anyone who's ever read the Larval Subjects blog, this is Levi Bryant's long-awaited book on Deleuze's Difference and Repetition.
i'm thinking i'll pick it up sometime soon, maybe in the fall when money's more abundant.
if anyone looks into it, please email me and tell me what you think....

bout damn time too.

Quoted: Hillary Rodham Clinton ended her historic campaign for the presidency on Saturday and told supporters to unite behind rival Barack Obama, closing out a race that was as grueling as it was groundbreaking.

I read Junot Diaz's first book, a collection of short stories called 'Drown' in a course about 5 years ago, and liked it quite a bit.

i just now found out that his recently-released first novel called "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (2007) just walked off with the Pulitzer prize. not bad for a first novel.
if i have time, who knows when, i'd like to check it out. his complicated sense of race, both in an urban setting and in a historical setting, makes his work interesting.

Quoted: Amazon.com: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Junot Díaz: Books
from a review online:
"...Junot Diaz's dark and exuberant first novel makes a compelling case for the multiperspectival view of a life, wherein an individual cannot be known or understood in isolation from the history of his family and his nation.Oscar being a first-generation Dominican-American, the nation in question is really two nations. And Dominicans in this novel being explicitly of mixed Taíno, African and Spanish descent, the very ideas of nationhood and nationality are thoughtfully, subtly complicated.
The various nationalities and generations are subtended by the recurring motif of fukú, the Curse and Doom of the New World, whose midwife and... victim was a historical personage Diaz will only call the Admiral, in deference to the belief that uttering his name brings bad luck (hint: he arrived in the New World in 1492 and his initials are CC). By the prologue's end, it's clear that this story of one poor guy's cursed life will also be the story of how 500 years of historical and familial bad luck shape the destiny of its fat, sad, smart, lovable and short-lived protagonist. The book's pervasive sense of doom is offset by a rich and playful prose that embodies its theme of multiple nations, cultures and languages, often shifting in a single sentence from English to Spanish, from Victorian formality to Negropolitan vernacular, from Homeric epithet to dirty bilingual insult."

same as last dot. just keeping track of it.
and more props to dubya.

although, now that i read it, this remark from the blurb makes me want to read this like right now:
"Johnston develops a transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity—in short, an account of how more-than-material forms of subjectivity can emerge from a corporeal being."

this whole question of how the 'incorporeal' character of thought relates to the dimension of the corporeal has been at the forefront of my thinking lately. that and the Hen-Panta of Ferrera's face.

Quoted: Amazon.com: Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (SPEP): Adrian Johnston: Books

anyone read this?

just bought a copy off amazon. i've read some montag on Althusser, and he's usually pretty on the spot.

Quoted: Amazon.com: Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries: Warren Montag: Books

anyone read this?

Quoted: "Anyone who has ever gamely tried and failed to absorb, enjoy, and--especially--understand the complex works of Schoenberg, Mahler, Strauss, or even Philip Glass will allow themselves a wry smile reading New Yorker music critic Alex Ross's outstanding The Rest Is Noise. Not only does Ross manage to give historical, biographical, and social context to 20th-century pieces both major and minor, he brings the scores alive in language that's accessible and dramatic.

Take Ross's description of Schoenberg's Second Quartet, "in which he hesitates at a crossroads, contemplating various paths forming in front of him. The first movement, written the previous year, still uses a fairly conventional late-Romantic language. The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory Scherzo, unlike any other music at the time. It contains fragments of the folk song 'Ach, du lieber Augustin'--the same tune that held Freudian significance for Mahler. For Schoenberg, the song seems to represent a bygone world disintegrating; the crucial line is 'Alles ist hin' (all is lost). The movement ends in a fearsome sequence of four-note figures, which are made up of fourths separated by a tritone. In them may be discerned traces of the bifurcated scale that begins Salome. But there is no longer a sense of tonalities colliding. Instead, the very concept of a chord is dissolving into a matrix of intervals."

Armed with such a detailed aural roadmap, even a troglodyte--or a heavy metal fan--can explore these pivotal works anew. But it's not all crashing cymbals, honking tubas, and somber Germans stroking their chins. Ross also presents the human dramas (affairs, wars, etc.) behind these sweeping compositions while managing, against the odds, to discuss C-major triads, pentatonic scales, and B-flat dominant sevenths without making our eyes glaze over. And he draws a direct link between the Beatles and Sibelius. It's no surprise that the New York Times named The Rest Is Noise one of the 10 Best Books of 2007. Music nerds have found their most articulate valedictorian. --Kim Hughes"

no idea if it's any good. anyone looked at it?

Quoted: Amazon.com: Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere: Rethinking Emancipation (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy): Books: Nick Hewlett by Nick Hewlett

this book looks pretty cool.

From the back cover:

"Opposing both popular “neo-Spinozisms” (Deleuze, Negri, Hardt, Israel) and their Lacanian critiques (Zizek and Badiou), Surplus maintains that Lacanian psychoanalysis is the proper continuation of the Spinozian-Marxian line of thought. Author A. Kiarina Kordela argues that both sides ignore the inherent contradictions in Spinoza’s work, and that Lacan’s reading of Spinoza– as well as of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Wittgenstein –offers a much subtler balance of knowing when to take philosophers at face value and when to read him against himself. Moving between abstract theory and tangible political, ethical, and literary examples, Kordela traces the emergence of “enjoyment” and “the gaze” out of Spinoza’s theories of God, truth, and causality, Kant’s critique of pure reason, and Marx’s pathbreaking application of set theory to economy. Kordela’s thought unfolds an epistemology and an ontology proper to secular capitalist modernity that call for a revision of the Spinoza-Marx-Lacan line as the sole alternative to the (anti-)Platonist tradition. "

Levi Bryant had some good things to say about it, which makes me want to read it even more.
see his discussion of it here:
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/urplus-spinoza-lacan/