a good day’s work, not just play

Just finished off a very productive and enjoyable day (despite nothing but naps on airplanes last night) and am calling it time to sleep.

Great time at Cirio, a 19th century café, with Didier and Katrin. Some of you may know Didier’s short French book on Whitehead, while others may know Katrin’s work in philosophy of science, including a very well-received contribution to Skrbina’s Mind That Abides panpsychism anthology (Didier, I.H. Grant, and I are also in that volume).

Among the major topics of discussion tonight were Latour, Meillassoux, and Shaviro (Didier met Shaviro in Australia once, while I have not yet had the pleasure, but soon will in Atlanta).

In this portion of the blogosphere, we talk a lot about S.R. and OOO, which are both largely Anglophone movements (despite Meillassoux’s role as the S.R. trigger). But there is a parallel Francophone trend as well that extends more widely than Meillassoux’s work: including his fellow editors at the PUF MétaphysiqueS series, and also including Debaise and some other Belgians. The conspiracy of the night was figuring out a way to join forces between the Anglophone and Francophone camps, and it turns out Debaise is already on the case. I’m on board with his plan as well, and there should be an announcement in the coming months.

Speaking of which, Katrin had just purchased the Eduardo Viveiros de Castro Métaphysiques cannibales volume from the PUF series. (I had been at the same bookstore one hour earlier –Tropismes- looking for it, but somehow failed to find it.)

The books in the series look really nice, though somewhat different from what I expected– they are pretty wide, not narrow as I imagined. Debaise is publishing in that series just as I am, it turns out. So far, Viveiros de Castro and Souriau are the only two books that they’ve printed.