1. In one interesting, controversial and yet little-known essay, René Girard applies his theory to an understanding of the phenomenon of eating disorders: ‘Anorexia and Mimetic Desire’ (2013, from a 1996 lecture). A thread.
2. Why can Girard speak diagnostically on this topic? On the basis of his theory about human desire. For Girard, desire is never a function of an autonomous subject. Rather, it is generated by a pre-conscious psychological formatting that he calls ‘mimetic’.

1. One of my favourite scholarly books of the last few years has been Gary Dorrien’s "Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism". I have learnt a lot from it. A short thread. 2. Dorrien argues for democratic socialism as “the ethical passion for social justice and radical democratic community […] conceiving democracy in terms of character of relationships in a society, not mere voting rights” (p.4).

1. I love the @DisorderShow podcast and have greatly appreciated thinking about contemporary geopolitics through this prism. But, if I may, I have a question about the concept of “order” itself.
@alexhallhall and @JasonPackLibya 2. Is there a risk that the term itself - including all its historical and lexical baggage - risks re-baptising a sense of exceptionalism and hegemony that (I know) at heart you seek to critique and overturn?

1. For those Vance-inspired American nationalists trying to claim an intellectual mandate from René Girard, I would suggest a careful reading of “Achever Clausewitz” (2011) - trans "Battling to the End" - in relation to political theology and the concept of apocalypse. A short 🧵 2. In this text Girard argues that world history is an admixture of progress and regression. And that we must live humbly in the midst of, not as "masters" of this trajectory. The metaxy is key here.

1. I’ve been meaning for a while to comment on an important article published in @NewLeftReview earlier this year by @docteur_en_rien entitled “Reactionary Ecology”. Let’s see if I can gather some thoughts now, even if this is somewhat inchoate.
newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/… 2. To begin with, I’m glad this sort of discussion can be held. With feisty polemic, it correctly identifies how the recent book - "On the Emergence of an Ecological Class" by Bruno Latour & Nikolaj Schultz - enacts an orthogonal redirection of Marxist political economy tropes.

1. Throughout his work Bruno Latour offers a critique not just of “modernity”, but also of “secular modernity” - in particular the claim of the secular to provide a structure within which all human ideologies are able to flourish equally.



2. Fundamental to secularism is its claim to provide a neutral or non-aligned space within which human existence can be creatively and independently pursued. Latour challenges this claim, proposing that secularism must be understood as itself having the form of an ideology.

1. What is agro-ecology? Its techniques may seem niche to those of us who are not "farmers", but the idea of applying ecological systems principles to food production is relevant to us all. Moreover, it has important connections to culture, social movements and even religion. 2. With this in mind, it was a delight to host a conversation earlier this week on "agro-ecology" as part of the new 'Integral Ecology Dialogues' series at @LSRIOxford @CampionOxf. With scholars and practitioners Norman Wirzba, Jenny Howell, Matthew Whelan and Austen Ivereigh.

1. Although we can approach it via history, politics, IR, theology or social science, at the heart of Eric Voegelin’s intellectual project is his Philosophy of Consciousness. This is abstract, abstruse and difficult. But essential if we are to understand what he is saying. 2. Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness enables him to analyse "symbolizations", that is, how humans have depicted their encounters with “the ground of being” over time. These symbols change and evolve of course, and may be more of less faithful to the original experience.

1. On Christmas Eve 1968, the Apollo 8 mission was in orbit around the moon. The crew comprised three American astronauts: Frank Borman, James Lovell and Bill Anders. 2. Over the course of three orbits, these men gazed down at the lunar surface through their capsule’s tiny windows as they carried out the observations prescribed for almost every minute of this tightly-planned and tightly-controlled mission.

1. Jospeh Conrad's "Nostromo" (1904) grew from a projected short-story into his longest novel. The composition was, even by Conrad’s standards, a ghastly ordeal: “I see nothing, I read nothing. It is like a kind of tomb which is also hell where one must write, write, write.”

2. Nevertheless, the narratival machinery is extraordinary, the plot beginning 'in medias res' and subsequently revealing itself through a series of flashbacks and metadiegetic retellings.

1. A brief thread on a possible literary influence on Kierkegaard’s understanding of Sin: 2. Kierkegaard often spoke of leaving his home and immersing himself in a ‘people bath’ in the streets of Copenhagen.

1. The late work of French philosopher Michel Serres was attuned in important ways to contemporary philosophy of religion/ theological metaphysics, esp its understanding of what constitutes a responsible religious "retrieval": tradition, renovation, non-identical repetition, etc.



2. In his very late work, "Religion: Re-reading what is Bound Together", for example, Serres seeks to go beyond historicist approaches that seek to undermine religion by appeal to "the mere facts" of history and by noting the problem of transmission of these into the present.

1. In his final book “Religion: Rereading what is bound together” Michel Serres offers his understanding of religion as a “hot spot”. For him, religion experience is a point of eruption out of the vertical matrix that goes from the heavenly to the chthonic/ earthly. 2. For Serres the power of religion is thus to be a connector. Religion indexes at the same time to “the universal and the singular, the global and the local". It is "an infinite immensity and a finite pinpoint, between the virtual and the real, the absent and the present” (p.41)

1/ I think this short article by Bruno Latour is an excellent precis of why his entire system of thought should be called “Gaian” and how this can even be considered as having the status of a new metaphysics.
lareviewofbooks.org/article/bruno-…
2/ What is the value of the Gaia concept for Latour?
His answer: “with the Gaia theory one can grasp the “power to act” of all the jumbled-up organisms without immediately integrating them into a unity that is superior to them and which they obey”.

1. Joseph Conrad’s wonderful late novella, “The Shadow-Line”, written in 1915, is one of my favourites. A short thread on historical, psychologising and metaphysical readings of this important text.

2. Conrad draws on his own experience as commander of the Otago in 1888. The genesis for the book itself dates to 1899, when Conrad had in mind a story titled “First Command,” a possible follow-up to “Youth: A narrative” (1898). (background story here: ) nzgeo.com/stories/joseph…

1. There is an important study to be made of the influence of the idea of “Gaia” upon the metaphysics that informs the work of twentieth-century novelist William Golding.





2. We know that Golding was James Lovelock’s neighbour in Bowerchalke in the 1960s and even suggested the nomenclature of “Gaia”, when they happened to fall in step during a walk to the post office one morning: facebook.com/tim.howles/pos…

1. Here we have publication of the final book by Bruno Latour: “La religion à l'épreuve de l'écologie” (“Religion put to the test by Ecology”). This is the book that will provide that final, crucial lens into Latour’s work as a political theology.
editionsladecouverte.fr/la_religion_a_…


2. I was privileged to receive a proof copy of the book from Bruno himself a few months before he died. He was proud and excited to see this being offered as his final legacy to the world.

1. In this article, published last year, I explore some developments in critical theory of significance for environmentalism, including the so-called “tournant écopolitique” in contemporary French thought (the work of Latour, Despret, Neyrat & Tsing).
cairn-int.info/journal-recher…
2. The article is in French but I can send an English copy if needed.

1. The critical point in Eric Voegelin’s decision to abandon his “History of Political Ideas” writing project came in 1951, whilst he was preparing the Walgreen Lectures that subsequently were published as “The New Science of Politics”.

2. Crucial here was Voegelin's eventual realization that “the conception of history of ideas was an ideological deformation of reality” for “there were no ideas unless these were symbols of immediate experience” (from ‘Autobiographical Reflections’, p.61).

1. Some thoughts on fundamentalist religious violence and the concept of the “katechon” as found within Christian theology. What does it mean for politics to intersect with religion on the question of what "authority" holds back the fragmentation or disintegration of social life?



2. The Greek verb katecho (κατέχω) is crucial to New Testament theology. In 2 Thess 2, for example, the Apostle Paul reminds the Christian community that the return of Christ will not take place so long as a divinely-appointed restraining force, the "katechon", remains in place.

1. Can we say ... that Michel Serres is water and that Bruno Latour is earth?

If this is the case, what does it mean for the intellectual relationship between them?

2. We note the injunction coded into the final words of Serres' 1977 book The Birth of Physics: “Invent liquid history and the ages of water”.