Category: Uncategorized
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Black Hole Sun: On the Materialist Sublime
The first image of black hole has just been released today. This is a profound and important aesthetic moment from a new materialist perspective. The image is not beautiful because we enjoy a free play of our imagination as we try to figure out what we are looking at and how it fits with our…
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Guilty Before Trial: The Image of the Criminal Migrant
I have just published a blog post at Border Criminologies, Oxford Law on images of migration. More people and more images are in circulation today than ever before in history. The digital image and the centrality of the migrant thus mark a new period in political aesthetics. Since 2014, in particular, people have been sharing…
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Returning to Lucretius
Why Return to Lucretius? I think a new Lucretius is coming into view today. Every period in Western history since Lucretius has returned to him like bees returning to their flower fields in search of nourishment. Each time, though, our return is different—like the expanding arc of a spiral. We bring new questions, find…
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“Returning to Lucretius,” talk at Saint John’s College, Santa Fe, Friday, April 5th, 7:30pm
I am giving a talk at Saint John’s College on Lucretius, Friday, April 5th, 7:30pm. It will be recorded. “A new Lucretius is coming into view today. Every great historical epoch returns to him like bees returning to their flower fields in search of nourishment. Each time, though, our return is different—like the expanding arc of…
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Trump, Alain Badiou (2019)
The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States sent shockwaves across the globe. How was such an outcome even possible? In two lectures given at American universities in the immediate aftermath of the election, the leading French philosopher Alain Badiou helps us to make sense of this extraordinary occurrence. He argues that…
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The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen After 9/11, Matthew Longo (2017)
Borders sit at the center of global politics. Yet they are too often understood as thin lines, as they appear on maps, rather than as political institutions in their own right. This book takes a detailed look at the evolution of border security in the United States after 9/11. Far from the walls and fences…
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Deleuze and Anarchism (2019) edited by Chantelle Gray Van Heerden, Aragorn Eloff
I just got my advance copy of Deleuze and Anarchism. Congratulations to the editors on this excellent book! Explores Deleuze and Guattari’s own diverse conceptions of anarchism and expands it in the spirit of their philosophy This collection of 13 essays addresses and explores Deleuze and Guattari’s relationship to the notion of anarchism: in the…
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Three Theses on Neoliberal Migration and Social Reproduction
Issue 27 of Polygraph is on “Neoliberalism and Social Reproduction” edited by Jaime Acosta Gonzalez, Jess Issacharoff, & Jacob Soule. Read the whole issue free online here Below is my contribution: Three Theses on Neoliberal Migration and Social Reproduction Today there are more than 1 billion regional and international migrants, and the number continues to rise:…
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The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, Emanuele Coccia (2018)
This is a wonderful book. I highly recommend it for those interested in materialism, nature, plants, posthuman ecology. We barely talk about them and seldom know their names. Philosophy has always overlooked them; even biology considers them as mere decoration on the tree of life. And yet plants give life to the Earth: they produce…
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Kinopolitics: Borders in Motion
We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history, people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. We live in an age of world historical global migration, increas- ingly rapid climatic changes, of high-speed digital images, of accelerating universes and accelerated particles. All that…
The Philosophy of Movement 