M-L-M Mayhem!

Considering that over a month has passed without any posting, I figure that I should write something so as to not lapse into obscurity.  Let's be clear: my job, not to mention my life in general, has temporarily appropriated my energy––I've had very little time to blog.  For example, I really want to continue that Terrorist Assemblages  series of reviews , but how can I do that when I'm spending half of the week re-reading 19th century continental philosophy so as to teach it (which means, very slowly with a bazillion reading notes so as to lead class discussion), let alone all of the things I'm doing outside of this job?  Hell, when I have free reading time these days I generally focus on fiction because at least it's a good break from my state of affairs. (A tangent: I just discovered that Ngugi wa Thiong'o has a son who writes hardboiled detective genre fiction with an anti-imperialist twist!  I'm thinking about reviewing the first on my arts-inclined blo...

Although we shouldn't be shocked that the limitations of identity politics has reached its nadir, it has definitely reached its point of self-destructing ignorance in the case of the recent furor over the name of the indie band Viet Cong .  As I've argued before, identity politics is the result of a valid impulse to deal with the problematic of sites of oppression that were not theorized by traditional marxism, and yet ended up becoming a set politics with serious limitations .  In the case of this Viet Cong "controversy" (which is also, to be honest, a hipster tempest in a tea cup, but still revealing), however, we have a case where an identity politics discourse is left in form but right in essence. To summarize: the band Viet Cong wanted to play a DIY art space in Toronto, "Double Double Land", and was told they couldn't because one of the artists who runs this site, Jon McCurley, found their name offensive.  He described the name as a "joke a...

A general update here, in lieu of posting the next piece of my Terrorist Assemblages  review, of things I've found interesting, or that I've been involved with, in recent weeks… Sticky Notes: so immediate! First of all, I've been reading a lot of The Worker's Spatula .  I don't know who is behind this website, but whoever they are they're fucking hilarious: it's kind of like an Onion  for the communist left, and thus requires an understanding of communism and the anti-capitalist left in general, to really get––perfect, then, for most of my readers.  I don't find all of their articles super funny, but most of them are.  And to be clear, when I say that "I don't find all of their articles super funny" I don't mean that I find the articles that poke fun at things connected to my set politics unfunny (i.e. like when they parodied Sison), because I actually find those things the most  funny: I truly like laughing at myself. More that,...

In my previous entries in this series I worried about Puar's eclecticism.  By this chapter, however, it seems as if she is beginning to centre her theoretical approach around Agamben, particularly his concept of the "state of exception."  While I don't think this enough to allow her to escape completely from the charge of eclecticism (because I think Agamben is also somewhat eclectic), or from the charge of a very narrow idealism (Agamben's focus and over-application of a Schmitt-inspired concept has always revealed an obsession of appearance over substance, an inability to cut down to the material foundation upon which both the state of exception and homo sacer  are dependent), it does permit a greater level of coherency. Earlier I worried that Puar's concept of homonationalism, though perhaps useful for most imperialist countries, was very US-centric.  Unfortunately this chapter confirms my fears about how the theory has been conceived as nationally spe...

This is the third part in my series of reflections on Jasbir K. Puar's Terrorist Assemblages .  The first part can be found here and the second here . The first chapter of Terrorist Assemblages is entitled "the sexuality of terrorism" and this immediately fills me with slight misgiving.  While I agree that, especially in light of this book's subject matter, it makes sense to examine "discourses of sexuality (and their attendant anxieties)––heterosexuality, homosexuality, queerness, metrosexuality, alternative and insurgent sexuality," I am not at all convinced that without these discourses, as Puar claims, "the twin mechanisms of normalization and banishment that distinguish the terrorist from the patriot would cease to properly behave." (37) To my mind an imperialist project accumulates particular and secondary ideologies and discursive frameworks that are always contingent upon its social-historical context––that is, contingent upon the way im...

The following is part of a "Let's Read" series where I plan to blog, slowly and probably interspersed with other posts, about my reflections of Jasbir K. Puar's Terrorist Assemblages . This first of these posts, concerning the Preface and an explanation as to what this series is, can be found here .  Today I'm reflecting on the Introduction. Yes, every post in this series will most likely contain a variant of the book's cover. The fact that the Introduction is titled "homonationalism and biopolitics", combined with what Puar has already claimed about "biopolitics" in the Preface, is somewhat worrisome for a historical materialist who finds the entire category of "biopolitics" suspect.  Let's be clear: there is indeed something about the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics that is politically useful––it's even useful in the way that Agamben mobilizes it––but at the end of the day this strikes me as an avoidance of a ...