Radical politics still lives under the shadow of Lenin. To clarify, Lenin stands first and foremost for primacy of organization. And despite the recent turn away from Marxism since the fall of the actually existing of the soviet bloc and China’s pro-capitalist Dengist reforms, Lenin’s legacy hangs over social movement politics. Lenin’s successes should not [...]
Archive for January, 2012
“Escape is the oldest story of freedom. It is also the simplest.”
Posted in dissertation, tagged anarchism, communism, escape, hill people, marxism, metropolis, peasants, postmodernism, revolution, the hills on January 27, 2012 | 2 Comments »
Half a century ago, an anarchic scholar struck out to write a heroic story of peasants. As the bodies piled up in Vietnam, it seemed as if people actually cared about peasants. The task had not been easy, given that peasants usually serve as the stage upon which more dramatic disputes between nationalists and colonizers [...]
televisual subjection
Posted in Reading Notes, tagged guattari, subjectivity on January 25, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
My identity has become that of the speaker, the person who speaks from the television. Like Bakhtin, I would say that the refrain is not based on elements of form, material, or ordinary signification, but on the detachment of an existential “motif” (or leitmotiv) which installs itself like an “attractor” within a sensible and significational [...]
The Scream
Posted in Reading Notes, tagged affect, AO, deleuze, habit, hume, philosophy, scream, spinoza, subjectivity, thought on January 24, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
from Susan Ruddick… Desire, not joy, becomes the central focus of Deleuze’s work, arguably a concept of desire which draws upon Spinoza’s concept of conatus, this being an innate tendency towards self-preservation which involves a determination to act on affections however they are experienced or conceived, through body or mind, through superstition or reason (E [...]
Nightmares
Posted in public scholarship, tagged capitalism, dreams, fascism, liberal capitalism, nightmares, occupy, ows, police state, politics, public talk, the state, v for vendetta, v4v on January 22, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Transcript of a talk I gave January 21st, 2012, as part of an Occupy event entitled “Symposium of V for Vendetta” The second in a series, which began with “Ghost Stories.” Lately, academics have been throwing around a new buzzword. Like all buzzwords, it is repeated to the point of meaninglessness. And academics, being the [...]
Deleuze & The Meaning of Life: Fichte!?
Posted in Reading Notes, tagged aufhebung, becoming, colebrook, deleuze, fichte, hegel, life, nietzsche, overcoming, queer, spinoza, subjectivity on January 17, 2012 | 3 Comments »
Deleuze’s search for a metaphysical grounding for his theory on the meaning of life as “becoming-?”, understood as becoming-different or queer vitalism, as Claire Colebrook explains in her article in New Formations no 68, ends with an unlikely philosopher: Fichte. The payoff is a form of Aufheben that, while still in the German Idealist tradition, [...]
how to give lacan the boot
Posted in Ideas, tagged D&G, guattari, lacan, psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis, transferrence, transversality on January 16, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
[it really starts to get good at the 6 minute mark...] Transversality was to replace transferrence. Why the replacement? Transference works by provoking change through coerced dialogue between analyst-patient. The patient, one-on-one, stuck in a room with nothing but the psychiatric gaze and the ambience of the room, has few options outside the give-and-take channeled [...]
Leading By Example, or, the power of a good example
Posted in Ideas, tagged Agamben, emergence, kant, massumi, materialism, ontology, power, singularity, the example on January 13, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Brian Massumi suggests in the introduction to his 2002 book “Parables For The Virtual” that the most Bergsonian form of argumentation follows from an “exemplary method,” by which he means supporting an argument through an example. There are three major arguments, which, while not stated explicitly, forms the subterranean structure by which Massumi makes his [...]
Lazzarato’s Virtual Communism
Posted in Ideas, tagged bernadette corporationg, biopower, communism, D&G, deleuze, disciplinary power, dispositif, enclsoure, foucault, get rid of yourself, lazzarato, minoritarian, multiplicity, neo-liberalism, tarde, utopia, virtual on January 12, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Lazzarato is able to distinguish his approach from traditional historical materialism with a few key reversals. The first is an elaboration on an argument he shares with Read: production is ‘greater’ than reproduction, which is just a translation of D&G’s claim that the virtual is richer than the actual. But rather than remaining within the [...]
