Metal Reviews

The God Disillusion

nice book.. though, I don't agree a 100% with Richard Dawkins because I only think he's partly right with some of his explanations concerning various innate phenomenons. However, he may have it all covered with his meme theory, even though i don't understand the point of it

But I don't disagree with his opinions as such

Never quite understood what the anti-Dawkins backlash is about. Just to prove my awesomeness, currently enjoying Life After Death by Deepak Chopra.... very interesting stuff.

I've always avoided him due to being labeled post-modernism. I've been eyeing it at the book store though. Is his writing style that dense because I might check him out sometime soon?

Re-reading Streetcar Named Desire for English class

I do love it... I'm a huge fan of Tennessee Williams. Even some of his later, more obscure plays are pretty good.

Joel Kupperman - Six Myths about the Good Life
Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway
a book about writing fiction
some World War One poetry

schoolschoolschool

Not that I know much at all about philosophy, but I think he gets labelled post-modernism because he is so eclectic in what he writes about. He is always drawing in pop culture references to discussions about Lacan or Heidegger or whoever.

But, really, it seems to me he is quite the opposite of po-mo. The argument in this book is that the world has taken a wrong turn by rejecting all-embracing universalist theories, which are labelled "totalitarianism", in favour of "democratic" mediocrity. He says that although Mao, Lenin etc. turned out badly, there was a positive "redemptive" moment expressed in the violent overthrow of the old order, which needs to be returned to by modern philosophers.

Like I said, I haven't actually read it yet, but from just flicking through it looks pretty readable, and definitely provocative and interesting, at the least.

Sounds pretty good. It just moved up in my purchasing order. I was always turned off by how much of his work seemed to be based on Lacan, which I have no understanding of. Seems like an interesting idea though.

In all honesty, he is probably labeled post-modern just because people would rather not give any respect to a Marxist. Labels like post-marxist or post-modern attempt to marginalize Marx. I just read a book about this phenomenon where the liberal left in academics values Heidegger, a sworned in Nazi, over Marx who has influenced everything from feminism to workers' rights to colonial emancipation, mainly the things which the Left is supposed to stand for.

Yeah, I don't have the first clue about Lacan, but hopefully I'll pick something up about it from reading this.

Yeah, Zizek seems to talk a lot about Heidegger in this one... he calls him signing up to Nazism "a right step in the wrong direction", I guess trying to say that he was right to embrace a more universal ideology, but that he chose the wrong one. Although, not haveing read it yet I can't say for sure what the deal with that is.

Part of me wanting to read it mainly comes from him talking about more actively political revolutionary figures and the way they have been interpreted as these monsters. I don't think he really disputes that interpretation in the case of people like Mao, but he just says that the movements they led were some kind of redemptive breakthrough even if they turned out to be "lost causes" (hence the title). The most interesting for me is him talkng about someone like Robespierre, where a better case can be made that he has been unfairly portrayed by historians.

Speaking of Robespierre, there was an excellent book I read once about how the French revolution went from its beginnings to the bloodbath it became. Completely forgotten the title, though.

http://www.lacan.com/zizmaozedong.htm

I just skimmed this essay which is Zizek on Mao and it is pretty interesting. If your book has anything to do with how the small shouldn't be afraid of the big because the big will eventually topple then it should be awesome. In the essay, he describes how Lenin had to betray Marx in the same way Paul betrayed Jesus to spread the good news. I'm not sure how I feel about that analogy.

Universal ideologies are sometimes just as scary as mediocre compromises but I'd have to know his argument to really argue against that. I generally ignore the revolutionaries for the intellectuals but with learning about Gramsci and Lenin more I'm gaining some respect for them. Zizek would be interesting to read for me.

Ah yes, that Mao one is the only other thing of Zizek's I've read. I believe this book (from looking at the subjects covered in the index and the blurb alone) is in some respects a greatly expanded version of that; mainly in the sense that it is highly critical of modern anti-capitalists who complain about the economic injustices of globalisation without linking it to a wider emancipatory struggle a la Lenin, or even a la Mao. In fact, they adopt a posturing and shallow anti-imperialism (or even more simplistically anti-Americanism, e.g. Chavez) but are actually simply hoping for a slightly more progressive rearrangement of capitalism itself.

Yeah, the Lenin thing is quite uncomfortable for more orthodox Marxists, because it prevents them from being able to explain away the USSR with fairly simple lines; "oh, Lenin did it the wrong time" etc.

Some of the stuff written by and about the revolutionaries sometimes seems pretty irrelevant now, I guess. Like a lot of the stuff about disciplined vanguard parties etc. in Lenin. Does it really have much relevance outside its original context? But it's still really fascinating and important IMO to study those movements and the truth of them. History and Revolution by Haynes and Wolfreys was a good collection of essays which talked about the conservative interpretations of revolutionary episodes in the past. Particularly the French one; it's commonly presented as being the bloodthirsty workers that caused all the violence and ruined a good civilised bourgeois liberal political transition. Whereas, this book argues that the radical left of the French revolution was the progressive side, abolishing slavery and empire, which was ultimately betrayed and those things reinstated when the liberals got back in charge with Napolean etc.

Another cool book on the French Revolution is "Vive la Revolution" by Mark Steel- who is a British socialist comedian. It's meant to be funny, but is also worth reading as a social history. You can hear him giving his lecture on it here. Pretty good but some references to brit politicians non-brits might not get.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=fiST1oTmeoc

Glad you're enjoying Deepak Chopra, Zad. Even though I disagree with him on some things (some of his views of Jesus are just bizarre), I find a lot of his spiritual philosophy quite compelling.

Anyway, I'm in the middle of Nothing Is Impossible by Christopher Reeve. Excellent book. Even though I ultimately disagree with him on some things like embryonic stem cell research, reading this book certainly made me better understand where people like Reeve are coming from with their views. It's also interesting to see how, despite being this big shot celebrity, Christopher Reeve was actually quite the family man in real life. And you can see that he really cared about the well-being of Dana and his children, even during his extensive treatment (which cost them a lot of time, money and energy and caused them a lot of stress/worry).

I love how we're discussing this book, neither of us having read it.

The book I just finished Wars of position described not only how critical theory and the Left focused on Heidegger to much but also post-colonialism without Marx or by pseudo-revolutionaries/whiny ass anti-capitalists. The book had good ideas but was awful to read by doing detailed case studies on advanced, advanced texts which I hadn't read. Antonio Negri, a post-marxist, and Hardt wrote a book, Empire, about how the revolution has already happened and we just need to embrace post-industrial society. That idea makes me look down upon Negri. Gramsci called these anti-capitalists and people like Negri "Southern Intellectuals", something about Italians from the southern part of the country being bourgeois but complaining about other bourgeois. Lucid enough, hopefully since I'm a little tired?

Finally starting Atlas Shrugged. It fucking scares me. It's been sitting there like a log of wood. 1200 pages or something. Fuck.

Man that book sucks.

Been re-reading Bakker's The Darkness That Comes before, since his new book comes out in a couple weeks. Also a shitload of stuff for school.

wut. I've heard a billion times that it's awesome.

Lots of people like to suck Ayn Rand's cock (particularly objectivists and super capitalists) but I thought it was badly written, overlong, and especially annoyingly didactic. Thank you Ayn Rand for telling us through your characters that communism is bad and objectivism good over and over and over and over and over and over for 1,200 fucking pages.

Ya, I really dislike Ayn Rand. But see what you think, of course.

I'm not exactly fond of capitalism myself but I can entertain an idea that I don't accept. I'm not a communist either. These two most popular economical systems that we humans could produce in our thousands of years are both full of fail. Yay!

I'm hoping this book can give me a new perspective. I like the "lone wolf" idea that she defends. I'd like to be a more selfish person dedicated to my own self improvement. Yeah I suck.

I started another book of hers once, and got about a page in before throwing it across the room. The most annoying writer ever? And that was before the political stuff started.

Sort of!

I never read that Negri and Hardt book, although I saw it on shelves a lot and considered getting it from time to time. Hardt actually just wrote this essay to introduce a collection of letters and speeches by Thomas Jefferson. I only read about 1 page flicking through it in the shop, but it was all about how Jefferson belongs in the same tradition as Marx/Lenin/Mao etc. Quite interesting, although I'm not sure how much of it I'd really accept if I read it.