Finished Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

Started The Tunnel by William H. Gass.

The Afghanistan Papers, Craig Whitlock

Fear and trembling by Søren Kierkegaard.

September readings:

• Classical Indian Philosophy, P. Adamson & J. Ganeri
• Razorblade Tears: A Novel, S.A. Cosby
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/05/books/s-a-cosby-razorblade-tears-crime-novelist.html
• Agon, J. Harper & S. Nittner (ttrpg)
• Exterminate All The Brutes, Sven Lindqvist

Classical Indian Philosophy, P. Adamson & J. Ganeri — 180 Proof

So interesting indeed :up: :flower: it is important to look into Asian philosophy sometimes.

September re-readings

In honor of Stanislaw Lem's 100th:
• A Perfect Vacuum
• His Master's Voice
• The Investigation
• Solaris
• Summa Technologiae

Arundhati Roy - The Cost of Living
Arundhati Roy - The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile
Hito Steyerl - The Wretched of the Screen

:fire:

Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead

The Wisdom of Myth, Luc Ferry. Amazon for a look.

https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Myths-Mythology-Change-Learning/dp/0062215450/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+wisdom+of+myth%2C+ferry&qid=1631764021&s=books&sr=1-1

Available second hand, cheap. Ordered, not yet read. But I like Luc Ferry; looking forward to the book!

Neuromancer, William Gibson

I like Luc Ferry — tim wood

He served as the Minister of Education under Sarkozy's presidency. I found him by and large ok, a bit old style.

Dead souls. Nikolai gogol.
Brother karazamov. Fyodor dostoevsky.
Through the looking glass. Lewis carroll.
Problems of dostoevskys poetics. Mikhail bhaktin.

Bhaktin is a philosopher whose work on Language is far far better than any of the famous philosophers or linguists.
You could solve all the pseudo epistemological and ontological problems with his dialogical concept.

I read it when it came out, listening to Sonic Youth on cassette. Ah, cyberpunk days...

New Essays on The A Priori - Boghossian and Peacocke
Does God Exist? - A. E. Taylor

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins.

The book is wild, loving it.

Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom

Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski - People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
Charles W. Mills - The Racial Contract (@180 Proof, he passed away this week :sad: )
Jon Roffe - Abstract Market Theory

@Maw

Charles W. Mills - The Racial Contract (@180 Proof, he passed away this week :sad: ) — StreetlightX

I'd meant to meet him on one of my next visits to NYC through a friend who happened to have been Mill's student decades ago – the pandemic has delayed my travels, and now he's gone. Thanks for letting me know. Excellent read. In his honor I'll soon start on

Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race

I've had the book for some time, a follow-up to The Racial Contract, which is long overdue for study. Coincidently, I've been reading Exterminate All The Brutes by Sven Lindqvist which I very much recommend as sort of a massive 'historical case study' of Mills' thesis.

That's very sad to hear, he was quite young to pass too, I very much enjoyed Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism several years back

"Within these racial polities, the Racial Contract manifests itself in white resistance to anything more than the formal extension of the terms of the abstract social contract (and often to that also). Whereas before it was denied that non-whites were equal persons, it is now pretended that non-whites are equal abstract persons who can be fully included in the polity merely by extending the scope of the moral operator, without any fundamental change in the arrangements that have resulted from the previous system of explicit de jure racial privilege.

...Nonwhites then find that race is, paradoxically, both everywhere and nowhere, structuring their lives but not formally recognized in political/moral theory. But in a racially structured polity, the only people who can find it psychologically possible to deny the centrality of race are those who are racially privileged, or whom race is invisible precisely because the world is structured around them, whiteness as the ground against which the figures of other races those who, unlike us, are raced-appear. The fish does not see the water, and whites do not see the racial nature of a white polity because it is natural to them, the element in which they move. As Toni Morrison points out, there are contexts in which claiming racelessness is itself a racial act".

Gosh it's like the debates haven't changed changed for two and a half decades.

This is why James Baldwin's almost six decades old essays are still, perhaps even more, relevant in America today.

I was just thinking I need to read some Baldwin after this!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B99wZK39VTQ
(a film review + some background)

I've seen it. Really fantastic.

:cool: JB's essays are even more intense yet crystal clear.

@Maw @StreetlightX

Charles W. Mills 1951-2021
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-house-that-charles-built

Having just finished the book, it's like a retrospective embarrassment to me that I haven't come to it sooner - that it took his death to kick my butt to read. I mean -

"By recognizing it as a political system, the "Racial Contract" voluntarizes race in the same way that the social contract voluntarizes the creation of society and the state. It distinguishes between whiteness as phenotype/genealogy and Whiteness as a political commitment to white supremacy, thus making conceptual room for "white renegades" and "race traitors." ... Correspondingly, the "Racial Contract" demystifies the uniqueness of white racism (for those who, understandably, see Europeans as intrinsically White) by locating it as the contingent outcome of a particular set of circumstances ... In a sense, the "Racial Contract" decolorizes Whiteness by detaching it from whiteness, thereby demonstrating that in a parallel universe it could have been Yellowness, Redness, Brownness, or Blackness. Or, alternatively phrased, we could have had a yellow, red, brown, or black Whiteness: Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations."

Absolutely killer. The dissent article is a fitting tribute.

"[ ... ] Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations." ~C.W. Mills — StreetlightX

:fire: