Vargas Llosa, Mario. "The Paradoxes of Latin America." AMERICAN INTEREST 3.3 (2008).

What does it mean to feel you are Latin American? It means being aware that the territorial boundaries dividing our nations are artificial, imposed arbitrarily during the colonial years. And neither our leaders during the emancipation period nor the republican governments that followed bothered to correct that situation. In fact, they often worsened things by further separating and isolating societies whose commonalities were deeper than their petty differences. This balkanization of Latin America, unlike what took place in North America, where the Thirteen Colonies became the United States, has been one of the conspicuous factors in our underdevelopment. It has engendered nationalism, war and conflict, bleeding our nations and wasting natural resources that could have been used for modernization and progress. Only in the cultural arena was Latin American integration a reality, the result of experience and necessity—everyone who writes, composes, paints or practices any creative endeavor discovers that what unites us is more important than what separates us. In other areas—politics and economics, especially—attempts to unify governmental actions and markets have always been thwarted by the nationalist reflexes ingrained in the continent. That is why all of the plans conceived to unite the region have failed. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.the-american-interest.com/ai2/article.cfm?Id=366&MId=17.

Kirsch, Adam. "Between Liberalism and Leftism: a Review of Michael Walzer's THINKING POLITICALLY." NEW YORK SUN December 12, 2007.

"I don't think that I ever managed real philosophy," Michael Walzer says in the interview that forms the last chapter of Thinking Politically (Yale University Press, 333 pages, $30), the stimulating new collection of his essays. This may sound like false modesty coming from Mr. Walzer, who is one of America's leading political philosophers. But in fact, by forswearing the name of philosopher, he is merely trying to give a more precise definition of the kind of thinking he does. "I couldn't breathe easily at the high level of abstraction that philosophy seemed to require," he explains. "I quickly got impatient with the playful extension of hypothetical cases, moving farther and farther away from the world we all lived in." Mr. Walzer's essays take exactly the opposite approach: They set up camp in the midst of the world we all live in bringing the rigor of political theory to the messiness of political debate. It makes sense that Mr. Walzer is both a professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and an editor of Dissent, the left-liberal journal: His theories are always also interventions. This is true of his major works — books such as Just and Unjust Wars (1977), which sought to redefine just-war theory for the post-Vietnam age, and Spheres of Justice (1983), which argues from liberal principles for a social-democratic politics. It is all the more obviously true of the essays in Thinking Politically, most of which began life as lectures and journal articles. The book offers an informal survey of the major themes of Mr. Walzer's thought, as applied to some of the major issues of the last 25 years. It is thus a good opportunity to come to grips with the strengths and the limitations of both Mr. Walzer's political principles and his way of practicing political philosophy. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nysun.com/article/67946.

Weiss, Michael. "The Bertrand Russell of Islam: a Review of Warraq's DEFENDING THE WEST [on ORIENTALISM]." NEW YORK SUN December 12, 2007.

. . . "Orientalism," Mr. Warraq writes, "taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity . . . encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist generation of the 1980s, and bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam." Though it's Mr. Warraq's plaint that the book "stopped dead the research of eminent Islamologists who felt their findings might offend Muslims' sensibilities," it is not merely an abstract charge, but personally felt. "Ibn Warraq" is an Arabic pseudonym, meaning "son of a stationer, book-seller, paper-seller," which this Indian-born writer assumed after witnessing the critical reception Islamists gave Salman Rushdie, all the while claiming themselves as victims. Said, Mr. Warraq argues, contributed to the Islamic ideology of victimization, practically inviting offense by writing, "every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric." This sentence is repeated multiple times throughout Defending the West, which otherwise might have been titled "Not In My Name." Applying the cool, thin steel of Occam to these and other follies of logic and critical analysis, Mr. Warraq asks, "If Orientalists have produced a false picture of the Orient, Orientals, Islam, Arabs, and Arabic society . . . then how could this false or pseudo-knowledge have helped European imperialists to dominate three-quarters of the globe?" . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nysun.com/article/67922.

Howard, Jennifer. "The Literary Anthology, Revised and Excised." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION December 21, 2007.

The first edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature appeared in 1962. Since then, the mighty tome has gone through eight editions and introduced generations of undergraduates to the joys (or sorrows) of Chaucer, Milton, and Keats. For many, the memory of staples like "Ode on a Grecian Urn" cannot be separated from the physical fact of the Norton, its hundreds of tissue-thin pages adding up to serious canonical heft. Forty-five years later, the Norton remains the 800-pound gorilla in the classroom. But it faces vigorous and growing competition from other anthologies, notably the Longman Anthology of British Literature and the Broadview Anthology of British Literature. And, like its younger rivals, it has to figure out how to stay relevant — and marketable — in what's been called the postcanonical age, when the old literary lions fight for space with hordes of once-neglected writers. Today's anthologies must appeal to instructors faced with increasingly tough decisions — about what students in survey courses should read, how much they're willing or able to read, and what background they need to understand it in the first place. Behind all of that looms a bigger, theoretical concern. The study of world literatures in English is on the rise. How close is the day when anthologies centered on the literary output of the British Isles will have outlived their usefulness? . . .

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=fcRjyp3kjvPnpsPNRfSQCMwD8MT3pZxt.

Summer School in Social Cognition and Social Narrative, University of San Marino, July 7-13, 2008.

A one-week interdisciplinary collegium/summer school sponsored by the European Science Foundation, on contemporary research in the area of social cognition, theory of mind, and narrative theory. This collegium is designed to bring CNCC researchers and major figures in the area of social cognition together with younger scholars, graduate students, and postdocs to discuss the role of narrative and embodied intersubjectivity. Within the framework of a week-long summer school, research presentations, discussions, and tutorial sessions will allow researchers and students to share knowledge and interact. Researchers from outside the CNCC projects, together with researchers from CNCC projects will be participating. For further information, go here: http://www.philosophy.ucf.edu/pcs/smCollegium.html.

Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL MIND: AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE. London: Routledge, 2007.

The Phenomenological Mind is the first book to properly introduce fundamental questions about the mind from the perspective of phenomenology. Key questions and topics covered include:

• What is phenomenology?
• Naturalizing phenomenology and the empirical cognitive sciences
• Phenomenology and consciousness
• Consciousness and self-consciousness, including perception and action
• Time and consciousness, including William James
• Intentionality
• The embodied mind
• Action
• Knowledge of other minds
• Situated and extended minds
• Phenomenology and personal identity

Interesting and important examples are used throughout, including phantom limb syndrome, blindsight and self-disorders in schizophrenia, making The Phenomenological Mind an ideal introduction to key concepts in phenomenology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

Shaun Gallagher is Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Central Florida and Research Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Hertfordshire. He is the author of How the Body Shapes the Mind and co-editor of Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? An Investigation of the Nature of Volition.

Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Subjectivity and Selfhood and Husserl's Phenomenology.

They jointly edit the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

For further information, go to http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t745720617.

Sawicki, Jana. "Review of Michel Foucault's ABNORMAL: LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE, 1974-1975." NDPR January 3, 2005.

Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975. Trans. Graham Burchell. London: Verso, 2003. Abnormal is the second of Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France to appear in this new series of English translations. (The French volume was published by Editions de Seuil/Gallimard in 1999 under the general editorship of Francois Ewald and Allesandro Fontana. Arnold Davidson is the general editor of the series of English translations. The first in the series is Foucault's course in 1975-1976, Society Must Be Defended.) Reading these lectures one is ever mindful of the immense archival labor and the intensity of the discipline that Foucault mustered in his counter-disciplinary work. Here again Foucault exhibits his talent for unearthing startling documents and bringing to life the figures represented in them. While many of the analyses of these documents are more suggestive and exploratory than definitive, they are suggestive enough that they are likely to stimulate further genealogical research. Indeed, this was one of their principle purposes. Furthermore, situated as they are between the publication of Discipline and Punish (February 1975) and History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (October 1976), the lectures deepen our appreciation of the books insofar as they contain more developed analyses of some of their central themes. Foucault expands on themes such as confession, the repressive hypothesis, the medicalization of the family, the emergence of psychiatry, and the sexual pervert. Moreover, the lectures also explore themes and figures that are either less central to or absent from the books--the human monster, incest, cannibalism, witchcraft, possession, and the discovery of "instinct" as pivotal to the emergence of the "abnormal individual." And although the "Foreword" by Ewald and Fontana warns against reading the lectures as "sketches for the books," it is tempting, at the very least, to read them as a preliminary formulations of ideas that would have formed the basis of the unwritten volumes that Foucault, while he was writing the first volume of the history of sexuality, imagined he would write. (A, xiii) Readers who are disappointed that Foucault never wrote the promised volumes on confessions of the flesh, hysteria, the Malthusian couple, and onanism will find that these lectures offer some compensation. . . . Read the rest of the review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=1581.

Hearn, Mark. "Review of Foucault's SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED." LABOUR HISTORY 86 (2004).

Foucault, Michel. 'Society Must Be Defended': Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Trans. David Macey. London: Verso, 2003. Given his tendency to opaque deliberation, and alleged scorn, at least in the eyes of his critics, for the serious study of the past, Michel Foucault would surely have felt ambiguous about the preservation of his January–March 1976 Collège de France lecture series, Society Must Be Defended, as an historical artefact. Or perhaps not? Society Must Be Defended indicates that Foucault approached his lectures thoughtfully, and with attention to detail; he fretted over their reception. Addressed, like all lectures from the professors of the prestigious Collège, to an audience of anyone who wandered off the Paris streets and cared to hear them, Foucault's lectures presented findings from research conducted in the previous year. As reprinted in this Penguin edition (the first in a series of his annual lecture programs to be published in coming years), Foucault sought to clarify his aims in a carefully argued course summary written some months after the conclusion of the program; this displays a comforting concern to be understood from an intellectual so identified with a disturbingly radical break with traditional knowledge and methodology. . . . Foucault had in common with Isaiah Berlin an ability to draw from history obscure actors and thinkers whose experience or thought illuminates past and present in new or neglected ways (hands up all those familiar with Boulainvilliers, Sieyes, Montlosier, Buat-Nancay). With Berlin he shared a horror of totalising power and an instinctive scepticism for 'totalizing explanations'. Berlin would surely have applauded Foucault's observation that 'whether one wants it to be or not, [ideology] is always in virtual opposition to something like the truth'. Foucault, however, lacked Berlin's clarity and consistency. Foucault often seems torn between his ambitions: to provide a discrete, probing analysis of the breakdown of the totalising explanations — Marxism, psychoanalysis, the whole notion of western enlightenment — which, as he tells his audience, have been 'crumbling beneath our feet' since the 1960s; to give voice, through 'discursive critique' to the 'abnormals', the 'buried and disqualified', whose stories have been denied by those who have controlled the prevailing discourse of power and the instruments of government. Yet in the lectures and books that poured from him from the 1960s until his death in 1984 Foucault seemed determined to try to explain everything: sexuality, governmentality, the very 'order of things', the nature of knowledge and how it may be reconfigured. Society Must Be Defended records this intensely creative and frustrated process. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lab/86/br_5.html.

Butler, Nick. "The Management of Populations: Review of Foucault's SECURITY, TERRITORY, POPULATION." EPHEMERA 7.3 (2007): 475-480.

Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Trans. G. Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. The ongoing publication of the entire set of lecture courses which Foucault gave between 1971 and 1984 at the Collège de France have so far proved to be essential companions to his better known works. Security, Territory, Population – the fifth installment in a total series of thirteen, covering the period from January to April 1978 – is no exception. It provides a compelling glimpse into Foucault’s research at a time when his intellectual interests were shifting in dramatic ways. One of the most significant changes to his work concerns the long-planned History of Sexuality project, which was put on indefinite hold after the publication of the first volume (The Will to Knowledge) in 1976. The project underwent successive revisions before volume two (The Use of Pleasure) and volume three (The Care of the Self) eventually emerged together in 1984. These adjustments to the direction of Foucault’s research are very much apparent in the present lecture series, and for this reason Security, Territory, Population – as a work-in-progress – sheds a great deal of light on the development of his thought during this period. . . . For the rest of the review, please go to: http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-3/7-3butler.pdf.

Godelek, Kamuran. "Review of Michel Foucault's PSYCHIATRIC POWER." METAPSYCHOLOGY ONLINE REVIEWS November 27, 2007.

Foucault, Michel. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France, 1973-1974. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Michel Foucault taught seminars at the College de France from January 1971 until his death in June 1984 under the title "The History of Systems of Thought". This edition based on the words delivered in public by Foucault covers the period between November 1973 and February 1974. Even though both his books and courses share certain themes, the lectures arise from a specific discursive regime within the set of Foucault's philosophical activities. In these lectures he sets out the program for a genealogy of psychiatry, of its characteristic knowledge/power relations. Thus, Psychiatric Power pursues the history started with Madness and Civilization which undertook the archaeology of the division between the insane and the sane in Western society. In order to give an account of this form of psychiatric and medical knowledge about madness, one must start with an analysis of the apparatuses and the techniques of power that organized the treatment of the mad in the period that spans from Philippe Pinel to Jean-Martin Charcot. Psychiatry is not born as a consequence of progress in the knowledge of madness but from the disciplinary apparatuses within which the regime imposed on madness is organized. From this point of view, Psychiatric Power continues the project of a history of human sciences. . . . Read the entire review here: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=3943.

Gladwell, Malcolm. "None of the Above: What IQ doesn't Tell You about Race." NEW YORKER December 17, 2007.

One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, received a large package in the mail. It was from a colleague in Utrecht, and it contained the results of I.Q. tests given to two generations of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. When Flynn looked through the data, he found something puzzling. The Dutch eighteen-year-olds from the nineteen-eighties scored better than those who took the same tests in the nineteen-fifties—and not just slightly better, much better. Curious, Flynn sent out some letters. He collected intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until he had data for almost thirty countries. In every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as the tests had been administered. For some reason, human beings seemed to be getting smarter. Flynn has been writing about the implications of his findings—now known as the Flynn effect—for almost twenty-five years. His books consist of a series of plainly stated statistical observations, in support of deceptively modest conclusions, and the evidence in support of his original observation is now so overwhelming that the Flynn effect has moved from theory to fact. What remains uncertain is how to make sense of the Flynn effect. If an American born in the nineteen-thirties has an I.Q. of 100, the Flynn effect says that his children will have I.Q.s of 108, and his grandchildren I.Q.s of close to 120—more than a standard deviation higher. If we work in the opposite direction, the typical teen-ager of today, with an I.Q. of 100, would have had grandparents with average I.Q.s of 82—seemingly below the threshold necessary to graduate from high school. And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded. . . . Read the whole article here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/17/071217crbo_books_gladwell?printable=true. (Thanks to Egberto Almenas for this and related links.)

McWhorter, Ladelle. "Review of Cressida J. Heyes' SELF-STRANSFORMATIONS: FOUCAULT, ETHICS, AND NORMALISED BODIES." NDPR December 8, 2007.

Heyes, Cressida J. Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies. Oxford: OUP, 2007. Deeply informed by both contemporary feminist theory and Michel Foucault's genealogical method and analytics of power, Cressida Heyes' Self-Transformations presents an extended consideration of a set of bodily practices that are increasingly common in North America, namely, sex reassignment surgeries and related sex-transformational regimes, dieting for the purpose of weight-loss, and cosmetic surgeries such as face-lift, liposuction, gastric bypass, and rhinoplasty. The book's discussion of these practices is interesting, nuanced, and politically sensitive. Heyes does an excellent job of reviewing the academic debates surrounding them and explicating the objections that many feminist social critics have made to them. But she doesn't stop there. She also critically, yet sympathetically, examines the claims and reports of those who take up these techniques and technologies and use them in their own projects of self-transformation. And she even goes so far as to take up one such practice herself, enrolling for a ten-month stint in Weight Watchers. Her descriptions in every case are vivid and compelling, and her prose is clear and honest, as well as often quietly amusing. Despite the book's straightforward tone, concrete examples, and relatively simple style, however, its thesis and themes are importantly complex. Its central issue is not whether these various techniques for altering the human body are repressive or, on the contrary, self-expressive; the central issue is not whether feminists should endorse these practices or condemn them and have them outlawed. In this book, detached moral judgment is displaced, and a different kind of ethical discourse comes to the fore. Heyes is concerned about normalization and the foreclosure of freedom it portends, and she is clear and adamant that these practices are normalizing, sometimes in the extreme. But as a student of Foucault she rejects both a sovereign account of selfhood and the notion that power is external to selves and primarily prohibitive, and thus she resists the feminist temptation to see trans men and women, recidivist dieters, and candidates for cosmetic surgery as mere dupes or victims of the normalizing sexist ideologies and institutions that they at times recite and inhabit. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu:80/review.cfm?id=11923.

CFP: "Literature and Law: a Celebration," John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, April 11, 2008.

This conference aims to bring scholars of literature and law into an interdisciplinary setting to share the fruits of their research and scholarship. The conference celebrates the restoration of John Jay's English major with its unique literature and law emphasis. The conference's keynote speaker is Brook Thomas, a noted literature and law scholar and Chancellor's Professor at the University of California Irvine. His most recent book, just published by UNC Press, is Civic Myths: A Law-and-Literature Approach to Citizenship. We are in negotiations with the journal Law and Literature to publish full versions of the best of the papers presented atthe conference in a special symposium issue.We invite papers dealing with any aspect of literature and law, including papers which might address some of the following:

• Convict narratives
• Treason
• Mercy and equity
• The reasonable man/person standard
• Natural, divine, and positive law
• Legal standards and presumptions
• Fictional evidence
• Proportionality and punishment
• Fairness versus equality
• Reasonable Doubt
• Lady Justice
• Blasphemy and censorship
• The legal fiction of an era

Please submit abstracts (250 words or less) to Andrew Majeske, ajmajeske@gmail.com, by Friday, January 18, 2008.

Further information may be found here: http://literatureandlaw.blogspot.com/.

Gillespie, Nick. "Who's Afraid of the MLA?" TCS DAILY December 27, 2007.

No academic conference draws more smirks and bitch-slaps than the annual Modern Language Association convention. Held every December 27-30, the MLA convention pulls together upwards of 10,000 literary scholars ranging in status from rock-star professors feeling the love of their intellectual acolytes to starving, hysterical grad students desperate for any position in a perennially tight job market. This year's meeting, which is taking place in Washington, D.C., features almost 800 panels and presentations, ranging from Tuesday's "Women and Devotional Writing in Early Middle English" (the first literature panel listed in a program as thick as a phone book) to Friday's finale, "Gypsies in European Literature, Culture, and the Arts." In between are meetings of groups devoted to Andre Gide, Margaret Fuller, William Carlos Williams, and seemingly every other author with more than a haiku to his name; endless job interviews in which those nervous grad students throw off more flop sweat than Thomas Jefferson contemplating a just god; and, not uncoincidentally, more cash bars than there are in heaven (or at least Brooklyn). Despite its preeminence within academic literary and cultural studies, the MLA convention is the Rodney Dangerfield of such confabs, getting little or no respect not just from right-wingers who reliably scoff at the unmistakable left-wing bent to the proceedings but from liberal mainstream media who eye the jargon-choked pronouncements of the professoriate with equal helpings of disdain, derision, and dismissiveness. . . . To read the rest of this article, go to http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=122705A; For part 2, go to http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=122805B; For part 3, go to http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=122905B.

Dowling, William C. "Literary Studies versus Cultural Studies." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION September 17, 1999.

The essential distinction is very simple. Literary studies takes the literary work as its object of inquiry. Whatever is not literary studies does not. Thus, a literary-studies teacher takes Hamlet to be a self-contained world of motive and action whose immense complexity is the subject of discussion with students. Many other things may be discussed in elucidating this world -- Renaissance cosmology, social history, theology, alchemy, etc. -- but they exist for the purpose of understanding Hamlet, not the other way around. Cultural studies, on the other hand . . . does not take Hamlet, or any other literary work, as its object of inquiry. [Cultural studies scholars like] Ms. Felski clearly thinks she's making a decisive point when she talks admiringly about "the multileveled meanings of black hairstyles" as a shining example of the sort of thing about which American critics of cultural studies need to be more aware. But she's missing the point. The point is that American universities are so structured that they already have departments -- anthropology, sociology, history, communications -- that study the sort of thing she's interested in. The problem with cultural studies is that, like a parasite flourishing at the expense of its host, it has left the study of literary works and literary tradition in a desperately enfeebled condition, with most younger English-department faculty members incompetent to do so much as help students learn how to read a lyric by Donne or Wyatt, let alone Hamlet or Paradise Lost. . . . Read the rest here: http://members.aol.com/rualliance/chronlet.htm.

Delblanco, Andrew. "The Decline and Fall of Literature." NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS November 4, 1999.

Although the following, somewhat dated article targets 'English' per se, Delblanco really seems to have in mind what many call today 'Cultural Studies' which, admittedly, has in many cases come to dominate literature departments:

A couple of years ago, in an article explaining how funds for faculty positions are allocated in American universities, the provost of the University of California at Berkeley offered some frank advice to department chairs, whose job partly consists of lobbying for a share of the budget. "On every campus," she wrote, "there is one department whose name need only be mentioned to make people laugh; you don't want that department to be yours." The provost, Carol Christ (who retains her faculty position as a literature professor), does not name the offender—but everyone knows that if you want to locate the laughingstock on your local campus these days, your best bet is to stop by the English department. The laughter, moreover, is not confined to campuses. It has become a holiday ritual for The New York Times to run a derisory article in deadpan Times style about the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, where thousands of English professors assemble just before the new year. Lately it has become impossible to say with confidence whether such topics as "Eat Me; Captain Cook and the Ingestion of the Other" or "The Semiotics of Sinatra" are parodies of what goes on there or serious presentations by credentialed scholars. At one recent English lecture, the speaker discussed a pornographic "performance artist" who, for a small surcharge to the price of admission to her stage show, distributes flashlights to anyone in the audience wishing to give her a speculum exam. By looking down at the mirror at just the right angle, she is able, she says, to see her own cervix reflected in the pupil of the beholder, and thereby (according to the lecturer) to fulfill the old Romantic dream of eradicating the distinction between perceiver and perceived. The lecturer had a winning phrase—"the invaginated eyeball"—for this accomplishment. During the discussion that followed, a consensus emerged that, in light of the optical trick, standard accounts (Erwin Panofsky's was mentioned) of perspective as a constitutive element in Western visual consciousness need to be revised. . . .

Thanks to Ed Brandon for sending the link (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/318).

Metcalf, Stephen. "Dissecting the IQ Debate: a Response to Liberal Creationism." SLATE December 3, 2007.

In response to James Watson's remarks concerning the intelligence of blacks, Slate's William Saletan wrote a series of pieces on race, IQ, and genetics. In his first post, Saletan wrote: "It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true." One's to-do list reflects a balance of perceived likelihoods. Is preparing for the congenital mental inferiority of blacks more like budgeting for retirement, or buying asteroid insurance? Caveats and wiggle words aside, the impression left by Saletan's piece is that it's more like, say, a prudent response to rising sea levels. To drive the point home, Saletan suggested a historical parallel: Liberals made angry or defensive by the possibility that blacks (as a group) score lower on IQ tests than whites (as a group) for genetic reasons are like Christians made angry or defensive by the theory of evolution. Thus the headline "Liberal Creationism." Saletan's analogy implies that the conflict over race, intelligence, and genetics is a conflict between science and superstition. It's not; it's a conflict between science and science. Worse, even when Saletan shades his rhetoric carefully, the reader is left with the impression that science—hard, empirical disinterested science—is trending to a hereditarian explanation for the IQ gap, and that bad or weak science—really a kind of wishful, mushy, quasi-superstitious scientism—is on the side of an environmental or cultural explanation. If you explore the subject in any depth, or even just click through to some of Saletan's own links, you find the opposite is closer to the truth. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1700945566886988248.

Hannay, Alastair. "Review of Mooney, Edward F. ON SOREN KIERKEGAARD: DIALOGUE, POLEMICS, LOST INTIMACY, AND TIME." NDPR December 7, 2007.

In his Preface Edward Mooney defines the space of On Søren Kierkegaard as one where 'theology and philosophy, literature and ethics, poetry and sculpture, artistry and sacrament can mingle, affording mutual attractions and inter-animations'. When so much Kierkegaard commentary and discussion is generated by partial and divided interests, this catch-all signals a refreshing return to square one. We are ushered back to a Kierkegaard in all his authorial multiplicity, but also to where Mooney thinks philosophy should begin. His book is a skillfully and richly presented case in defense of what Kierkegaard came to believe himself: that Socrates was the thinker with whom he should be most closely associated. The book is divided into three parts, the second two including revisions of previously published essays. . . . Read the full review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=11884.

Kant Attack Ad on You Tube -- Nietzsche for President!

From The Mole, the blog of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society: http://friedrichnietzschesociety.wordpress.com/2007/12/10/kant-attack-ad/. (Or here: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7M-cmNdiFuI.)

"The Guattari Effect: the Life and Work of Felix Guattari, 1930-1992," CRMEP, Middlesex University, April 17-18, 2008.

This 2-day international conference, organized by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, will be the first devoted to the work of the French psychoanalyst, philosopher, and political activist Felix Guattari. Its primary aim will be to gauge the contemporary significance of a theorist whose status as an ‘extraordinary philosopher’ was proclaimed by his collaborator Gilles Deleuze. To that end, it will bring together 3 internationally renowned experts on Guattari (Gary Genosko, Brian Massumi, Peter Pal Pelbart) along with 7 other philosophers, psychoanalysts, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and artists, all of whom have been profoundly influenced by Guattari. The goal will be to explore the full spectrum of Guattari’s work, from his early political engagement as an activist in the French mental health system, through to his critique of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis and his conception of a ‘micro-politics of desire’ (which challenged the then dominant theoretical paradigm of ‘structure’ with the concept of ‘machine’), finally considering his later elaboration of a ‘new ethico-aesthetic paradigm’, where ‘subjectivity’ was to be considered ‘from the point of view of its production’. While acknowledging the importance of Guattari’s influential collaborations with Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus, Kafka, A Thousand Plateaus, What is Philosophy?), one of the primary purposes of the conference will be to give due weight to Guattari’s own independent and highly innovative contributions to a variety of fields, including linguistics, pragmatics, aesthetics, ecology, architecture and media theory. Among the questions the conference seeks to explore are:

• Why did Guattari turn his attention to these fields, and what did he produce in them?
• What forms did his activism take in the 1970s and 80s, and of what relevance are they today?

Rare archival film and audio footage from these periods will be screened to accompany discussions of Guattari’s adventures in media activism.

The conference will be chaired by Professor Eric Alliez and Dr. Christian Kerslake, both of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University. Speakers include:

• Franco Berardi, Academy of Fine Arts, Milan 'Chaosmotic Sensibility and Ethics’
• Dr. Gary Genosko, Lakehead University ‘Banking on Félix: Refashioning Low Threshold Semiosis Through A-Signifying Particle-Signs’
• Professor Barbara Glowczewski, Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales ‘Passion According to Guattari: Attractors and Detractors in Anthropology’
• Professor Monique David Ménard, Université de Paris VII Denis-Diderot ‘Guattari and “Collective Assemblages of Enunciation”’
• Dr. Anne Querrien, Université de Paris XV-Evry Val d'Essonne ‘Mapping in an N-Dimensional Plane’
• Professor Brian Massumi, University of Montreal ‘Always Having Been, For the First Time: Emergence and Eternality in the Work of Guattari’
• Professor Peter Pal Pelbart, Catholic University of Sao Paolo ‘Re-founding the Unconscious upon Deterritorialization’
• Dr. Anne Sauvagnargues, École Normale Supérieure ‘Politics of the Face’
• Dr. Stephen Zepke, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna ‘To Remake the Readymade: Guattari and Duchamp’
• Professor François Dosse, History, Institut Universitaire de Formations des Maitres de l’Académie de Créteil 'Guattari with Deleuze’

Further information is available here: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/CRMEP/EVENTS/TheGuattariEffect.htm.