M-L-M Mayhem!

I have another book coming out with Zero Books:  Methods Devour Themselves , co-written by one of my favourite SFF authors, Benjanun Sriduangkaew. As some of you might know I have been a long time SFF fan. On my lesser read "cultural" blog I have written more frequently about SFF, particularly the work of Sriduangkaew . Collaborating with her on a book that was a combination of story and essay was something of a dream come true. In fact, seeing my name along with hers on the cover of a publication was one of those SFF fan "squee" moments––but in a more professorial manner befitting of a jaded leftist and academic pushing 40. Methods Devour Themselves  is a conversation between Sriduangkaew's stories and my essays, where one begets the other and vice versa, a dialogical experience that becomes a liminal literature. The question guiding the book's structure was: what philosophical exploration will this story provoke and what story will be provoked by th

Finally, after many months and a lot of shameless self-promotion for my books, I edited the final chapter and epilogue of Right Against Right , formatted them, and made them available for download. I apologize for the 5 month delay; the editing and layout didn't take me that long so I have no idea why I waited so long. For those who might be unfamiliar with this serialized extended essay, Right Against Right  is my longer and more involved discussion on the problematic of free speech. It should be relevant in a context where the convention of free speech is being mobilized by reactionaries against progressives and when liberals, because of their dedication to this convention, support the former over the latter. It is also opposed to pseudo-progressive valorizations of the convention of free speech in that it argues that this convention is thoroughly liberal. (The prologue is available here , the first chapter here , and the second chapter here .) In the third chapter I exa

Now that a very busy semester is nearly over, my marking is almost finished, and I'm about to enter a jobless EI summer between contracts, I'm finally going to have time to do some reading that is not job related. Thinking about the amount of reading time that has opened up has also got me thinking about the books coming out this year that I've marked in my to read  lists. In lieu of a substantial post, and in an effort to stop this blog from being empty, I've decided to provide a list, in no particular order, of the soon-to-be-published books on my radar. 1. Ottawa and Empire by Tyler Shipley A year and a half ago I had the opportunity to help with some thesis-to-book editing of this upcoming work on Canadian imperialism in Honduras. The problem with doing this kind of editing on a piece-meal basis is that it is difficult to get a picture of the book as a whole since you're focused on the minutia. I'm looking forward to reading it as a completed coherent w

In To Our Friends  the Invisible Committee writes: "Historically, the anti-globalization movement will remain as the first attack of the planetary petty bourgeoisie against capital––a touching and ineffectual one, like a premonition of its coming proletarianization." (223-224) Back in 2014 I wrote The Communist Necessity  as a critique of the movementism that, following a sequence from the anti-globalization movement to Occupy, was enshrined as dogma amongst the first world left. The Invisible Committee's earlier work was a defense of this dogma. My argument then was that this movementism was indeed the manifestation of a petty-bourgeois politics on the part of a privileged first world social class that was about to face an economic crisis that would drag it down to the level of the proletariat. It is thus interesting that the Invisible Committee has since recognized the "ineffectual" nature of the opening chapter of movementism approaching closure with a "

Since the release of Continuity and Rupture  in December I have been busy hustling this book at launches in various cities. Thankfully it's doing quite well (or so it seems) and so far has garnered two favourable reviews: one by Hamayon Rastgar in Marx and Philosophy Review of Books , and one over at Tiger Manifesto . In lieu of editing, laying-out, and posting the final section of my Right against Right  extended essay, I've decided to blog a little (that is, shamelessly self-promote) on my book launch experiences to date. 1. Toronto Launch Hosted by Another Story Bookstore , this launch was packed with Toronto colleagues, comrades, and fellow travellers. Anjula Gogia, formerly the key organizer of the late Toronto Women's Bookstore , was the Another Story  events coordinator who made the event a success and I'm very thankful for her kindness and acumen. She was also generous in allowing me to have a panel where the politics of the book were discussed rather than

The Toronto launch of Continuity and Rupture  yesterday evening went better than expected. Indeed, I was quite surprised by the turn out and support. Although this is my second book, and so I should be a little familiar with launches, since C&R  was shorter than The Communist Necessity , less a polemic and more of a rigorous examination of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and the result of three years of writing and rewriting, I was far more anxious about its reception. Moreover, the DIY aesthetic of my first Toronto book launch (it happened in the back room of a bar) made it feel less official and thus less nerve-wracking than this one which happened in Toronto's oldest still operating independent book store. Hence, I feel that I need to deliver an extended thank-you to the people who made yesterday night's event a success. First of all, I want to thank Another Story Book Store  that took a chance on me and provided a comfortable launch space. Another Story  has been my favourit

Continuing the serial of my pamphlet on bourgeois free speech, I'm posting the link to its second chapter. This chapter concerns the boundaries of free speech, the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas, the supposed "black market of ideas" that is used in anti-censorship discourses, and the free market logic behind this liberal discourse. It leads up to the concept of the harm principle which will be discussed in the following chapter. Download Right Against Right (Chapter 2)

Since I'm leaving for holidays in a couple days, and will be away from my main computer until the new year, I figure I should put the next instalment of my free speech manuscript up before most of you lose interest. The other chapters require much more editing, and will probably take me some time to get to (I really hate editing because it's boring), but this one was less messy. In this first chapter, entitled "The Modern Discourse of Free Speech", I examine the vicissitudes of the contemporary discourse's foundations, tracing them to the watermark of liberalism: J.S. Mill's On Liberty . While it is the case that liberal theory is much more than Mill, my intention with this project was to focus on the most coherent aspects of the free speech discourse and this coherence is located in Mill. Indeed, key modern liberal theorists such as Rawls or Nussbaum are working within the problematic determined by Mill. (Nussbaum has been pretty open about this influence b

Once again, like the aborted Torsion and Tension manuscript, I have a project that did not make the roster of publication submission. Unlike Torsion and Tension , that I eventually withheld because I thought it was incomplete, I was unable to submit this particular (and smaller) manuscript for publication because it was initially meant to be part of a series of extended essays that I was unable to consolidate. The point of this series was to produce a number of very small books––the non-fiction equivalent of novellas or novelletes––that were designed to interrogate particular ruling class conventions. Here was the original proposed series blurb: Excavating Bourgeois Ideas is a series of extended essays intended to provide a radical “thinking through” of key ruling ideas of the ruling class. The point with each of these engagements is not to provide a thorough engagement of the subject matter but instead to promote a thoughtful but polemical introduction to the concepts in question

NOTE: I found this review in my drafts bin. It was written months ago when I read the book in question  and missing only a conclusion but, because of work/organizing/childcare, I must have forgotten about it. Indeed I only have a vague memory of writing it! In any case, I think some of the substance of this review has found its way into other things I've written but it's still worth putting out in full. It's worth reading this kind of critical scholarship in light of the *The Continent* controversy or, more productively, for writing the kind of politically charged literature that the left sorely needs. I recently finished Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the United States  and was not at all surprised by its quality and content. It is pretty much what I expected it to be, but I would be shocked if Dunbar-Ortiz had failed to live up to the expectations that she set in her previous work. While there is not a lot of new material that she

Lionel Shriver's recent complaint about charges of "cultural appropriation" has caused me to think again about the uses and abuses of the term. For those unfamiliar with Shriver's speech regarding cultural appropriation it goes something like this: at the Brisbane Writer's Festival the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin  and The Mandibles delivered a speech about " fiction and identity politics " that was about the right of authors to write and represent any culture they desired and that all charges of racism or cultural appropriation were attacks on a writer's essential right to free expression. Since the speech was driven by her anger at a particular criticism made of The Mandibles , it was in many ways a knee-jerk "how dare you tell me what I can write about" screed. In the context of recent debates in literary forums about the ethics of representation that have raised a number of important concerns (i.e. when and how is it justified

Long time readers and supporters! My upcoming book with Zero, Continuity and Rupture , will be released early December and I hope that all of you, if you possess the means, will support it so as to let progressive publishers know that the Maoist turn in theory/philosophy is not unpopular. Since many of you supported my last book with Kersplebedeb (and from what I heard there was recently a reading group dedicated to The Communist Necessity  in Austin) I figure you'll do the same with this one… But because it's larger and with Zero it's about three times more expensive in dead tree (around $30 instead of $10) but much cheaper as an ebook. Yeah, I sympathize with the wallet strain and I get that the pricing of this kind of book is a detriment to those it speaks to most directly. All I can say is that I hope that those of you who do possess the means, or can at least plan ahead to salvage the means, care enough about supporting this sort of politics to let Zero know that it&

I'm finally reading my doctoral supervisor's seminal work on Antonio Gramsci: Gramsci's Historicism  by Esteve Morera. Originally published in 1990 but rereleased in 2011 as a "Routledge Revival", Gramsci's Historicism was influential for a whole generation of Gramsci scholars (many of whom are now seen as Gramsci "authorities") who broke from post-modern and post-colonial appropriation of Gramsci in order to return to this thinker's Marxist roots. Although my doctoral work was not on Gramsci (it was a philosophical engagement with anticolonial theory in the present conjuncture of ongoing settler-colonialism ), Morera was the departmental Marxist who was happy to work with anyone doing radical philosophical work in this tradition. Since his brilliance was quiet and humble, he never tried to force his own work on me, or demand that I put more Gramsci in my project, but instead encouraged my thought in an organic manner. [My second reader, Lo

I finally returned to copy-editing the final chapter and epilogue of Torsion & Tension ; this will be the last entry in the series. As noted before, one of the main reasons I did not wish to pursue this project any further was because of my use of simple [propositional] logic symbology to represent some aspects of dialectical logic: not because the symbolization was simple (I wanted it to be as simple as possible so as to avoid obfuscation) but because, since it can be nothing more than an analogy, it doesn't really work. Even though I mentioned this multiple times in the text, the fact that we are dealing with two different logics––and thus two different senses of "contradiction"––means that maybe I should have avoided pseudo-formalizing the unity of opposites rather than just paying lip service to the fact that it was a "model". There are some things in this chapter, though, that I enjoyed rereading and that lurk beneath some of the other things I have b

As I've mentioned before I'm in the process of releasing my next book with Zero Books––the contract has been signed and the latest draft is with the editor––which is both unexpected and exciting. This particular book is one that I've been working on for over three years (off and on alongside other manuscripts, such as the abandoned one I've been serializing on this blog).  The Communist Necessity  actually came about because, while I was working on this longer manuscript, I was thinking about the need for a longer introduction about movementism, a polemical settling of accounts: hence the subtitle of TCN indicating it was a prolegomena. So the book in question is entitled Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain  and will hopefully be printed and available for purchase in the fall. I've even managed to obtain the endorsements of some pretty cool people, but I'll save the surprise of who read the drafts and agreed to write blurbs for the book

I'm slowly struggling through my reading list. That is, I'm getting to all those books that I've had on the back-burner for over a year, that I keep accumulating, but that I can only slowly get to due to: a) all the other books that have accumulated first; b) the stuff I have to read because of my job. Summers are always easier, because that's usually a period when I'm on EI, and so it won't be too long before I can eliminate a large swathe of my reading list. Generally my readings follow a particular instrumental hierarchy: texts connected to my organizational life (whether they be essays, position papers, or books), texts connected to my job (whether they be course material or student papers – argh Hegel's Philosophy of Right  again and hundreds of essays!), texts that are related to whatever paper or manuscript I'm working on, texts that follow the rule of my reading cue when this cue does not prioritize the previous categories. In any case, when it