in place of a really post, ill let you know what i’ve been reading and where I’m going.
Most importantly is the stimulating conversation stemming from the university without condition. They are reading The Perverse Perseverance of Sovereignty which discusses globalization and the nation-state. Other interesting articles relating this topic which I’m working thru are john milbank’s Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror and william cavanaugh’s wars of religion and the rise of the state and the world in a wafer. (both of which are in his Theopolitical Imagination and are brought to you by the jesus radical library.)Excerpt from World in a Wafer to show the trajectory of his thinking: “What I hope to show…is that globalization does not signal the demise of the nation-state but is in fact a hyperextension of the nation-state’s project of subsuming the local under the universal.”
After spending so much time on critical theorists/theologians I decided to revisit my hermeneutic root and picked up Paul Ricoeur’s From Text to Action , esp. his essays on ideology (which zizek and badiou would despise) and also his Oneself as Another . As an intro to Ricoeur I would hightly recommend from text to action.
I’ve also been reading up on new media as mediated through Len Manovich. I’ll be blogging about this soon as i’ll be reviewing The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society for the matthew house project. This is some great matter for reflection in all this media/technology stuff.
so that’s what I’ve been reading while I was away.