Tag Archives: what i’m reading

(Foucault) The Birth of The Clinic (Reading Notes)

In the spirit of the day I’m including text on epidemic consciousness, medical fields, the medical gaze, death and the human. Below are more or less chapter by chapter reading-notes cribbing directly from the primary text, Foucault’s The Birth of … Continue reading

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Islamic Ornament & The Spiritual in Art (Oleg Grabar)

Just finished reading Oleg Grabar’s The Mediation of Ornament for a survey class on Religion and Art. Written by one the great art historians of Islamic art, The Mediation of Ornament is more like a meditation after a career long … Continue reading

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Law Not Law (The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law)

For a long time I have thought that “Law” is something of a thorn in the side of Jewish thought and philosophy, associated as it is with all sorts of wild, even violent claims by those invested in its discourse … Continue reading

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New Materialism and the Study of Religion (Manuel Vásquez)

Manuel Vásquez’s More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion has pride of place in the fairly recent materialist turn in Religion Studies. The three keyterms are embodiment, emplacement, and practice (p.325). The force of the title is to take … Continue reading

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Deleuze Leibniz Cosmogenesis

You would have thought it was Spinoza, but Leibniz turn out to be the beating metaphysical heart of the Deleuzian universe and its modelling of cosmogenesis, the creation of worlds (compossible and incompossible) around inflection points, the emission of singularities … Continue reading

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(Abstract Bodies) Balls or Columns or Cubes (Resurrection) (Maimonides)

With characteristic confidence, Maimonides is here arguing against what he assumes is the false, nay absurd, notion that human souls would have bodies in the world to come. He thinks the world to come is entirely without nature and natural … Continue reading

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(Reckless Mind) Philosophers & Politics (Mark Lilla)

The distinctly unkind pleasure reading through Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics belongs to liberal skeptics who would concur with Lilla that the combination of philosophy and politics would seem, at least in the twentieth century, to be … Continue reading

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(Shipwrecked Minds) Religion & Political Reaction (Mark Lilla)

Not a knockout intellectual blow, Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction packs a tough little liberal punch nevertheless. But to what effect? Meant for a broad readership, The Shipwrecked Mind appeared in 2016 as a New York Review … Continue reading

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(Deleuze & Guattari) Jews + Jews + Jews (Cynthia Baker)

A giddy dive into the elaboration of a concept, Cynthia Baker’s Jew will lend itself inevitably to two kinds of weak misreadings among many of its readers. The first possible misreading mirrors Foucault’s once provocative contention that “the homosexual” did … Continue reading

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(Levantine) Aesthetic Judaism (Lucette Lagnado)

Memoir is an unusually interesting genre for the study of modern religion and modern Judaism. Casting about for material that would expand the contours of my mid-level class last semester (spring 2017) on American Judaism I finally got around to … Continue reading

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