Which Way Marxist-Spinozist? On Diefenbach's Spinoza in Post-Marxist Philosophy

 

I have a lot of books from the Spinoza Studies series 

One of the best pieces of advice I got in graduate school came from Warren Montag. He was visiting Binghamton University. We were talking about Spinoza and he said to me to the effect of reading Alexandre Matheron, Pierre Macherey, Pierre François Moreau, etc. was absolutely necessary for understanding Spinoza scholarship, and those books would never be translated into English. They were too big, five volumes in Macherey's case, and too niche of an audience. He told me I needed to get to work learning to read French. So I did.

You Would Make a Great Cop: On Lezra's Defective Institutions

I had the opportunity to respond to Jacques Lezra's book Defective Institutions: A Protocol for the Republic at SPEP's virtual conference this year.  There is much to talk about in the book, but I decided to focus on his discussion of the police, partly because it allowed me to stitch together some thoughts about the police in the current political moment. My remarks are below.

How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland: The Mad Max Films as an Introduction to Political Philosophy

 

Years ago I was teaching political philosophy and decided to do something interesting with social contract theory. I made the point that the post-apocalypse is our state of nature. Whereas the seventeenth century contemplated the nature of authority and law from the origins of society we confront the same problem from its collapse. In each case human beings outside of the state, whether prior to or post, became the basis for thinking about both human nature, and the nature of the state. I then showed a bunch of clips from The Road Warrior and other films, all of which illustrated the intersecting problem of social contract theory and post-apocalyptic films: how does one go from disorder to order, from violence to authority?

Inalienable: Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke on Self-Defense

 

Since I am discussing Dorlin's Self-Defense 

I thought that I would use some pictures from old self defense manuals

including this variation of nikkyo. 

Elsa Dorlin's Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence  considers, among many things, the role that self-defense played in social contract theory (and beyond). What follows bellow is a response to that particular provocation and not a review of the whole book, but it is very much worth reading.

Anti-Hobbes: Waging War on the War of All Against All

 

Top Image The Road Warrior, bottom image people in the US putting gasoline in plastic bags

I am going to assume that most readers of a blog like this are familiar with Hobbes' description of the state of nature as "nasty, brutish, and short." His assertion that without an overwhelming authority human beings will engage in a life of perpetual strife and war, killing each other for whatever their desire. Hobbes gives what could be considered three proofs for this state of nature, the first is the new world, or at least an armchair speculative colonial imagination of it, the second is the behavior of kings and states towards each other, but the third, which actually appears first, is the presence of this state of nature in civilized state breaking through, like weeds through concrete. As Hobbes writes, 

Hobbes Versus Spinoza: This Time It's Anthropological

This morning I received an email that had the following sentence in it: "A demographic note for this week is that we have almost three times as many applicants to online programs as we did this time last year, confirming a trend we are all aware of --- that students want online degree offerings." Maybe it was the lack of coffee, or the fact that I was woken up in the night by a barfing dog (don't worry, Bento is fine. He just eats garbage sometimes), but I thought for a minute about responding to this email, pointing out that the premise did not support the conclusion. There are multiple reasons why people take online classes. They are ways of dealing with jobs that demand increased flexibility from employees, ways of finishing school around the demands of families and work. Negotiating these demands is not the same as wanting something, as desiring it or choosing it.