recommended reading

Here’s some recommended reading on a number of topics I’ve had the good fortune and privilege to study at length. Perhaps you’ll find something that interests you.

Jacques Rancière – The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991, originally 1987)

Paul Feyerabend – Against Method (2010, originally 1975)

Charles Sanders Peirce – The Essential Peirce, Volumes 1: Selected Philosophical Writings‚ (1867–1893) and 2: Selected Philosophical Writings (1893-1913) (1998)

Samantha Frost – Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human (2016)

Wilfred Bion – Experiences in Groups (1990, originally 1961)

J. L. Austin – How to Do Things with Words (1975, originally 1962)

Schmitt, Plessner, Voegelin

David Roden – Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (2015)

Quentin Meillassoux – After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2010, originally 2006)

Grégoire Chamayou – Manhunts: A Philosophical History (2012)

Philip Rieff – The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (2006, originally 1966)

“The short course”

I think these core texts are absolutely essential for coming to terms with the manifold conditions of our existence.

1. Jacques Rancière – The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991, originally 1987)

Rancière shows us that learning and teaching are processes that exceed or even explode the historical, institutional constraints that transform education into a disciplinary operation by means of which an authoritative teacher supposedly transmits information to a docile, receptive student. Rancière disarticulates the process of learning from the various modes in which it is typically mediated and defanged. Instead, he shows how learning is the primary function of activated and applied natural intelligence. If this is true, then how we approach not just formal education, but learning and teaching in all contexts, must change fundamentally. For example, instead of emphasizing certification, content, metricization, or standardization, a good teacher will focus on motivating students to exercise error-tolerant, ideally interminable strategies of inquiry and revision. In fact, these are strategies that everyone already employs, e.g., to navigate the world. More abstractly, Rancière argues that these apparently pedagogical insights translate into a radical conclusion about the human – namely, that all humans are equally naturally intelligent. This is because intelligence is not aggregative, such that an individual can be more or less intelligent than any other individual. Rather, intelligence is a basic faculty – the capacity to learn, or to update beliefs on the basis of interactive, motivated engagements with any content or problem whatsoever.

2. Paul Feyerabend – Against Method (2010, originally 1975)

Feyerabend shows us how the logic of inquiry proceeds without the assistance of any programmatic method at all – and he argues that it’s a good thing, too. He uses detailed case studies from the history of science to demonstrate the crooked path by means of which knowledge finds its way and then gets updated and supplanted. However, Feyerabend’s point is not merely that the history of inquiry is a patchwork, but that how we form inquiries in the first place benefits tremendously from this condition of epistemological anarchism. Abductive and heuristic reasoning are the best tools we have for producing knowledge or pursuing inquiries. Accordingly, Feyerabend dismisses the refuge of methodology as a fantasy at best – and, more likely, a disciplinary tool by means of which generative ideation and perceptive speculation get shut down. (See also his “How to Be a Good Empiricist: A Plea for Tolerance in Matters Epistemological” [1971].) Ultimately, and ironically, given his many late provocations to contrary, Feyerabend ends up disclosing his own profound loyalty to reason, understood properly. As Feyerabend (in)famously claims, when it comes to epistemology and method, “Anything goes.” But this is actually a fundamental insight underlying the operation of reason itself, because reason is a contingent process according to which any and every prior belief or statement undergoes tests that produce its own revision.

3. Charles Sanders Peirce – The Essential Peirce, Volumes 1: Selected Philosophical Writings‚ (1867–1893) and 2: Selected Philosophical Writings (1893-1913) (1998)

4. Samantha Frost – Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human (2016)

5. Reza Negarestani – Intelligence and Spirit (2018)

6. Manuel DeLanda – A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997)

7. Quentin Meillassoux – After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2010, originally 2006)

8. F. W. J. Schelling – Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom (2006, originally 1809)

9. Wilfred Bion – Experiences in Groups (1990, originally 1961)

10. J. L. Austin – How to Do Things with Words (1975, originally 1962)

Left political realism

I often find myself frustrated with how contemporary political theoretical vocabularies can serve as flybottles for our thinking. These texts help us start to break with, revise, and unsettle those vocabularies in highly generative ways.

Aeschylus – Oresteia (2013, originally 400s BCE) and Sophocles – Antigone (2013, originally c. 441 BCE)
Hannah Arendt – The Human Condition (2018, originally 1958)
Aristotle – Politics (2013, originally 300s BCE)
Cătălin Avramescu – An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (2009, originally 2003) and Grégoire Chamayou – Manhunts: A Philosophical History (2012, originally 2010)
Roberto Esposito – Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (2010, originally 1998) and Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (2011, originally 2002)
Jean-François Lyotard – Libidinal Economy (1993, originally 1974)
Niccolò Machiavelli – The Chief Works and Others, Volume I (1989, originally 1530s)
Friedrich Nietzsche – Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (2011, originally 1886) and On the Genealogy of Morality (2017, originally 1887)
David Roden – Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (2014)
Sheldon Wolin – Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (2016, originally 1960)

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order, Volumes 1-4 (2002-2004)
Roberto Esposito – Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2008)
Arran Gare – The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization: A Manifesto for the Future (2016)
Bruno Latour – We Have Never Been Modern ()
Val Plumwood – Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002)
Lebbeus Woods – Radical Reconstruction (2001)

The ecological crisis

Much of my work involves the ecological crisis. The ecological crisis is not reducible to climate change alone, for climate change is only a symptom of a deeper, relational crisis of nature that the dominant planetary culture embodies. Rather than abandoning the very idea of a philosophy of nature, such an approach needs to be contested, reclaimed, and reinvented. “It is only if thinking about nature always involves more nature than can be thought that nature is in fact being thought.”

Donna Haraway – “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) and Laboria Cuboniks – “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation” (2014)
Paul Kingsnorth – Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (2017)
Aldo Leopold – A Sand County Almanac (1968, originally 1949) and The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays (1991, originally 1904-1947)
Bruno Latour – Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2017)
Val Plumwood – Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) and
Jeff Vandermeer – The Southern Reach Trilogy (2014)

William C. Wimsatt – Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality (2007)

 

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2011

Giorgio Agamben – Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998, originally 1995)
Jacques Derrida – The Politics of Friendship (2006)
Philip K. Dick – The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
Michel Foucault – History of Madness (2006, originally 1961)
Alexandre Kojève – Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (1980)
Alasdair MacIntyre – After Virtue (1981) or Whose Justice? Which Rationality (1988)
Jacques Rancière – Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1999, originally 1994)
Gillian Rose – Love’s Work (2011, originally 1995)
Carl Schmitt – The Concept of the Political (2007, originally 1932)
Slavoj Žižek – The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Honorable mentions: Peter Brown – Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (2000, originally 1967), Hélène Cixous – “The Laugh of the Medusa,” John P. McCormick – Machiavellian Democracy (2011), Hanna Fenichel Pitkin – Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (1984)

2012

Giorgio Agamben – The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2011, originally 2007)
Louis Althusser – Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987 (2006)
Alain Badiou – Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (2003, originally 1997)
Hans Blumenberg – Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (1996, originally 1979)
Herman Melville – The Confidence-Man (originally 1857)
F. W. J. Schelling – The Ages of the World (2000, originally 1815)
Carl Schmitt – Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation (1997, updated in 2015, originally 1954)
Clare Spark – Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (2000)
Jacob Taubes – Occidental Eschatology (2009, originally 1947)
Urbanomic – Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development (ed. Robin MacKay), Volumes I-IV

Honorable mentions: Louis Althusser – Machiavelli and Us (2011, originally 1995), Ray Brassier – Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007), Peter Fenves – Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (2003), Haruki Murakami – 1Q84 (2011), Alastair Reynolds – Chasm City (2003), Carl Schmitt – The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950, 2003), Carl Schmitt – Theory of the Partisan (2007, originally 1963)

2013

Elizabeth Grosz – Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art (2011)
Jack Judith Halberstam – The Queer Art of Failure (2011)
Nick Land – Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007 (2011)
Bruno Latour – An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (2013)
Quentin Meillassoux – L’Inexistence divine (1997, digital circulation, excerpted in translation in 2011)
Reza Negarestani – Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008)
Isabelle Stengers – Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (2011, originally 2002)
Bernard Stiegler – Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998, originally 1994)
Geoff Waite – Nietzsche’s Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (1996)
Peter Watts – Starfish (1999)

Honorable mentions: Robert Aickman – The Collected Strange Stories of Robert Aickman (2000), Jack Judith Halberstam – Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), Peter Hallward – Badiou: A Subject To Truth (2003), Peter Watts – Blindsight (2006)

2014

Sara Ahmed – The Promise of Happiness (2010)
Jessica Benjamin – The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (1988)
Lauren Berlant – Cruel Optimism (2011)
Joshua Foa Dienstag – Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (2006)
Lee Edelman – No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004)
Jill Frank – A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics (2005)
Shirley Jackson – The Haunting of Hill House (originally 1959)
Ernst Jünger – The Forest Passage (2013, originally 1951)
Marion Milner – The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men (1987)
Donald Winnicott – Playing and Reality (2006, originally 1971)

Honorable mentions: Laird Barron, “The Forest” (2007), Philip Rieff – Freud: The Mind of a Moralist (1977, originally 1959), Steven Shaviro – Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (2012)

2015

Neal Asher – Dark Intelligence (2015)
Mark Epstein – The Trauma of Everyday Life (2014)
Iain Hamilton Grant – Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (2006)
Ernst Jünger – Eumeswil (2015, originally 1977)
Carolyne Larrington (trans.) – The Poetic Edda (2014)
Armand Marie Leroi – The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science (2014)
Thomas Pradeu – The Limits of the Self:Immunology and Biological Identity (2012)
Neil Roberts – Freedom as Marronage (2015)
Elaine Scarry – The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1987)
J. Peter Euben – The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (1990)

Honorable mentions: Neal Asher – The Technician (2011), Robert J. Richards – The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (2002), Daniel W. Smith – Essays on Deleuze (2012), Mick Smith – Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World (2011)

2016

2017

Elisabeth Bronfen – Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature, and Film (2013, originally 2008)
CCRU – Writings 1997-2003 (2015, Urbanomic)
Philippa Foot – Natural Goodness (2001)
Alan Moore – Providence (2015-2017)
Joshua Ramey – The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (2012)
William Clare Roberts – Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (2016)
James C. Scott – Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017)
Adam Scovell – Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017)
Étienne Souriau – The Different Modes of Existence (2015, originally 1943)
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro – Cannibal Metaphysics (2014)

Honorable mentions: Greg Bear – Blood Music (2014, originally 1985), Richard Gavin – The Benighted Path: Primeval Gnosis and the Monstrous Soul (2015), Project Itoh – Genocidal Organ (2012, originally 2007), Tim Larkin – When Violence Is the Answer: Learning How to Do What It Takes When Your Life Is at Stake (2017), Sean McFate – The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (2017), Matthew Levi Stevens – The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs (2014)

2018

2019

Richard Adams – Watership Down (1996, originally 1972)
Marcus Aurelius – Meditations (2003, originally 161-180 CE)
Ellen Kennedy – Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (2004)
Ludwig Klages – Of Cosmogonic Eros (2018, originally 1922)
Alexandre Kojève – The Concept, Time, and Discourse (2019, originally 1991)
Bruno Latour – Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2018)
Serge Margel – The Tomb of the Artisan God: On Plato’s Timaeus (2019, originally 1995)
Petra Mendik – A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy (2016)
Thomas Moynihan – Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History (2019)
Michael Surya – Bataille: An Intellectual Biography (2010)

Honorable mentions: Cinzia Arruzza – A Wolf in the City: Tyranny and the Tyrant in Plato’s Republic (2018), K.D. – Headless (2015), Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright – Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (2018)

2020

William H. F. Altman – Ascent to the Beautiful: Plato the Teacher and the Pre-Republic Dialogues from Protagoras to Symposium (2020)
Hal Brand and Charles Edel – The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order (2019)
Barry Gewen – The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (2020)
M. John Harrison – Viriconium (2005, originally 1971-1985)
Laurence Lampert – How Philosophy Became Socratic: A Study of Plato’s “Protagoras,” “Charmides,” and “Republic” (2010)
Christopher Logue – War Music: An Account of Homer’s Iliad (1959-2016)
Thomas Moynihan – X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction (2020)
Helena Rosenblatt – The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (2018)
Andy Sharp – The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography (2020)
Camila Vergara – Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic (2020)

Honorable mentions: Edmund Fawcett – Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition (2020), Timothy Jarvis – The Wanderer (2014), Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss – Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder (2006), Trevor Paglen – Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (2009), Jan Patocka – Plato and Europe (2002, originally 1972-1977), Thomas Rid – Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (2020), Peter Salmon – An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida (2020), Patrick Stuart – Deep Carbon Observatory – Remastered (2020, originally 2014)

2021

Jefferson Morley – The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton
Jairus Victor Grove – Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World
Robert Ackerman – The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists
David Kilcullen – Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
Christian Kracht – Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas
Ludwig Wittgenstein – The Mythology in Our Language: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough
Joanna Kavenna – The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule
Daniel Deudney – Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity
Leo Strauss – On Plato’s Symposium
Phil Baker and Anthony C. Clayton (eds.) – Lord of Strange Deaths: The Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer
Mark Fisher – Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures
Caitlin R. Kiernan – Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales
Ben MacIntyre – Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche
Reinhold Neibuhr – Moral Man and Immoral Society
Thomas Pangle (ed.) – The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues
Theodore Roszak – Flicker
Adrian Tchaikovsky – Cage of Souls
Gene Wolfe – The Fifth Head of Cerberus
John T. Irwin – The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story

2022

Alistair Rennie – BleakWarrior
Barry Cooper – Paleolithic Politics: The Human Community in Early Art
Jacqes Barzun – A Stroll with William James

Ioan Culianu – The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism

Mel Gordon – Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman – Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life OR Benjamin L. B. Lipscomb – The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics

Iris Murdoch book

Charles Nicholl – Somebody Else: Arthur Rumbaud in Africa, 1880-1891

Heather Pringle – The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust

James C. Scott – Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States OR Barry Cooper

Lucius Shepard – The Dragion Griaule

Gene Wolfe – The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

Runners up: Centipede Press – Library of Weird Fiction: Frank Belknap Long, Kevin Coogan – Red Swastika, Paul Gottfried – Fascism: The Career of a Concept, Krister Dylan Knapp – William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity, Edwrd Luttwak – Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook, Pierre Prevost – Georges Bataille et Rene Guenon: l’experience souveraine (1997); James Tiptree, Jr. – Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

2023

Christopher Buehlman’s Between Two Fires
Homeric Moments by Eva Brann
the new translation of Beowulf
Thomas Nail – Theory of the Earth
UVG 2e
Pynchon – Mason & Dixon
The Pike: D’Annunzio
Contesting Nietzsche
something about the Phaedo

Runnersup:
Hynek bio
Robert Kurvitz – Sacred and Terrible Air (2013), trans. Group Ibex