What I’m doing this summer: Or, My God! I may have to drink less!

My presence on this blog needs to be asserted once again and yet I haven’t really had many blogological insights lately as most of my energy has been directed towards shit that must be done. As a few others have shared their respective tasks for the summer (and because I’ve been accused by some of being a lazy good for nothing who does no work and so should shut his lazy good for nothing mouth) sharing my own tasks might not appear so self-absorbed and help me to foresee the plan for getting it all done.

Writing

• Editorial responsiblities (with the very talanted Daniel Whistler) for the volume After the Postmodern and the Postsecular: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion. This is coming out on Cambridge Scholars Press in  mid-2010 and will contain some really powerful articles and, we hope, survey the field and mark out new lines of thought.
• Translation of François Laruelle’s Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy for Continuum. This should come out in mid-2010 as well.
  • I’m writing a translator’s introduction to introduce the reader to Laruelle and situate this book in the wider line of his thought with the tentative title “The Philosopher and the Heretic: On the Importance of Religion for Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy”.
• Articles:
  • One on Deleuze (& sometimes Guattari) on the actual and the virtual and philosophy of nature for a special issue of SubStance with the working title “Believing in this World for the Making of Gods: On the Ecology of the Virtual and the Actual”.
  • One on integrating ecology into philosophy with special reference to Laruelle for Polygraph with the working title “Towards the Transcendental Ecology”. (Both of these are subject to peer review of course.)
  • A more technical article on Laruelle and philosophy of religion for the edited volume mentioned above with the working title “What Can Be Done with Religion? François Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy and the Future of Philosophy of Religion”.
  • Write a response and summary of changes to a reader’s report for an article co-written with Daniel Colucciello Barber.
• The plan is to finish the completed drafts of two dissertation chapters by the end of the summer (I’m counting September as the end of summer because that’s when the new University year starts up again).
• A conference paper on the way films think about animals for the Film-Philosophy confernce this July in Dundee with the title “Shooting the Animal: On Animal-Philosophy and Film-Philosophy”.

Reading

• As you may expect I’m reading a lot of Laruelle. A lot of it is re-reading as I’m not comfortable only reading through material in French just once if I’m writing on it.
• Schelling’s work in philosophy of religion (or mythology or revelation) and philosophy of nature.
• Some ecology books. Specifically a textbook written in narrative style, a book on resilience in ecosystems, and a few more histories of the idea of nature.

Career Development

I’m not really into calling this career development, but I suppose from a certain perspective it is. I’m basically lucky enough to be working with some people I really respect on a possible postdoc and also have the rare oppurtunity in the UK to teach a bit.

• Working on a framework document that will lead to a detailed research agenda in the arts and humanities within an ecology/enviromentalist organization.
• Teaching “Theology through Film” in the Spring. I probably won’t do this in the summer, but I’d like to revisit the syllabus I wrote this year and tweek it according to what worked and what didn’t this year. I really liked teaching and even though I don’t think I could handle another class on top of finishing the dissertation next year I would really like to teach more.

A fair amount of work to do. I find that doing lots of work, and trying to make that good work, really helps with certain kinds of depression that arise in graduate study. It also distracts you from the kind of drama that goes on in institutions, though that probably has more to do with the fact that you talk to people less.