°Temporality, geopolity

September 1, 2007

According to Hegel, Africa is a land of unchanging substance and dazzling disorder, the joyful and tragic country in Creation. Black people, as we see them today, are as they have always been. In the immense energy of the natural arbitrariness that dominates them, neither the moral moment, nor ideas of freedom, justice and progress have any place or particular status. Whoever wants to discover the most appalling manifestations of human nature can find them in Africa. Strictly speaking, this part of the world has no history. What we understand, in short, going by the name of Africa, is an ahistoric, undeveloped world, entirely prisoner of its natural spirit and whose place remains on the threshold of universal history.

- from Mbembe’s “Nicolas Sarkozy’s Africa” (trans. M. Thackway, and via).

Filed under: Biowar + Hegel + Mbembe
:: trackback url | permanent link | comments (0)

Bookmark and Share

°The terror of (a) right (people)

August 14, 2006

At a time when it has become habitual to think of terror(ism) and human rights, or terror and democracy, as polar opposites, as completely distinct forms of politics, it bears some consideration that la Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen was followed by la Terreur, that is, a war on (internal) enemies of the French revolution.

Filed under: Democracy + Hegel + Rights + Comay
:: trackback url | permanent link | comments (1)

Bookmark and Share

°Publication

February 18, 2006

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

Filed under: Biowar + Benjamin + Hegel + Rights
:: trackback url | permanent link | comments (4)

Bookmark and Share

°Revolve or break?

November 1, 2005

In 1843, Karl Marx replied to a letter from Arnold Ruge. The immediate context of the letter is the banning of the Rheinische Zeitung by the Prussian Government, of which Marx was the editor. I cannot find Ruge’s letter, but Marx quotes it sufficiently to gather the gist of their disagreement. Marx wrote:

I assure you, even if one has no feeling of national pride at all, nevertheless one has a feeling of national shame

Filed under: Nationalism + Sense + Marx + Hegel
:: trackback url | permanent link | comments (6)

Bookmark and Share

°Hegel

September 22, 2005

I’ve been reading a couple of books on Hegel, which seem to me at first bite, to constitute a perverse, if fascinating, labour. Werner Hamacher’s Pleroma - Reading Hegel and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Restlessness of the Negative. Both, in somewhat different ways, attempt to read Hegel against Hegelianism, against the dialectical system.

Filed under: Nancy + Hamacher + Hegel
:: trackback url | permanent link | comments (14)

Bookmark and Share

°Absolutism

August 15, 2005

In Hardt’s and Negri’s Multitude, the chapter on democracy begins:

The end of the cold war was supposed to be the ultimate victory of democracy, but today the concept and practices of democracy are everywhere in crisis.

Filed under: Democracy + Hegel
:: trackback url | permanent link | comments (45)

Bookmark and Share





Get free blog up and running in minutes with Blogsome | Theme designs available here