What in the hell …

I’m fucking sophisticated as fuck. No, for real. Check this shit out. (more…)

It’s just the German for “militant research.” What that is is a tough question to be left for a rainy day when I don’t have other work to do and a union meeting to attend. In this case it’s really just an excuse to stay in format. (The phrase being German is appropriate, then, because without ordnung what do we have?! Nichts!)

*ahem*

It’s the subject of an issue of Transversal web journal, which I think is great. It includes a translation of the intro to the book Nociones Communes, a translation of a piece by Panzieri, one by Negri, and something by Colectivo Situaciones. (I’m biased cuz I had a hand in some of the stuff there, of course, but it’s cuz I like the material that I wanted to have that hand in.)

More on Schmitt … in the discussion on another post in the Schmittposium, Anthony writes on Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, “I recollect Schmitt very pointedly saying that the political is historical. In fact, looking ove rmy notes, it’s his discussion that follows page 19: “The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.” Without the state there is no political (humanity not having an enemy as such) and so a stateless, global society is a post-political reality, albeit one that Schmitt doesn’t see happening any time soon.” (more…)

I don’t know Althusser’s work. I was uninterested in it for a long time - categories like ideology and structure don’t interest me very much. My impression was that his work was largely about the successful continued accomplishment of the reproduction of capital, which doesn’t strike me as of much use to articulating the breakdowns thereof. I’ve become more interested, while those concerns remain, in large part via exposure to folks I respect very much who have made use of Althusser (Angela and David are high on that list, as is Jason Read). (more…)

It’s role, I mean. Jodi has a post at the latest LS symposium wherein she describes the partisan as not having a self-interest in being the partisan (or doing partisan stuff). This is Jodi’s read on Carl Schmitt’s using intensity of political commitment as one of the marks that makes the partisan be the partisan. I’m pretty sure I disagree, but I’m not entirely whether I’m disagreeing with Jodi’s read of Carl here or with Jodi and Carl. (more…)

There’s a line in a Chevy Chase flick, I think it’s Fletch, where he talks about this old house - it “just needs a little spackle and some napalm”. In that spirit, click here for an improved version of this blog. (Provided by bunnyhero labs and restless boredom.)

Crojas in his contribution to the partisan party at LS quotes Agamben:

the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with one another. The suspension of the norm does not mean its abolition, and the zone of anomie that is establishes is not (or at least claims not to be) unrelated to the juridical order

There’s been a bit of discussion on the autopsy email list about an interview with Paolo Virno that appeared in Grey Room. In it Virno says the following -

The decisive experience of my youth was the revolutionary
struggle in a developed capitalist country. I insist: developed. A country, that
is, in which physical survival was guaranteed, consumption relatively high,
with by that time widespread scholastic instruction. I did not participate in
an uprising against misery or dictatorship but in a radical conflict aiming at
abolishing that modern form of barbarism: wage labor. We were not “thirdworldist”
but “Americanist.” Fighting at Fiat of Turin, we were thinking of
Detroit, not Cuba or Algiers. Only where capitalist development has reached
its height is there a question of the anticapitalist revolution.

(more…)