What in the hell …

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

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

Gauche Proletarienne formed after and partially out of the the UJCML split. (more…)

The letters stand for Union de la Jeunesse Communiste Marxiste-Léniniste, which translates as Young Communist League (Marxist-Leninist). (more…)

The Tronti symposium has started at Long Sunday. Jon’s contribution has started a bit of discussion on what Tronti means by the term ‘intellectual’. That’s actually one of the terms I planned to use this blog to get my head clearer on when I initially set this thing up. Haven’t done so yet. (more…)

Thiago dissed a piece by Michael Berube over at Long Sunday. (more…)

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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This is from a conversation my friend Nathaniel and I have been having about Ranciere, though it’s not much about Ranciere here, and is slightly shaped by reading the first two pages of Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Buck-Morss says the opening bit, entitled ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’, had a big impact on Adorno).

I recently read a set of notes on Schiller, by Gary Thomas. Gary notes that for Schiller we never know a thing itself, but rather our knowing occurs filtered through historically contingent subjectivities. He goes on to say “ ‘modes of perception’ result in diverse accounts of reality, each compatible with facts and logic though incompatible with each other”. Gary says that Schiller’s book On The Sublime is an attempt to escape the compulsion to discover a fixed unalterable reality. He writes, “concepts of reality (…)” are “inventions, not discoveries about the world” or “all human constructs are (…) ‘fictions’, ‘texts’”. Later he notes that this poses a difficult demand – “that we somehow resolve the problem how to maintain our deepest and most serious beliefs strongly enough to be able to act on them, while at the same time recognizing that those beliefs have no final justification”. (more…)