@StreetlightX any books about Time that you would recommend? Anything general would be great, but also specific to a Marxist interpretation would be of interest as well. I'm reading E.P. Thompson's paper on Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism, and it's fascinating.

Hmm, I've never really approached questions of time 'directly' - generally it's through other lenses (X's or Y's take on time) - and there's nothing I know that is quite so 'concrete/historical' as anything Thompson would have written. The closest thing I can think of is a great essay by Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille on time keeping devices and their social effects (look in your PMs!).

Otherwise, David Couzens Hoy's The Time of Our Lives is a great overview of different 'continental' approaches to time which I really like.

Elizabeth Grosz's two books, The Nick of Time and Time Travels, might be somewhat closer to what you've looking for, but they're more 'how to think about time and politics', and again, not anything like that Thompson essay (also, they're both essay collections themselves).

Henri Lefevbe's Rhythmanalysis might be even closer (Lefebvre being a Marxist sociologist), but it's a short book that deals more with rhythm than it does with 'time' as such.

Errr, otherwise, there's Poalo Virno's Déjà Vu and the End of History which I haven't read, but looks very much like something that matches what you're after.

Sciency-wise there's Lee Smolin's Time Reborn and Ilya Prigogine's The End of Certainty, which are superb (no politics at all!).

My last reccomendation might seem strange but is one of my favorite books I've ever read and has influenced me massively when thinking about time - Martin Hagglund's Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, which strictly speaking is a (very clear!) reading of Derrida on time, but which I think is absolutely super as a stand-alone book on time in general.

But yeah, this is all a very random scattering of things off the top of my head. Time is always something I've approached 'sideways on', so these recc's may not be the best/most relevant, but yeah.

:cool:

Paolo Virno - A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life
Giorgio Agamben - The Use of Bodies (The ninth and final book of the Homo Sacer series!)

Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism
Paolo Virno - When The Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature
Paolo Virno - Essay on Negation: For a Linguistic Anthropology

Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux (re-read, never finished previously)
The Basic Kafka by Kafka
The Trouble With Being Born & Drawn and Quartered by Cioran

:up: for Cioran and AF

Capital V2 by Marx

Daniel Dor - The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology

Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd - Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present
Brian Rotman - Ad Infinitum... The Ghost in Turing's Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In. An Essay in Corporeal Semiotics

Gonna start Dracula by Bram Stoker tomorrow, because it's a S P O O K Y month

The History of Money By Jack Weatherford

This is is one of the best books I've read in a while. It contains sentences like: "The ancient ruins of the Imperial Age lie scattered across the center of modern Rome like whale bones that have washed up on a rocky shore and been picked clean by the birds and rodents that make their nests and burrows amid the debris."

Whale bones. Plus its author is a hero of the Mongolians. Awesome.

"A discovery of witches" by Deborah Harkness. I love a good story!

Etienne Balibar - Spinoza and Politics
Brian Rotman - Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero
Brian Rotman - Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting
Brian Rotman - Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being

On a bit of a Rotman/Spinoza kick.

Etienne Balibar - Spinoza and Politics — StreetlightX

This has been on my radar for some time. Can you let me know what you think?

So I'm about half-way through and I'm liking it alot. The title 'Spinoza and Politics' is actually deliciously ambiguous: it refers not just to 'Spinoza's political theory', but quite literally, the politics of Spinoza's time, and how the political events of the day in Dutch republic profoundly shaped Spinoza's writing. It's also fairly lucid, and treats the both of the Tractati as seriously as it treats the Ethics, treating the whole oeuvre holistically, rather than distinguishing between a 'metaphysical' and 'political' Spinoza. It's fairly fast-paced, and condenses alot in a small space, which makes it a very rich read. Good if you want a study that brings out the uniqueness of Spinoza's approach and situates it with respect to his time.

What do you do for work? How do you have so much time to read? Are you just a better steward of time than the average person? You make me feel like the lazy procrastinator I am.

Heh, you'll be surprised how much you can get through if you set aside just an hour of undistracted reading a day. Like, if it takes about 2 hours to read a chapter (conservative estimate), and if a book (of philosophy) is usually between 4-7 chapters, you can almost certainly get through a book and a bit a week. Once you develop the habit, it's very possible.

Damien Cahill & Phillip Toner (eds.) - Wrong Way: How Privatisation & Economic Reform Backfired

Essays by various authors on the Australian context specifically, covering everything from healthcare to education to public engineering projects. I've been looking for a book like this for about a year now, and this is perfect.

How do you have so much time to read? — ProbablyTrue

Heh, you'll be surprised how much you can get through if you set aside just an hour of undistracted reading a day. — StreetlightX

Good reading skills must help too. I too set aside some reading time, usually more than one hour per day, but there is no way I could get through an average-sized book in a week, especially a philosophy book.

(I read mostly fiction though. Currently finishing Javier Marías's A Heart So White in English translation. It is a fairly slim book, as novels go, but it still took me a couple of weeks.)

Walter Ong - Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
Giorgio Agamben - What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays
Fernando Zalamea - Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics
Fernando Zalamea - Peirce's Logic of Continuity: A Conceptual and Mathematical Approach

Spinoza's Ethics (part 1 and 2)
Maybe it is bullshit. But it so successfully circumvents other peoples' bullshit that it gets my attention.

Innate How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are, by Kevin J. Mitchell, Princeton and Oxford, 2018.

Whatever by Michel Houellebecq.
Pensieri by Giacomo Leopardi.

Why i Assassinated Gandhi by Gopal Godse

Mary Tiles - The Philosophy of Set Theory: An Historical Introduction to Cantor's Paradise
Albert Lautman - Mathematics, Ideas and the Physical Real
Giorgio Agamben - What Is Real?

The Neuroscience of Religious Experience by Patrick McNamara
The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq

Reading for 2018! (Bold indicates favourites)

Philosophy of Math

Albert Lautman - Mathematics, Ideas, and the Physical Real
Fernando Zalamea - Peirce's Logic of Continuity: A Conceptual and Mathematical Approach
Fernando Zalamea - Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics
Mary Tiles - The Philosophy of Set Theory - An Historical Introduction to Cantor's Paradise
Brian Rotman - Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being
Brina Rotman - Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting
Brian Rotman - Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero
Brian Rotman - Ad Infinitum... The Ghost in Turing's Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In. An Essay In Corporeal Semiotics
Bob Clark - Wittgenstein, Mathematics, and World

Animals and Aesthetics

Elizabeth Grosz - Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art
Elizabeth Grosz - Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power
Raymond Ruyer - Neofinalism
Jakob von Uexküll - A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning
Richard Prum - The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - And Us
Adolf Portmann - Animal Forms and Patterns: A Study of the Appearance of Animals
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson - On Growth and Form
Andreas Wagner - Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates

Deleuze, the Digital, and Aesthetics

Aden Evens - Logic of the Digital
Claire Colebrook - Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics, and the Digital
Alexander Gallloway - The Interface Effect
Seb Franklin - Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic
Ronald Bogue - Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts
Anne Sauvagnargues - Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon
Anne Sauvagnargues - Deleuze and Art
Daniella Voss - Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas
Elizabeth Grosz - The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism

Agamben and Virno

Giorgio Agamben - What Is Real?
Giorgio Agamben - What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays
Giorgio Agamben - What Is Philosophy
Giorgio Agamben - Taste
Giorgio Agamben - The Use of Bodies
Giorgio Agamben - The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath
Giorgio Agamben - Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy
Giorgio Agamben - The Unspeakable Girl: The Myth and Mystery of Kore
Giorgio Agamben - The Fire and the Tale
Giorgio Agamben - The Adventure
Giorgio Agamben - Karman: A Brief Treatise on Action, Guilt, and Gesture
Paolo Virno - Essay on Linguistic Negation: For a Linguistic Anthropology
Paolo Virno - When the Word Becomes Flesh
Paolo Virno - A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life

Other

Wilfrid Sellars - Science, Perception, and Reality
Wilfrid Sellars - Naturalism and Ontology
Walter J. Ong - Orality and Literacy
Damien Cahill & Phillip Toner - Wrong Way: How Privatisation and Economic Reform Backfired
Etienne Balibar - Spinoza and Politics
Moria Gatens & Genevive Lloyd - Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present
Daniel Dor - The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology
Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Bruce Pascoe - Dark Emu
Miguel Sicart - Play Matters
Byung-Chul Han - Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese
Byung-Chul Han - The Agony of Eros

---

This was a super interesting year, where I kinda oscillated between the super abstract (math) and the super concrete (aesthetics), so as to get a better feel for the relation between the two. Not a great deal of politics or sociology this year, which is always a bit of a failing, so maybe this is something I can remedy next year. I think the path forward is going to consist in a bit more math - especially Wittgenstein - and after, possibly a project on gesture and language. In any case, happy reading for the New Year everyone! And of course:

Currently Reading: Jose Benardete - Infinity: An Essay on Metaphysics. This is a book I've heard credited for helping to revive analytic metaphysics, and also as having affinities with Deleuzian metaphysics, so I'm pretty hyped for it.

Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Non-Fiction by Brian Dillion
The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Oh right in 2018 I read:

The Heights of Despair by Cioran (reread)
Tears & Saints by Cioran (reread)
A Short History of Decay by Cioran (reread)
All Gall Is Divided by Cioran (reread)
The Temptation to Exist by Cioran (reread)
History and Utopia by Cioran (reread)
The Fall into Time by Cioran (reread)
The New Gods by Cioran (reread)
The Demiurge by Cioran (reread)
The Trouble With Being Born by Cioran(reread)
Drawn & Quartered by Cioran (reread)
Anathemas and Admirations by Cioran (reread)
The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai
Seibo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (reread)
Dark Money by Jane Mayer
A Hero Born by Jin Yong
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Donald Trump by Corey Robin
Satantango by László Krasznahorkai (and then watched the 7+ hr movie lol)
Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
The Trial by Kafka
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu
Capital volume 1 by Karl Marx (reread)
Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Capital volume 2 by Karl Marx

Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? — StreetlightX

Just got this, starting this after I finish Dillion's short book