Lukacs (Georg) Archives - Public Seminar

Education

Agnes Heller and “Everyday Revolutions”

Portrait of a Philosopher

December 14, 2015 • by Anna-Verena Nosthoff

The forms of the southern clouds at the dawn of April 30th, 1882, are comparable to those mottled streaks on this one book he had only seen once (a Spanish edition). Following the Naturalis Historia, he recounts exactly four historically exemplary cases of prodigious memory: Cyrus ...

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Cognitive Mapping

May 1, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

I am inordinately fond of a crappy TV show called Leverage. Its about a little band of hackers, grifters and second-story artists who steal from the rich to give to the poor. Perhaps I like it because it reminds me of my favorite childhood TV show, The Adventures of Robin Hood. Made ...

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Spinoza on Speed

November 19, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

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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Can Anyone Even Remember Postmodernism?

October 31, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

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, ...

Politics

The Empty Chair: On Reading Jameson

His texts are allegorical readings of the Marxist classics, the texts of and for a people, their being and their destiny

October 31, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

—Guy Debord, Panegyric Hermeneutics has its roots in the practice of reading the old testament through the new one. The sacred Jewish texts are at one and the same time a book of and a book for a people; at one and the same time the text of that people’s being ...

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Althusserians Anonymous (2)

October 13, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

This post has been revised, here: https://publicseminar.org/2016/02/aa/ The thing about being a recovering Althusserian is that one can’t help remembering the good times. Being on Althusser really does feel great. It makes certain problems disappear. For example, one is no longer trapped in the oppressive reality of Hegelian Marxism, and yet nor does ...

Theory & Practice

Extrapolation, not Acceleration

September 29, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

We hoped; we waited for the day The state would wither clean away, Expecting the Millennium That theory promised us would come: It didn’t… W. H. Auden, New Year Letter, 1941 It would appear that in the twenty-first century, we should probably relinquish a faith in a force external to capital, even if generated by it, ...

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Critical Theory After the Anthropocene

August 9, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

1. One does not have to look far to find intellectuals trained in the humanities, even the social sciences, who feel the need to ‘critique’ the concept of the Anthropocene. Clearly, since we did not invent this concept, it must somehow be lacking! And yet rarely does one find them ...

Theory & Practice

Four Cheers for Vulgar Marxism!!!!

April 25, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

If you want to show that your version of Marxism is better than somebody else’s, the quickest way to do so is to call the other version vulgar. One’s own version is nuanced, sophisticated, subtle, erudite, philosophically rich – all the things the vulgar is not. Or so it has ...

Theory & Practice

Kierkegaard’s Frenemies: From Adorno to Zizek

December 23, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

2013 was Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday. I am grateful to Mark Taylor for asking me to contribute something to his birthday celebration, and also for not giving us any time to prepare for it. Had he done so I might have had to do more than say what I think I know. Marx ...