Undead

"Braaaaaaaains..."

Hello friends and allies. I have recieved a few kind notes and emails from some of you wondering if I'm ok, still alive, still sane, etc. I'm very grateful for your kind thoughts and concern.

I am indeed still alive and ok, though my sanity has always been ambiguous. I'm just at a crucial juncture in my life going "monastic" on my PhD this year. As well, Roland Boer has organised a panel on 'Capital as Religion' at the upcoming 'Capital Against Capitalism: New Marxist Research' conference where I'll be presenting a paper on Liberation Theology in retrospect and prospect. So all this has kept me well occupied and off the streets (and internet).


I will however be back soon with some new posts. Three I have in mind in particular, and that have been floating around in my head in line with what I have been writing, are:



* The last instalment of a series of posts on Ernesto Laclau's latest work on the dynamics of populism beyond the fashionable politics of 'pure immanence'



* The rehabilitation of Sartre's later work (i.e. Search for Method, Critique of Dialectical Reason) within an non-humanist rubric, especially pertaining to his work on praxis, the practico-inert, organisations and institutions, which I think have a lot to offer in terms of how to think through the relation of social structures with everyday practices



* And possibly the most ambitious (and least well-formed) of all, the possibilities for a re-configuration, re-articulation and re-deployment of concepts from Radical Orthodoxy's earlier work (i.e. Milbank's Theology and Social Theory and Pickstock's After Writing) for progressive politics(!). This follows my long-held conviction that much of the diagnosis RO is valuable and pertinent for a nominalistic age (of pure immanence!)... but that their political prognosis, esp. in the form of 'Red Toryism, constitutes a spectacular of crash-landing (on a smaller scale but homologous to Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt's BIG-ASS crash landing in the 1930s).



Looking forward to chatting with you all soon.