Break reading, or, how I learned to stop watching TV online and read every day

A while back, Adam Kotsko at An und fur sich, posed a question regarding what books you’d take if you had to be away from your library for a month. Since I’m leaving many of my philosophy books at my house on campus, I’m taking this question to mean “what books do you plan to read over break?” Looking back at my reply, since I’ve read one of the books already, don’t have the money to buy some I intended to, and have recently purchased a slew of other books, I feel the need to do an update.

For the sake of engaging my superego, I’ve decided to make an updated list of what I plan to read over my break, which will last for a little more than a month. I’m hoping to get a lot read, and had been looking forward to going home for a while, but the craziness of grad school applications has sapped some of that energy out of me. Nevertheless, in posting the list to my blog, I hope to put some pressure on myself to make it to a lot of these books.

Here is the list, which includes two books that I’m currently reading for book discussions:

• The Recognitions, William Gaddis
• Theology of Money, Philip Goodchild
• The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
• I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett
• The Time that Remains, Giorgio Agamben
• Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction, Leland de la Durantaye
• What I Believe, Jacques Ellul
• Anatheism, Richard Kearney
• Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Louis Mackey
• The Manual of Detection, Jebediah Berry

Eight books is pretty ambitious, but two are novels and two are ongoing projects. What I’m really hoping to do is dig into the Agamben stuff; if I have a lot of time to dedicate to Kearney, that will be a bonus.

Does anyone have plans for reading over the next month?

Kearney and Anatheism: a preview?

Readers interested in Kearney’s recent book, Anatheism: Returning to God After God, might be interested in this essay in the (open access?) journal Analecta Hermeneutica. The article has just come to my attention, so I have not had the chance to read it yet, but given this abstract, and the little I’ve read about the book, it sounds like this article might be a condensed form of some of the arguments that Kearney presents in the book.

Here is the abstract:

The basic thesis of this essay is that several of our great modern novelists–Proust, Joyce and Woolf–epitomize a singularly sacramental imagination which celebrates the bread and wine of the everyday. The author suggests that a specific phenomenology of incarnation, adumbrated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Julia Kristeva, may help us discern the grammar of transubstantiation operating in these sacramental accounts of the sensible universe. The paper begins with a brief sketch of such a phenomenology before moving on to consider in more detail certain eucharistic epiphanies in these three modernist novels. The author examines his findings in the light of a new hermeneutics of the religious imaginary, advanced by Paul Ricoeur and others, will proposes the paradigm of ana-theism as a way of returning the sacred to the profane.

The article is called “Sacramental Imagination: Eucharists of the Ordinary Universe,” and can be found in the link above. More information on Kearney’s book, Anatheism, can be found here.

Sovereignty and American conservative logic

Joshua Delpech-Ramey, over at Dark Horse, has written a stunningly lucid post on the kind of thinking that pervades conservative thought in America. The post is several months old, but I have just run across it tonight. The post is a pointed response to the vilification of Obama’s policies by conservatives, whether they are the Fox News type or the Ron Paul type (indeed, what’s really the difference?). If anything, the kicking-and-screaming reaction has only been amplified in the months since Joshua’s post. What he analyzes so well is the core, often unconscious assumptions that make reactionary conservatism possible, and, incidentally, predictable (although he does not make this point explicit in the post, it bears out if you watch one god-forsaken “episode” of the Glenn Beck program that aired after Joshua’s post).

Here is an excerpt:

There is only one kind of power in America, and it is the power that the conservative coalition tapped when it tapped the evangelicals.  That is the power of belief.  Not the power of belief in God, but the power of belief in a particular kind of theology, a kind of Calvinism.  Here, my torture is always deserved, my fate is always given in advance.  It is a heinous and Gnostic vision, one that is in fact a heresy, departing completely from the Christian notions of natural grace and of salvation by grace.  What American capitalism is, in fact, is a massive theological argument.  It is the playing out of a very specific, highly flexible and nuanced vision of the world, divided into clear winners and losers.  Helping one another out, trying to change the lot of those less fortunate, and so on, is not something that those most attached to the soul of America object to out of their own greed.  It is something they reject because it violates their most profound theological commitments, their vision of what life in this world, even in the universe, really amounts to.  This is a vision that is profoundly reassuring for, and builds tremendous solidarity among those who suffer most from it.  These are the average Americans who work hard and enjoy hard work and enjoy the sentimentalism and voyeruistic pleasures that come “after work” as if it were an after-sex cigarette.  Work is always a working out of guilt, and the sense of liberation at the end of the week is not so much physical as spiritual.  The right to the weekend and the pleasures of the weekend is the right to divine grace, to the presence of God.  And of course, that hideous presence takes the form of its truth:  mind-numbing spectatorship.  For indeed, all the God of Capital, the God of the American Soul, really does is watch it all go down, watch us build up talent and energy and desire and squander it in pointlessly violent competition.

The rest of this tremendous post can be found here. Readers who are interested in exploring the intersection between theology and politics would do well to follow the book event on Philip Goodchild’s Theology of Money that is currently taking place at An und fur sich. Goodchild is one of the exciting thinkers that Joshua mentions towards the end of the post, and the small part of Theology of Money that I’ve read thus far is certainly exciting and inspiring.

Reading in French

Next semester should be one of my lighter semesters as far as my academic workload goes, as I’m only taking 15 credits (and only 6 of these are for classes that will require a lot of effort). I’ve been wanting to at least start a language for grad school for a little while now, and the logical choice seems to be French. Now that I’m going to have an easier semester, I’m entertaining the idea of bearing down and getting a good start on French in the spring. I’ve looked around at various programs, and even entertained the idea of getting Rosetta Stone (someday I’d really like to be fluent in at least one language, and maybe spend some time abroad during grad school), but the one book that seems to stand out for me is Sandberg’s French For Reading. I’m wondering if anyone who has happened by the blog and is reading this has anything to say on the matter. It would be especially helpful if you can read French and/or have used Sandberg’s book.

Here is a link to the book on Amazon. What do you think? Should I order the Sandberg book and dedicate 10-15 hours a week to reading French? Do you have a better alternative for learning to read French (by alternative I don’t mean easier, but instead more efficient, etc)?

Introductory study on Paul Ricoeur

Throughout the semester, I’ve been working on an independent study on Paul Ricoeur. I’ve hopefully gained much more knowledge in the reading process than has come through in the paper, but last night I finished the first draft of my paper. I’m toying with the idea of throwing it up on the blog when I’m done with it, in case anyone would like to read it. My goal for the paper was roughly speaking to situate Ricoeur historically and explore some of his important influences while also charting some of his own insights. I quickly realized that this goal was too vague for one paper; obviously, such a task is better suited for a Ricoeur scholar who is writing a book for something like the Oxford Very Short Introduction Series.

In any event, writing the paper was still a beneficial process for me, and working on Ricoeur generally has been a good way to become exposed to some fields of philosophy that I haven’t had to chance to study as an undergrad, such as phenomenology. Lately, it has also led me to appreciate Gabriel Marcel, who was Ricoeur’s university professor and I suspect a pretty influential figure (at one time he hosted Friday evening philosophical discussions that were attended by Ricoeur, Wahl, Levinas, and Sartre among others). As chance would have it, Marcel is one of the figures I will be looking at closely in a seminar next semester.

The paper is historical/explanatory and probably somewhat boring if you know anything about Ricoeur, but I hope is a good introductory study that can give the reader some inroads into understanding where Ricoeur is coming from. I noticed while I was writing that there were multiple possibilities for smaller, more focused topics and I wish I had more time to keep reading and exploring these issues. One general area that I think some interesting work could be done in is reading Ricoeur alongside existentialist thinkers.

The paper is a little over 7100 words currently, and I’m meeting with my professor tomorrow to talk about some things that I might need to sharpen up, cut out, or work in. If anyone thinks they might want to read it (even if you know a lot about Ricoeur and want to critique me!), feel free to post a reply. I’ll probably end up putting it on the blog anyways, since the Augustine paper I uploaded a while ago still gets me a ton of hits.

Birthday books

Last year, while in England, I randomly decided to buy Barth’s Epistle to the Romans at Blackwell’s on my birthday. This year, I kept with the Romans theme and ordered Agamben’s The Time That Remains and also ordered Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. I’m excited to get to both books over break, and am especially looking forward to Agamben’s. This past spring, I decided to write a paper for my class on Pauline Literature on Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, which I found to be interesting, although I’m not sure I was able to get as much out of it as I would have had I been more familiar with Badiou. From what I’ve read, Agamben’s is more like a commentary that sticks to the text, unlike Badiou who jumps around quite a bit. I had looked into all of the various philosophical appropriations of Paul, but went with Badiou thanks to the advice of the posters over at An und fur sich. I was very impressed with Agamben after reading Infancy and History this summer, so hopefully his book on Romans won’t disappoint. Perhaps I will have the ambition to blog through it.

The theological reception of Darwinian evolution

In one of my classes we are discussing Jerry Coyne’s book Why Evolution is True, and during the discussion, I thought I remembered a book that deals with Darwin’s reception in the theological community in the nineteenth century. From what I remember, the author argued that the stereotypical hostile contrast between the two only came about due to the rise of fundamentalism in America. (This is all speaking from an American context, I think).

Anyways, I can’t remember the name of the book or the author, so I figured I’d post an inquiry to see if anybody knows. I know that this isn’t much to go on, but maybe someone who has more knowledge in this area can pick up on my vague recollections. I am fairly sure that this was a published dissertation. I distinctly remember stumbling across it on Amazon and writing it down, but that was a few years ago. I’ve done a little bit of looking, but am unsuccessful so far. Any help would be appreciated, even if it’s not directly related to the identity of the book or author.

Speechless

In keeping with the recent trend of insane Americal civil religious output, I offer this, courtesy of a friend’s facebook update.

I really hope that the author(s) of that entry are not as blinded to themselves as the entry makes it seem.

The gospel according to Woody Guthrie

As performed by Slaid Cleaves.

Amen.

Any French translators out there?

Please translate this. I need it for my independent study. Thanks.