Front Table 9/23/2022

September 23rd, 2022

On this week's Front Table, we find not only poets and novelists, but psychologists and philosophers, from intimate portraits of writers’ lives and their homages that defy erasure to the allure of the alternate self and questions of fundamental robot ethics. Find the following and more at semcoop.com
Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation
(Graywolf Press)
Nuar Alsadir

Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school, Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction, Freud’s un-Freudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers, to “Not Jokes,” Abu Ghraib, Fanon’s negrophobia, smut, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, and how poetry can wake us up. At the center of the book, however, is the author’s relationship with her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter. These interventions—frank, tender, and always a challenge to the writer and her thinking—are like tiny revolutions, pointedly showing the dangers of being severed from one’s true self and hinting at ways one might be called back to it. A bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.


Catching the Light
(Yale Universty Press)
Joy Harjo

In this lyrical meditation about the why of writing poetry, Joy Harjo reflects on significant points of illumination, experience, and questioning from her fifty years as a poet. Composed of intimate vignettes that take us through the author’s life journey as a youth in the late 1960s, a single mother, and a champion of Native nations, this book offers a fresh understanding of how poetry functions as an expression of purpose, spirit, community, and memory—in both the private, individual journey and as a vehicle for prophetic, public witness.Harjo insists that the most meaningful poetry is birthed through cracks in history from what is broken and unseen. At the crossroads of this brokenness, she calls us to watch and listen for the songs of justice for all those America has denied. This is an homage to the power of words to defy erasure—to inscribe the story, again and again, of who we have been, who we are, and who we can be.

On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives
(Harvard  University Press)
Andrew H. Miller

We each live one life, formed by paths taken and untaken. Choosing a job, getting married, deciding on a place to live or whether to have children—every decision precludes another. But what if you’d gone the other way? It can be a seductive thought, even a haunting one.Andrew H. Miller illuminates this theme of modern culture: the allure of the alternate self. From Robert Frost to Sharon Olds, Virginia Woolf to Ian McEwan, Jane Hirshfield to Carl Dennis, storytellers of every stripe write of the lives we didn’t have. What forces encourage us to think this way about ourselves, and to identify with fictional and poetic voices speaking from the shadows of what might have been? Not only poets and novelists, but psychologists and philosophers have much to say on this question. Miller finds wisdom in all these sources, revealing the beauty, the power, and the struggle of our unled lives. On Not Being Someone Else offers the balm that when we confront our imaginary selves, we discover who we are.

Perjury and Pardon, Volume I 
(University of Chicago Press)
Jacques Derrida, tr. David Wills

“One only ever asks forgiveness for what is unforgivable.” From this contradiction begins Perjury and Pardon, a two-year series of seminars given by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris in the late 1990s. In these sessions, Derrida focuses on the philosophical, ethical, juridical, and political stakes of the concept of responsibility. His primary goal is to develop what he calls a “problematic of lying” by studying diverse forms of betrayal: infidelity, denial, false testimony, perjury, unkept promises, desecration, sacrilege, and blasphemy. For Derrida, forgiveness cannot be reduced to repentance, punishment, retribution, or salvation, and it is inseparable from, and haunted by, the notion of perjury. Through close readings of Kant, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Plato, Jankélévitch, Baudelaire, and Kafka, as well as biblical texts, Derrida explores diverse notions of the “evil” or malignancy of lying while developing a complex account of forgiveness across different traditions.

Robot Ethics
(MIT Press)
Mark Coeckelbergh

Does a robot have moral agency? Can it be held responsible for its actions? Do humans owe robots anything? Will robots take our jobs? These are some of the ethical and moral quandaries that we should address now, as robots and other intelligent devices become more widely used and more technically sophisticated. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh does just that. He considers a variety of robotics technologies and applications—from robotic companions to military drones—and identifies the ethical implications of their use. Questions of robot ethics, he argues, are not just about robots but are, crucially, about humans as well.Coeckelbergh examines industrial robots and their potential to take over tasks from humans; “social” robots and possible risks to privacy; and robots in health care and their effect on quality of care. When we discuss robot ethics from a philosophical angle, Coeckelbergh argues, robots can function as mirrors for reflecting on the human. Robot ethics is more than applied ethics; it is a way of doing philosophy.

Sinostan: China's Inadvertent Empire
(Oxford University Press)
Raffaello Pantucci

China's rise is changing the world. Much attention has been given to how China's geo-economic vision is playing out in the global economy, or how its technology is reshaping the planet, yet it is over its western borders, in Central Asia, that China's influence has been quietly expanding in a more pervasive way. In Sinostan, two acclaimed foreign policy experts recount their travels across Central Asia to keep their finger on the pulse and tell the story of China's growing influence. They interview Chinese traders in latter day Silk Road bazaars; climb remote mountain passes threatened by construction; commiserate with Afghan archaeologists charged with saving centuries-old Buddhist ruins before they are swept away by mining projects; meet with eager young Central Asians learning Mandarin; and sit with officials in all five Central Asian capitals, bearing witness to a region increasingly transformed by Beijing's presence. Their stories and experiences illustrate how China's foreign policy initiative has expressed itself on the ground, and what it means for those living both within and beyond the boundaries of its 'inadvertent empire'.


War And Peace: On the Principle and Constitution of the Rights of Peoples
(AK Press)
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, tr.Paul Sharkey

This book by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, originally published in 1861, is still one of the only extended accounts of anarchist international theory and is one of the earliest in the history of socialist thought. It is a profound contribution to the traditions of jus gentium and just war theory, that puts force and power at the centre of analysis. Alex Prichard's introduction describes both its specificity and the multiple lines of influence War and Peace had on thinkers as diverse as Tolstoy, Sorel, French sociology more broadly, and post-1945 Anglo-American International Relations theory.

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