Tuesday, January 22, 2013

2012 in Review

It turns out that 2012 ended up being a year of transition. For the blog, it meant that by the end of the year, all of the contributors, myself included, were wrapped up in enough projects and commitments so as to preclude blogging--as evidenced by the decline in posting. In fact, October 2012 was the first time since I started blogging that The Notes Taken had a month with no posts.

There should be some interesting things happening in 2013, and at the least we'll use the blog to keep you posted. But first, we'll take a look back at a few highlights from 2012.

First, several pieces of the puzzle that will become Part I my book on Jacques Rancière were published: "Cartesian Egalitarianism: From Poullain de la Barre to Rancière" was published in Phaenex 7.1, and "The Nothingness of Equality: The 'Sartrean Existentialism' of Jacques Rancière" was published in Sartre Studies International (it's behind a subscription wall). Both pieces were written in 2011, but mentioning them gives me a reason to post this photo:

Robespierre appreciating the works of Descartes and Sartre

Then, Sean Moreland, Jonathan Murphy, and I edited a special themed issue of The Edgar Allan Poe Review. We posted a draft of our introduction here and more information about the journal is available here. I don't yet have a cat-themed picture for this publication.

Finally, the book reviews. In mid-2012 I took over book review editor duties for Symposium. Prior to that, I had contributed two reviews to the journal, one concerning Miguel Abensour's Democracy Against the State (here). At the end of 2012, I ended up editing Matt McLennan's review of Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik's Molecular Revolution in Brazil (here).

For The Notes Taken, we were apparently stingy with our time, posting only four reviews.