Lazzarato and Pasolini

I have a passing acquaintance with the work of Felix Guattari, but the person who perhaps knows his work best is Maurizio Lazzarato. His recently translated book Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Semiotext(e), 2014) shows the ongoing usefulness of the “anti-sociology” (120) that Guattari elaborated, both alone and in ...
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Religion, Essentialism, and Violence

Cherry picking on the left

There has been a contentious theme circulating around the Left-wing blogosphere for quite a while now, sharpened by the atrocities of ISIS and the massacre at Charlie Hebdo. The theme usually begins with the accusation that Islam as a religion is soft on violence, a consequence of its vehement rejection of ...

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From Metaphyiscs to Meatphysics

The mark of a major body of work is that it will support more than one interpretation, all of which are coherent and persuasive, and each of which is open-ended enough for further elaboration. So it is with Marx. But at least one possible path of interpretation and elaboration seems ...
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The Return of Gilded Feminism?

Alva Belmont vs. the Glam-SAHMs

[S]ome of us are the wives or sisters of employers of large numbers of factory operatives, or perhaps ourselves are owners and stockholders in companies. Should not the woman who spends the money which the employees help to provide, take a special interest in their welfare, especially in that of ...
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Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

Where Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri were born in the 30s, Berardi (1948) belongs with Paolo Virno (1952) and Silvia Federici (1942) to a second wave of Italian Marxist thinkers who grew out of the workerist current that struck out on its own path, diverging from the official Gramscian postures of the ...
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Communal Luxury

One of the constant labors required of an open, creative, critical and radical thought is a constant reconstitution of the archive from which present conceptual armatures might most usefully be drawn. Its not just a question of harping on certain well-known proper names, but constituting, over and over, a milieu ...
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Zizek and me

It is illuminating to have comrade Zizek write about one’s work. I think his comments on Molecular Red highlight two paths among which theory can choose to move at the moment: the high road of philosophy, or the low road of something else, as yet unknown. It is less about the wrong or right ...
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Between Freud and Einstein

On the homology at the heart of modernist art

With this possibility of a coincidence in mind, we may dare to compare the two fundamental contributions given by Sigmund Freud in the field of the humanities and by Albert Einstein in the almost opposite world of the natural sciences. Let us remember the well-known formula on which Einstein’s relativity ...
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Fury Road

Australian film-maker George Miller is a master of the horizontal in cinema, of a certain kind of movement-image, where the landscape sliding away across the screen is a double of the movement of the frames of celluloid through the projector. At his best, Miller makes a cinema of pure kinetics, ...
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