I have about ten pages left of Martin Heidegger’s “An Introduction to Metaphysics”. I’ll try to do some writing on it once I finish it. It’s taken me much longer than it really should, but I think with a lot of Heidegger’s phenomenology it’s worth trying go through the steps of putting yourself in the world he is creating along with him in order to get something out of it. As my friend Brendon says, you’ll never understand Heidegger if you just try to understand him through logic and systematic argument, the way you would with Aristotle or Kant or even Hegel. He *is* a very rigorous philosopher, but at the same time you really need to “experience” what he is talking about to understand it. Even so, I think I spent way too long on the book, since it’s easier than most of his other work and probably more importantly, once you refer back to a philosophical text continually like you do the morning paper, it loses some of its philosophy.
Anyways, I made some pretty fascinating additions to my personal library since I graduated, so I’ll post those and the “Runner Up” books for the future.
Once I finish An Introduction to Metaphysics I am going to start reading Agamben’s Profanations and The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William H Whyte.
New Books:
Giorgio Agamben-Profanations
Antonin Artaud-The Theatre and Its Double (Already had this and its one of my favorites but the copy I had was falling apart)
Lauren Berlant-Cruel Optimism
Maurice Blanchot- The Writing of the Disaster
Maurice Blanchot-The Step Not Beyond
Gilles Deleuze-Difference and Repetition
Ben Highmore-Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday
Emmanuel Levinas-Totality and Infinity
Susan Sontag- Against Interpretation (Going to make a post on the title essay of that book one of these days)
Slavoj Zizek-The Sublime Object of Ideology
Runners Up (Books that were close contenders and I will probably get at some point, and some of which I already have on PDF. Not an exhaustive list, needless to say.)
Giorgio Agamben-Homo Sacer
Giorgio Agamben-Potentialities
Giorgio Agamben-The Coming Community
Gilles Deleuze-Cinema I
Jessica Grogan-Encountering America: Sixties Culture, Humanistic Psychology, and the Shaping of the Modern Self
Felix Guattari: Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm
Jane Jacobs-The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Carl Jung-Alchemical Studies
Carl Jung-Symbols of Transformation
Bruno Latour-Reassembling the Social
Kathleen Stewart-Ordinary Affects
Cartographic Thought 