Hello, friends! It's time once again to have a look at the last few books that I've been reading in
the background as I research the show and
I think I'd like to start doing these book recommendation videos along with  theme and the theme I have for us this time is
citations. Sounds incredibly exciting, I know- but bear with me. I want to talk about two books that I think
don't do citations very well, and one book that I think does. First up, Simon Critchley's
"Infinitely Demanding".
Critchley is a philosopher and what he's trying to do in this book is come up with an entirely new
theory of mind and selfhood and then apply that theory to
morality
theology and
political philosophy, so he's really set himself a big task in the book that is only about
150 pages long. The new theory of mind that he puts across is cool and interesting;
I have a few issues with it. If you've seen my series "Are you rational?", you might remember it from there.
He then applies it to theology and there were some pretty cool bits there
I've studied a bit of theology at the University,
so I did find it interesting.
It did leave me with a few more questions than I went in with.
And things started to get woolly there, and then in the political philosophy section
I felt it sort of went off the rails a little bit. There are parts where he skips over quite a few thinkers
and quite a few big areas of thought quite quickly, and also he writes in this book -particularly towards the end-
that he hopes this new theory of mind and selfhood he puts across,
will be the glue that can bring lots of disparate political groups together.
And I couldn't help but wondering if that's the goal
This book is very...
difficult to understand if you haven't read a lot of other authors
And this is where the citations theme comes in: If you haven't read Hegel, if you haven't read Kant, if you haven't read
*struggles to correctly pronounce names* "Levine, la Venus, Levinas, del lew, deluse"
ah, "Badew, Bahdu"
Because this show is watched by people all over the world, no matter how I pronounce these names, somebody's gonna say "you pronounced it wrong"
Basically, if you haven't read a-a very long list of people, a lot of this is going to be pretty much impenetrable.
Compare that to uh, something like Harsha Walia's "Undoing Border Imperialism",
a book that I seem to recommend to everybody I bump into on the street,
which, again, is about political philosophy at Salford and bringing groups together, but is very accessible.
Or, uh, compare it, compare it to, uhm, Vladimir Lenin's "Imperialism: The Highest Stage Of Capitalism".
Again, very accessible. Or even compare it to a lot of right-wing thinkers and-and
contemporary, very right-wing thinkers, for whom the barrier of entry is just like:
"Hey, have you ever noticed things are a bit rubbish? Well, here's why I think that is."
Whereas this, it's like: "Hey, you know how you've read like, 900 other people? Here's what I think about them."
And so I think that the way Critchley references other authors kind of makes the book more difficult to read,
and kind of shoots itself in the foot.
If you can get your hands on the first couple of chapters of this, the idea that he puts across about self-hood and mind,
is pretty cool, so I would recommend checking out the first two chapters, two or three. Other than that though,
unless you've read, like, everyone else, you probably give this one a rest. This book was sent to me by an anonymous fan
They chose to keep themselves anonymous. I really hope it wasn't Simon Critchley. *laughs*
Hope I haven't just dumped all over your book, Simon.
You know, I bet I did- I did, like, like large bits of it. Um, so yeah, whoever sent me this,
Thank you. Next up, a book that does citations slightly better, but still...
Still not great, and it's Edward Said's "Orientalism". If you've not heard of this book, it's an absolute classic.
Edward Said wrote "Orientalism" and it became massively popular.
I think he says in an afterword, which has written many years later, more popular than he anticipated
and then he wrote his follow-up book which was called "Culture and Imperialism", which I've already read.
"Culture and Imperialism" is much more accessible to a wider audience than this is.
It's about how the East, "the Orient", has been portrayed in the West throughout history.
Said's great strength is that he's read almost everybody
He's not just talking about how the East was represented in political speeches, but he goes through, uh
translations... editions... travel writings... educational documents
He goes through like everything... Everything, everything, everything.
I think the book is actually quite prophetic in a lot of ways
because he's saying that the East has been portrayed in a very limited, negative way.
And that people thought they were portraying it neutrally, but because of the socio-political context in which they were writing they weren't,
and some of the trends he identifies in the historical literature and the tropes,
I still see being reproduced in writing today. So it's a classic for a reason, and it is brilliant but...
One of the best bits of advice I ever got when writing,
is: If you're gonna introduce somebody, like, Joe Bloggs,
just put a few words in front of their name so the reader knows who they are, even if you think they're really famous;
Chances are, somebody hasn't heard of him, so don't just say "Joe Bloggs says this",
be like "The philosopher Joe Bloggs says this". And I could've really used that in Edward Said's "Orientalism",
because his great strength is that he's read everybody where the drawback, I think, is that he assumes that you've also read them.
So rather than "Sir Randall Bloggs said this", what I would have liked would have been:
"Sir Randall Bloggs, who was an eighteenth-century...
ethnographer and an MP who had a massive influence in the field and wrote (uh)
'Sir Randall Bloggs' Fantastically Racist Adventures to the Orient', okay
And which sold this many copies" or whatever. Just, just something in front of it!
"And then he said this." So that when he's talking about these texts,
I have an idea of of how important they were and because I'm sure if you go through history,
you could find people saying all kinds of things.
But if Sir Randall Bloggs wrote this book and nobody ever read it, then I don't know why we're talking about it.
Whereas if he says "Hey, Sir Randall Blogs, he wrote this.
It was one of the most published books in England and it contains this horifically racist generalization,
which everybody thought was true. That- that's a bit more useful.
Lastly, a book that does citations very well, but is, perhaps ironically, the hardest one I have to recommend:
It's George Ciccariello-Maher's "Decolonizing Dialectics".
The book is about Marxism and where it goes wrong.
People who've misapplied it, applied it in limited ways.
I found it quite interesting to engage critically with the history of Marxist thought and that's something that Edward Sayid does as well:
He talked about Marx's own anti-semitism and about his first world chauvinism. It's complicated. It's tough.
It's niche.
But what I loved was that Ciccariello-Maher took me by my hand and said:
"This is what this author said, this was the response, this is what I'm saying about it."
And in *gestures* bam, bam, bam; really clear.
"This is what Sorrell said if you haven't read him", which I hadn't, so it was really nice to have that primer-like catch up,
"this is what the kind of fallout from him saying that was and how that fit into the wider international discussion,
this is what I'm saying about it." It was like an experience of being taught, and I didn't understand a little bit,
but I appreciated that the book was laid out in a way that was still accessible to me.
In particular, I read Frantz Fanon's book "The Wretched of the Earth" a few years ago now,
and I wasn't really ready for it at the time
And I loved the bits of this book where Ciccariello-Maher went through and said:
"This is where Fanon is responding to Hegel. This is what Hegel was saying, this is what Fanon was saying in response,
this is what I'm saying to kind of back it up."
And it also left me some room to engage in and have curiosities of my own.
So he talks a lot about Fanon and assertions of political blackness,
and Fanon talks a lot about anti-colonial violence.
I might have been curious to hear some stuff about "how do we guard against toxic masculinity when we're talking about political violence?"
Maybe hear a little bit about assertion to political black womanhood as well.
George Ciccariello-Maher, I understand, has recently left his university teaching position,
so if you want to support him as an academic and as a writer, and the book sounds cool,
I'll put a link where you can get his book and indeed all of the books I've discussed today in the doobly-doo
Thank you so much to the fans who sent me books from my wish list
Thank you very much for watching, and I will see you in the next video that I make, *singsong* byee
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