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March competition: win a Guernica anniversary t-shirt
75 years ago, 1937. The Nazi Luftwaffe backed Franco's fascists with the first ever carpet bombing of an undefended civilian target, Guernica. This atrocity horrified the world and helped to shift public opinion behind the Spanish Republican cause. Philosophy Football has produced a 75th anniversary T-shirt and we have 5 to be won in our March competition. Each lucky winner will also receive Max Aub's evocative novel set in the prelude to the Spanish Civil War, Field of Honour.
To enter, simply answer this question. By what name was the unit consisting of the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht volunteers, that served with Franco's forces, known? Email your answer with name, address and preferred T-shirt size to admin@philosophyfootball.com
Entries close 31 March 2012, no purchase necessary to enter.
Congratulations! To Marc Behrendt, Jon Hackett, Heather McCallum, Guy Reading and Francesca Silvani. All winners of a Tahrir Square T-shirt , also available from Philosophy Football, in our January competition.
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The Faith of the Faithless—“everything to be true must become a religion.”
"Everything to be true must become a religion" said Oscar Wilde, and The Faith of the Faithless, Simon Critchley's examination of the importance of religion to the irreligious, builds upon this maxim to produce a political theology that "calls not for our "passive resignation from the world", but for "the urgency of active commitment"", according to Tom Cutterham in the Oxonian Review.
Recognising the contemporary shift of political philosophers towards the "return to religion", Critchley provides a nuanced account, offering no easy answers to the question of an ethical engagement with the political imperative.
Still, says Cutterham, the nuance complements a precise ethical position: a stand against violence and terror as political activity, as expoused by Slavoj Zizek:
again and again in [The] Faith of the Faithless, he points out and rejects the desire for a messianic rupture, an "event", an "exception" that will answer this infinite demand with a divine violence or an absolute newness.
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Spring event dates for Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres
Keep a close eye on Verso's events page in the coming weeks: during March, April and May, Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres, co-authors of News For All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the Media, will be going across the country for a series of lectures and discussions about the history of race and media in the United States.
Please click below to see a list of their respective speaking dates and stay posted for more information and details to come:
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"Job snobs": the new reality of domestic labour
"Why do we spend our lives living through them?" The words of the intelligent and frustrated housemaid, Elsie, in the Robert Altman film Gosford Park, remind us of the human potential locked away in the relationship between the British aristocracy and those who served them. Chained by poverty to a social class who both despised and resented them, generations of intelligent working people had their lives moulded by the comings-and-goings of their employers, with the personal lives of both becoming dangerously and unhappily intertwined.
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Owen Jones on 10 O'Clock Live
10 O'Clock Live this week featured author Owen Jones, alongside social commentator Julia Hartley-Brewer and X-Factor winner Matt Cardle. Tackling the hot topic of workfare, Jones addressed the compulsory work-for-JSA scheme adopted by Tesco, which was dropped this week following pressure from a number of activist campaigns.
Visit the Channel 4 website to view the episode in full.