Until the seventeenth century, a war was essentially a war between one mass and another mass. For his part, Boulainvilliers makes the relationship of war part of every social relationship, subdivides it into thousands of different channels, and reveals war to be a sort of permanent state that exists between groups, fronts, and tactical units [...]
Archive for November, 2010
war turns the very disruption of right into a grid of intelligibility
Posted in Reading Notes, tagged foucault, politics, sovereignty, state on November 29, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
On the Edge of the Crowd
Posted in Reading Notes, tagged D&G, micro-politics, subjectivity on November 29, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Franny[1] is listening to a program on wolves. I say to her, Would you like to be a wolf? She answers haughtily, How stupid, you can’t be one wolf, you’re always eight or nine, six or seven. Not six or seven wolves all by yourself all at once, but one wolf among others, with five [...]
The Right to Revolt
Posted in Reading Notes, tagged anarchism, foucault, lived communism, politics, sovereignty, state on November 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
A schematic dichotomy between rich and poor no doubt already existed, and it divided perceptions of society in the Middle Ages, just as it did in the Greek Polis. But [seventeenth century England (w/ the Levellers and the Diggers)] is the first time a binary schema became something more than a way of articulating a [...]
Christian Marazzi, “Financial Entropy: The Struggle Within and Against Empire”
Posted in Reading Notes, tagged capitalism, communism, financial capitalism, language, lived communism, marx, marxism, neo-liberalism on November 21, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Presented November 18, 2010 at “Empire: A Retrospective”, The University of Pittsburgh. The Context: A tension within Empire between its aspirations and the processes by which is pursues them. The First Point: The Colonization of Spheres of Life The Second Point: Financial Capitalism and the Overproduction of the Commons The full summary can be viewed [...]
Michael Hardt’s Keynote @ “Empire: A Retrospective”
Posted in Reading Notes, tagged capitalism, communism, D&G, empire, foucault, hardt, lived communism, marx, marxism, materialism, negri, politics, sovereignty, state on November 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Talk given November 19, at the University of Pittsburgh. Short Description: Hardt decided that after the completion of the third book in the “trilogy” of Empire – Multitude – Commonwealth, he’s finally in a place where he can reflect on the whole series. He proposes two general frameworks to understand the trilogy as a general [...]
Empire: A Retrospective
Posted in Reading Notes, tagged autonomism, communism, conference, marxism, politics on November 20, 2010 | 1 Comment »
I just got back from the conference “Empire: A Retrospective” hosted by the University of Pittsburgh. Expect quite a few posts in the next day or two. A recording of Michael Hardt’s keynote lecture, w/ my notes A recap of Michael’s “New Communist Manifesto” A description of the two panels I saw Specific discussion of [...]
We Barbarians
Posted in Reading Notes, tagged anarchism, state, war machine on November 11, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Note that this account of the periphery is sharply at odds with the official story most civilizations tell about themselves. According to that tale, a backward, naïve, and perhaps barbaric people are gradually incorporated into an advanced, superior, and more prosperous society and culture. If, instead, many of these ungoverned barbarians had, at one time [...]
The State is a Racket
Posted in Reading Notes, tagged anarchism, state on November 11, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
If protection rackets represent organised crime at its smoothest, then war risking and state making – quintessential protection rackets with the advantage of legitimacy – qualify as our largest examples of organised crime. Without branding all generals and statesmen as murderers or thieves, I want to urge the value of that analogy. At least for [...]
