criminal complaints make for fascinating reading

If you go to the Boston Globe website, HERE, you can actually download (towards the upper left of the page) a PDF containing the 11-page federal criminal complaint against the surviving alleged Marathon bomber. I always find these documents fascinating, in part because they spell out in explicit prose numerous background facts that normally go without saying. For instance:

“In the area near the finish line, businesses are located on both sides of Boylston Street, including restaurants, a department store, a hotel, and various retail stores.”

What’s so fascinating about this? I suppose it’s that due to the necessity of relative completeness in describing the facts surrounding a crime, the author (an FBI agent, in this case) has to adopt the pretense of addressing people who know nothing at all about the situation, even though we all know an awful lot about it already. And in that sense, a contemporary author is forced to write like a historian more than like a contemporary.

The 9/11 Commission Report was fascinating reading for much the same reason. While there were a fair number of facts in that report that were news, it was mostly a clinical summary of things pretty much any human alive on that date who paid some attention to the news already knew. By now we may have forgotten enough about the events of 2001 that there might be a historical value in that report, but at the time it was simply a summary of the obvious, but written in the tone of a history for newcomers.

other book news

I may have forgotten to mention that I’ll be doing an expanded edition of Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making for Edinburgh. The book is still doing well.

It will be 20,000 words longer than the current edition. I don’t plan to cut anything, but do plan to add a chapter on the (really admirable) Mallarmé book, along with treatment of perhaps 3 additional articles that were not covered in the first version.

This one probably won’t be released until 2015, since the series already has a lot of great titles coming out in 2014 and there’s no point clustering them all together.

I love doing business with EUP. They’re always full of ideas about where to go next.

on the title “Heidegger Explained”

An ultra-orthodox Heideggerian was recently sneering at my book title Heidegger Explained (2007), as though it were some sort of unforgivable pomposity to have claimed to “explain” someone as inscrutably complicated as Heidegger.

First, let me repeat that while I think Heidegger is indeed very deep, he really isn’t that complicated, inconvenient though this fact may be if you want to make a living as a High Priest interpreter of his texts.

But more germane to the present discussion is that I didn’t choose the title, which instead was mandated by the publisher. It is part of an Open Court series of introductory books: Frege Explained, Sartre Explained, Ockham Explained, Daoism Explained, Atheism Explained, etc.

It is safe to say that too many Heideggerians are far too protective of the Heidegger turf.

sounds like a good band name

Triple-Dip Recession

another translation from the French appearing this summer: Descola

Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture has an announced publication date of June 1. The automatic linking mechanism on this blog appears to be temporarily broken, so I will simply paste the whole URL here:

http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Nature-Culture-Philippe-Descola/dp/0226144453/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366645289&sr=1-1&keywords=descola+beyond+nature+and+culture

When speaking with the young French philosophers at ATMOC in early 2012, I found that most of them were passionately reading Descola’s book. (There are clear traces of it already in Garcia’s Form and Object.)

speaking of Latour’s later philosophy

Amazon lists a July 22 release date for the English version of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence.

There had been talk of an earlier release date (right around now, in fact) for an eBook version, but I see no evidence of an early eBook here. But it’s been a distracting spring, and it’s quite possible I’m simply missing something.

Prince of Modes: Latour’s Later Philosophy

That’s the title of my sequel to Prince of Networks, which re.press (home of the earlier book) has just agreed to published. I’ve really enjoyed working with them, and it’s still my best-selling book despite being available free of charge as a PDF on the re.press website. I wanted the sequel to be living in the same home. The center of this book will be Latour’s massive new modes of existence project, though I plan to cover the Gifford Lectures and maybe a few other things, and some attention will need to be given to the philosophy of Étienne Souriau.

This does mean that I’ll be working on 3 books simultaneously (this one, the Latour’s politics book, and the one on continental epistemism) during sabbatical. But at the risk of this sounding like an affectation, I find it much easier to work on multiple books simultaneously rather than one at a time, and will be doing it that way from here on out.

It’s the best antidote to writer’s block, since you can always turn to another project if one of them is feeling stale. And though I haven’t had writer’s block in awhile, I had it badly enough in my 20’s that I don’t care to go anywhere near it again. Most of the smart people who fail in intellectual life fail because they can’t get written work done, and while the fate of most such people is merely self-destructive depression, some of them develop personality-wise in ways that verge on the evil. Avoid that path at all costs, even if you have to break with a whole group of associates to do it. Getting projects done has to become something like a religion for you.

A prominent author recently passed through our campus (I admire his books very much) and we were trading writing strategy anecdotes. In response to my claim that it’s easier to write 3 books at a time than just 1, he asked how I prevent the projects from blending too much together. I didn’t really have a good answer at the time. But after thinking it over, decided that the whole point is to have some blending. The projects tend to inspire each other.

And in the case of the present 3 book contracts: the two Latour books are on partially overlapping but different themes, while the epistemism project is centered in Žižek and Badiou, though Meillassoux’s remarks in Berlin last year were really the inspiration for it.

article: “Countdown to a Coup in Egypt”

THIS ARTICLE covers that theme.

It’s an interesting read, but I am completely opposed to a military coup here, and think that those who fear the Muslim Brotherhood that much (for understandable reasons) should remember that it was no fun at all to live under SCAF [Supreme Council of Armed Forces] for a year and a half [after Mubarak was thrown out], and also remember that a post-coup military government is unlikely to be better than the Mubarak era in any important way. Democracy, human rights, and certainly free speech would not be likely to improve after a military coup. (And free speech is one of the few precious gains made since the 2011 Revolution. Not that people always say whatever they want with impunity now, but they do tend to say whatever they want, something that didn’t happen when Mubarak was in power.)

Though the Muslim Brotherhood has been as divisive as expected, and has been shockingly more incompetent in the work of governance than expected, I’d still prefer that we take our chances with the Egyptian electorate making a wiser decision next time. A military coup would mean erasing whatever gains were made since 2011.

And more simply put, it’s never a good idea to call for military fascism, especially after such pains were recently taken to dislodge it.

But it’s not so surprising that people are calling for a military coup now. These seem to be largely the same people who were willing to vote for Shafik for President even though he was the same man who served as Prime Minister while protestors were being gunned down from rooftops and attacked with camels and horses.

While I can understand why those who feel especially vulnerable in this society might prefer a tight military grip to an Islamist government, that wouldn’t be my own choice– at least as long as the Islamist government is basically sane, despite their sweeping incompetence and frequent lack of basic truthfulness.

[ADDENDUM: Maybe I should say a little more about what I mean by the incompetence of the government, since most of you don’t live here in Egypt. I’m not just talking about absurd gaffes, such as Morsi announcing tax increases in the evening and then revoking them at 3 AM on his Facebook page. (Spawning the joke: Morsi walks into a bar. He orders a drink. Then cancels it.) I’m talking about the basic sense here that public services are a mess. Electricity goes out at random times now, much more often than before. Garbage is not being collected as efficiently. Government offices, such as post offices, do not seem as well run as before. Traffic is hideously worse, for reasons that no one seems able to explain adequately. There’s just a general sense that the present government is lacking in basic technocratic ability, and is not evolving quickly enough from sectarian group into public entity.]