool-being’
An attempt to read Heidegger against Heidegger’s own interpretation of himself and to free him from the linguistic / pragmatist / correlationist / anthropocentric hordes and perform a coup d’etat towards Heidegger’s notion of the ready-to-hand/present-at-hand axis of being as the start of an all powerful object-oriented philosophy. Brave stuff!
Bruno Latour ‘Politics of Nature’
Latour tries to articulate a theory of political ecology which doesn’t lapse into the nature/culture divide (mononaturalism vs multiculturalism). He sees politics as an infinite process of discovery, testing and re-presentation of what is exterior to the common through working out strong articulations between human and non-human actors which doesn’t prioritise our access to them through philosopher-scientists, but emphasises a collective multi-skilled approach.
Roger Scruton ‘Spinoza’
This reading probably ruins the nuances and intricacies of Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’, but I need a basic map to help me through my first reading. The style of the ‘Ethics’ much like Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’ I find sour and sterile, hopefully this should sweeten things up.
Antonio Negri ‘Time for Revolution’
Apparently, our conception of time is dependent upon our historically contingent moment within class struggle relations. Sounds good to me.
Ray Brassier ‘Nihil Unbound’
‘Nihilism is not… a pathological exacerbation of subjectivism, which annuls the world and reduces reality to a correlate of the absolute ego, but on the contrary, the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is mind-independent reality, which despite the presumptuousness of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ’values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable.’
I should be getting ‘After Finitude’ by Quentin Meillassoux soon. As soon as I have read that, I’ll try and get a good review up, although there are already some fantastic summaries available:
CORRELATIONISM AND CREATIONISM
Introduction to:
