Book(s) Session at APA-Pac
I am very much looking forward to the author-critics session at APA-Pacific tonight on my Pragmatism and Genealogy books. It’s quite an honor to have a chance to open both books up to public scrutiny together (in part because the two books were really written together as ‘one idea’ as it were).
I owe an enormous thanks to Brad Stone, Noelle McAfee, and Paul Patton for being my scrutinizers. There are, of course, many others to whom much gratitude is owed in addition. Both books are products of a series of ongoing conversations in which I am just one locale of many — the books are thus in may ways not entirely of me though I am of course the site at which these specific interventions have been articulated. They are both not ‘mine’ but also mine. In any event, the occasion tonight will be a welcome opportunity to have a chance to submit these locales in the conversation to criticism, in the sense of that word according to which it is an achievement.
I am trying to think of a funny joke as part of my response but nothing good is coming to me. Perhaps the tone will just have to be very ultra-serious.
(By the way, if you happen to be at apa-pacific and can’t make the session, which will be in the kent room of the conference hotel, but want to come out after for a little book-criticism celebrating, then just send me a txt or an email to find out where some of us are heading.)
My latest book now exists… as a book…
I received copies of my Genealogy as Critique this week. It is a real little object. That makes me happy. So I posed for a picture of myself holding it. Then I went out with a few friends to celebrate its publication. Through it all I even donned a bowtie to punctuate the occasion with what I hope was an unassuming bit of flair.
The publisher did a handsome job with 
the typography and cover, or at least I think so. Indeed, I’m very happy with the cover design and image (and yes, I chose the image, it’s a Duchamp, surprise surprise, and you can read about it in the book).
Here is a description from the back cover (cobbled together, of course, somewhere between me and the publishers): “Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems.”
If you like, you can read more about the book on Indiana University Press’s website (http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?cPath=1037_1112&products_id=806494) and, one hopes, in book reviews in your favorite journals soon. If you are coming to APA Pacific then there will be a little author-critics session on this book plus the Pragmatism one, if you feel like coming out in support.
I could say much much muchly more but I guess that’s why I wrote the thing. Hopefully I say it all there.
And so on to the next one.
Net Theory Talk
Poster for an event tomorrow for a speaker 
series I helped co-organize. Our inaugural talk will be by Wendy Chun (Brown Univ) on her new project on networks. The title of the talk is “Imagined Networks, Affective Connections”. EMU Fir Room 12.00p-1.30p, Thur 1/17/13.
Also in a related vein just saw this (thanks Andrew Lison): http://www.facebook.com/events/463556203709031/
Foucault & Deleuze
Heading to Purdue University for a conference on Foucault & Deleuze. All the other speakers have done great work in one or the other (or both), so am very much looking forward.
I will try to rise to the occasion with a paper on the status of critique in F & D. The idea is to make sense of the idea of critique beyond (or outside of the sway of) the dialectic. Critique is experimental not dialectical for F & D. An experiment works on problems and responses, and thereby avoids the work of negation.
The pretty conference flyer:
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/research/deleuze/Conference/BDF_flyer.pdf
What an index looks like…
Indexing can be fun! Indeed one realizes that it is a bit of an art form once one gets into it: it involves an interesting mix of constraint and choice. All that said, I don’t think I’d want to spend my Christmas vacation writing an index — fortunately, I’m already finished with mine, and even before our the fall colors (or what we have of them here) have let go of their trees.
Below is the near-final draft of the index (sans page numbers, and separated out into separate subject and name indices) for Genealogy as Critique, my next project. It’s quite nice to have the writing process end on a very up note.
Subject Index
anthropology,
; of the contemporary,
appropriationist historiography. See historiography, appropriationist
archaeology,
; expansion into genealogy,
; as problematizational,
; proposed alternative forms of,
; and transcendentality,
articulation,
Pragmatism and Social Science Methodology
Headed to a Pragmatism and Social Sciences workshop today and am very much looking forward to it. Questions of philosophy’s relationships and contributions to methodologies of ‘the human sciences’ have long been central for me, so am glad to have a chance to discuss this with others in a format crossing up the disciplines. Genealogy has long been a player in these debates, so it’s nice to see pragmatism (the other tradition I focus my work on), coming into play again here, in a serious and considered way.
Speaking of crossing up, the meeting is at Hopkins, so I get to see a little bit of Baltimore, which will be nice, because aside from a visit during a dreadful APA, I’ve never much been before. In my mind, Baltimore is practically synonymous with John Waters.
time for you to check out Hey, Michel Foucault
a fun interlude from your day or night is always to be found at
