Tuesday, September 7, 2010

A Post of Links

First off, Clare has moved her discussion of Foucault news over to a new blog, Foucault News. Time to update your rss feeds, and to thank her for this wonderful service.

EJ has a remarkable (if a little long) paper/post on Derrida and Animals. Go and read it despite the length.

The DeLanda reading group continues to pump out interesting posts. Here is Reid on Genres as Assemblages, here is Levi on Reid's post.

Eileen Joy has a response up to Jeffrey's "Queering the In/Organic" which I linked to before. Joy takes a more pro-humanist stance. I think I currently inhabit a third position between the humanist Joy stance, and the stance of Jeffrey and Bennett. Basically, I am worried that this generalized vitalism opens the backdoor for human exceptionalism in ethics and politics. This is something I talked about in the reading group of Vibrant Matter. This isn't an objection against Jeffrey or Bennett's work, but something that I worry about and hope their work can actually answer and push back against. In other words, I hope to be worrying about nothing.

Speaking of Bennett, she is engaged in a discussion with Akeel Bilgrami. See here, and here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has recently decided to go vegetarian. His incredibly mild statements and stance elicited the usual chorus of militant opposition, which caused Lee to ponder some of these terrible arguments against vegetarianism.

Vegan cupcakes are yummy. Sad that surprises so many people, but hopefully this will start changing.

Adam has an interesting post up on job applications and the utopian job. Worth reading.

Speaking of jobs, here is an interesting essay on tenure and other higher education reforms. It is a bit more fair than many of the other articles I have read on the subject. I think we should also pair this with this article on the lives of adjuncts and grad student teachers (I can't remember who linked to this on their blog, post here and I will add the hat tip to you). Nothing new there, but all of this underlines the point: while most of the suggestions for education reform has been pretty much bunk, it is obvious that reform is needed.

Lastly, many of you have heard of the disgusting comments made by Morrissey. Unfortunate, offensive, absurd, and racist. However, I have generally liked his music. So, let's watch the better part of Morrissey, but remember that this sort of attitude and language is completely and utterly unacceptable.