The graduate students of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, invite submissions for its annual conference: Impasse University of California, Irvine Friday, March 2, 2012 Humanities Gateway 1030 Website: impasse-uci.tumblr.com Keynote Speaker: Professor Homay King, Bryn Mawr College In a climate of seemingly insurmountable economic indebtedness, a poisonous and ineffectual…
Category Archives: Demos
is the populace as composed of politically active beings.
[Wenzel Hablik's Sunset, Mont Blanc] In the second book of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche has life confide to Zarathustra: Behold, [. . .] I am that which must always overcome itself. Indeed, you call it a will to procreate or a drive to an end, to something higher, farther, more manifold: but all this…
[The statement of purpose I'm using for my MA Review at UCI. Please leave comments and suggestions, especially before my exam (on 15 Feb)!] My main interest is in political economy. I am interested in the ways in which material scarcity (real and imagined) leads to some kind of system or regime, a certain way…
[The introduction to a current project:] There is something nomadic about Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006). While the novel, so far Pynchon’s longest, takes place in a specific context—the Progressive Era in America up to the chaos of World War I—it nonetheless moves back and forth across space—across America, the globe, and beyond, including…
[The Tupinambas; Image from wikimedia] In his provocative Society Against the State, Pierre Clastres draws from his ethnographic work to provide a theory of a society that, rather than developing into the state, operates directly against it. By ‘operating against’ I mean, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s reading of Clastres in A Thousand…
[The Pintura of Chimalhuacán-Atoyac, an Amerindian "map"] Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance explores different practices of representation/expression (literature, history, cartography) and the way in which in their respective registers (language, memory, space) they have been shaped and utilized by the imperial power (Europe, Spain in particular) for its colonizing project (of the…
[Some of the PhD programs I applied to wanted to know more about my person and how it has shaped the kind of work that I do. This is the statement of “personal history and philosophy” I wrote in addition to the “purpose of study.”] I was born in cosmopolitan Manila, capital of the Philippines,…
[A revised version of the “purpose of study” I sent out when applying for the PhD, written with the feedback of professors, friends, and family] I have taken a long and unusual route to decide what kind of work to do for the PhD. Partly this is due to my Third World background. Focused on…
I recently finished and defended my thesis for my MA in Philosophy. I wrote about surplus value in economics, Marx, and Deleuze. Here’s the introduction: In his critique of political economy from the Grundrisse to Capital, Karl Marx presupposes abstraction and quantification. The process by which activity and its product are alienated from the human…
I finished teaching Marx in class today. We had started out with his philosophy where I traced Marx’s intellectual development (in the context of Hegel and Feuerbach) and the historical materialist method that he developed (I offered a schematic and a narrative based on a Deleuzian flat ontology made possible by Heidegger’s notion of mode).…
