Speculation and Counter-speculation

From value to price, from labor to debt, from revolution to disruption

Finance is speculation on debt. In the past decades, finance has replaced production, while debt has replaced waged labor as the main generator of profit in the contemporary economy. Under the reign of production, labor-time aimed to semiotize value. In other words, each terrain of human activity was assigned a ...
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Normalizing the State of Emergency

France’s recent anti-terror legislation

This measure codifies what has been an ongoing state of emergency, originally enacted by the Socialist President Francois Hollande in the wake of the attacks of November 2015. Since then, the state of emergency has been extended six more times in the face of ten more attacks, reinforcing what has ...
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How (Not) to React to the Far Right in Germany

On the attempt to respond to the rise of the AfD Party

Even though this result was in line with the last pre-election polls, this success has come as a shock to Germany’s other parties. Since the results were announced, the country’s political and journalistic classes have been engaged in a collective soul-searching to account for the AfD’s rise. A good amount ...
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How We Got Here

Transition failures, their causes, and the populist interest in the constitution

The answers to these questions are related. In the following, in the form of six theses, I start with what I mean by “populism”. Next, I wish to point to the two deficits of liberal democracy that provide the context for the rise of populist politics. These deficits have been ...
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Public Seminar Interview with Khary Lazarre-White

Lazarre-White discusses his latest book ‘Passage’

Mr. Lazarre-White recently spoke with Public Seminar about where Passage came from, the experience of writing it, and what he hopes the novel will communicate. Copies of Passage can be found at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at your local book retailer.   *** Public Seminar: Thank you for taking some time with Public ...
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Triangulation is the Not-So-New Black

Party Coalitions, Racial Scapegoating and the Carceral State

Bill Clinton vilified African-Americans with his draconian crime bill while pushing for economic deregulation policies that he hoped would woo Republicans while also not upsetting the labor base of the Democratic Party too much. By the time Obama came around, African-Americans went from being vilified by the Democratic Party to ...
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Who Goes to Jail for Sex Crimes?

Weiner’s sentencing should be a wake-up call

Despite his plea to serve his time as a suspended sentence, he will spend 21 months incarcerated for sexting with a 15-year-old. In a series of exchanges, he cajoled her into undressing and touching herself on Skype, and then sent her explicit messages about what he would do to her ...
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Full Frontal Feminism

Why Billie Jean King Made History in the Battle of the Sexes

If only the 2016 election had turned out so well. “The Battle of the Sexes” puts its politics -- both feminist and sexual -- front and center, which is rather remarkable for a mainstream Hollywood offering. King takes on the male tennis establishment, personified by unctuous tennis promoter and former champion ...
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A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time

An extract from Kinneret Lahad’s recently published book

From Chapter 4, ‘Facing the horror: becoming an “old maid”’ Age and Singlehood In her analysis of single women in popular culture, Anthea Taylor (2012) proposes that the study of single women opens a window on how heteronormative and patriarchal frameworks operate in new and sophisticated ways. Inspired by Taylor’s study, I ...
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A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time

Reading Adorno on Fascism in the Age of Trump

A New School roundtable

In an era marked by the rise of a paradoxically international right-wing populism, and in the midst of ethno-nationalist tumult in the United States, this roundtable reflects on the legacy and contemporary utility of “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda.” Might Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists still have something ...
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