Columbia University Press

This week our featured book is The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, by Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, published by Columbia Business School Publishing, an imprint of Columbia University Press. Enter our Goodreads book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy!

Today, we have a couple of videos from the excellent Vimeo channel of the Robin Hood Foundation. In the first video, Michael Weinstein explains the Robin Hood Foundation approach, and in the second, he explains “benefit-cost ratios.”

Our Approach from Robin Hood on Vimeo.

Michael Weinstein Benefit-Cost Video from Robin Hood on Vimeo.

Earlier this week, Lawrence Friedman, author of The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet, appeared on The Leonard Lopate Show, to discuss the book and the life and legacy of Erich Fromm:

“When we feel powerfully moved by what words do to us, I think it’s because we’ve entered into some deeper, older part of us, a place of wisdom and wholeness that is preverbal, even prehuman.”—Christopher Collins

The following is an interview with Christopher Collins, author of Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination

Question: Let’s start with your title: what do you mean by “Paleopoetics”?

Christopher Collins: All my life I’ve been involved with thinking about, talking about, and writing about literature. But through all those years what most intrigued me were the feelings—the moods and emotions—and the mental images that words can invoke. My deepest responses to poems, dramas, novels—any artwork made up of words—always seemed to come from a level in me that somehow went far back into the past. I don’t mean past lifetimes or anything like that—just a very deep and ancient genetic past, some part of me that wasn’t derived from my personal experience. When we feel powerfully moved by what words do to us, I think it’s because we’ve entered into some deeper, older part of us, a place of wisdom and wholeness that is preverbal, even prehuman. In writing this book I’ve tried to find insight into these intuitions by studying what the sciences of the mind/brain have to say about memory, emotion, perception, and the simulation of perception, imagination.

Q: Is that how you arrived at your subtitle, “the evolution of the preliterate imagination?”

CC: Yes, but by imagination I don’t mean foresight or mental agility, but rather the simulation of perception, auditory, kinetic, and, above all, visual imagery. For me, mental imagery is the prelinguistic content that language was evolved to communicate and that writing was eventually invented to disseminate.

Q: How can anyone know how humans thought before they were able to write down their thoughts?

CC: That’s a fair question. We need to approach this from many angles, for example, primate social behavior, the evolving architecture of the brain from pre-human to human, its consequences for the perceptual systems of vision and hearing, the semiotics of gestures, eye–hand coordination and tool use, and the implication of these for fully human social behavior. We need to look for converging evidence from many disciplines—from paleontology, ethology, anthropology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, and neuroscience. We need to ponder the implications of our reading, let us take us with it, and not be afraid to revise our basic assumptions. Then, if and when concepts seem to click into place, we need to be ready to draw inferences.

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“The pictures of Nazism first projected by Hollywood between 1933 and 1939 will always be before our eyes.”—Thomas Doherty

In the second half of our interview, Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, discusses the role of newsreels in depicting Nazism to American audiences, Mussolini’s son’s trip to Hollywood, and films of the era. (For part one of the interview and to read an excerpt from the book):

Question: Another component of American awareness of Nazi Germany came through film newsreels. What balances or compromises did newsreel producers make? Did they provide a forthcoming, honest picture of Hitler?

Thomas Doherty: The newsreels are actually one of the most interesting and untold stories of the era. Our focus on Hollywood feature films sometimes makes us forget that the most powerful images of the Nazis came from the motion picture journalism of the day. The problem for the newsreels was that it was virtually impossible to obtain uncensored film of the Nazis in action. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels controlled all outgoing motion picture imagery, which meant that when the newsreels showed the Nazis on screen, it was in Nazi—shot and—approved footage. As a result—and because unruly moviegoers would sometimes hiss and jeer at the Nazis on screen—the commercial newsreel companies often refrained from featuring the Nazis in the newsreels. Even when the newsreel editors did include pictures of Hitler and the Nazis in the newsreel issues, local exhibitors were known to cut out the clips so as not to disturb patrons out for an enjoyable night at the movies. The full motion picture record of the rise of Nazism—so vivid to us today—was not before the eyes of Americans in the 1930s.

Q: Your book also includes the odd but telling stories of Mussolini’s son and Leni Riefensthal’s sojourns to Hollywood. What do their stories tell us about Hollywood’s evolving attitudes toward fascism and its growing political awareness.

TD: Yes—the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League used the visits of Vittorio Mussolini in 1937 (in town to work out a a co-production deal with producer Hal Roach) and Leni Riefensthal in 1938 (she hoped to arrange a stateside distribution deal for Olympia [1938], her epic documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics) to discourage Hollywood from doing any business with the Nazis. The efforts of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League made Mussolini and Riefenstahl social pariahs around town—and intimidating anyone else in the film industry from associating with them. The animus towards Riefenstahl— “Hitler’s honey,” they called her—was especially intense because she was perceived as a genius of the cinema who had turned her talents to a demonic cause.

Q: Which anti-Nazi movies do you find most compelling? Do they feel dated or do they still have resonance today?

I find MGM’s The Mortal Storm (1940) oddly affecting—ironically enough, because MGM was the Hollywood studio that had no qualms about doing business with the Nazis throughout the 1930s. Director Frank Borzage shows how the Nazis destroy a culture through the disintegration of a once-happy family, with the warm conviviality of the opening scenes turning to emptiness and death in the end reel. Ernest Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) is go-for-the-jugular satire at its best, though I can see why American audiences in 1942 were not amused. Of course, Casablanca (1942) still packs an anti-Nazi punch, especially during the scene where everybody in Rick’s Cafe sings “La Marseilles” and drowns out the Germans.

Q: What is the continuing legacy of Nazism and Hitler on Hollywood either thematically or visually?

TD: Check out Quentin Tarantino’s Inglouriuos Basterds. Hitler, Goebbels, the SS, the Nuremberg rallies, swastikas, and all the other images of the twelve year Reich remain the most visually striking manifestations of political evil in motion picture history. The pictures of Nazism first projected by Hollywood between 1933 and 1939 will always be before our eyes.

Forthcoming events with Columbia University Press authors in April include talks and signings by Michael Mann, author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, Kara Newman, author of The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets, Santiago Zabala, author of Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx, and others.

Looking a back, here’s a round-up of reviews and author media appearances and op-eds:

“The Most Hated Climate Scientist in the U.S.”, an article on Michael Mann in Energy Wise

Michael Mann on becoming a public figure in the climate change debate in The Scientist

Plato, Our Comrade?, Berfrois reviews Alain Badiou’s Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters

A review of Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life in STIR

An translator of Li Rui’s Trees Without Wind , and a review of the novel (via Washington Independent Review of Books)

Victor Cha and David Kang argue that North Korea is a lot more dangerous than you think, but that doesn’t mean that Kim Jong Un is insane

SCOTUS: Where Pessimism Could Kill Marriage Equality, Ludger Viefhues-Bailey’s piece for Killing the Buddha

Global reviews Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia, by Siddharth Kara

Animal People Online reviews Experiencing Animal Minds: An Anthology of Animal-Human Encounters

A list of books for Women’s History Month from Washington Independent Review of Books includes An Imperial Concubine’s Tale: Scandal, Shipwreck and Salvation in 17th-Century Japan , by G. G. Rowley

Watch Kenneth Goldsmith’s, lecture at the Museum of Modern Art

Richard Nash discusses The Late Age of Print, by Ted Striphas, and more books in his article “The Business of Literature”

Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, and died almost eighty years later, on March 18, 1980. In celebration of Fromm’s life, we have a two-part Q&A with Lawrence J. Friedman, author of The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet, looking back at Fromm’s many intellectual contributions and accomplishments.

In part two of the interview, Friedman discusses how Fromm’s ideas can be applied to modern political problems.

Question: Fromm led efforts to revitalize American democracy. What did he feel was wrong with our system?

Lawrence Friedman: Fromm was the principal funder and platform architect for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s bid to win the White House in 1968. McCarthy ran as a peace candidate determined to extract America from the Vietnam War. This fit with Fromm’s antimilitarism. On a deeper level, he felt that pointless wars like Vietnam might be avoided if American democracy were restored. Invoking the old New England town meeting as his point of departure, Fromm tried to promote a small, community-based government structure with all officials directly and personally responsible to the local citizenry. Fromm continued to promote this view of democracy throughout his life even as, in his opinion, a Big Brother–like national-security state thrived under less democratic presidencies such as Nixon’s.

Fromm would have seen the possibility of democracy restored in the 2008 Obama campaign, with Obama’s appeal to racial minorities, women, and students and his ability to spark excitement about the political process. But he would have been less enthusiastic for the Obama of 2012 because the president sent additional troops to Afghanistan and essentially ordered the assassination of Bin Laden. But he would have voted for Obama a second time because he was somewhat more democratic and less elitist than Romney. Fromm had strong ideals and democracy was one of them. But he was also a pragmatist, willing to take half a loaf as a first installment on any basic goal. He would have supported Obama with this perspective.

Q: While Fromm was a strong advocate for democracy around the globe, he was also critical of how bureaucratic state socialism (such as obtained in the Soviet Union) and corporate capitalism (such as in the United States) both alienated modern man. He envisioned a “Third Way”: a humanist society that valued the happiness of the individual in a democratic polity. Can this type of government ever truly exist and function?

LF: Fromm saw both the alienating capitalism and consumer culture of the West (especially the United States) and the bureaucratic socialist societies of the Eastern bloc as anathema to the human condition. Western societies for the most part offered only the façade of democracy while covering selfhood in a plethora of estranged consumerism. The Russians were more dictatorial, Fromm argued, and the Russian leadership promoted inhumane and inefficient bureaucracy.

Fromm cooperated with intellectuals and activists in “Third Way” countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland that were trying to break from the Soviet sphere of influence while distancing themselves from Western “democracies.” They were relatively small countries and the citizenry passionately sought small community-based democratic socialism free of both Soviet bureaucracy and Western alienation. In our contemporary world where there is no longer a Soviet Union and the United States can no longer impose its will abroad. Fromm would see continuing potential for a “Third Way,” especially in small countries like Finland, Denmark, and even Tunisia.

Q: Fromm challenged the dominant Freudian model of psychoanalysis and paid a professional price for doing so. His approach encourages “central relatedness,” where confidentiality breaches may sometimes occur and the clinician is personally involved with the patient rather than distanced by therapeutic neutrality. What is his legacy in the psychiatric world and has his approach been embraced or rejected by modern psychoanalysis?

LF: Orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis involved a seemingly neutral and distant analyst. The patient projected his repressed concerns on the analyst so these concerns could be studied. Fromm’s “central relatedness” was markedly different. The analyst was not neutral but opened himself to his deepest personal issues and encouraged the patient to similarly open his “center” to the analyst.

Traditional Freudian analysis is essentially gone. Given Fromm’s and other clinicians’ affairs and other professional breaches with their patients, rooted in the temptations of “central relatedness”, it, too, has a problematic legacy. But Fromm, like his friend Harry Stack Sullivan, emphasized the clinical relationship as an interpersonal one– the connectedness between people as the way to understand what troubled patients. Because the interpersonal is perhaps the dominant clinical approach today within psychoanalytically informed therapy, Fromm and Sullivan have reemerged as significant figures. From a therapeutic perspective, Fromm has finally come of age.

Q: You write that mental health and illness are heavily social constructs. If Fromm were living today, current clinicians might have labeled him as bipolar. Yet there were “stabilizers” in his life that pushed away bipolarity and let Fromm be very productive. What can we learn from Fromm’s approach to dealing with the effects of mental illness?

LF: Contemporary psychiatrists and other mental health experts are too quick to label their patients “bipolar” and “schizophrenic.” Both tend to be seen as genetically rooted organic maladies; psychotropic drugs are the remedies or alleviants of choice. Coming from the social misery of a deeply depressed mother and a manic father and trying somehow to keep the family together, Fromm adapted. By his own admission, he would have been called manic depressive or bipolar. However, considering the way he led his life, “manic depressive” is diagnostically far off the mark even if he was genetically or temperamentally disposed.

Fromm developed an array of daily habits that “stabilized“ or fine-tuned his existence. He wrote regularly, meditated, conversed with a small circle of convivial friends, cultivated a love for political activism, and corresponded regularly and caringly with those close to him. Succinctly, Fromm’s life and the social emphasis behind his therapeutic approach suggest that our daily social arrangements may keep us healthy and happy without recourse to drugs. At least these arrangements should precede drug trials that may be unnecessary. Fromm thought so and always emphasized social circumstances in caring for his patients even as he never dismissed the possibility of drugs as periodic supplements down the line.

Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, and died almost eighty years later, on March 18, 1980. In celebration of Fromm’s life, we have a two-part Q&A with Lawrence J. Friedman, author of The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet, looking back at Fromm’s many intellectual contributions and accomplishments.

In part one of the interview, Friedman discusses Fromm’s views on love and politics, and how his works still have political impact today.

Question: Fromm was a believer in love or, as you call him, “love’s prophet.” How did his relationships with women influence his philosophy about the role of love in the world?

Lawrence Friedman: The Art of Loving (1956) sold over 25,000,000 copies and still sells well globally. The theme is easy to fathom. At a very deep level, one must simultaneously love oneself, the cherished other, and all of humankind. Love starts as a specific relationship and then becomes a global transformation of humankind into a peaceful and caring society.

Succinctly, a self in love with another is transformative. This was a perspective on love that connected to Fromm’s view of humanism and spirituality. The theme of love had an overwhelming dose of authenticity. It was rooted in Fromm’s own life. Fromm’s unhappy first marriage led to a divorce; in the second, his wife committed suicide; the third, with Annis Freeman, was love from the start. Sometimes Fromm would write six or seven love letters to Freeman every day, and she would reciprocate. The expressions of love through letters bound their lives together and energized Fromm’s spiritual crusade to humanize the world.

Q: Fromm was a founder and major funder of Amnesty International. How has Amnesty transformed our understanding of social justice and human rights?

LF: Fromm was a founder of Amnesty International in the early 1960s and was its principal funder for the next twenty years. He did much to make Amnesty perhaps the most vibrant and effective global agency for human rights and against government brutalities. To free incarcerated victims of harsh regimes, Fromm could play the part of global diplomat, shuttling among Washington, New York, London, and Moscow with remarkable skill and effectiveness. His money and his strategies to free people from governmental barbarities did much to make Amnesty International the most important human rights organization in the world today.

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This week we are featuring the Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture series, edited by Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey Robbins, and Slavoj Zizek. Also check out Insurrections on Pinterest!

Today, we have a Q & A with Professor Jeffrey Robbins, in which he discusses some of the essential components of the Insurrections series and their importance today.

Question: Clayton Crockett wrote that insurrectionist theology is not politically neutral and is critical of corporate capitalism. Can you elaborate on the insurrectionist critique of contemporary corporatism?
 
Jeffrey Robbins: Perhaps it is important to distinguish between insurrectionist theology as named and employed by Crockett (together with myself, Creston Davis, and Ward Blanton), and the Insurrections series.  An insurrectionist theology, as we conceive it, is a materialist political theology that takes seriously the emancipatory potential of religion.  Instead of relying on the concept of transcendence or the notion of a transcendent God, it accepts Wittgenstein’s maxim that “the world is all that is the case,” and thus expresses itself in the form of an immanent critique. 
 
Beginning from this point, we can say of the insurrectionist critique that contemporary corporatism is today’s undeniable hegemon.  Consider the story from today’s New York Times:  After protests erupted in Cyprus over the European Union’s planned austerity measures that would seize funds from individual Cypriot savings accounts, Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth, offered its own private bailout to rescue the Cyprus economy.  As the story puts it, “The fate of this proposal is uncertain. . . But it illustrates how a sprawling, wealthy company so deeply entwined with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that it is often called a state within a state is willing to seize an opportunity and exploit weaknesses and divisions within Europe to cement its position and power.”
 
While certain corporations operate as a state within a state (consider here, as well, an entity such as the company formerly known as Blackwater whose CEO admitted it worked as a “virtual extension of the CIA”), marshaling the mechanisms of the state for its own private gain, there are others operating as transnational corporations without respect to national boundaries.  At a minimum, this suggests a new, alternative form of political sovereignty.  Further, when the flow of capital is not only global, but instantaneous, this demands new forms of political organization and new means of political resistance.  And finally, contemporary corporatism’s reign can be considered complete when it becomes the logic—or better, the rubric—by which we determine even educational and philanthropic success.

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“The experience of the U.S. invasion and occupation scarred the country much more deeply than even I as a correspondent there imagined.”—Mark Kukis

Upon the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we are re-posting an earlier interview with Mark Kukis about his book Voices from Iraq: A People’s History, 2003-2009 and the current situation in Iraq and future prospects for the country.

Kukis wrote the book to give Iraqis a voice as a way to counteract their under-representation in the U.S. media. He discovered that most Iraqis were genuinely glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein but fault the United States for many policies enacted during the occupation, particularly its disbanding of the Iraqi army.

Iraqis, Kukis believes now see many of the problems confronting the country as the responsibility of the Iraqi government even if they are a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation. Here are some excerpts from the interview in which Kukis considers how Iraqis view their future:

What does Iraq’s near-term future look like to them? Do you agree?

The near-term future looks rather bleak to many Iraqis, mainly because of the persistently high violence. No nation can think of itself as normal or stable when bombs kill and maim hundreds each year in the biggest urban areas. I believe Iraq will grow economically in the coming years and return to its status as one of the most developed and wealthiest nations in the Middle East. You can have economic growth and high violence at the same time.

But most Iraqis I suspect will find little solace in economic gains so long as violence endures at the current levels, and there is little to suggest it will be easing. So, yes, I tend to join those in Iraq with a fairly dim view of the future given the violence.

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Our featured book this week is Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life by Michael Marder, with a foreword by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala. Enter our book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy!

The following is an abridged version of a debate between Michael Marder and Gary Francione, author of, among other works, Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation.

The debate and the questions were inspired by Michael Marder’s controversial New York Times op-eds Is Plant Liberation on the Menu? and If Peas Can Talk, Should We Eat Them? which generated a variety of responses from animal right advocates, philosophers, and others.

How does plant ethics relate to veganism?

Michael Marder: Plant ethics shares with veganism a strong commitment to justice, which is to say, to the reduction of violence humans perpetrate against other living beings. It is by no means a threat to or an invalidation of veganism. Rather, plant ethics is an open invitation to fine-tune our dietary practices in keeping with the philosophical and botanical considerations of what plants are, what they are capable of, and what our relation to them should be.
[…]
[Plant ethics] does not mean that, having entertained the real possibility of violence against plants, vegans would throw their hands up in despair and concede that it is pointless to alleviate animal suffering by refusing to consume animal flesh and by-products. What it implies is that they would not rest on the laurels of their accomplishments but would consider residual violence against other living beings, such as plants, thoroughly instrumentalized by the same logic that underpins human domination over other animal species.

Gary Francione: If plants are not sentient—if they have no subjective awareness—then they have no interests. That is, they cannot desire, or want, or prefer anything. There is simply no reason to believe that plants have any level of perceptual awareness or any sort of mind that prefers, wants, or desires anything.
[…]
I do believe that we have an obligation not to eat more plants than we need to live, but that is because I think that overeating is a form of violence to our own bodies. I also believe that we have an obligation to all sentient inhabitants of the planet not to use more non-sentient resources than we need. In both cases, we have obligations that concern plants but these obligations are not owed directly to plants.
[…]
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The following is an interview with Kush Varia, author of Bollywood: Gods, Glamour, and Gossip

Question: Why write a book on Bollywood?

Kush Varia: This year, Bollywood turns 100 years old and I have presented highlights which demonstrate a variety of genres, historical periods and stars. Sadly there was not enough room to include some other favorites but I hope that the book acts as an introductory guide to a new viewer and that they can experience the full spectrum of what the cinema has achieved, the guises it can take, and the emotions it inspires.

Q: Many in the West or non-Indian audiences seem to have a notion of Bollywood cinema as kitschy and somewhat absurd, is that a fair assessment?

KV: Much of popular experience of Bollywood in the West is composed of quick clips seen on cable channels, semi-erotic stills or colorful ephemera. Bollywood does have elements of the fantastic from songs sung in romantic dream sequences to melodramatic acting styles and emotionally charged music. However much like the often derided “women’s films” from the heyday of Hollywood, Bollywood films deal with extremely important social and moral issues providing a space for the negotiation between tradition and modernity.

Q: What is distinctly Indian about Bollywood film?

KV: Religion, family and morality are key issues in Bollywood films and it is through these issues that the films become a forum to discuss and challenge issues pertinent to Indian society and the wider Indian Diaspora. Throughout its hundred-year history Bollywood film has played a key socio-cultural role. In the films of the colonial period there were coded swipes at the British whilst post-independence movies aimed to construct a new identity for India. In the Seventies – a time of deep social unrest – films reflected issues faced by rapidly growing urban communities through the figure of the ‘angry young man’. More recently, Bollywood films have provided a forum for investigating the role of the internationally based Indian and their access to new experiences which may contradict traditional Indian values or ways of thinking.

Q: To what extent does Bollywood borrow from Indian literary or cultural traditions?

KV: Some argue that Bollywood is influenced by ancient Indian theories of drama however Bollywood is much more closely linked with popular traditions such as religious theater as well as Western influences such as pop videos. The role of song, dance, and music hearkens back to classic Hollywood with a great deal of importance placed on creating outstanding spectacle. Bollywood is a unique cultural product but despite the industry having a large output, very few films go on to become huge successes. But those that do often become keystones of modern India and they can provide fascinating insights into the emergence of India as a global superpower.

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In this interview, Clayton Crockett, author of Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event and editor of the Insurrections series, discusses why he decided to defend Gilles Deleuze from Alain Badiou, and how, in the process, he came to write a radical reworking of Deleuze’s political philosophy and discovered a continuity between the French philosopher’s controversial and abstruse writings.

Q: You have written and published on theology and religion. Why a book on two French philosophers, who are both opposed to religion?

A: Yes, both Deleuze and Badiou are atheists, but they both grapple with what I call theological issues and questions, Badiou most explicitly in his book on St. Paul. And my understanding of theology is radical and non-confessional, as well as strongly influenced by poststructuralist French or Continental philosophy.

Q: How did you come to write this book?

A: I studied Deleuze in graduate school at Syracuse, and the further I went, the more I kept coming back to his thought, especially Difference and Repetition, which I didn’t fully understand but found brilliant and groundbreaking. As Badiou’s work became more prominent I read Badiou, but I really disliked his treatment of Deleuze in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Over the past three years, I ended up leading seminars on Difference and Repetition and Cinema 2, and began to develop a much better understanding of Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole. Around this time, Jeff Robbins, my series co-editor for the Insurrections Series, asked Creston Davis and I to respond to a question from one of Jeff’s students about the difference between Deleuze and Badiou. Creston liked Deleuze, but leaned towards Badiou, whereas I appreciated Badiou but preferred Deleuze. I ended up writing a much more detailed answer than I expected, which expanded into a blog post for Creston’s blog “Objet Petit A,” and then just kept writing.

Q: What is specifically your problem with Badiou’s interpretation of Deleuze?

A: Badiou charges Deleuze with being a hidden philosopher of the One, with being aristocratic, quietist, and with being obsessed with the past. He also associates him with the Presocratic naïve efforts to understand nature. I really felt that Badiou created this caricature of Deleuze that was set up as a foil for Badiou to present himself as this master-philosopher. And Daniel W. Smith explains in an essay called “Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities” why this is such a terrible understanding of Deleuze.

But I wouldn’t have written the book just to show that Badiou is wrong about Deleuze. As I worked through Difference and Repetition I realized that my own understanding of Deleuze’s philosophy was changed, and that I found a radical, revolutionary way to read Deleuze based on his work on repetition, intensity, energy and physics in chapter 5, and that this is consistent with his incredible book on the time-image, Cinema 2. Finally, I argue that Cinema 2 is a political book; as Paola Marrati says, it’s the book where Deleuze works out his political philosophy. And then I figured out how to situate Capitalism and Schizophrenia between Difference and Repetition and Cinema 2. So Badiou becomes a productive foil against which I can present my interpretation of Deleuze.

Q: Badiou aggressively attacked Deleuze in print, and even disrupted his classes, right?

A: Yes, Badiou was a radical Maoist, and he felt that Deleuze was insufficiently radical. Deleuze supported the student movements in 1968 while teaching at Lyon, even though he was ill with tuberculosis. In the 1970’s, they were both teaching at Vincennes, an experimental university designed to respond to the student protests, and Badiou and his “brigades” led interventions into Deleuze’s seminar. Furthermore, under a pseudonym, Badiou published an essay called “The Fascism of the Potato” where he attacked Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, which is the root-structure of tubers.

Q: So they were not friends.

A: No, although at the end of Deleuze’s life, they engaged in a correspondence of letters, partly because Badiou appreciated Deleuze’s dismissal of the Nouveaux Philosophers, people like Bernard Henri Levy who he felt popularized and trivialized philosophy. Anyway, Deleuze was critical of Badiou’s understanding of multiplicity, and said so in his last book (written with Guattari), What is Philosophy?. Deleuze ended up asking Badiou not to publish their correspondence, because he was becoming weaker and sicker, and he felt that they were not his best articulations of what was at stake. Badiou agreed, but then referred to these letters in his book Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, and used their occasion to write a final critical response to Deleuze after Deleuze’s death, which many readers of Deleuze felt was highly unfair, because Deleuze was unable to respond.

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In his book Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City, Jonathan Soffer offers a critique of Ed Koch’s complicated legacy for New York City. Soffer argues Ed Koch was instrument in leading New York City’s recovery from bankruptcy. Businesses and financial confidence returned to the city and Koch also brought new housing to thousands of low-income housing. At the same time, racial animosity was seemingly a constant in the city during his administrations and many social services were cut back.

In this video from the 92nd Street Y , Ed Koch discusses Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City with Jonathan Soffer. (While not an “authorized” biography, Koch did participate in interviews for it, and, not surprisingly, helped to promote it.)

For more on the book, there is an interview with Jonathan Soffer and here is a video trailer for Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City:

This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real. Today, the last day of our giveaway and blog promotion for Rewiring the Real, we have a special interview between Mark C. Taylor and one of the authors featured in Rewiring the Real, Mark Danielewski. In this interview, Professor Taylor and Danielewski discuss the influence of film and technology on House of Leaves. The entire interview can be found on the CUP website.

Mark Taylor: All right, let’s talk a little bit about various kinds of technologies and your work. Film obviously pervades your work in a variety of ways. Indeed, House of Leaves is modeled, among many other things, on a horror film, in certain ways. Only Revolutions is something like a road movie through American history. You grew up with a filmmaker as a father. You studied film at USC. Can you talk a little bit about the intersection of film in your writing and how film has shaped the way you think about writing?

M. Danielewski: I was raised by parents who made sure that we were watching movies in our basement. My father would bring home 16 mm prints of films by Kubrick, Welles, Ford and Sturges. I would have to change the reels.

Between reels, there was a discussion about what the movie was about. Some of my friends, who thought they were just there for movie night, would suddenly hear my father’s voice asking, “What is the political angle of this shot?”

My father would talk about choices – of color, costume, angles, camera movement, how a scene was constructed, the grammar of crossing the line or not crossing the line, the kind of equipment used. So, I was very fortunate to internalize that.

I’m always a little hesitant about terms like “experimental” and “avant-garde,” because I feel like so much of what I’m doing is built on what so many profound visualists were already doing. I mean, I’m not the first one to move text around.

But I think one little addition that I’ve been steadily working on is applying to text the grammatical laws of how we see things, in a very specific and limited way. So, there’s a way of leading the eye to a certain place, and then when you change the shot – or the page – if the eye is continuing to where it expects to continue, it’s actually kind of relaxing and pleasing.

But for action scenes, or scenes that have more intensity – you can think of A Touch of Evil at the very end where Heston is following Orson Welles – the camera angles are all over the place, but the eye is specifically being led to different corners of the frame, so that when the sequence is then cut, the eye has to travel from the right side – the upper right corner to the lower left corner.

So immediately, there’s that sense of searching for where the thread is continuing. By applying that to text and to the page, it could actually intensify the emotional experience of the reader.

A simple example is in the labyrinth chapter of House of Leaves. It intentionally slows you down. It confuses you. It disorients you. Then the following chapter has only a few sentences per page, and suddenly, you’re reading 100 pages. No matter who you are, there’s something very satisfying about reading 100 pages in a few minutes

With Only Revolutions, it very much uses light the way James Turrell uses light. It’s about seeing even if there are very few vocabulary words that are even part of the family of seeing. Colors, with the exception of two, are not present – the word “seeing” is not present. The way the world is perceived through the eye is not there . . . So that particular book floats somewhere between light and music.

Mark Taylor: I want to come back to this whole issue of design, which is crucial in this, but there’s another question on various technologies. Film’s not the only technology that’s important for you in many ways. I mean, House of Leaves began, and continues, online. It’s a text that involves not only a house that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, but it isn’t contained between the covers, as it were. Your new work – we’ll talk about that more later – you’ve described as modeled as something like a TV series. One might say that part of what you’re exploring is what it means to write and read in an age of electronic reproduction, in certain ways. That you are really asking questions about the ways in which these visual technologies transform the ways in which we read and write. Is that something that’s self-consciously in your mind as you –

M. Danielewski: Well, everything transforms us, right? My father said something that was very important, and it was one of those early lessons I’ve held onto, and I see no reason to deviate from it, which is – imagine first, then find the technology that helps you embody that imaginative moment.

So I always start with wandering in my head. I start with a pencil and paper. I start scribbling. I start toying with different things, using my hands, whatever it is. And only then do I start to conceive of the software, the technology, that can be used to tell that story.

[…]

Mark Taylor: Can you talk a little bit about – because that’s an exceptional process, when you look at the complexity and the subtlety of a lot of this design work. So, you delivered to them, more or less, copy-ready text?

M. Danielewski: Yes. And it’s a cycle. While I’m conceiving something, I’m also educating myself on what, for example, CS6 or other various technologies can do. So, of course, that’s going to cycle back into my imagination and begin to influence me in certain ways.

This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real. Today, we have a fascinating Q&A with Professor Taylor, in which he delves into the relationships between art, technology, and religion he explores in greater detail in Rewiring the Real, and discusses the role of philosophy in a changing world.

Question: Rewiring the Real is part two of a trilogy, the first part of which is Refiguring the Spiritual. Both of these two works discuss important aspects of today’s society through analysis of a single work by important modern cultural figures (novelists and artists respectively). What led you to this conceit?

Mark C. Taylor: Let me begin by placing these two books within the larger trajectory of my work. For almost four decades, I have been developing an analysis of the interplay between religion and multiple aspects of culture. As I explain in After God, religion is not limited to what transpires in churches, synagogues, temples and mosques but pervades all aspects of society and culture. Unfortunately, the hyper-specialization and professionalization of the university discourage the multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural analyses that are, in my judgment, essential to effective critical inquiry.

In a series of books dating back to the late 1980s – Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion; Imagologies: Media Philosophy; About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture; The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation; Hiding; Grave Matters and Mystic Bones – I have explored the relationship of religion and philosophy to art. In some of these books, I use design to develop my argument. More recently, I have begun to expand philosophy beyond the printed page by creating artworks in different media – video games, photography. I am also engaged in creating art. In 2002, I had a major exhibition entitled Grave Matters as Mass MOCA and I am now engaged in a major land art and sculpture in the Berkshires.

There is also an historical context for this work. During the crucial decade of the 1790s, art and literature began to displace religion as the means for expressing religious and spiritual concerns. Though rarely acknowledged, it is not possible to understand many major twentieth-century artists and writers without an appreciation for their spiritual preoccupations. Refiguring the Spiritual and Rewiring the Real attempt to rectify this oversight.
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It’s been a good week for Kara Newman (@karanewman), author of The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets.

A recent review in the Washington Post praised the book for providing “a refreshing and much-needed look” at food as a commodity amid the plethora of other food books.

The review points to Kara Newman’s “engaging observations” about the development of such phenomena as year-round dairy products and the transformation of pepper from a financial instrument of critical value to lowly food stuff. Additionally, Newman’s tracing of the history of commodity tracing is documented “clearly and elegantly.”

In addition to the great review, Newman was also interviewed about the book by Eric LeMay on the New Books Network.

“Do contemporary citizens, some of them descendants of wrongdoers, owe anything to the descendants of victims? For almost all cases, the answer given is no.”—Nahshon Perez

The following is an interview with Nahshon Perez, author of Freedom from Past Injustices: A Critical Evaluation of Claims for Inter-Generational Reparations:

Question: What is Freedom from Past Injustices about?

Nahshon Perez: In Freedom from Past Injustices I argue that past wrongs should not be corrected through legal means, and that it is important to let bygones be bygones. This is not a popular opinion among scholars and many practitioners, and the arguments carefully examined and developed in my book are not frequently voiced. They are nevertheless, I think, powerful and persuasive.

Freedom from Past Injustices focuses specifically on past wrongs: these are substantial cases of injustices in which all the wrongdoers and victims have since passed away. The issue, therefore, always includes the question: do contemporary citizens, some of them descendants of wrongdoers, owe anything to the descendants of victims? For almost all cases, the answer given is no.

Freedom from Past Injustices views persons as individuals. Consequently, the first challenge facing those who support inter-generational reparations for past wrongs would be to justify burdening non-wrongdoers with the payment of reparations to non-victims. As the arguments for and against inter-generational reparations for past wrongs are carefully examined, the importance of this individualistic point of departure becomes clearer.

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Earlier this week, we posted on BiDil, the first FDA-approved drug with a race-specific indication on its label. In the following interview with Columbia University Press, Jonathan Kahn, author of Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age, places BiDil in context. He provides some compelling examples of how “personalized” medicine is being “racialized” and makes an argument for why this needs to be stopped.

CUP: Generally, can genetics be reliably used to determine the efficacy of a drug?

JK: Using genetics to determine the efficacy of a drug is very different from using race. A lot of progress has been made in using genetics to identify how a person may metabolize a particular drug. This is not quite the same thing as efficacy, but it is important. There are several steps to using a drug to treat a disease. Once you decide that a person needs a drug, you then need to determine what the appropriate dose is for that person. Many factors can influence this – height, weight, age, and, of course, genetics. You would not want to give an infant the same dose of Tylenol that you would give an adult. Similarly, some people have genetic variations that make them metabolize certain drugs more quickly or more slowly than others. If you are a slow metabolizer, then the drug is going to present in your system for a longer time, and you may not need as a high a dose as someone who is a faster metabolizer, and so forth. Many of these variations have been identified and can be tested. In some circumstances this can improve treatment outcomes; in others, it does not seem to be significantly more effective than the old-fashioned way of having your physician monitor your response to a particular dose and adjusting as needed.

Some significant advances have also been made in targeting drugs to treat some cancers based, not on the genetics of the person, but of the cancer itself. Thus, for example, there are certain types of breast and lung cancer that respond particularly well to certain drugs. To determine whether the drug will work, doctors test the cancer cells to see if they have certain genetic variants that will make them susceptible to the drugs. In all cases, whether drug metabolizing genes or cancer genes, the relevant genetic variants are not specific to particular racial groups.

CUP: Could you define your use of the term “unstated white norm” in the book?

JK: In the realm of biomedicine, the “unstated white norm” is the common practice of thinking about the health status or conditions of white people as the normal state of affairs from which people of color are seen somehow to deviate. It becomes manifest in such practices as algorithms that use race as a variable in calculating the proper dose of a drug for a given patient. Some of these – even those using genetic information – include values for being “African American” or “Asian American” but not for being white. The idea here is that if you are white you get the “normal” dose that does not have to be adjusted for race. It is similar to the idea that somehow whites do not “have race” – only people of color do.

In the case of a drug like BiDil, the idea of the unstated white norm becomes manifest in the logic of its approval by the FDA. The approval was based primarily on data from a drug trial that enrolled only self-identified African Americans. The FDA approved BiDil with a race-specific label based on the idea that since it was only tested in African Americans it should only be approved for African Americans. But the fact of the matter is, most of the drugs on the market today were approved based on data from similarly race-specific trials – trials conducted only with white people – but these drugs were not designated as “white” drugs, nor should they be. One unfortunate implication of this dynamic is the FDA sending a message (unintentionally to be sure, but a message nonetheless) that drugs tested in black people are only good for black people but drugs tested in whites are good for everybody – that is, that whites are somehow more fully representative of humanity than are blacks.

CUP: What are your views on the future of racialized and personalized medicine?

JK: I consider racialized medicine to be the inappropriate use of racial categories in medical practice and drug development. It often involves constructing practices around mistaken assumptions of some innate genetic difference among racial groups. For me, the important issue is not whether to use race in biomedicine, but how to use it – and when. There are very real health disparities in the country that are based on a long history of social, economic, and legal practices that have consistently and deliberately subordinated groups of people based on their race. As a social and historical phenomenon the health impacts of race are very real and can only be addressed by taking race into account. The key is to recognize that in these contexts it is the social and historical practices of racism that have become manifest in racialized bodies as the very real biological differences of health disparities. That is, it is history and culture that has created these biological differences in the incidence of disease across racial groups – not genes.

The future for personalized medicine should be to focus on specific genes for disease and drug response and use new knowledge to develop more effective therapeutics. My hope is that a better understanding of the relationship between race and race-based health disparities will lead to rejection of racialized medicine and an embrace of broad-based approaches to addressing the persistent social and historical determinants of health in our country.

The following is an interview with James Pettifer, author of The Kosova Liberation Army: Underground War to Balkan Insurgency, 1948-2001 :

Question: Some years have passed now since the main conflicts in the Balkans, and interest in them has been overtaken by the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. What motivated you to write a book about the ethnic Albanian Kosova Liberation Army and its role in the conflict there in the late 1990’s?

James Pettifer: I had been very involved in the region for many years, as a foreign correspondent and as an academic. The war in Kosova was a success for NATO, in my opinion, and it was in danger of being forgotten as the later and much larger conflicts in the Middle East and with their much more problematic outcomes occupied public attention. And I felt the Kosova Liberation Army was a very interesting organisation, a rare example of a successful insurgency in the Balkans that had attracted outside support. I wanted to try to explore why this was, and above all why a tiny group of people with what many people would regard as an antiquated nationalist ideology were able to be so successful in modern Europe.

Q: You write a good deal about the support the Kosova Liberation Army received from different outside émigré groups, particularly in the United States, Germany and Switzerland. Why was this so important?

JP: The ethnic Albanians in Kosova were (and are still) in a poor landlocked country that few people have visited. Many of them had family members who had been forced to emigrate in order to find work, often after they were thrown out of their normal occupations in the Milosevic martial law period in Kosova after 1989. These people took away with them a strong resentment of Serbian rule, and a determination to help rescue their homeland from it. Switzerland was particularly important. Over 400,000 people of Albanian descent(mostly from Kosova) live there, and Swiss traditions of respect of the rights of political refugees are very important if you are conducting underground political activity that seeks to change the state you have come from in the first place. The United States Albanian Diaspora was also essential to the KLA. These émigrés had long nationalist traditions, and were very active in the wartime period.

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In the following interview with The Street, Howard Marks, author of The Most Important Thing Illuminated: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor, discusses some of his insights about investing. Marks points to the complexity of the stock market and the importance of second-level thinking. He argues that there are inefficiencies in the stock market and it is important to focus on the value of an investment rather than its potential growth.