°XI

April 3, 2008

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. - Marx, “Theses On Feuerbach”.

Thesis Eleven – what is ‘the point’? What is at stake? Eleventh - that moment beyond the neat ten, in excess of the theological commandments. Karl Marx’s eleventh comment on Feuerbach, while very far from being, as it is so often read to be, the purportedly a-theoretical pragmatic command which forestalls asking any significant or difficult questions about ‘how things are’ or, even less, amounting to a dialectics which seeks to project idealised versions of what exists into an infinite future, is nevertheless equivocal enough to have enabled interpretations of such varieties. Such are the contingencies of writing and reading, to be sure.

Filed under: Labour + Escape + Benjamin + Marx + theologico-politico
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°Play

February 4, 2008

A couple of lengthy fragments from Catherine Mills’ “Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice” (South Atlantic Quarterly, 107:1, 2008), following on from these meanderings around questions of norm and precariousness here and here:

Toward the end of his book State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben writes:

One day humanity will play with law just a children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.1

Filed under: Precarious precarity + Escape + Benjamin + Derrida + Agamben
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°Detained

May 21, 2007

“They were jittery with the idea of staying,” he says, “and paralyzed with fear at the idea of leaving. You would get them prepared with their passports and all their visas in order, and a month later they would still be sitting in the Marseille cafés, waiting for the police to come and get them.”

From Michael Taussig’s Walter Benjamin’s Grave - a longer excerpt here.

Filed under: Borders + Benjamin
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°capitalism, religion, history

December 20, 2006

A redux of Hamacher’s “Guilt History - Benjamin’s Sketch “Capitalism as Religion” (and the graphic I used last time), apropos recent debates. (I won’t blockquote it though, because it’s long and easier to read without doing so.) Trans. Kirk Wetters, Diacritics 32:3-4 (2002).

Filed under: Benjamin + Marx + Hamacher + theologico-politico
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°Gewalt redux

February 18, 2006

Something to add to the readings of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Gewalt’: Alexander Karschnia’s “Down by Law - A Critique for the 21st Century”:

Filed under: Benjamin
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°Publication

What’s at stake in publication is the creation (and fortifiction) of publics.

Filed under: Biowar + Benjamin + Hegel + Rights
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°Afformative flashes

December 6, 2005

I thought I might extract some threads from the discussion on Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” that’s been happening over at Long Sunday.

Filed under: Laboratories + Benjamin
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