Eugene Thacker: After Life (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · immanence, life, life itself, metaphysics, neo-vitalism, ontology, pantheism, philosophy, speculative realism, theology, univocity, vitalism
Life is one of our most basic concepts, and yet when examined directly it proves remarkably contradictory and elusive, encompassing both the broadest and the most specific phenomena. We can see this uncertainty about life in our habit of approaching it as something at once scientific and mystical, in the return of vitalisms of all types, and in the pervasive politicization of life. In short, life seems everywhere at stake and yet is nowhere the same.
In After Life, Eugene Thacker clears the ground for a new philosophy of life by recovering the twists and turns in its philosophical history. Beginning with Aristotle’s originary formulation of a philosophy of life, Thacker examines the influence of Aristotle’s ideas in medieval and early modern thought, leading him to the work of Immanuel Kant, who notes the inherently contradictory nature of “life in itself.” Along the way, Thacker shows how early modern philosophy’s engagement with the problem of life affects thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, and Alain Badiou, as well as contemporary developments in the “speculative turn” in philosophy.
At a time when life is categorized, measured, and exploited in a variety of ways, After Life invites us to delve deeper into the contours and contradictions of the age-old question, “what is life?”
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2010
ISBN 0226793729, 9780226793726
312 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)
Comments (2)Asef Bayat: Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · democracy, everyday, islam, life, middle east, politics, religion, resistance, social movements, women
The popular view in the West deems the Muslim Middle East as socially and politically stagnant. The Art of Presence challenges this view. It shows how, under often authoritarian rule, the ordinary people discover or create new spaces within which they can voice their concerns and assert their presence. The major venues for social and political change are not simply mass protest or revolutions, even though these do happen; they are rather embodied in what Bayat calls ‘non-movements’, the millions of dispersed poor, women, the young, and other grassroots who act in common.
Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2010
ISIM Series on Contemporary Muslim Societies
ISBN 978 90 5356 911 5
320 pages
Tom Apperley: Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · australia, computer games, everyday, game studies, gaming, life, venezuela
Global gaming networks are heterogenous collectives of localized practices, not unified commercial products. Shifting the analysis of digital games to local specificities that build and perform the global and general, Gaming Rhythms employs ethnographic work conducted in Venezuela and Australia to account for the material experiences of actual game players. This book explores the materiality of digital play across diverse locations and argues that the dynamic relation between the everyday life of the player and the experience of digital game play can only be understood by examining play-practices in their specific situations.
Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2010
Theory on Demand series, No 6
ISBN: 978-90-816021-1-2
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License