Monthly Archive for November, 2011

Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 92nd Street Y, New York

Published on November 30, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Shailja Patel at 3quarksdaily.com…

Rockstar goddess of postcolonial studies. Leading feminist Marxist scholar of our time. Gadfly of subaltern studies: her seminal paper, “Can The Subaltern Speak?” seeded a thousand dissertations. Irreverent, iconoclastic, unfailingly taboo-busting, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a study in highwire intellectual risk-taking. As University Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, one of the world’s most elitist academic institutions, she trains upper-class graduate imaginations for epistemological performance. At the other end of the global spectrum, she has, for three decades, pursued the painstaking, backbreaking project of creating and sustaining schools for rural children in Western Bengal.

I want to understand something about bypassing the necessity of good rich people solving the world’s problems. Good rich people are dependent on bad people for the money they use to do this. And the good rich people’s money mostly goes to bad rich people. Beggars receive material goods to some degree and remain beggars. My desire is to produce problem solvers, rather than solve problems. In order to do this, I must continue to teach teachers, current and future, with devotion and concentration, at the schools that produce the good rich people – Columbia University – and the beggars, seven unnamed elementary schools in rural Birbhum, a district in West Bengal. This work cannot be done with an interpreter, and India is multilingual. I must understand their desires, not their needs, and with understanding and love try to shift them. That is education in the humanities. (Spivak, 2010) More…

A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary by Voltaire – review

Published on November 29, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Nicholas Lezard at The Guardian…

In three years it will be the 250th anniversary of the publication of this incendiary work. I hope suitable festivities are being planned. I cannot think of any political work this old which survives modern scrutiny so well – not so much because it contains essential truths, but because it is still such fun to read. Dangerous fun, that is: it’s like being in the presence of a particularly enraged alternative comedian, an Enlightenment Bill Hicks, perhaps.
Readers opening the first edition and reading the first entry – on Abraham – would have raised an eyebrow at this: “The fact is that the seed of Ishmael has been infinitely more favoured by God than the seed of Jacob. Both races have in turn produced thieves; but the Arab thieves have been prodigiously superior to the Jewish thieves.” Any reader consoling him- or herself at the time with the thought that this is just antisemitism of a particularly broad kind is not reading properly: this is a declaration, as it were, that nothing in the following pages is going to be treated as sacred. Everything is about to get a good kicking, and irony will be piled upon irony. More…

Our Zombies, Ourselves

Published on November 28, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Alix Ohlin on Colson Whitehead and the undead at Los Angeles Review of Books…

In Zuccotti Park on Halloween, protesters dressed up as zombies in suits, eyes vacant and deranged, fake blood and money dripping from their lips. A directive had been sent from Occupy Wall Street organizers:

Everyone come dressed as a corporate zombie! This means jacket and tie if possible, white face, fake blood, eating Monopoly money, and doing a slow march, so when people come to work on Monday … they see us reflecting the metaphor of their actions.Oh, the insult of this metaphor — of all the monsters to pick! Zombies aren’t sexy and glamorous like vampires, or changeable and muscular like werewolves. They represent appetite run amok, violence without thought, and total abdication of the individual will. The undead are not just monstrous in their greed, but unreflective in it. You can’t argue with them. More…

Famous Authors’ Harshest Rejection Letters

Published on November 23, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From the Atlantic…

It’s hard to imagine that the definitive icons of literature could have been subject to the same iciness of the high-gated publishing-house “no” machines that we know all too well. Of course, even down-to-earth publishers can miss a great work sitting on their desks; with thousands of titles of varying merit clogging editors’ mailboxes, it’s impossible to skim every page of every slush-pile manuscript, let alone give it its proper consideration. Furthermore, some of our most adored geniuses churned out well-spotted crap before maturing into the artists we remember.
Prescience is no hard science, but hindsight can be a kick in the shins nonetheless, especially for the editors who sent these rejection letters to writers who would later become the bestselling, influential giants of their day—and ours. More…

Neuroscience Challenges Old Ideas about Free Will

Published on November 22, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Gareth Cook at Scientific American…

Celebrated neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga explains the new science behind an ancient philosophical question

Do we have free will? It is an age-old question which has attracted the attention of philosophers, theologians, lawyers and political theorists. Now it is attracting the attention of neuroscience, explains Michael S. Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of the new book, “Who’s In Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain.” He spoke with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

Cook: Why did you decide to tackle the question of free will?

Gazzaniga: I think the issue is on every thinking person’s mind. I can remember wondering about it 50 years ago when I was a student at Dartmouth. At that time, the issue was raw and simply stated. Physics and chemistry were king and while all of us were too young to shave, we saw the implications. For me, those were back in the days when I went to Church every Sunday, and sometimes on Monday if I had an exam coming up! More…

Discourse Analysis: A Social-Philosophical Grounding

Published on November 19, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Discourse Analysis: A Social-Philosophical Grounding by Kyrkos Doxiadis is now available as part of  The Humanities series.

Michel Foucault once expressed his disagreement with the “breach” between social history and the history of ideas brought about by the assumption that the former is concerned with how people act without thinking, while the latter analyses how people think without acting. “People both think and act”, he says, by way of a sarcasm consisting in having to point out the obvious.

While in complete agreement with Foucault on this as on several other issues, the author of this book chooses to emphasise another “obviousness” of at least equal importance: that thoughts and (material) actions may well be inseparable in all fields of human/social existence, but they are not the same thing. The maintenance of the distinction between subjectivity/conceptuality on one hand and objectivity /materiality on the other constitutes a fundamental premise for the book’s two closely interrelated goals: to criticise certain extremely influential currents of contemporary thought more or less loosely associated with “poststructuralism” and/or  “postmodernism” which, each in its own fashion, have served to undermine this distinction; and to provide a philosophical /theoretical grounding for the methodology of the social sciences known as “discourse analysis”. The importance of the latter is shown to consist in forming a methodological framework for a materialist critique that would escape both the economic reductionism of Marxism and the implicit (or manifest) idealism pertaining to all variations of Hegelianism.

Kyrkos Doxiadis was born in Athens in 1955. In 1986 he received a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Politics and Sociology of Birkbeck College, University of London. He is Professor of Social Theory with special reference to Communication at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the University of Athens.

Samuel Beckett’s Letters Reveal Roots of Resistance

Published on November 2, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Benjamin Ivry at The Jewish Daily Forward…

Although Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett is known for his tragicomically inert characters, he himself was an anti-Nazi activist during World War II. Unlike the ever-absent Godot, the bedridden vagrant protagonist of his novel “Molloy” or the despairing characters in his play “Endgame” who lack legs and the ability to stand, Beckett — though painfully shy and prone to melancholy — was a dynamic member of the French Résistance. His surprising wartime actions are detailed, if not fully explained, in the 2004 biography from Grove Press, “Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett”by James Knowlson.

Like his mentor, James Joyce, Beckett was unusually philo-Semitic among European modernist writers, and he joined the Résistance, Knowlson notes, soon after Joyce’s Jewish friend and amanuensis, Paul Léon, was arrested in Paris (Léon would later be murdered in Auschwitz). A fuller understanding of Beckett’s motivation for his pro-Jewish and anti-Nazi activism had to wait until two new books appeared. More…