We Are All Greek

During the thirties Edmund Wilson recalled his reaction to the stock market crash of 1929 as “not depressing but stimulating. One couldn’t help being exhilarated by the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid, gigantic fraud.” I fear that we may be coming to a point when many people throughout the ...
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Can Architecture be Democratic?

The tension between The People and their places

Can architecture be democratic? Most people would readily agree that the built environment is bound to be political. Yet in the popular imagination the combination of “architecture” and “politics” tends to conjure up distinctly undemocratic figures: totalitarian leaders designing monumental edifices and avenues for eternity. And if authoritarians ...

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No-Futurism

As a tenured academic I am one of the last of an almost extinct social class – the bourgeois. Unlike the capitalist, who owns capital, the bourgeois is the professional who keeps the superstructures of capitalism going, including those of art and knowledge. Our job is to be a superstructure ...
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On Galloway

Take the tv show, 24. In what sense could one say that the show is ‘political’? It certainly appears so in a ‘red state’ sort of way. The Jack Bauer character commits all sorts of crimes, including torture, in the name of ‘national security.’ But perhaps there’s more to it. Galloway draws ...
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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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