Had to redo my password. Here’s an excellent review of Vitale’s Biodeconstruction (SUNY, 2018) at https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jonathan_basile_reviews_biodeconstruction/. The book itself is excellent and picks up important parts of Derrida’s mid-70s unpublished lectures on life.

Reviewed by Don Landes at NDPR. A quick peak:

Henri Bergson occupies an intriguing place in the history of philosophy. Despite being the most famous philosopher during his lifetime and possessing a lucid and engaging style of philosophical reflection, his importance has nonetheless waxed and waned with the times. Perhaps this is not surprising, given that Bergson’s philosophy requires a constant attempt to resist dogmatic or static thinking in the face of the inevitability of this tendency. Nevertheless, not only have many of his concepts sedimented into our collective philosophical lexicon, but Bergson has also had a marked influence on specific thinkers (such as Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze) and on developments outside of philosophy. Following Gary Gutting’s description, Ansell-Pearson suggests that Bergson’s enduring greatness perhaps lies in his unique “combination of descriptive concreteness and systematic scope and metaphysical ambition” (1). His philosophy is a call to a going beyondof philosophy and the human condition, since traditional approaches to the problems of philosophy “presuppose a subject already installed in being” and thus already located within the confines of the human condition (ibid.).

Reviewed here at Phenomenological Reviews. I contributed a chapter on Lefebvre (trying to make connections between his own thinking of place and Heidegger’s work in particular), but the whole collection is chockful of excellent writings, though given its price, you might want to get it through a library.

Andreas Keller’s Philosophy of Olfactory Perception (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) is discussed here.

By Tim Howles here. The post is instructive and helpful. What’s particularly interesting, though, if undiscussed here, is Latour’s invocation of Schmitt for the climate crisis, one that I’m quite dubious about.

Davide Tarizzo’s Life: A Modern Invention, tr. Mark William Epstein (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), is reviewed by Charles T. Wolfe (Ghent U.). The review marks out only “minor quibbles” and jumps, like the book, across so many figures as to lose any thread on what is meant by the “invention” of “life” (presumably one that is non-teleological). One would think this was more than a “minor quibble” below in the italicized sentence:

That Tarizzo thinks Darwin and Darwinism lead to Hitlerism is clear enough: “Darwinism, i.e., the theory of natural selection, is racist and discriminatory, as facts have demonstrated many times and unfortunately continue to demonstrate” (194). Why this is the case is a bit trickier to make out from his book [my emphasis]. Most basically, both raise life to the status of an ultimate value. But then, we (we moderns, we people of today, whoever the ‘we’ is) are just as bad! Indeed, “Worse still, we are the last racists, because we already embody the future, we embody human beings to come, we embody the eschatological Race that by definition and on principle cannot be followed by any other” (213).

Shona Jackson (Texas A&M University) reviews George Ciccariello-Maher’s Decolonizing Dialectics at Antipode.