books | Churning Through The Reading List

I haven't been writing for a while but have turned my attention to my reading list. There are books on it that I simply need to read. If you're anything like me, there are those books that you know are important to you, that you've purchased, that you perhaps have opened and read the forward or preface, but have never actually read. I'm trying to polish off a few of those. I read Michel Henry's I Am The Truth, a lovely book. I'm still puzzling why, though employing arguments that I find similar to Karl Barth's theology, they don't irk me in the periodic way that Barth does. Read Hauerwas' With the Grain of the Universe to see if there was a potential take on Barth and natural theology that I could use in my dissertation. Today, I started Jean-Luc Nancy's Being Singular Plural, which will probably be followed by Agamben's The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans since I've read Infancy and History and wanted to round out some of his thinking on temporality.

Commenting on the epigraph, Agamben provides a long list of violent encounters around the world and writes:

It is an endless list, and everything happens in such a a way that one is reduced to keeping accounts but never taking the final toll. It is a litany, a prayer of pure sorrow and pure loss, the plea that falls from the lips of millions of refugees every day: whether they be deportees, people besieged, those who are mutilated, people who starve, who are raped, ostracized, excluded, exiled, expelled.

What I am talking about here is compassion, but not compassion as a pity that feels sorry for itself and feeds on itself. Com-passion is the contagion, the contact of being with one another in this turmoil. Compassion is not altruism, nor is it identification; it is the disturbance of violent relatedness.

If only I read more quickly, oh well...happy Monday!