Life Sciences

Straight Sense

By Andy Campbell

Jean-Luc Nancy. Corpus II. Trans. Anne O’Byrne. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

I often ask undergraduates encountering philosophical texts for the first time to initially read as though they were encountering poetry instead of philosophy. Not only does this tactic soften the array of feelings (overwhelmed indignation is perennially popular) that inevitably seem to arise when reading dense texts, but it also opens a student’s capabilities to understand and imagine alongside a text.
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A Materialist Theory of Affect

By Emilie Dionne

Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou. Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience. Columbia University Press, 2013. 304 pp.

In Self and Emotional Life, Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou diagnose an incapacity for Continental thinkers to embrace an “authentically materialist theory of subjectivity” (ix) such as it is emerging in the neurosciences.
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In The Meantime Without End

By Adam Broinowski

Eric Cazdyn. The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness. Duke University Press, 2012. 230 pp.

The Already Dead comes at a critical moment in which the vulgarities of the global capitalist system have become increasingly difficult to conceal. The book’s approach, at once theoretical and personal, historical and cultural, seeks new modes of revolutionary consciousness that can destabilize both within and without the capitalist system so as to reconfigure everything.
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