“The End of American History As We Have Known It” (Thomas Bender)

La vie des idees interview with Thomas Bender (audio and text) is here.

One of the most illuminating examples of your approach seems to be the chapter on the Civil War. How does this apparently internal war between Northern and Southern States connect to global history?

Tom Bender: It is indeed such a very central American event, it seems implausible that it is part of something larger. But it actually is part of what we’ve just been talking about: it is a part of the construction of modern nation-state. And this is what the Republican Party understood: they were seeking a stronger, more centralized state than the Jacksonian period had had. And so we see, roughly around this time, that there are a number of these kinds of consolidations, they take different forms: there’s Germany, Italy, Japan, those are the most classic ones but there are other that are less obvious. Argentina is centralizing at the same time, and the world is starting to get divided up between those in nation-states and those in something else. 

Opinions on Guantanamo

Georgetown Law Brief has a collection of opinions/links on Guantanamo here.

Louiza Odysseos on Schmitt

Some of Louiza Odysseos’ articles available on her website here.

The New Republic (Finally) Reveals What Zizek “Really Believes”

UPDATE: Larval Subjects has an interesting discussion of the matter here and here.

An article from the next The New Republic on Zizek finally puts all things Zizek in their places and reveals the secret of “what Zizek really believes” – intrigued?

Last year the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek published a piece in The New York Times deploring America’s use of torture to extract a confession from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who is thought to have masterminded the attacks of September 11. The arguments that Zizek employed could have been endorsed without hesitation by any liberal-minded reader. Yes, he acknowledged, Mohammed’s crimes were “clear and horrifying”; but by torturing him the United States was turning back the clock on centuries of legal and moral progress, reverting to the barbarism of the Middle Ages. We owe it to ourselves, Zizek argued, not to throw away “our civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.” […]

Simplifying Kant: A Historical Lesson.

While lazily reading this and that, I came across Kant’s very nice letter to Reinhold in which he very politely thanks him for his attention to his philosophy and congratulates Reinhold for his successful simplification of his ideas:

Claude Lévi-Strauss Turns 100 Tomorrow.

Dig it, youngsters, born on November 28, 1908.

Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation

UPDATE: I also came across this beautiful 1768 edition of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica that you can download as a PDF as well. Plus some Leibniz.

Google Books has an old translation available in “Full Preview” with an option to download a whole book a PDF file – there is a number of cool old books there as well… Like 1846 William Smith biography of Fichte, for example.

Biology of Procrastination: Read It (Sometime When You Have Time)

From Scientific American:

Raymond, a high-powered attorney, habitually put off returning important business calls and penning legal briefs, behaviors that seriously threatened his career. Raymond (not his real name) sought help from clinical psychologist William Knaus, who practices in Longmeadow, Mass. As a first step, Knaus gave Raymond a two-page synopsis of procrastination and asked him to read it “and see if the description applied.” Raymond agreed to do so on a flight to Europe. Instead he watched a movie. He next vowed to read it the first night at his hotel, but he fell asleep early. After that, each day brought something more compelling to do. In the end, Knaus calculated that the lawyer had spent 40 hours delaying a task that would have taken about two minutes to complete.

Read the rest here.

Interview with Jean-Michel Rabaté

In November issue of Parrhesia, you can read this (PDF) interview with Jean-Michel Rabaté:

Q Getting acquainted with secondary literature before being able to write something yourself is perhaps an inherent characteristic of the Humanities. Do you regard this as a fruitful academic paradigm? Or can it have a sort of paralyzing effect on scientific thought? 

(Newish) Badiou on Financial Crisis

From Le Monde, via Infinite Thought (translated into English), to us: 

Telle qu’on nous la présente, la crise planétaire de la finance ressemble à un de ces mauvais films concoctés par l’usine à succès préformés qu’on appelle aujourd’hui le “cinéma”. Continue in French.

As it is presented to us, the planetary financial crisis resembles one of those bad films concocted by that factory for the production of pre-packaged blockbusters that today we call the “cinema”. Continue in English.