Byzantine Matters

The current issue of the New York Review of Books (December 18, 2014) contains Peter Brown’s review of Averil Cameron’s recent Byzantine Matters, which illustrates some of what is wrong with academia in general today, and especially with the discipline of history. Peter Brown is a truly great historian, famous ...
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Notes on Zizek’s Absolute Recoil (2)

When ever Marxists lift their attention from vulgar matters and start creating theories of the subject, it is always the bourgeois subject that seems to need theorizing. Perhaps there is no other kind. Althusser illustrates his theory of ideology with an anecdote about being hailed in the street by a cop: ...
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Notes on Zizek’s Absolute Recoil (2)

Notes on Zizek’s Absolute Recoil

Perhaps the first thing to know about Zizek is that his work entails a certain interpretive strategy, which in his new book Absolute Recoil he calls brachylogia, (41) which refers to statements of excessive brevity, with words left out. This can be coupled with Zizek’s insistence that authors misrecognize their more ...
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Notes on Zizek’s Absolute Recoil

Democracy’s Crisis

We are currently experiencing a major crisis of democracy. What is at stake here is the specifically political dimension of a broader, multifaceted crisis, which also has other important dimensions -- for example, economic, financial, ecological, and social. Taken together, all of these aspects, including the political dimension of democratic ...

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Democracy’s Crisis

Spinoza on Speed

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s, Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2000) is a book I have always been ambivalent about. It is a kind of Spinozist-accelerationist epic. (As Benjamin Noys has usefully shown). Spinoza on speed. I admire the boldness with which it attempted to describe the situation that was ...
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Spinoza on Speed

The Old Patterns of the New Afghan Democracy

The Ghani-Abdullah Agreement and national and international stability in historical perspective

After a long electoral process, on September 27, 2014, Ashraf Ghani was sworn in as the Afghan president. The arrangements to grant him that office, which was earned in a controversial election, were not easy, because it forced a generous conciliation with Abdullah Abdullah, Ghani’s chief rival. Abdullah was granted ...

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The Old Patterns of the New Afghan Democracy

Postpolitical Infrastructures

As a kid I was always fascinated by my father’s work as an architect. He used to take me to building sites and explain what was going on. But I was particularly interested in how he made the plans. These he drew by hand on a huge drafting table, with ...
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Postpolitical Infrastructures

LGBTQI Rights and Brazil’s Presidential Election

Controversy and the necessity to go beyond elections

For the first time in Brazil's recent democratic history, which began in 1984 after the country's twenty-one-year long dictatorship ended, the LGBTQI rights have appeared as the main controversial topic in this year’s presidential election. In the space of two weeks during the election first round, the topic got more ...

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LGBTQI Rights and Brazil’s Presidential Election

The Nothingness That Speaks French

Quentin Meillassoux's The Number and the Siren (published by Urbanomic and Sequence Press, and elegantly translated by Robin Mackay) is quite simply the most beautiful book by a philosopher that I have read for many years. It is a highly original reading of Stéphane Mallarmé's Coup De Dés.  If the objective of Meillassoux’s ...
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The Nothingness That Speaks French