Lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living

Thesis titles I won’t use

The modern revolutionary Peking opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, carefully revised, perfected and polished to the last detail with our great leader Chairman Mao's loving care, now glitters with surpassing splendour. I’ve been thinking a bit about what I want to end up writing about; I’m having difficulty not scoring potential topics on the basis of how many Maoist poster titles I could work into the chapter titles. My current not-actually-going-to-use title is Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy: Action and Utopia in Post-enlightenment Political Thought. I’m trying to figure out how to work the utopian socialists, Marx, Agamben on dynamis, Butler and Mahmood on agency, maybe Lenin, maybe Spinoza, maybe Kant, into some kind of critical take on the centrality of action to most (particularly radical) political theory. I think it’s fair to say I need to figure out a way to restrict the range of my interests here.

Related

Support from an unexpected source

Adam points to the annoying habit among people doing academic work of moralizing about the “relevance” or accessibility of their work, and, I think, gets to the heart of what’s wrong with the way this usually proceeds. By positioning themselves in opposition to academic “irrelevance” the speaker can make a double assertion: The common people […]

I wanted to find, the logic of all sex wars

As I understand it, radical feminism, particularly as developed by MacKinnon, is based on a binary account of power in which having, or not having, power, is what defines gender. It’s paradoxical, then, that one of the main criticisms radical feminists make of post-modern feminists is that the posties, in critiquing the idea of the […]

Ideology critics are a superstitious, cowardly lot

Two bad reviews of The Dark Knight: bad in the sense that they’re poorly executed reviews, as well as being highly critical of the film. There are a number of annoying things about John Pistelli’s review, but the politically important one is the claim that: Batman, operating outside the law to protect the defenseless people, […]