{"id":1201,"date":"2010-02-18T11:08:25","date_gmt":"2010-02-18T16:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/02\/18\/readings\/"},"modified":"2010-02-18T11:08:25","modified_gmt":"2010-02-18T16:08:25","slug":"readings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/02\/18\/readings\/","title":{"rendered":"readings"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m reading, and being very impressed by, John Protevi’s recent book Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic<\/a>. The book brings together a lot of recent work on affect with the best of the cognitive sciences (embodied\/embedded\/distributive\/enactive cognition), complexity and nonlinear dynamical systems theories, and a strong grounding in philosophy, from Aristotle to Kant to Deleuze and Guattari. Protevi’s main source of strength is Deleuzian theory, and here he draws very much on Manuel Delanda’s efforts to synthesize Deleuze with complexity theory (as did his very good co-authored book on Deleuze and Geophilosophy<\/a>). But he also perceptively accounts for the strengths and weaknesses of these very differently rooted research\/theoretical programs as he tries to build a synthesis out of them — one that would account for affect (and affective cognition) at multiple levels of the “body politic,” from the neurophysiological to the subjective\/intersubjective and “up” to the civic, cultural, “populational” and societal. Chapter One is a gem of summative concision. I haven’t gotten yet to the case studies — Terry Schiavo, the Columbine high school massacre, and Hurricane Katrina — but having read his earlier writing on Katrina, I expect these will be good.<\/p>\n

It’s the kind of book I would recommend for a reading group (graduate class or online cross-blog sort of thing). Others in that category might include Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things<\/a> (which I’ve so far only read bits and pieces of that have appeared elsewhere); John Mullarkey’s excellent, perhaps even field-defining Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image<\/a>, which I recommend to anyone interested in film, the image, and philosophy; and Sean Esbj\u00f6rn-Hargens’ and Michael E. Zimmerman’s Integral Ecology<\/a> if only to see where they succeed and where they fail in synthesizing the various extant forms of ecophilosophy. I’ve yet to get to the latter book, and reviews I’ve seen have been mixed, which isn’t surprising given the authors’ almost devotional indebtedness to integral philosopher Ken Wilber (quite a shift from Zimmerman’s earlier Heideggerian\/Continentalist work). But we need syntheses like it, so I expect the effort, even if flawed, to be valuable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m reading, and being very impressed by, John Protevi’s recent book Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. The book brings together a lot of recent work on affect with the best of the cognitive sciences (embodied\/embedded\/distributive\/enactive cognition), complexity and nonlinear dynamical systems theories, and a strong grounding in philosophy, from Aristotle to Kant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[203,688977],"tags":[4427,16861,4426],"class_list":["post-1201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academe","category-geo_philosophy","tag-affect","tag-geophilosophy-2","tag-theory"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s4IC4a-readings","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1023,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/01\/23\/geophilosophy\/","url_meta":{"origin":1201,"position":0},"title":"geophilosophy","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 23, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The term \"geophilosophy\" is intended here in a nod both to Aldo Leopold's idea of \"Thinking like a mountain,\" which I take as a provocation (what, or how, does a mountain think?) rather than a declaration of identity (\"I'm the one who speaks for the mountain\") and, secondly, to Gilles\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1227,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/04\/02\/deleuzeguattari-and-ecology-review\/","url_meta":{"origin":1201,"position":1},"title":"Deleuze\/Guattari and Ecology (review)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 2, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Seems someone else beat me to reviewing Bernd Herzogenrath's anthology Deleuze\/Guattari and Ecology for Deleuze Studies, and the reviews editor failed to tell me that (which he must have known for a few months now; I hope that's not common practice for them). In any case, things like that happen,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1180,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/01\/16\/ecology-deleuzetarkovsky-the-time-image\/","url_meta":{"origin":1201,"position":2},"title":"ecology, Deleuze\/Tarkovsky, & the time-image","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 16, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Gilles Deleuze's cinema books make for difficult reading, and if one is to make headway into them, it helps not only to know something about Bergsonian philosophy, Piercian semiotics, and the history of film, but also to have clips at hand of the films Deleuze discusses. Fortunately, Corry Shores has\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1056,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/04\/12\/deleuze-whitehead-bergson\/","url_meta":{"origin":1201,"position":3},"title":"Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 12, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Keith Robinson's introduction to the collection Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections, just published by Palgrave Macmillan, provides an excellent and much needed overview of the reception histories of these three thinkers. Robinson's contextualization of them within the analytical and continental philosophical traditions makes clear why each has been marginalized or\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1016,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/01\/13\/why-deleuze\/","url_meta":{"origin":1201,"position":4},"title":"why deleuze?","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 13, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Not because of his convoluted language, which entices and charms the converted but puts off others (though linguistic innovation is a way to provoke new thinking), nor the ways some of his (and Guattari's) concepts get taken by their followers into a celebratory Mad Max style of desert anarchism (though\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1054,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/04\/11\/after-1968-the-blessedness-of-the-buddho-spinozan\/","url_meta":{"origin":1201,"position":5},"title":"‘After 1968’ & the blessedness of the Buddho-Spinozan","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"There's a wealth of material in post-marxist and poststructuralist political philosophy to be found at the After 1968 web site, which documents a series of seminars and lectures held in Maastricht over the last few years. You can find texts by Agamben, Deleuze, Badiou, Ranciere, Baudrillard, Negri, Derrida, Nancy, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}