Grand unified books thread

[The Brain]

I loved Memoirs of Hadrian. Read it basically in one sitting.

[Razgovory]

I'm looking for a book on Roger de Flor and the Catalan company, ideally something published fairly recently.

[Syt]

I'm looking for a book on Roger de Flor and the Catalan company, ideally something published fairly recently.

This should have some pointers: https://www.academia.edu/19583509/The_Catalan_Company_in_the_East_the_Evolution_of_an_Itinerant_Army_1303_1311_

[Sheilbh]

Interesting sounding biography of Derrida:

Think Jacques Derrida was a charlatan? Look again
A scintillating new biography should make many doubters reappraise the enigmatic French philosopher
by Julian Baggini   / October 4, 2020 / Leave a comment

In May 1992, academics at the University of Cambridge reacted with outrage to a proposed honorary degree from their venerable institution to Jacques Derrida. A letter to the Times from 14 international philosophers followed, protesting that "M Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour."

Depending on your viewpoint, the incident marked the zenith or nadir of Anglo-American analytic philosophy's resistance to what it saw as the obfuscation and sophistry of its continental European cousin. To them Derrida was a peddler of "tricks and gimmicks," a cheap entertainer whose stock in trade was "elaborate jokes and puns."

The irony is that the protests showed a shocking lack of rigour themselves. As Peter Salmon points out in his brilliant biography An Event, Perhaps, Derrida had never used the puerile pun "logical phallusies" that the letter writers attributed to him. This was remarkably sloppy since "it is not as though neologisms ripe for their sort of mockery are hard to find." Salmon concludes that "none of them had taken the time to read any of Derrida's work."

It would have been understandable if some had tried but quickly given up. One of Derrida's examiners at his prestigious high school, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, wrote of his work: "The answers are brilliant in the very same way that they are obscure." His work as an undergraduate was no easier to decipher. Louis Althusser said that he could not grade his dissertation because "it's too difficult, too obscure." Michel Foucault could do little better, remarking: "Well, it's either an F or an A+."

The Derrida portrayed by Salmon would have shared these doubts. His "nagging fear that those who saw him as a charlatan were right never left him." Given Derrida's whole project was one of radical doubt, he could hardly have felt otherwise. Derrida was both admiring and mocking when he described analytic philosophers' "imperturbable ingenuity," but their absolute confidence in the rightness of their approach was anathema to him. He was in this respect more truly a philosopher than those who question everything except the peculiarities of their own methods of questioning.

An Event, Perhaps is called a biography but, as Derrida incessantly argued, all categorisations are to some degree arbitrary. Derrida's life story provides a frame and background for an intellectual biography of his ideas and their development. In the process it also serves as one of the clearest introductions to 20th-century continental philosophy available. The movements and minds that Derrida was responding to are finely sketched with clarity and concision. Difficult thinkers such as Husserl, Levinas, Heidegger, Cixous, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and Gabriel Marcel become surprisingly approachable; the frequently-blurred distinctions between movements such as structuralism, phenomenology, post-structuralism and existentialism suddenly clarify.

[bJackie Derrida, as he was named, was born in Algiers in 1930, then a French colony, to largely secular Sephardic Jewish parents. His childhood testifies to his later claims about the inadequacies of language to capture the ambiguities and contradictions of the world, especially those of identity. He was Algerian but not a citizen of Algeria, French without ever having even seen France, Jewish without living a Jewish life, of an Arab country but not Arab, too dark to be seen as European by Europeans, too culturally European to be seen by Africans as African. Little wonder he would later write that identity "is never given, received or attained: only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmic process of identification remains."[/b]

Life in Algeria was unsettling and unpredictable. In 1940, the collaborationist Vichy government in France took away citizenship from the 120,000 Jews in Algeria, which was only restored three years later after Allied forces retook the country. But from the time Derrida enrolled as a boarder at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and then the even more exclusive École normale supérieure, he lived a comfortable life among the elite. However, he never lost his outsider's edge. Never one to join groups or mass movements, he would in time dislike the cultish adoration of his acolytes.

Despite the way the Anglo-Saxon academy often bundles him in with them, Derrida was never one of the postmodernists. He did, however, share the movement's distrust of grand narratives that provide single, and often simple, explanations that erase the complexities of the real world. Everything has to be carefully "deconstructed": analysed in its specificity, "alert to the implications, to the historical sedimentation of the language which we use." That is perhaps why he wrote so much. Deconstruction was a method more than a theory and there was no limit to what could be deconstructed.

Still, there was a unity to Derrida's oeuvre, captured in his talk of "adopting equivocality"—what Salmon calls "perhaps as close as we have to a Derridean call to arms." In much classical and contemporary analytic philosophy there is an assumption, more or less explicit, that there is a way that things are and that the task of language is to map it, to "carve nature at the joints" as Plato put it. For Derrida, it is not that nature has no joints, or that the world can simply be carved however we please. Rather, there is always more than one way to carve, and every slice divorces us from possible alternative ways of seeing and understanding. Naming is thus, says Salmon, a "founding act of violence... before there is a road taken and a road not taken."

This idea is at the heart of Derrida's key concept of différance. Every concept, every distinction, carries with it the ghost of an alternative conception or distinction not made. One task of deconstruction is to recover these lost possibilities, to show that the way we think of things is not the only way they can be thought. We may not use the word, but we all have a sense of what différance means. "Anyone who has formed quotation marks in the air with their fingers to identify a word where the use and meaning are not absolutely cleaved," says Salmon, "has acknowledged the possibility of différance as posited by Derrida." The ubiquity of this gesture suggests Derrida was right when he commented "once quotation marks demand to appear, they don't know where to stop."

Derrida's project is diametrically opposed to that of most philosophers. One of the broadest and most accurate descriptions of philosophy as generally practised in the west is that it seeks the resolution of aporias: seemingly intractable contradictions that inevitably emerge from our understanding of the world. For instance, it is an aporia that we seem to have knowledge, but also have reason to believe we can be certain of nothing. Another is that we appear to have free will, but also understand ourselves to be subject to mechanical laws of nature. In such aporias, simply giving up one side of the contradiction is not possible without a major reconfiguration of our understanding.

For Derrida, however, Salmon argues "the goal was to keep an aporia in suspension." Using Gabriel Marcel's distinction, philosophy has seen itself as concerned with solving problems that exist independently of us, when it should be trying to understand the insoluble mysteries that we have to live with.

You can see why Derrida's writing could never have been clear and plain. If you take as a premise "meaning cannot be fixed" then in your writing you will take pains to avoid any suggestion of false precision. As Salmon puts it, "Language that presumes itself fixed and proclaimed from the mountain is the sovereign right of God, not of humans."

Hence Derrida's difficult style, far from being an affectation, is an inevitable requirement of his philosophy. He adopts "obfuscation as a structural necessity, to draw attention to the undecidability of certain notions, or to foreground their complexity." Manner and matter cannot be separated. The style of analytic philosophy, "privileging clarity as though it was a transparent deliverer of meaning," is not philosophically neutral but professes the foundational assumptions of the school itself.

One of Derrida's claims that analytic philosophers would have no difficulty agreeing with is: "One shouldn't complicate things for the pleasure of complicating, but one should also never simplify or pretend to be sure of such simplicity where there is none. If things were simple, word would have gotten round." The difference is that they take a different view of what is difficult. The complication of analytic philosophy arises from the attempt to be as precise as possible, whereas the complication for Derrida is the result of meticulously trying to avoid being more precise than is possible.

That is not to say Derrida is never guilty of linguistic extravagance. He admitted that he was "an incorrigible hyperbolite," and that "I always exaggerate." Early in his career he accused Heidegger of using "Noisy, pretentious and heavy dialect... [a] crowd of neologisms of which a good part are superfluous," which leads Salmon to sardonically note that "Derrida's prejudices against this sort of writing were, one might point out, not ongoing."

Yet Derrida also sagely said "ordinary language is probably right," because ordinary language never pretends to have the precision or purity of philosophical speech. Philosophy's attempted resolutions of aporias are attempts to tidy up language. Derrida, in contrast, wants to remind us that language is even less precise, even more equivocal than common sense presumes. Philosophers' attempts to pin down words are as futile as nailing jelly to a wall. Language is slippery since each new iteration newly recombined by each speaker brings with it the possibility of a mutation of meaning, even from the meaning the speaker intended for it.

A revealing dispute with a leading analytic philosopher, John Searle, makes the cleft between the two approaches clear. Searle's early work was on his mentor JL Austin's concept of the "speech act." Austin's insight was that words do not only convey meanings, they can be used to actually do things. If a priest pronounces a couple man and wife, they become married; a judge sends someone to prison merely by issuing a sentence.

If this recognition of the heterogeneity of speech was helpful to Derrida, the ways in which analytic philosophers developed the idea were not. For instance, when talking of promising as a speech act, Searle wrote: "I am ignoring marginal, fringe, and partially defective promises." For Derrida this was inexcusable. By only focusing on abstracted, tidied-up, ideal forms of speech acts, Searle was ignoring how they actually work. Searle thought this simplification was harmless, just "a matter of research strategy." Derrida thought it was another example of philosophy choosing a false precision over more truthful messiness.

The written dispute with Searle was bitter. The American was snide and condescending, but Derrida came to view his own reply "with a certain uneasiness," seeing it "not devoid of aggressivity." He at least recognised that philosophical debate involves passions and personalities, not just language and logic.

For all his 20th-century jargon, Derrida at heart belongs to a long line of sceptics that traces back to Pyrrho in Ancient Greece. "Crucial to his thinking," says Salmon, was an opposition to the "violence of any gesture that pretends (assumes, supposes, presupposes) to know." He was not a nihilist who denied truth, but a sceptic who thought "we cannot know whether there is truth or not." Still, we can understand better by digging beneath the surface of concepts and language, finding what has not been said. Deconstruction is not destruction, as he was at pains to point out.

In ethics and politics Derrida's suspension of judgment made him cautious of political action. Unlike many peers, such as the then Maoist Alain Badiou, he did not join the Paris revolts of 1968. "What we desired, in poetics terms, was the metaphysics of radical conflict, and not the patient deconstruction of opposites," the soixante-huitard Badiou said, "and Derrida could not agree about that."

In retrospect, this might seem admirable. However, his defence of the antisemitism and duplicity of his old friend Paul de Man back in the Nazi era, which emerged only after de Man's death, cast him as just the kind of slippery relativist his critics accused him of being.

But Derrida was intensely serious about his work, writing more than 40 books and accumulating a library of over 13,000. Maybe he was profoundly mistaken. Even Salmon, clearly an admirer, says his 1966 classic Of Grammatology is "gloriously bonkers." But anyone who believes he was a charlatan—especially without having made a serious attempt to read him—will surely have their minds changed by Salmon's scintillating account of his life and thought.

An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida, by Peter Salmon (Verso, £16.99)

[The Brain]

14 international philosophers

Of mystery?

[The Brain]

Next up is The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West, by Frieser. The authour was (is?) with the Military History Research Office of the Bundeswehr, so I hope it will be a bit meatier.

That one does look good.    at the Kindle price, though.  Let us know what you think.

Finished it. I was expecting it to be drier than it was, it's a pretty nice read that chugs along like a Guderian panzer. The book deals with the campaign of May 1940 (Fall Gelb), its background and what caused its result, it explicitly does not deal with the second phase of the fighting (Fall Rot), the logic being that the defeat of France was unavoidable by then. It does not deal with Allied strategy in general in 1939-40 (why no strike in September 1939, why so passive in general). Within Fall Gelb the main focus is on those events that the author thinks were the decisive ones, which naturally mostly involve Army Group A. Many nice color maps, they are in the original German (cost reasons), which I don't think is much of a problem for anyone in the target audience.

To this non-expert the author appears to have done his time in the archives and know what he's talking about (at least when it comes to Fall Gelb). If I were to nitpick he doesn't necessarily seem as knowledgeable when he (rarely) drifts into other areas, but I could definitely be wrong here. The 2nd Ed of the original German work was published in 1996, and that's the one available in English translation, so obviously it doesn't incorporate the very latest research (which I don't know if it has produced any significant new knowledge). Among many other things I liked the description of the halt order before Dunkirk, I don't remember if I've read a detailed description of it before.

The essential conclusion, simplified af, is still that the French command didn't GIT GUD the way they should have. Just like my own conclusion in 1994.

I would say that the book is a must read for anyone interested in Fall Gelb.

[The Brain]

Addendum: it seems to me that the translation is very good. According to the editor's introduction it took many years, and Frieser was heavily involved. It seems pretty solid to me.

[Oexmelin]

Since we discussed it earlier, the finalists for the Cundill Prize have been announced:

Vincent Brown, for Tacky's Revolt
William Dalrymple, for The Anarchy and
Camilla Townshend, for Fifth Sun. 

[Maladict]

Since we discussed it earlier, the finalists for the Cundill Prize have been announced:

Vincent Brown, for Tacky's Revolt
William Dalrymple, for The Anarchy and
Camilla Townshend, for Fifth Sun.

The Anarchy has almost reached the top of the to-read pile, looking forward to it.
I'm not much given to fanboidom, but getting a mention and follow from Dalrymple on social media made me giddy as hell 

[Sheilbh]

I had the same with Sir Lawrence Freedman (). I've never actually read any of Dalrymple's books but should and have heard excellent things about The Anarchy.

I had 5-6 weeks in Mexico last week with a lot of time in the museums so I am very interested in reading Fifth Sun.

[Admiral Yi]

I had 5-6 weeks in Mexico last week

that's an impressive trick.

[The Minsky Moment]

Addendum: it seems to me that the translation is very good. According to the editor's introduction it took many years, and Frieser was heavily involved. It seems pretty solid to me.

I read it in English and found it pretty breezy for what it is.  At the time I was able to find used copies in very good condition.

[Sheilbh]

I had 5-6 weeks in Mexico last week

that's an impressive trick.

Soz - last year. In the beforetimes when I could leave the house

[Oexmelin]

I had 5-6 weeks in Mexico last week with a lot of time in the museums so I am very interested in reading Fifth Sun.

I read it after the long list was announced. I was slightly disappointed. Part of the appeal certainly was access to Nahuatl poetry and songs, but it was juxtaposed to attempts at evocative writing from Townshend (which I think fell a bit short), and to more traditional (i.e, duller) historian' writings. I think it is inevitable that I would compare with Inga Clendinnen's Aztecs (which I recommend). Clendinnent was taken to task for not reading Nahuatl (as she should), but I found her writing to be much more successful at conjuring up a foreign people. By contrast, one of Townshend's avowed point is to make the Nahua more "recognizable" as rational-political-technical actors. This is probably why her attempts to do so by evoking literary style is not entirely successful.

Dalrymple is next on the Cundhill pile - but I have to go through a bunch of French-language history books first (and a few novels, now that access to Quebec lit. is easy again).

[grumbler]

Finished Case Red, and give it a qualified thumbs-up.  It covered an area of history generally ignored, and was generally quite readable.  It was a nice mix of explanation and analysis.  It was clearly and appropriately divided into four sections:  the first 20% or so dealt with the lead-up to the war, devoting about equal time between the Axis and the Allies.  The second 20% dealt with the Initial Case Yellow, the invasion of France.  The next not-quite-20% dealt with the plans of both sides for Case red, and the last 40% with the actual battles and political maneuverings post-Dunkirk:  Case Red itself.  I thought the book benefitted from this division, because, while it didn't actually describe Case Yellow in detail (other works do that well) it was important to understand what each side learned from Case Yellow.

The book suffered badly from poor editing, though.  I found few errors in the actual language used, but the maps absolutely sucked and the fact that they only appeared at the ends of the chapters describing the action meant that the reader was constantly faced with the problem of not knowing what the hell the author was talking about.  Maps were black-on-white cartoons of the action, with almost no terrain depicted and no way to readily distinguish between, say, roads and rivers.  Units were standard NATO symbols with German units only slightly lighter than Allied ones.  I'd rate the maps a D.

Just as bad, the author switched willy-nilly between using good ol' English and French or German designations for units.  Sometimes, we read about German motorcycle battalions and sometimes kradschutzen battalions, as though we are supposed to remember the German name for "motorcycle battalions."  With the French, it was worse... far worse.  The French had distinct names for all of their units, and so we get an alphabet soup of GRDI (Groupe de Reconnaisance de Division d'Infantry) and RICMS and CACC and... well, the list takes three pages in the appendix.  The reader loses track of whether the author is talking about a unit of 200 guys or 200,000 guys.  I guess we are supposed to be impressed that the author can keep track of the specific designations, but the reader starts to not care.

The analysis seem good, though.  The author's main theme is that morale was not the French problem in 1940, though the main problem at Sedan was caused by the low fighting efficiency and confidence of the ill-equipped-and-trained Reserve B divisions the French hid there to keep them from being exposed to attack.  The French fought fiercely where they could but didn't have the equipment to succeed.

He thinks the blame is about 50% due to the poor decision-making by the British and French before the war.  He calls out the poor choices in equipment design by the French (not selecting appropriate equipment in time to get it in the hands of the troops so they could train prewar, choosing not to replace their WW1 machine guns) and their decision to spend billions of francs on the navy and army, while ignoring pilot training requirements.  He is brutal on the British side, essentially accusing the interwar government of deliberately starving the Territorial Army of equipment so that future British governments could not do anything so foolish as to send a BEF to France again.  The abandonment of the French allies in eastern Europe he thinks was a failure of the French to really consider that they needed to defend France, not just deter Germany.  The French failed to even consider what they needed to do to sustain their allies.  They were engaged in pure wishful thinking.

The other half of the Allied failure he blames on poor decision-making at the point of contact.  The British had an armored division, but took away its infantry and artillery at the start of the war, sending it first to Norway and then to Calais, where it was wiped out.  The rump of the division was pathetic in combat, being annihilated in embarrassing fashion by lack of infantry and artillery.  The French figured out how to beat panzer divisions by the time of Dunkirk, and did so afterwards, but their solution made the job of German infantry divisions much easier, and Case Red was decided by the German infantry.  British troops post-Dunkirk were helpless children caught up in a war they didn't understand, because they were now all Territorial Army troops with no modern weapons or training.

The author's Top Four Reasons for the French Defeat were:
1. The French and British did not understand the value of firepower in the air and on the ground.  They were always out-shot.
2. The French were over-reliant on deterrence and did not start producing weapons in quality early enough
3.  The French, prewar, engaged in "imperial prestige" projects like rebuilding their battle fleet (they spent more on battleships, naval bases, and carriers than on the Maginot Line), and
4. The British failed to support the French battle as thoroughly as the situation demanded.  In particular, he is critical of the British decision to hold back the RAF fighters until the Germans could face them unopposed elsewhere, rather than committing them when they could have made the Battle of Britain unnecessary.  The futility of the BEF was pre-ordained, so he is less critical there (except for Brooke)

Some interesting new things I learned, assuming the author is correct:
1.  God, did the Generals suck for the Allies.  It's hard to argue with the author's conclusion that Renaud's greatest mistake was not shooting Weygand as soo as it was clear that Weygand wanted France to lose.  British General Alan Brooke panicked and routed off the continent as soon as he got there (he fled four days after arriving, but two weeks before the French surrender) and ordered his troops to destroy a huge amount of equipment that could easily have been saved.  Gamelan was lost, and didn't even understand what caused the French defeat.
2.  The Germans murdered a lot of French colonial troops because... well, because.  Not SS.  Heer.  The Waffen-SS murdered a lot of colonials and their officers (and ordinary poilus and their officers) because murder was the SS pastime, but the Heer troops killed colonial soldiers because, apparently, they were enraged that black solders dared fire on Aryan ones.
3.  The French has a lot more planes than pilots.  They resisted employing colonial and Czech/Polish pilots (though they took them towards the end - the RAF was glad to get them) and didn't understand their own needs for pilot training.  As an aside, the superiority of the US equipment they had rather surprised me; the Hawk 75 (P-36) did little in American hands but was great in French hands.  The DB-7 (A-20) was unstoppable in French hands.  There just wasn't much American equipment delivered in time.
4.  Wow, did the British suck in this battle.  It is kind of astonishing that Alan Brooke was ever employed again, let alone made into a hero.  British tanks did nothing but litter the battlefields with broken-down or just broken wrecks.  The RAF was pathetic.  When they weren't getting slaughtered by the Germans it is because they were dropping leaflets at night.  The Hurricanes got blasted as did, more famously, the bombers. 
5. The French army, more than any other service in any of the major powers, were reliant on civilian telephone services for vital military communications.  This failed them several times in critical situations.  They didn't think radios were very important, and didn't have many (and what they had were bulky and recalcitrant).
6. De Gaulle was the real deal.  He was successful on the battlefield and, brought into the cabinet by Renaud, was the most clear-eyed man in the room.  Nobody would listen to him, though.  As someone who previously kinda despised De Gaulle, this was an eye-opener.

The one real failing of the book seems to be the bibliography.  It's mostly popular history.  Little academic research or primary source material.

As I said, a qualified "worth reading."