books received

Finally… I received the Amazon package with Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (which is deliciously short, meaning that I might just blaze through it tonight) and the two other Adrian Johnston books.

Speaking of short books… I’m glad to see zerO doing these. Just yesterday I reread Leibniz’s Principles of Nature and Grace, which in the Hackett volume runs to a whopping 6 pages, while saying more than most books that are literally 100 times as long in some cases.

Friendly visitors to my home will sometimes tease me when they see that each of my books has gotten shorter (Heidegger Explained doesn’t count, since it had to fit a preordained series format). But if you look at my other three books, each one is indeed shorter than the next. The flavor of the genial teasing seems to be “haha, getting lazy there, aren’t you?” But in fact, it is harder work to compress what you know into smaller and smaller spaces– like miniaturizing weapons. L’objet quadruple is even shorter, and if you were following my live-blogging of the book, then you’ll recall how hard it was for me sometimes to fit ideas into the available 2 pages for the topic, or whatever. (The analogy I often used was what Ian Bogost was saying about the pathetic memory limits of the Atari, and how the programmers flourished not just in spite of those limits, but to some extent because of them; a more powerful Atari might conceivably have led to worse games.)

I won’t be able to keep it up forever, of course, but I do have the rough goal each time of writing a book that is shorter than my previous one. And I absolutely envy Leibniz his series of 15-page treatises.

Tool-Being was initially 100 pages longer than the current length, which is already probably too long. When you’re younger, it feels like a sign of utmost seriousness and thoroughness to write a long book. Over time, I feel like I’m doing my job better when I compress the material more. But it’s difficult.