archive : s0metim3s

°Liquefaction

September 22, 2009

… there is no foundation in nature or in natural law, why a set of words upon a parchment should convey the dominion of land; why the son should have a right to exclude his fellow creatures from a determinate spot of ground, because his father had done so, before him … - William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769).

And here’s a pdf for the frontier household piece.

°Economies of race, queer households and the crisis

August 14, 2009

Here’s the spiel for a workshop, as part of “Seeing Through the Emperor’s New Clothes,” a conference on the GFC in September:

Filed under: Biowar + Laboratories + Borders + Memes + Marx + Keynes + Sydney
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Quite possibly the funniest 7.30 Report story I’ve seen for a while (ok, it’s one of the very few episodes I’ve watched in years) - Greg Hoy’s report on gold, stimuli, inflationary prospects and the UK/AU Governments’ predilection for Keynes versus the PRC’s reading of Marx.

Filed under: Memes + Marx + Keynes
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°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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°Refusal and désistance of the political

February 4, 2007

Below is a fragment from Lacoue-Labathe’s contribution to a 1980 seminar on Les fins de l’homme, which sought, as he put it, to “question of the links which indisociably unites the political with the philosophical.” The excerpt is from Retreating the Political. It clearly takes place as a response to what, in the 1980s at least, took the form of a dispute between Marxism and deconstruction.

But, since the effort of enshrining these philosophical/political camps is only functional to either/both the academy and sects - which is to say, to a certain priesthood, in both cases - the fragment might otherwise be read as the moment when the intersections (but also tensions) between - as I put it some time back - the philosophers of the désistance and the theoreticians of the refusal were explicitly put. Lacoue-Labarthe:

Filed under: Laboratories + Marx + Lacoue-Labarthe
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°Exodus

January 14, 2007

Paolo Virno’s “About Exodus” (trans. Alessia Ricciardi, Grey Room, n.21, 2005):

Among the different ways in which Marx described the crisis of capital accumulation (overproduction, the law of diminishing returns, etc.), there is one that goes largely unrecognized: the workers’ desertion of the factory.

Filed under: Escape + Movement + Marx + Virno
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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).