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The Spectacle of Disintegration by McKenzie Wark
At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to arms in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets, The Spectacle of Disintegration recalls the hidden journeys taken in the attempt to leave the twentieth century, and plots an exit from the twenty first.
Read "A Cavalier History of Situationism: An Interview with McKenzie Wark" at Rhizome
Authors
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Nancy Fraser
Nancy Fraser is Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research,... -
Annette Fuentes
"‘Zero-tolerance' policies funnel students into prisons." -
Franco Moretti
Franco Moretti teaches Literature at Stanford, where is the Director of the Literary Lab. He is...
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Owen Jones
"A work of passion, sympathy and moral grace." Dwight Garner, New York Times -
Vijay Prashad
Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Professor of South Asian History at Trinity... -
Medea Benjamin
Medea Benjamin is a cofounder of the peace group CODEPINK and the international human rights...
Blog
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The Financial Times and Art Review on Wu Ming's Altai
Edward Stourton, writing for the Financial Times, recommends readers take Wu Ming's latest novel Altai on vacation to Venice, while Stewart Home visits Bologna to discuss politics and history with the elusive writing collective for Art Review.
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Joe Glenton's heated interview on BBC HARDtalk
In the military following orders isn't a choice, it's an obligation. So what happens when a solder says no? Joe Glenton, author of Soldier Box: Why I Refused to Return to the War on Terror was that soldier. Watch his heated interview with Stephen Sackur on BBC HARDtalk. As grillings go, this one is pretty good.
Joe Glenton is the author of Soldier Box: Why I Won't Return to the War on Terror - which published last week in the UK.
Read Joe's interview in the Independent on Saturday Magazine here, and this feature on him in the Metro. -
The price of pacifism: Refusing to go to war is finally being recognised as a brave act
On Saturday, the Independent Magazine featured this excellent article on conscientious objectors. From the Second World War refusenik to the 19-year-old Israeli, Holly Williams spoke with five people who risked shame and suffering to take a stand as conscientious objector. Joe Glenton was one of those conscientious objectors - here is his interview:
There’s a 99-year history of objectors - Joe Glenton, AfghanistanJoining the British Army is, obviously, voluntary; but leaving before you've served your time – even if you've undergone a complete change of moral conviction – is not so simple.
There is an established process for coming forward as a CO, but many soldiers may be unaware it is their right.
Joe Glenton joined the Army in 2004, and was on tour in Afghanistan for seven months, from early 2006. During that time, he began questioning what exactly they were doing there. "We knew civilians were being bombed, we knew this operation that had started under the banner of peace-keeping, peace-building, providing security, just drifted straight into war-fighting," he explains, adding wryly that "we ran out of ammunition at one point during this 'peace-keeping' operation…".
On his return to the UK, and after further reading, research and reflection, he became increasingly concerned that Afghanistan was "part of a much broader project in the Middle East and central Asia.
I pillory people who go 'It's all about oil', but there is that: obviously Afghanistan is geo-politically important, and there are 90 billion barrels of oil in the Caspian Basin…"
Glenton was also suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), after a mortar strike hit near his camp. "So there was that emotional, traumatic stuff, but fundamentally I was opposed to the war. Later, I had more of a politically-informed objection, but initially it was, 'I have a sense that what is going on here is wrong and I don't want to be in it'." He is, however, clear that his objection was specifically against that war; he doesn't consider himself a pacifist: "I still think force, even armed force, has a place, potentially – but that's not it".
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How can Democracy be Rejuvenated? Ideas for Transforming a Still-Oligarchic Society
From the 7 May 2013 print edition of Le Monde
Pierre Rosanvallon is a French center-left thinker, previously involved with François Furer in the Fondation Saint-Simon. His books in English include, amongst others, Democratic Legitimacy: Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity; Democracy Past and Future; and The Demands of Liberty. In 2002 he founded the République des Idées.
How did you make democracy and equality the central axes of your political concerns, inquiries and research ?
Pierre Rosanvallon: I became a full timer for the CFDT [union federation] when I finished at the HEC [business school] just after May ’68. At that time I began to read an enormous amount on the history of the workers’ movement. I had made contact with a publisher, Léon Centner, who had issued an impressive collection of hundreds of pamphlets on the building of the workers’ movement, Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle [‘The Revolutions of the Nineteenth Century’] in 48 volumes. Having got the CFDT to buy the lot, I dived into reading them. From that point on, I knew well that it is impossible to understand the tasks of the present – the project of self-management then being central – without a long-term perspective on the questions in hand. I wanted, besides, to understand the disorderly phenomena of democracy. To know why the structures of collective organisation did not work as well as expected. All these questions on the organisation of democratic life made for my first field of studies.
Discussions
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Has anyone else read this book?
The comments seem like none of those people have ever read this book - yes, including Mr. Jones. I'm not even thirty pages in and I have learned nothing, except that the cartoon is like vaudeville, and that Felix was awesome. (I've read Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat, and I'm sorry to say, it was a much better read than this.)He claims to start in 1928 - and yet talks about nothing but the 19th century for a good two pages. The first chapter is a waste of pages and words.The reason I'm bringing this up is because I'm attempting to write a book on the history of American animation. The books I have found are awful. If anyone could help me find either books pertaining to this subject or could point me in the right direction, I'd be forever indebted. I took this book from the library assuming it would be the best thing I've ever read pertaining to this subject. -
For philosophy, framing the phenomenological gift aligns an eidetic point that begins to bracket in Nothingness, which may or may not give rise to the Encounter. It is a matter of thinking about contingency. The primacy of thinking about contingency is simply the facticity of existing there within the Unconscious and the ether of unreal atoms—parallelism ad nausea. “The world is a ‘gift’ that we have been given,” Althusser elucidated, “the ‘fact of the fact’ that we have not chosen, and it ‘opens up’ before us in the facticity of its contingency, and even beyond this facticity, in what is not merely an observation, but a ‘being-in-the-world’ that commands all possible Meaning.” Opening this gift does frame “being-in-the-world.” There is the possibility of meaning and the meaning of the possibility—there is an effect of fictional subjectivity. There are effects stemming from the facticity of this very contingency of being-in-the-world. It is an eidetic effect as philosophical effect. Philosophy postulates eidetic points. As materialist portrait, nothingness is nothing but the theoretical understanding of non-materiality--the original of Being-- and hence there is a retroactive excursion, more or less, that may or may not find nothingness as a material object that is idyllically graced by the Philosophical Void.
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Not new. not a review by Marx.
These translations are not, as is alleged here, "new". Hanfi translated them 40 years ago. The review "Luther between Strauss and Feuerbach", quoted from here, has been known not to be by Marx for almost as long. See MECW Vol. 1, 1975.