Next year

This what I am currently scheduled to do next year, of course thanks to the cuts I could end up with a lot more time and far less money... I'm also trying to write a review of Blanchot's Political Writings, planning to write an essay on Debord's cinema, specifically In Girum, and working on the spaghetti western paper.

Political Vitalism

For some reason much of my current reading seems to be converging around problems of vitalism, so thanks to Federico for this link, which has much material (and much I can't read thanks to unforgiveable linguistic incompetence), including texts by Federico himself. I'm also hoping to make it to the Zagreb conference on vitalism next year ('To Have Done with Life'), which is looking more and more like a crucial event.

My paper for HM is currently being re-drafted, 'worsened' (a la Beckett), for the JCGS, if it doesn't get turned down. Caught in the 'grief' of completing the book (thanks to Michael Holroyd's excellent talk at our University for this formulation), but if I can only combine current interests (Kierkegaard, Lefebvre (on dialectics), Rousseau on political economy) then perhaps something will emerge from that, after writing a piece on 'Debord's Time-Image' and editing the communization collection.

Other, better, people on grading protest, on nothing changes but everything gets worse, on the British misery, hostile objects, Greece as crucible of protest, the Italian misery (pdf), and, courtesy of the Institute, Marcuse on student protest.

Arrived!

The book is here, thank god (or whatever). Very pleased. Obviously in expensive hardback, but anyone who is interested in reviewing let me know, or who doesn't receive a review copy soon who has already agreed.

Available to review for HM

Negativity II

My contribution to 'Cutting the 'Not'' now up here.

out and about

In Maastricht from tomorrow to Sunday at 'Cutting the 'Not'', should anyone be in the 'area'... I'll put up my paper on academia.edu and perhaps post a report when I return. I don't actually have a portable laptop so can't do any on-the-spot reporting.

After a day's recovery, off then to Accelerationism at Goldsmiths on Tuesday 14th, which Mark updates here with further news (currently downloading the mix). I have to say being anti-accelerationist doesn't make me anti-drum n' bass / (detroit) techno - two of my absolute favourite forms of music.

Chillaxing after that, ie working, although launching my book at Chichester on October 14th 4pm with an early evening soiree, before gearing up for HM in November.

Cutting the "Not"

Cutting the “Not”: Workshop on Negativity and Reflexivity
September 10-12, 2010
Jan Van Eyck Academie
Maastricht, Netherlands

Organizers: Mladen Dolar, Avigail Moss, Eli Noé, Kerstin Stakemeier and Tzuchien Tho
Please see our website for schedule and updates.


Cutting the “Not”
The question of the negative has been one of the fundamental concerns, if not the central problem, of modern and postmodern philosophy. If, since Descartes (and more explicitly since Kant), philosophy is understood as an inherently self-reflexive practice - no longer an inquiry into the essence of things, but the reflection of thought onto its own conditions and limitations - the question of the negative has risen as the necessary counterpoint to this self-reflexivity: negativity as the non-identity between subject and object, the differential correlation between thought and what is external to (and yet conditioned by) thought.

Perhaps the strongest historical example of the coincidence between the problem of reflexivity and negation is the Hegelian concept of negativity, the dynamic process of self-differentiation as self-identity. No doubt, its tremendous impact on contemporary thought can be seen as itself a negative one. In various ways, much of contemporary philosophy ranging from the work of Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida and Badiou has been posed in specific opposition, modification or reinvention of this negative/reflexive dynamic. By inventing forms of negativity that do not involve dialectic reversals and over-comings, by rejecting the fundamental structure of contradiction outright, or by de-globalizing the scope of any dialectic system, contemporary forms of thought have either rejected negativity outright or have re-inscribed or readjusted the power of negativity in local, that is, non-totalizing functions.

In this context of "thinking beyond the negative", the concept of negativity is often treated as a theoretical shibboleth, a conceptual "password" that serves to divide conflicting doctrinal tendencies, separating allies from foes. In so far as this logic involves the demarcation of a homogeneous theoretical field to be rejected (e.g. Deleuze's critique of "post-Kantian Hegelianism"), it not only involves a rude simplification, presupposing a unambiguous dividing line where there is in fact a complex knot, but also attests to the fact that in polemically opposing the negative, one inevitably takes part in it. Hence, a fresh, actualized take on negativity does not only involve new ways of affirming the negative, but also has to take note of the "persistence of the negative" (B. Noys) in any thought and practice that claims to have surpassed negativity.

The aim of this workshop is to cut the (k)not of the negative, not to offer any easy way out of the problem, but to reconsider, with the polemical strings cut, the question in its complexity. This means, above all, to appreciate the field of negativity as a "garden of forking paths", a tissue of folded and interwoven philosophical lineages, with branches extending to extra-philosophical domains. We propose to investigate the problem both forwards and backwards, both looking at the origins of the problem in modern (transcendental and dialectical) philosophy, as well as to the vicissitudes of the negative in contemporary thinking. Our focus will also extend "laterally", by directing the attention to figures of negativity in art, politics, psychoanalysis and science.

Participants include: (alphabetically)
Mark Van Atten
Jean-Yves Beziau
Ray Brassier
Mladen Dolar
Sven Lüttiken
Catherine Malabou
Gregor Moder
Avigail Moss
Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt
Eli Noé
Benjamin Noys
Frank Ruda
Kerstin Stakemeier
Tzuchien Tho
Jan Völker
Susanne M Winterling

Big in Poland

Thanks to Agata for noting this appearance of my work on Herzog's Grizzly Man in Polish, for the original English version see here (pdf). Would have been nice if they'd asked, but even so good to see the work getting out there.

Registering with the Big (Commercial) Other

The Persistence of the Negative makes it to Amazon. The usual punishing price point I know, but interested parties, especially reviewers, get in touch nearer the time. Also, any requests to EUP for a paperback gratefully received, and also any orders, again nearer the time, for library copies. Currently I am completing the copy editing, then I have the index to do, and then it's fame and fortune all the way.

On a related, and heartening note, Nihil Unbound makes it into paperback (after 3 years...).

Production

In lieu of anything particularly seasonal or intelligent on the blog, instead I review Jameson's Valences of the Dialectic in The Philosophers' Magazine (2010) under the excellent title 'Wal-Marx' (not mine I add, perhaps Infinite's wit), and have a review essay on Gregory Elliott's Ends in Sight in Historical Materialism 17.4 (2009) (email me if you want the pdf - although I'm off email from 24 December to 4 January).

In the meantime completing a review of Heller-Roazen's The Enemy of All for Radical Philosophy, perhaps amending the piece on Black Metal for the collection, writing something on Queimada to be presented with Alberto on 12 February 2010, and writing some substantial pieces on politics and time for the conference Waiting for the Political Moment, and on Negation and Affirmation. That's the next six months sorted...

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Space is the Place

Presentation at ‘Is Black and Red Dead?’ Conference, The Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice, University of Nottingham (7-8 September 2009)

Introduction
If, according to Sun Ra, ‘space is the place’, then what type of space is the place we want to be? From Hakim Bey’s mystical-Stirnerite ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’, to Alain Badiou’s post-Maoist invocation of ‘independent spaces’ subtracted from the State, from the ‘offensive opacity zones’ of the neo-Agambenian anarchist group ‘Tiqqun’, to Masteneh Shah-Shuja’s libertarian communist ‘zones of proletarian development’, the answer appears to be the ‘zone’, or its equivalent, as the space of liberation.

There is no doubt that the zone of resistance, or of liberation, has been a recurrent and attractive theoretical and practical trope. I want to suggest that this is because the zone appears to offer an answer to the central problem of any radical spatial politics: on the one hand, this politics must be rooted or grounded in a particular space to have traction; on the other hand, this politics cannot remained confined to a particular space, but must (potentially at least) spread out and develop across all spaces. The attraction of the zone is that it appears to answer both these needs: fixed but fluid, rooted but rhizomatic. Of course where the emphasis falls accounts for a great deal of the political diversity of these ‘zones’. Usually in Marxism the stress has been on the strategic recognition of particular privileged sites of antagonism linked to the socio-economic contradictions of capital: from Lenin’s call to strike at the ‘weakest link’ in the imperialist chain, to Tronti’s argument that the capitalist chain will break at the point where the working class is the strongest. In contrast, anarchists, in Antonio Negri’s characterisation, ‘have always refused to define a time or space as privileged moments of uprising … thinking that there are one or thousands of spaces and times of revolt.’ (2008: 144) And yet all forms of radical spatial politics, I would argue, must negotiate with the problem of this dual imperative.

While not denying the attractions of the ‘zone’, both theoretically and practically, as either a resolution to this problem, or, in a more Deleuzian sense, as a better way of posing the problem, I do want to consider here what might be elided or evaded in the invocation of the ‘zone’. In his discussion of radical spatial politics David Harvey inflects the tension I have noted by distinguishing between place and space. Place is correlated with particularity, and the mobilising and empowering effects of localised or materially-grounded identities (which can include class, minority, gender, or sexuality, based identities). This is contrasted with the wider and more fluid domain of space, conceived of as the more generic and global site of politics. As Harvey notes, place-based groups are ‘relatively empowered to organize in place but disempowered when it comes to organizing over space.’ (Harvey 1990: 303) However, even this relative gain in power is problematised in the context of the capitalist organisation of space: the ‘assertion of any place-bound identity’ states Harvey, ‘[risks] becom[ing] part of the very fragmentation which a mobile capitalism and flexible accumulation can feed upon.’ (Harvey 1990: 303) The desire to invest place with an aesthetic and political meaning as a site of resistance ‘meshes only too well with the idea of spatial differentiations as lures for a peripatetic capital that values the option of mobility very highly.’ (Harvey 1990: 303) Instead of drawing an immediately pessimistic conclusion from this critique, can we find a more fine-grained understanding of the potential pressures on any existing or prospective ‘zone of resistance’?

Territoriality
I want to refer to one comparatively under-discussed staging of this problem of radical spatial politics: the work of Ranajit Guha. One of the founders of the Gramsci-inspired school of Subaltern studies, Guha is concerned to recover peasant insurgency in colonial India from, to use E. P. Thompson’s famous and felicitous phrase, ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ (Thompson 1991 / 1963: 12). Contrary to the usual teleological historiographical models, whether colonialist, nationalist, or Marxist, Guha argues that this particular form of peasant politics ‘was by no means archaic in the sense of being outmoded’ (Guha 1982: 4). In spatial terms Guha rehabilitates the reliance of peasant mobilisation ‘on the traditional organization of kinship and territoriality’ against the abstract ‘national’ spatiality of elite mobilisation (Guha 1982: 4). Guha, however, is still haunted by the constraints of this form of mobilisation, noting that: ‘the numerous peasant uprisings of the period, some of them massive in scope and rich in anti-colonialist consciousness, waited in vain for a leadership to raise them above localism and generalize them into a nationwide anti-imperialist campaign.’ (Guha 1982: 6) Leaving aside the question of leadership, no doubt crucial to the disputes between anarchists and Marxists, here I want to focus on the spatial coding of the problem. Again we can see the tension between localism as the condition for radicalisation, and localism a constraint on radicalisation.

This is further cashed out in Guha’s later monumental work Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983 / 1999), which, in a chapter titled ‘Territoriality’, specifically takes on Marxist criticisms of the spatial confinement of peasant politics. In particular he rejects Engels charge, made in The Peasant War in Germany (1850 / 2002), that the defeat of the German peasants was specifically the result of their ‘stubborn provincialism’ (in Guha 1999: 279). In contrast Guha asserts ‘territoriality as a positive factor of rebel mobilization’ (1999: 305; my emphasis). Territoriality composes two overlapping axes of mobilisation: one based on common lineage and the other on common habitat. Peasant mobilisation operates spatially in terms of the identification of colonial power and its native protégés as alien, and this definitional act can either be negative – defining space in terms of the otherness of the alien – or positive – defining conflict in terms of the self-identity of the insurgents (Guha 1999: 281). Through a series of detailed historical reconstructions Guha emphasises the motivational power, and political dimension, of local struggles in which familial and ethnic ties overlap with that of spatial determinations.

He also raises the question of the articulation between a spatial politics and temporality, noting that: ‘A correlate of the category of space was a sense of time.’ (1999: 291) The ‘rootedness’ of peasant insurgency expresses a particular temporal politics, which is, as Guha states:

Expressed in its most generalized form as a contrasted pair of times (then / now), a good past negated by a bad present, its function was to endow the struggle against the alien with the mission of recovering the past as a future. (Guha 1999: 291)

Holding on to a particular territory becomes coded as holding on to a particular time – the ‘good past’ – but now refigured as a possible future. The reappropriation of past and future time is therefore staged through the spatial reappropriation of territory. This second point is crucial to Guha’s argument. It is vital for him to resist the usual model of such peasant insurgencies as resolutely backward looking, and so archaic. Instead Guha insists that: ‘The domain of rebellion extended thus in both directions [past and future] from the subject’s locus in an embattled present.’ (1999: 294) In exactly the same fashion as the question of spatiality, temporality also has to be re-thought to avoid the sense of confinement and archaism usually invoked to dismiss such insurgencies.

Confinement in a particular place, whether spatial or temporal, is resisted by Guha’s insistence that the two axes of territoriality – ethnic and physical space – do not completely overlap (Guha 1999: 330). It is this spatial difference that produces the expansive drive of peasant insurgency as it comes to fill in these ‘gaps’, creating the capacity to enlarge and define a wider domain of insurgency – a kind of expanding zone of insurgency. It is the non-coincidence of place and space, the very fact that territoriality is permeable and dis-located, which makes possible a non-archaic radical spatial politics. And yet, once again, Guha is forced to note the limits of such insurgencies in the context of later militant mass movements, writing that the peasants can only attain a ‘fragmented insurgent consciousness’ (Guha 1999: 331). The fragmentation of consciousness is mirrored in the spatial fragmentation in which the rootedness of territoriality eventually blocks the connection of insurgents in space, and blocks a generic or unified consciousness that can transcend territoriality. Contrary to Guha’s express intention, it appears that localism has its revenge, and these insurgencies remain merely prefigurative of later national or global insurgencies.

Teleology
We could argue, however, that Guha’s problem does not lie with the object of his research, but with his inability to give-up on his residual Marxist commitment to historical teleology. Regarding the proletariat as the true generic subject of history, and the only subject able to universalise itself spatially through the immanent rupture with the ‘false’ universality of capital, Guha can still only leave the peasant insurgent as a prefigurative moment. In Provincializing Europe (2000) Dipesh Chakrabarty aims to radicalise Guha’s work by freeing it from its residual teleology. The refusal of such teleologies, and their correlation with privileged carriers or bearers of history, allows us to free spatial and temporal difference from metaphysical and political subordination.

What is interesting is that Chakrabarty does not, at least initially, simply abandon Marxism. In fact, he argues that the question of spatial and temporal difference is posed within the horizon of capital and, more particularly, within our conceptualisation of capital as a spatial and temporal order. We can regard such differences as: (1) inevitably overcome by capital in the long run; (2) negotiated and contained within capital; or (3) produced by capital (Chakrabarty 2000: 47). In each case difference is essentially tractable to capital, and this produces a narrative of historical progress or development. It is just this conception that Chakrabarty contests by ‘show[ing] how Marx’s thoughts may be made to resist the idea that the logic of capital sublates differences into itself.’ (2000: 50)

Contrary to the usual conceptions of Marx’s thought as irremediably ‘stagist’ and teleological Chakrabarty insists that ‘Marx … does not so much provide us with a teleology of history as with a perspectival point from which to read the archives.’ (2000: 63) Unpacking this statement Chakrabarty distinguishes in Marx a history posited by capital itself as its precondition, as universal and necessary, which he calls ‘History 1’. This is opposed to ‘History 2’, which is composed of the antecedents of capital, but they are encountered by capital ‘not as antecedents established by itself, not as forms of its own life-process.’ (Marx in Chakrabarty 2000: 63) In this case we can distinguish historical differences that lend themselves to the reproduction of capital and those that do not. Chakrabarty summarises the result: ‘Marx accepts, in other words, that the total universe of pasts that capital encounters is larger than the sum of those elements in which are worked out the logical presuppositions of capital.’ (2000: 64)

The surprise is, as Chakrabarty notes, that Marx’s own examples of History 2 are money and the commodity. The reason for this counter-intuitive selection is that money and the commodity, as relations, can exist in history without necessarily giving rise to capital. In fact, capital had to destroy the previous forms of money and the commodity to subsume them to its own reproduction. History 2 is not a separate and alternative history to capital’s History 1, in the style of a communist version of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962). Instead the plural moments of History 2 ‘inhere in capital and yet interrupt and punctuate the run of capital’s own logic.’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 64) They can never be fully subsumed in History 1, but exist as its constant interruption. In this way historical difference and, we could add, spatial difference, ‘writes into the intimate space of capital an element of deep uncertainty.’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 64)

While Marx’s more teleological moments conceal this uncertainty, Chakrabarty excavates History 2 as the means for an immanent critique of the teleological narrative of capital. Chakrabarty argues is that difference is neither external nor internal to capital, but ‘lives in intimate and plural relationships to capital, ranging from opposition to neutrality.’ (2000: 66) This intimacy does not simply equal alignment with capital, along the lines of a teleological historicism of subsumption. Instead, alignment is the labour of capital, produced through its own disciplinary matrix. The despotism of capital is a work of real abstraction that signals a dependence on History 2, but also its over-coding or re-territorialisation as History 1. Chakrabarty also insists that we should not simply think of History 2 (or plural History 2s) ‘as precapitalist or feudal, or even inherently incompatible with capital.’ (2000: 67) Such a position might appear to be anti-capitalist, but leaving History 2 spatially separated from capital would only have the ironic result of confirming capitalism as internally coherent, as absolute and inescapable Weberian ‘iron cage’. What I want to take more seriously, especially in relation to the zone, is how, to quote Chakrabarty, ‘the idea of History 2 allows us to make room, in Marx’s own analytic of capital, for the politics of human belonging and diversity. It gives us a ground on which to situate our thoughts about multiple ways of being human and their relationship to the global logic of capital.’ (2000: 67)

Conclusion
To conclude, the attraction of the zone as a site of resistance lies in the fact that it incarnates an actual territory of politics in the face of the hegemonic ability of capital to re-organise social, economic, and political space seemingly at will. It is this effect, I would argue, that has drawn so many to it from opposed and antagonistic political orientations. Its problem is that it appears to always risk succumbing to the historical irony of becoming merely another site of capital, precisely because of its resistance and inventiveness. Such a conclusion courts cynicism, of the kind Christopher Connery has described as ‘always-already cooptation’ (2007: 87), in which resistance is not only recuperated after the fact, but recuperated in its becoming. Capital wins the game in advance, with every move against it inscribed within its own unfolding.

I am suggesting that the virtues of Chakrabarty’s position are first that it refuses the consolation of valorising the zone as radical per se, as the automatic incarnation of History 2. As Marx’s own examples indicate History 2 might not always be the obvious moment of resistance, and it would have to be form of resistance that can negotiate its own intimacy with History 1. Second, it would also refuse the automatic assumption that all such zones are already fatally contaminated by capital, mere ruses of real subsumption. Instead, to think the spatial politics of the zone requires the politicisation of the intimacy of History 2 and History 1. Without this thinking we are left with either abandoning the zone as irremediably contaminated by capital, or positing it as uncontaminated outside. In either case the result is the same: we confirm capital’s own fantasmatic self-image as a total temporal and spatial order, and leave radical politics with only consolatory and symmetrical fantasies of inexplicable and yet somehow total revolution.

Bibliography
Badiou, Alain (2008) ‘“We Need a Popular Discipline”: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative’, Interview by Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason Smith, Critical Inquiry 34: 645-659.

Bey, Hakim (1985) T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (New York: Autonomedia, 1985).

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Connery, Christopher Leigh (2007) ‘The World Sixties’, in Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery (eds.), The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, Santa Cruz, CA: New Pacific Press. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, pp. 77-107.

Deleuze, Gilles (1991) Bergsonism [1966], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books.

Guha, Ranajit (1982) ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.) Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp.1-7.

Guha, Ranajit (1999) Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India [1983], Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.

Negri, Antonio (2008) Reflections on Empire, trans. Ed. Emery, Cambridge: Polity.

Shah-Shuja, Masteneh (2008) Zones of Proletarian Development, London: OpenMute.

Thompson, E. P. (1991) The Making of the English Working Class [1963], London: Penguin.

Tiqqun, (2008) How is it to be done?, Support the Tarnac 9: site of the US support committee for the Tarnac 9. PDF.

Everything must go...

My second book, The Culture of Death, is on sale for the princely sum of £5, less than a packet of cigarettes. As most people know I have mixed feelings about it, but it's a bargain.

Monumental Construction (for free)

My article in Third Text 'Monumental Construction': Alain Badiou and the Politics of Aesthetics has come out and T&F have sent me a bundle of offprints. Should anyone want to take one (or more) off my hands please email a mailing address to the usual place and I'll put them in the post when next in work.

The issue as a whole looks excellent, which is thanks to John Roberts, although annoyingly (so far) T&F haven't sent a copy of the issue itself. Also, for some reason, our library seems to cancel journals when I get published in them...

Holiday Reading

I am off tomorrow to Sardinia for a week's break (trusting in the taxi company to turn up at 4.30am...). I dislike the process of travelling, but enjoy being on holiday. Considering we are firmly on a 'sun lounger by pool' drive I am taking what I hope are enough books (I read quickly).

1. Francois Cussett's French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States

Recommended by the Institute this seems suitably gossipy and low-brow for my tastes, already the anecdotes about Lotringer have amused me. I have shown unusually iron will by not reading further.

2. Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and other stories
I actually wanted to get one of the novels, as I liked The Haunting of Hill House (1959) (great cover in this edition, which is the one I have), but will have to make do with the short stories.

3. Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives
I've been warned on this one, but it's long (good for holiday) and I've read most of the others translated into English. I particularly like the fake memoirs of right-wing / fascist / Nazi writers. It's interesting how reviewers also identify them as 'failed' or 'bad' writers, implying that fascists / Nazis by definition cannot be good writers; I don't get that from the stories by Bolano, but rather a more disturbing sense of how like other writers they are.

4.Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.

One history book is essential and as I did once write a book on death this seemed appropriate as I know little about the American Civil War but have also been interested in it as one of the first instances of 'total' technological war.

5. Elfride Jelinek, Greed
To my shame I've never read any Jelinek, but Austrian misery should be great in the sun (try Bernhard's Concrete, but not if you are writing a book / essay / thesis).

6. JG Ballard, Miracles of Life
In tribute

7. Eliza Haywood, Love and Excess
18thC furries fun (so I'm told)

Steve's reading sounds good as well.

New issue of S: Psychoanalysis and Islam

The new issue of S is out, which includes my review essay on Sam Gillespie's book on Badiou (pdf here).

A descending and self-diminishing spiral

This is a report (for some reason the direct link doesn't work so put in Wild Eye if you're interested) on the Wild Eye conference at which I was plenary speaker; I'm glad to hear about my 'impassioned' defence of the right to theorise and I like the characterisation of my paper as 'a descending and self-diminishing spiral' of negations - I'll take that as a compliment. I personally found the experience frustrating, but then I usually do.

Past texts

As Gilles has left what I guess is his final statement re sans-philosophie I'll post my two contributions that must now go down as 'historical documents', (the other text I posted previously). In auto-critique I must say my position on these texts has changed significantly, but I stand by all my errors (which is lucky really as i've only generated a whole series of new errors since...).

People Power

At the RP event yesterday, which was disappointing for a number of reasons. IT will no doubt be doing the uneviable task of posting up a report (now up), for which we should all be eternally grateful (for reasons which attendees will be all too aware of). She has also kindly posted Alberto's paper from the SR event as well.

On a personal note just to say thanks to all those who have expressed an interest in reading the book and Dominic in particular for already supplying comments and proofing corrections (invaluable for those of you familiar with academic publishing). The book will be a hideously expensive hardback, never to go to paperback I would guess. Eventually I'll probably be begging people to put in library orders. But in relation to IT's points about availability for this and any other works of mine you may be interested in just contact me. I don't have the facility to put up papers, except on the blog (which is painful to do), plus to me it seems to be a bit vain in relation to my own work.

Also thanks to everyone for a lovely evening after RP, nice to meet so many nice people.

Done (for now)

'Work ceases upon the picture or manuscript, not because it is finished, but because sending-in day is at hand, or because the printer is clamorous for copy, or because “I am sick of working at this thing” or “I can’t see what more I can do to it”’.
R G Collingwood, An Autobiography (1939)

The manuscript is done (for now) and if I haven't already victimised you and you are interested in providing comments / criticism please email me. The plan is to submit to EUP in September and it should be out next year.