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Monthly Archives: June 2008

Montesquieu’s “Discoure on the Motives that Ought to Encourage Us to the Sciences”

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Diana Schaub, author of Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and one of those forgotten Straussians in Bush’s administration (member of the President’s Council on Bioethics), has translated Montesquieu’s “Discourse on the Motives that Ought to Encourage Us to the Sciences” [PDF] and a brief a commentary on the “Discourse” [PDF].

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Foucault – “Birth of Biopolitics”

Friday, June 20, 2008

For those you who haven’t either already ordered the UK edition or who haven’t pre-ordered the American edition, Amazon informed me that Birth of Biopolitics shipped today.

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Help With Latin!

Friday, June 20, 2008

As a side project driven entirely be a too great interest in a short section in the chapter on Hobbes in my dissertation, I’ve started (passively) working on a critical edition of Charles Butler’s The Feminine Monarchi, or The History of Bees. Butler’s “classical” sources are limited to four authorities: Aristotle, Pliny, Virgil and St. [...]

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New Blog: Critical Animal

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Some may have noticed comments left by Scu on a number of the usual blogs in recent weeks. I highly recommend reading Scu’s blog, Critical Animal, especially if you are interested in the intersection of social/political theory/philosophy and animal studies (including, of course, Agamben, Arendt, Foucault, Haraway, etc). He (and here I assume based upon [...]

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More Teaching Evaluations

Monday, June 16, 2008

It would seem that I have gone from significantly below average to above average insofar as my teaching evaluations are concerned. (We’ll ignore for now that teaching evaluations don’t evaluate much of anything and are largely a silly bureaucratic exercise that amounts to nothing more than useless “performance indicators” – just like all of our [...]

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Political Animals: Bees

Sunday, June 15, 2008

The work known as Feminine Monarchie was first published in 1609 by Charles Butler went through a number of editions during the course of the seventeenth century in England. The original 1609 edition was entitled The Feminine Monarchie or a Treatise Concerning Bees, and the Due Ordering of Them: Wherein the Truth, Found Out by [...]

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Agamben’s “Il Regno e la Gloria”

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Adam Kotsko is kindly posting his reading notes on the latest volume in Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Homo Sacer’ series to An und für sich. Il Regno e la Gloria is Volume 2, Part 2 of the saga – continuing where State of Exception (recall that State of Exception was originally billed as Volume 2) left off [...]

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Musical Friday: Native Hip Hop

Friday, June 13, 2008

Appropriate given the official apology to Natives for abuse in the residential schools. While the apology is being praised in the mainstream media, few remember that Harper’s government continues to perpetuate crimes against the Native people of Canada – for instance: destroying the Kelowna Accord; refused to fast-track payments – to the very people named [...]

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Oops!

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Meaning to delete two spam comments, I also deleted 23 real comments. Sorry.

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To-Do List

Sunday, June 8, 2008

(1) Learn French again having all but lost what little French I learnt during French immersion in elementary and middle school. They always said two things in high school: (1) you’ll regret not taking more math and (2) you’ll regret not staying with French. Both ended up being true. I’ll likely order this book for [...]

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