One of my holiday plans is to read a bit of Badiou. I’ve got a knee jerk reaction anti, my Lenin allergy, but people I like and respect use him so I’m trying my best to maintain an open mind. That’s not always my forte, and even more so w/ Badiou - all that math! It’s even harder because my mom’s a math teacher and though I am too old I am still playing out adolescent rebellion. I read this stuff and feel by turns hostile and out of my league (I suspect the latter is partially a source of the former).
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December 20, 2005
… is a set?
December 19, 2005
… am I doing in the midwest?
This is not what I want to use this space for.
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December 16, 2005
… does NEFAC think about workplace organizing?
They like it. Got this off an email list, where it’s sparked a bit of discussion. One question is whether they mean something like the old lefty ‘boring from within’ idea, or just ‘organize in/against your workplace’. In any case, I like the piece.
December 15, 2005
… makes the past weigh so nightmarishly upon the present?
Can’t think of any more clever history quotes.
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… is the weight of dead tradition?
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.”
Stephen Daedalus
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December 14, 2005
… is the deal with whiteness?
Thinking about the recent shit in Australia (which I pretty much know about exclusively through material on or referenced at the Archive and Interbreeding, and which I think I’ve convinced Thiago to write about unless I’ve just jinxed it here), I’ve started to think a bit about this category ‘white skin privilege’.
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December 11, 2005
… is up with theology?
In particular I mean the theological motifs in Benjamin. As in, what does one do with all of that stuff if one is an atheist? I’ve been thinking about this largely in response to the Long Sunday Benjamin symposium, and various reading I’ve been doing.
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December 10, 2005
… is insomnia?
Ranciere writes in the preface to his Nights of Labor that “[t]he topic of this book is, first of all, the history of those nights snatched from the normal round of work and repose. A harmless and imperceptible interruption of the normal round, one might say, in which our characters prepare and dream and already live the impossible: the suspension of the ancestral hierarchy subordinating those dedicated to manual labor to those who have been given the privilege of thinking. Nights of studying, nights of boozing.” (viii)
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