Benjamin in Jerusalem

The Middle East as crisis and critique

This month, two conferences and one exhibition dedicated to Walter Benjamin’s legacy are descending on Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Because of an unhealthy mix of political considerations, security measures, and academic snobbery, I will partake in none of them, despite my deep roots in this troubled land and my ...

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Benjamin in Jerusalem

Benjamedia

Benjamin thought that there were moments when a fragment of the past could speak directly to the present, but only when there was a certain alignment of the political and historical situation of the present that might resonate with that fragment. Applying this line of thought to Benjamin himself, we ...
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Think Outside the Boss

Cooperative alternatives to the sharing economy

Digital labor touches all of us, whether you are browsing Tinder profiles in your spare time, searching for “Jersey Shore” on Google, or ordering an Uber taxi.

In this afternoon’s talk, I will highlight what is and what could be successful about 21st century work and what are some tendencies that ...

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Virno and History

He could have been talking about something that goes by many names in Paolo Virno’s Déjà Vu and the End of History, (Verso Futures, 2015). Sometimes Virno calls it potential, or the virtual, or memory, or faculty, or disposition, or even labor-power. This unquenchable fire is for Virno the source ...
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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

The Drone of Minerva

The one kind of speculative thought that might be of service in the Anthropocene is surely some kind of philosophy of history, and yet within the academy itself it seems the one nobody wants to actually attempt. It is as if the debates at the end of the last century ...
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The Drone of Minerva

Can Anyone Even Remember Postmodernism?

If one teaches the ‘postmodern’ moment to today’s students, it is worth remembering that when pomo was a big deal, they had probably not even been born. If ‘retro’ was one of the characteristic style moves of pomo, then there is now even retro-pomo, a kind of meta-retro, or meta-pomo, ...
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Can Anyone Even Remember Postmodernism?