weird tweet from Tripoli

“Also my internet connection is faster than anything I have experienced before. I am suspicious.”

What could that be about?

the Colonel shuts down the mosques

Who’s afraid of Friday?

1152: ShababLibya tweets: “Gaddafi has ordered all the mosques to be surrounded by armed guards to prevent the mass protests.”

defection of helicopter and more troops and police

1118: A Palestinian pilot, presumably serving in the Libyan armed forces, has landed his helicopter in Misrata, east of Tripoli, and defected to the protesters, private newspaper Libya al-Yawm reports on its website.

1125: Army and police in the eastern city of Ajdabiya say they have withdrawn from their barracks and joined the protesters, al-Jazeera reports.

roundup of other news

0913: Nato ambassadors are to hold an emergency meeting in Brussels at 1530 on the situation in Libya. Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen says he has called the meeting to consult on what he described as a fast-moving situation.

0941: CNN reporter in Benghazi bencnn tweets: “Heard in Benghazi: “Ben Ali of #Tunisia fell on a Friday, Mubarak of #Egypt fell on a Friday, Qaddafi will fall this Friday.”

0948: Prominent Egyptian blogger Wael Ghonim tweets: “Praying that Libya brothers and sisters put an end to the dictator today. Reminder: Qaddafi, It’s Friday!”

1031: Reports from Paris say that anti-Gaddafi protesters – calling themselves the “children of revolution” – have occupied the Libyan embassy in France. “We’ve taken over the embassy,” a spokeswoman for the group told the AFP. Police are stationed outside the embassy, preventing anyone else gaining access to the building.

Further protests today in Bahrain, Yemen, and– Iraq.

They’re a brave generation, these young Arabs.

EU to declare a no-fly zone?

1042: EU nations are preparing to participate in a possible no-fly zone over Libya to prevent Col Gaddafi from bombing protesters, an EU diplomat is quoted as saying by the AFP news agency.

This would be good, both for the no-fly zone itself, and also because the EU really ought to be doing this. But make no mistake, this means taking sides in an armed conflict that will inevitably lead to the deaths of Qaddafi and his inner circle in short order.

article in SubStance

“Realism Without Materialism,” which is a streamlined version of my Zagreb lecture in June 2009. SubStance will be printing it in August.

What does that leave still in press? Let’s see.

*the Leibniz/Heidegger article for Cultural Studies Review (Sydney). That should be out pretty soon; the proofs were corrected over a month ago.

*the long Metzinger article. Cosmos and History, but I don’t know when.

*article on Jean-Luc Nancy in the Gratton/Morin anthology at SUNY Press, though I’ve heard nothing about it for awhile.

*article on Heidegger in The Ontic Return, which aspires to be something like the analytic philosophy version of The Speculative Turn (DeLanda and I are the only two authors to appear in both volumes). Amazon says it will be out this summer, but I’ve heard nothing in a long time.

*A German translation of my 1999 “Object-Oriented Philosophy” lecture near London, the first time the term was used in public (unless someone used the term before me, which I doubt).

*My 2009 Manchester keynote, which will appear in a Routledge anthology in 2012.

*An article on Edward Said, which will appear in a U. of Toronto Press anthology late in 2011 or early in 2012. Stated roughly, one can only agree with Said that there’s a lot of bad orientalism out there (Flaubert’s Letters from Egypt are an embarrassing and sickening abomination, to name my own least favorite instance; after reading the book, I refused to have it in my house any longer and gave it away to the first person who wanted it). Nonetheless, Said’s anti-realist/anti-essentialist intellectual framework is not only wrong on the philosophical merits, it also backfires and leads in my opinion to something less than a philosophy of liberation. That’s too big an issue to be settled in one article, but I’m quite clear that that sort of 1970’s/1980’s social constructionism has done its work and needs to be replaced. I think postcolonial theory made a mistake by swallowing that type of anti-realist philosophy, and I also think it will take them years to recover from that decision, though I don’t think they’re in a hopeless position. Reality itself has been forcing us for the past month to take the issue of colonialism seriously again, and reality generally teaches us how to make the tools we need, after some initial disorientation.

*three books: the English version of The Quadruple Object, The Prince and the Wolf [w. Bruno Latour and Peter Erdélyi, who wrote a splendid long introduction to the book], and Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making.

There’s a lot more coming than that. Those are just the pieces that I’ve already finished, and which are now entirely in the hands of others.

interviews

Just now I tried to count how many interviews I’ve done. To my surprise, there are already 7, with 3 more soon to appear.

(There’s the one with Protevi to be posted next month on the New APPS blog, another already completed one with that Belgian/Lithuanian arts journal, and then the still-in-progress one with Hilan Bensusan, for a book on the contemporary metaphysical renaissance. It’s still unsure where that book will be published, I believe.)

the Bennett review is in press

new formations issue #71 is now in press, including my review of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. (Bennett herself has already read and liked the review, incidentally.)

It’s more of a short review article, not a stub book review. I didn’t realize it would need a title, but the editors wrote today and suggested “Autonomous Objects,” which sounded perfectly fine to me.

Bennett’s book is a very nice read and I’d recommend it strongly to those of my readers who don’t yet know it.

“an end to the violence”

This phrase is always admirable in principle, of course. But I fail to understand why Obama and some other Western leaders are using it as a mantra in recent days.

Clearly, there is only one way now to end the violence: remove Qaddafi by whatever means necessary.

Qaddafi will not lay down his weapons at this stage, and neither is it fair to ask the rebellion not to use any violence in putting an end to the ruler who just launched one of the most barbaric crackdowns in recent history. I hope no one is even considering the latter option.

So, what does it mean to ask for “an end to the violence”? Ten days ago, maybe. But the crimes of the Qaddafi regime are now far beyond remedy. And given that no one is likely to offer asylum to Qaddafi and his inner circle (though I could be wrong about that), they are simply going to have to be removed by violent means. It’s an ugly fact, but they have only themselves to blame for it.

happiest stat I saw all day

82% of Americans were sympathetic to the Egyptian protestors.

Good. There is some hope. Our country’s instincts are still democratic.

The 18% who were unsympathetic are perhaps roughly the same group as the 17.79% who voted for Le Pen in France in the 2002 runoff: a coalition of crazy people, nasty people, deluded people, and people playing a sick prank. Every country seems to have a built-in structural component of 18% jerks and Archie Bunker reactionaries.

But all joking aside, the 18% of Americans who didn’t sympathize may have included some cold-blooded patriotic Realpoliticians. It would be interesting to see how much above 82% the sympathy would go if the question were about a full-blown American enemy state, such as Iran or North Korea. It might get up into the 90’s in those cases, sure. That would leave us with, say, 10-12% of Americans who care only about what’s good for America, and mathematically that sounds about right.