John Protevi's Blog

Suport Salaita fundraising: donate an amount equal to list price of David Blacker's book!

David Blacker was one of the first scholars to cancel a talk at UIUC in support of the #boycottUIUC action. I've just bought his book, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame (Zero Books, 2013). (Publisher link here; Amazon link here). I donated an amount equal to the price to the Support Salaita fund, and want to ask everyone to do the same.

The Support Salaita site has this preamble: 

Help support Steven Salaita’s case against the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign for its unethical and unconstitutional firing of him only 3 weeks before his scheduled classes were to begin, for speaking out against war and violence on Twitter.

Salaita now has no job nor does his wife who quit her job in Virginia to support the family’s move, no personal home to live in, and no health insurance for their family, including their two year-old son.

But even beyond the immediate tie-in with the Salaita case, I'm very eager to read Blacker's work. It's was quite widely reviewed: Salon, Inside Higher Ed, Times Higher Ed, Radical Philosophy, S.China Morning Post, Counterfire and others. Here are some audio interviews as well: Extraenvironmentalist, Majority Report, Alpha2Omega, C-Realm 1/2, Diet Soap 1/2

Other titles by Blacker: Democratic Education Stretched Thin; Dying to Teach; Educator Ethics Series. 

LAST BUT NOT LEAST: here is the Amazon page for Salaita's books. Why not buy some of them and donate an amount equal to the price to the Support Salaita fund as well?

UMP | University of Minnesota Press Blog: Author Q&A: On Gilles Deleuze, philosophical tools, and "Political Affect"

A preview from a recent Q&A with me. 

Q: How did you decide on case studies as a method of doing philosophy?

A: I think case studies are an important and under-used tool in philosophy, as opposed to thought experiments ... with case studies we’re not after essential distinctions at the borders of categories. Instead, we’re trying to explore concrete situations and the “problems” they express. Here is where my reliance on the thought of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze comes in. Deleuze did not think in terms of essences that would slot things into categories, but thought that events are the points of intersection of “multiplicities.” That’s a technical term for Deleuze which, roughly speaking, means a field in which several processes meet to produce events, much as a crystal or a lightning bolt or a hurricane forms out of a field of multiple processes. In dealing with analogous multiplicities in our social fields we see that (1) any one move changes the conditions for future moves and that (2) no one solution exhausts the potentials for future creatively different solutions ... The more we explore the Schiavo case, the Columbine case, the Katrina case, the more we realize that concrete situations are “crystallizations” of a problematic field, and that a change here or there, if it occurs at a critical point, might make all the difference in the world. (READ THE FULL Q&A)

via www.uminnpressblog.com

Q & A with me at the U Minnesota Press blog, about Political Affect.

Political Physiology, the book

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.

Against the Prodigal Son interpretation of Foucault

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.

Deleuze, DeLanda, and Marx

Steve Shaviro has posted a very interesting review of Manuel DeLanda's new book, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (Continuum, 2006). While a good bit of the review is devoted to Shaviro looking at Deleuze's ontology from a Whiteheadian perspective, on which I'm not qualified to comment, he does say this as well, which caught my eye:

But it seems to me, again, that DeLanda’s (often expressed) hostility to Marxist formulations is not an inevitable consequence of his ontology; and that adopting this ontology (or better, the Whiteheadian version of it that I have tried to point to here) actually has significant advantages for Marxist theory, as well as for much else.

This recalled to me a few exchanges I've had with DeLanda on similar topics that are available on the net. This one was arranged by Torkild Thanem of the Stockholm University School of Business for the organizational theory journal Tamara, while this one was arranged by Evan Selinger of the Department of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology for the on-line journal CTheory.

I'd be happy to hear feedback from people on the issues discussed in any of these pieces.

New Book Series: "New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science"

I've recently become series editor for a new series with Palgrave Macmillan entitled New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science. The topic of the series is a great occasion for dialogue between analytic and continental philosophers, if you ask me, and since you're visiting my blog, I guess you are asking me.

I've added a link to the left column, but if you don't want to click on it, here's what you'll read there:

New Book from Adrian Parr

My friend Adrian Parr, who is on a visiting Assoc Prof appointment at University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP) and who is on the board at the art and culture journal Drain (www.drainmag.com) writes to tell me of her new book from Edinburgh University Press entitled Memorial Culture and Deleuze: desire, singular memory and the politics of trauma.

Read the description after the break.