What in the hell …

I wrote about this a bit to some UK pals not long ago. This weekend it came up again. (more…)

Can anyone help me out on this? I vaguely recall a quote by Walter Benjamin, to the effect of aiming to produce work of no use to fascists. I used to know the reference and the exact phrase, but fucked if I can remember either. I’d like both.

Some googling turned up a blog discussion including a paraphrase of “Benjamin’s goal: to write in such a way that your words are of no use to fascism.”

“Progress” is the title of an essay by Adorno written in the 1960s. (more…)

I’m taking advantage of a little more free time than usual to do some more translating. I’m working on a piece by the Precarias a la Deriva on militant research, which originally appeared in the excellent book Nociones Communes, which collects some contemporary militant resarch materials from some people in Spain, Italy, and Argentina. (more…)

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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Long Sunday is a group blog who are kindly hosting a symposium on Benjamin’s critique of violence (which Craig at Theoria was kind enough to make electronically available).
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Walter Benjamin’s short essay “Fate and Character” begins by presenting a common idea: “if, one the one hand, the character of a person, the way in which he reacts, were known in all its details, and if, on the other, all the events in the areas entered by that character were known, both what would happen to him and what he would accomplish could be exactly predicted. That is, his fate would be known.” (Selected Writings v1, p201.)
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