Reviews for I Learned Today

The average rating for I Learned Today based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-09-16 00:00:00 Alex Belknap Michael Taussig has a way with words that transports me, his storytelling weaves myth and reality until you don't know which is which. He is a Marxist, anthropologist, historian, and yet he is none of these things. You can't place him in a single box. I'll have to come back and do more thorough reviews of his work because he makes the most convincing case for the state being a magic ritual we all perform both willingly and unwillingly. Stunning! Taussig is onto something and I can't wait to read more... Recommended for people critical of anthropology and other academic pursuits, are interested in rituals, Marxists critical of Marx, anybody who loves non-linear, mythological writing.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-12-22 00:00:00 Larry Olaf Thought-experiment is where it's at. Agamben discusses this in his new book, where as asks the enlightenment question, What is A Paradigm?" In like with Goethe's Urphenomenon, he proposes the experiment, neither universal nor particular, as the meeting place of object and subject. Taussig is writing at this crossroads. Working neither inductively upward nor deductively downward to give us a view of South American which is constructed out of neither pure method or raw data, Taussig presents that region in the form of pure analogue one he can only make available by becoming it and then pointing to himself. If this is narcissism - and certain reviewers have charged Taussig with as much - at least it's a form of narcissism which knows, thanks to a careful reading of Callois, what narcissism is - a form of becoming other.