I've posted a draft of a review article (.pdf) on recent work in "Philosophy of Consciousness and the Body." It's destined for the Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy, edited by Beth Lord and John Mullarkey.
You can find other drafts on the research page of my website.
He's not only a laughably bad writer, he's also a morally depraved monster!
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy now includes an entry on Gilles Deleuze, written by Dan Smith of Purdue and myself. As the entry can be updated, I'd be glad to hear of any suggestions for improvement (keeping in mind that we are already well past the suggested 12K word count!).
Down here in Louisiana, we've got something of a trifecta going in the Legislature:
1) A bill to allow concealed handguns on college campuses ("gats" is I think how the bill puts it) (written by the NRA)
2) A pro-ID "teach the controversy" bill (written by the Discovery Institute)
3) A bill to "reform" sick leave policy in public universities (written by LSU administrators)
Together the bills show two things:
1) The LA Legislature is getting serious about outsourcing. Think of all the public money they save by not having to have a staff and just letting others write their bills for them!
2) When ID-infected future LSU students pull out their peacemakers in biology class, the profs will have a cap on accrued sick leave to think about before confronting them.
Good news yesterday as I agreed in principle to a contract with University of Minnesota Press for my book Political Physiology. It will appear in the Posthumanities series, edited by Cary Wolfe of Rice University. My thanks to Cary and to Doug Armato, Director of UM Press and the commissioning editor for philosophy.
Here's a brief description of the book:
The book investigates embodied, embedded, and affective cognition. It challenges both the exclusion of affect from cognition and the individualism of most treatments of the subject, insisting that subjectivity be studied in terms of the distribution of affective cognitive traits in a population. The standpoint is named “political physiology” in order to indicate that subjectivity is sometimes bypassed in favor of a direct linkage of the social and the somatic. After a theoretical and historical base in the first part, the second part offers three case studies of contemporary instances of political physiology: the Terri Schiavo case, the Columbine high school massacre, and Hurricane Katrina.
Todd May (Philosophy, Clemson) reviews Jeff Nealon's (Penn State, English) new Stanford book on Foucault for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. May shows how Nealon fights the "Prodigal Son" interpretation of Foucault, the "return of the subject" or "retreat from power to ethics" or "turn to liberalism" (pick your poison) reading of the late Foucault. Check it out.
Jennifer Martinez, who's affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham, did a video interview with me prior to my talk there in December. In the interview I discuss the outlines of my Katrina paper, which on this occasion I put in the context of Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine, which I blogged about here and here.
LSU now has a Employee Wellness program, and one of its activities is a team virtual trek, measured by pedometer. Are we on the slippery slope to Weyco? Instead of asking for your papers, will HRM soon be asking for your pedometer? Or will it just be a matter of demonstrating your lifestyle in order to qualify for reduced insurance premiums? Of course the propertarians have no problem with all this: freedom of contract, dont'cha know?
All kidding aside, there actually are serious issues here, involving changing definitions of personal sovereignty in an age of biopower or managed life, as Lauren Berlant for one shows in her recent essay, "Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)" Critical Inquiry 33.4 (Summer 2007): 754-780. (Link here, but subscription is required to access full text.) I'd be happy if readers could send references to other articles on these issues.
Marc Bousquet, author of the new and highly recommended NYU Press book How the University Works, and the man behind the essential blog howtheuniversityworks.com, has some great YouTube interviews on labor practices in the contemporary American university. Check out my colleague Michelle Massé's line at the end of her interview "Higher Ed: A Pyramid Scheme" on the coming K-12-ization of the university. Wouldn't you rather be a "loving teacher" than merely a "professor"? Massé (English and Women's & Gender Studies at LSU), is co-editor with Katie Hogan (English and WGS at Carlow University) of the forthcoming collection, Over Ten Million Served:
Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces from SUNY
Press.
Cross-posted at Meta-philosophy (where John McCumber has been doing some very interesting posts).
I had one of those M. Jourdain moments today. I was preparing a lecture on Ch. 2 of Time and Free Will for my Bergson course, explaining the distinction between discrete and continuous multiplicities. Here's what I wrote:
Bergson will distinguish two forms of multiplicity, discrete and continuous.
In his Bergsonism, Deleuze traces the notion of multiplicity back to Riemann. According to D, roughly speaking, a discrete multiplicity has an internal metric: that is, one of its units can serve as a measure for other units. For example, the first inch of a ruler can measure other parts of the ruler (this part is 1.5 inches long, this other one is 3.7 inches long, etc.)
But a continuous multiplicity has to find its metrics (note the plural) elsewhere than in one of its [spatial] parts: for example, in the forces working within it. The key is that continuous multiplicities are both continuous and heterogeneous. That means they change their nature (their genus) when they divide. That means that each “indivisible” stage in their unfolding process needs its own measure.
At this point, I thought I would riff a bit on how this illuminates Deleuze's notion of the distinction between ethics and morality:
Morality has one (abstract) standard which is applied from above, crushing the singularity of concrete situations. [Just as psychoanalysis crushes the singularity of desiring-production by applying Oedipus.] In other words, it treats life as a discrete multiplicity: there is one unit internal to the multiplicity that can measure all other parts of the multiplicity. The key is the spatial notion of “part” which ensures the homogeneity of the thing: moral situations differ only in degree.
Ethics, OTOH, requires the concrete analysis of the affects generated in encounters of bodies. Thus its metrics are plural and generated on the spot, and must be evaluated on the spot in the full concrete singularity of the situation. In my Schiavo paper, I argue that this is what should ground the liberal notion of the right to privacy, rather than sovereignty-based notions.
That's when it hit me: following Deleuze, I've been a full-fledged moral particularist all along!
h/t to Chris Blakley!
