The Shade of Kenneth

For some reason I tend to get lots of emails from people applying to Oxford around this time of year, and well 1. I'm just a doctoral candidate, I can't supervise your work, 2. Nobody here works on African or Chinese philosophy, or any Continental philosopher after existentialism

@mutualcreation What about them do you have in mind?

@saditious do you have opinions on Weil vs Nietzsche, Bataille

It looks like The Routledge Companion to Simone Weil finally has a page on the Routledge website and an official release date! I'm very excited for this to come out - it'll include my first book chapter (on Simone Weil and Italian Theory). routledge.com/The-Routledge-…

I'm considering submitting a paper challenging Horkheimer's criticisms of Montaigne for the Historical Materialism conference this year. Although I'm slightly concerned that it'll be too theoretical of a piece, or that anything I might say about it will already have been written.

@JoshuaLWatson Pannekoek is great!

But as soon as the wealth exceeds a certain level, it enables the owner to live from exploitation instead of his own work, modestly if he is a small rentier or entrepreneur, lavishly if he is one of the rich. ~Anton Pannekoek

New review just published online in the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books: Richard Gilman-Opalsky on Gabriel Rockhill's Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/22624_…

To be clear: Eliade is vastly factually incorrect for most of this book. Like all forms of fascism, his research fails to meet even the lowest standards of credibility. What is interesting is how he disguises that to make something utterly putrid and false seem true and noble.

I'm currently reading Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, and it's striking to me how he espouses his hideous fascist ideology, while at the same time trying very hard to appear as though he's giving a politically neutral account of the origins of religion. /1

I know this is not in any way a hot take - Eliade was a fascist. But it's interesting to see how fascists display their ideas to make them seem compelling. They usually won't say 'I'm a fascist,' but they will introduce distortions that show where they're coming from.

That, in a nutshell, is the theoretical core of the fascist ideology. Eliade doesn't scream it from the rooftops, but it is unmistakeably there in the way he explains the nature of the sacred and the (supposed) risks we face in losing our sense of it. /end

Would Degrowth be more popular among marxists if they called it “metabolic thrift”?

@JoshuaLWatson From speaking with Nadler, I know he follows Mori's argument for Spinoza's atheism. But Nadler's usual argument is that the difference between atheism and pantheism is that the former denies the validity of any reverential attitudes to nature (as Nadler argues is so for Spinoza).

@saditious It's an interesting form of atheism that says there is a necessarily existing, ultimate reality upon which all else depends and the knowledge of which is our highest good. I don't actually mind someone calling that atheism but is it just denying providence that merits the title?

It's 6 days until this book comes out and I am stoked for it

@14JUN1995 I'm not sure actually 🙃 Nadler has been picking this fight for many years now, but I think this book comes off the back of his more recent fights with Melamed over Spinoza's religion

@saditious At least you know you’ve got your finger on the pulse of Spinoza Studies

Parts of our new documentary... @longhaul_mag @virginia_worker @endnotesjournal @weareplanc @BristolAFed @CosmonautMag @Prada_Meinhof @prometheus_mag @as_a_worker @illwilleditions

@James_Martell_ I think he’s a good writer! So melodramatic, every little theological disagreement he somehow manages to claim is evidence of satanism in the Church of Rome

me after reading some Calvin for the first time