Here are two very interesting and somewhat lengthy articles that I think are worth reading. The excerpts that I’ve included probably don’t make too much sense out of context, but I think they’re the most enticing parts of both, so maybe it will encourage you, the reader, to give them a look.

• Messianism of All Kinds at Perverse Egalitarianism, discussing “good” and “bad” messianism, as well as Agamben’s notion of grace in the context of Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas:

The operative term here I think is unsurprisingly, grace. It’s a grace that exceeds relations of contract and/or exchange to persist as the potential for a goodness that is freely extended but never exhausted, never completed, never encapsulated in some sort of coherent injunction. The “politics to come” Agamben is reaching at, I think, wants to shift the very way we experience time. That is, let’s avoid talking about transcendence. Rather, Agamben insists there some sort of possible transformation of our way of “being profane:” as far as I understand him, it seems to be an attempt to transform our lives so that our own praxis becomes the means that it has always already been. It’s an interesting reading of Benjamin, indeed.

• The Onticological Dialectic 2: The Mathemes and the Formal Schema of the Inter-Ontic Relations at Larval Subjects, showcasing one of the most thorough elaborations to date of Levi’s philosophical system following his recent “conversion” to object-oriented ontology:

At the outset, I shall stick with four of these categories drawn from the four discourses that Lacan investigated in the most detail. However, where Lacan uses the symbol $ (barred subject), S1 (master-signifier), S2 (battery of signifiers), and “a” (objet a) to represent relations between an agent and his addressee, I instead propose the mathemes Ø, O1, O2, and δ to represent these relations. Some commentary is required for these symbols, however it should be borne in mind that the symbols are polysemous and can take on different senses depending on the relations they entertain. Moreover, this is very much a work in progress.