November 14, 2011

"Building on the work of Donna Haraway and her own previous studies, Keller studies how metaphors derived from social and sexual relations are expressed in even the scientific language with which the nature of life, cell biology and the evolutionary process are understood. Our understanding of the natural world cannot be innocent; nor therefore can any attempt to naturalize the social be innocent. This book, midway in Keller’s distinguished career, serves as a good introduction to her earlier and later work."

"In my book I am interested in older forms of life discourses, but to write about them today I wanted to understand how life is presently understood. As Rose explains in a brilliant phenomenology of our new biosociety, scientists, bioethicists and science fiction writers are all tantalized by the new possibilities of knowing life not simply to restore a lost normativity but to transform it at conception, in utero and at the molecular level. Such manipulation of life now overshadows biopolitical concerns like state management of bodies for docility and population for quality."

"Bioethics is now responsible for the increased talk about life in philosophy, but Deleuze had tried decades before to rethink ontology and ethics in terms of life. Hallward, who is also a social analyst of contemporary Haitian society, reveals in this remarkably sophisticated philosophical study how impatience for the creativity putatively characteristic of pure life can only result in escapist fantasies given what Sartre once called the practico-inertness of the world."

"Schnädelbach recovers the central cultural importance that Lebensphilosophie had in the early twentieth century (see also the chapter on it in Edward Skidelsky’s recent book on Ernst Cassirer), charting the development of Lebensphilosophie from Romantic reactions to mathematical positivist methods that seemed to be able to understand life only by stripping it of its essence to its wider critique of reason in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

"This is a wonderful collection of essays that was not taken as seriously as it should have been probably because it was published a few years before Deleuze’s Bergsonism was to make its mark in the Anglo-American world. The book begins with a translation of Bakhtin’s critique of Hans Driesch’s vitalist biology and the social assumptions underlying it.

"By interpreting such as movements as Futurism, Fauvism, Cubism, the discerning art historian shows powerfully how Bergson’s élan vital underwrote anarcho-individualist expression as well as irredentist nationalist projects. Yet how did a philosophy of life and becoming, of creative evolution, get tied up with the latter? Antliff’s study, which he has deepened in several articles and an additional book, motivated me to investigate whether there are any real conceptual connections between an often abstruse and poetic philosophy and revolutionary traditionalism.

"This book conveniently collects essays that the great African scholar Abiola Irele has written over forty years on the struggle for black cultural identity. Irele immediately understood that Negritude was not simply a call for a return to an African origin but a movement in complex relationship to modernism and European anti-intellectualist philosophy. This allowed one not only to read Negritude anew but modernism, Nietzsche and Bergson as well.

"Here was a serious attempt to unmask positivism, loosen the hold of determinism, create doubt about logic and the intellect, dethrone symbols and concepts, solve in one swoop Zeno’s paradoxes, dissolve solid bodies into flows and awaken the powers of intuition. Bergson, a celebrity philosopher who created traffic jams during his visit to the United States, won the Nobel Prize in Literature but formidable minds wrote one criticism after another: Arthur Lovejoy, Bertrand Russell, Georges Politzer, Gaston Bachelard, and Jacques Lacan.

"At once a revolutionary development of poetic form and a volcanic expression of black consciousness, Cahier [Notebook] has been read in many different ways. I explored it as an attempt not to celebrate only that which is vital in black existence but to affirm black existence in all its tragedy and beauty—a work that both emboldens and heals a people in need of poetic voice. I ultimately read Cesaire as outside the vitalist tradition that I criticize."