archive : s0metim3s

CultStud Affable Persona ™

So, a symposium on Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” over at Long Sunday next week - or after Thanksgiving, for all you pilgrims. It promises to be both a challenge and a delight, given the rest of the participants. Craig has been kind enough to put a copy of “Critique of Violence” up on Theoria.

Passagen (left) was built near the site of Benjamin’s suicide in 1940, in Portbou, the border between France and Spain.

The shifting projects of precariousness - the latest from Precarias a la Deriva. It should go without saying that their taking a distance from the rights-based, unitarian, statifying projects that shaped other efforts is, I think, a very good thing:

Todas a Cien : Agency of Precarious Affairs (Lavapies, Madrid)

Precarias a la Deriva has been, until now, a research project on precariousness which aspired to take ourselves, our own precarious realities, as a point of departure, and to interpolate others in search of new forms of resistance and new spaces of encounter and cooperation built out of multiplicity.

Speaking of populism, a fragment of a draft on a fragment on politics:

Nancy writes that “our entire history” seems to show that the empty figure of the citizen is persistently turned over to the identifications of the subject. And, he adds, “democracy without identification” would “be without any demos or kratein of its own” (1997:108). Subject and citizen represent—as Nancy will insist in the second fragment on ‘politics’ (1997)—“two postures of the claim to sovereignty and the institution of community.” The citizen folds into the “politics of the modern subject”, as the “laicised theology, or if one prefers, a romanticised theology, of the ‘people’, ‘history’, and ‘humanity’.” Nancy emphasises that it is “the word people” which marks the turn of the citizen—who otherwise circulates as “a mobile complex of rights”—toward the theological ground of the subject. He asks, and goes on to answer in the affirmative, whether the citizen and subject “are not in an intimate solidarity or connivance.”

Over at Posthegemony, Jon has an excerpt of a first chapter from what I take to be a manuscript. The fragment is on populism and Cultural Studies - or, as I think it should be called, CultStud.

In the end, populism, and so also cultural studies, is an anti-politics.

It’s not only good reading, but sharply accurate. I’m looking forward to the rest.

Update: more here.

So, around half a million poeple turned out for the rallies against the latest changes to work laws, ironically called ‘Workchoices’. The largest - an estimated 150,000 - being in Melbourne (above). More at Melbourne.Indymedia, on the rallies and the laws.

We don’t want your mercy or pity and we definitely don’t need your permission.*

How far can the body be pushed, how far can it go? Riots, protests continue in France. The hunger strike at Villawood (Sydney’s migrant internment facility) enters its 25th day. And, below, a statement from The Plataform Against Criminalisation* (Berlin, 10.11.05), translated from the German:

We have come together today to make our voices heard and our anger felt.