Theory. Utopia. Empathy. Ephemeral arts – EST. 1990 – ATHENS LONDON NEW YORK

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Philosophy

Theory

Histories of Violence: Why We Should All Read Walter Benjamin Today

THIS IS THE 36th in a series of dialogues of Brad Enans from Los Angeles Review of Books with artists, writers, and critical thinkers on the question of violence. This conversation is with James Martel, professor of political science at San Francisco State University. He is the author of seven books, the most recent of which are Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead (Amherst College Press, 2018) and The Misinterpellated… …

Theory

Buddhism and Anarchism: Exploring the Unlikely Compatibility of Two Distinct Traditions

In the summer of 2018 I was at a movie night event with newly acquainted classmates from grad school. We were all still getting to know each other and one of them asked me something about my personal beliefs. I don’t remember the details but I remember admitting I was a Buddhist anarchist. I think the reason I put it in those terms had to do with the context of… …

Theory

On the Current Conjuncture- Alain Badiou

A rational political evaluation of the present conjuncture has become a genuine rarity. Between the catastrophist homilies emanating from the most unwittingly religious sectors of environmentalism (we are on the brink of the Last Judgement) and the phantasmagorias of a rudderless Left (we are the contemporaries of exemplary ‘struggles’, of unstoppable ‘mass movements’, and of the ‘collapse’ of a crisis-ridden liberal capitalism), any rational orientation slips away, and a sort… …

Theory

The End Is Coming- by Agnes Callard

This article first appeared at the amazing magazine The Point from Chicago and is part of a series of columns on public philosophy by Agnes Callard; read more here. Probably this is not the end of the world. But a plague is creeping around the globe at a seemingly exponential rate, killing some of us and affecting all of us. And this pandemic is only the most recent and most sudden… …

Theory

The society of enmity- Achille Mbembe

Perhaps it has always been this way. [1] Perhaps democracies have always constituted communities of kindred folk, societies of separation based on identity and on an exclusion of difference. It could be that they have always had slaves, a set of people who, for whatever reason, are regarded as foreigners, members of a surplus population, undesirables whom one hopes to be rid of, and who, as such, must be left ‘completely or… …

Theory

No Other World Is Possible: Game of Thrones and the poverty of the liberal imagination- George Sotiropoulos / Void Network

This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends – Not with a bang but with a whimper. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’[1] [includes spoilers] To the reader who has seen what has been justifiably called a “cultural Behemoth”, Eliot’s phrase may not seem an entirely accurate depiction of the series’ ending. After all, a capital is practically… …

Events/Theory/Void Network News

Becoming-Other, Becoming-Many: Poststructuralism and the Problem of Justice – George Sotiropoulos / Void Network

In a talk that he gave about religion Derrida has made the following statement, “We believe we pretend to believe that we share in some pre-understanding. We act as if we have some common sense on what “religion” means in the languages we believe we know how to speak. We believe in the minimum trustworthiness of this word. […] Well nothing is less pre-assured that this factum, and the entire… …

Global movement

900 FREE audio BOOKS Masterpieces – ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΑ 900 ηχητικά Βιβλία αριστουργήματα

Download hundreds of free audio books  to your MP3 player or computer. Below, you’ll find great works of fiction, poetry and non-fiction, by such authors as Kerouac, Kafka, Philip K. Dick, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Orwell, Nietzsche, Austen, Shakespeare, Asimov, Burroughs & more. Fiction & Literature Aesop – Aesop’s Fables – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com Anderson, Sherwood – Winesburg, Ohio – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Aristophanes – Lysistrata – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File Asimov, Isaac – «Nightfall» – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com Asimov,… …

Theory

Walter Benjamin: Messianism and Revolution – Theses on History

Walter Benjamin’s relevance for activists today is most strongly felt in his works on social transformation. In the sixth of eight pieces on Benjamin, Andrew Robinson explores the Theses on History, and discusses the revolutionary implications of allegory, collecting, citation, DIY, and time. by Andrew Robinson   Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”, also known as “Theses on History” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, deals with the question of social… …

Events/Void Network News

ΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΗ και Ουτοπία- μέρος 3ον / Στέφανος Ροζάνης- Πεμ.1/2/2018 NOSOTROS- Κενό Δίκτυο

Η ΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΗ όπως και ο Χρόνος*, είναι δύο σημαίνοντα τα οποία αναζητούν στην πολύπλοκη και γεμάτη αντιφάσεις εκτύλιξη κοινωνικής-ιστορικής διαδικασίας, την ανανοηματοδότηση τους. Ο 21ος αιώνας ένας άγριος και τρομερός ως προς τα διακυβεύματα του αιώνας, μόλις τώρα αρχίζει πλέον να δείχνει τις φοβερότερες προεκτάσεις του προσώπου του. Χρέος όσων απο εμάς επιζητούν την υπέρβαση αυτών των πλευρών και την συνολικοποίηση μιας διαφορετικής προσέγγισης σύμφωνης με την εποχή μας, που όμως… …

Theory

An Essay on Liberation- Herbert Marcuse – 1969

Acknowledgments Thanks Again to my friends who read the manuscript and whose comments and criticism I heeded throughout: especially Leo Lowenthal (University of California at Berkeley), Arno J. Mayer (Princeton University). and Barrington Moore, Jr. (Harvard University). My wife discussed with me every part and problem of the manuscript. Without her cooperation, this essay would have appeared much sooner. I am grateful to her that it didn’t. Preface The growing… …

Theory

“The New Nihilism” by Peter Lamborn Wilson aka Hakim Bey

  It feels increasingly difficult to tell the difference between—on one hand—being old, sick, and defeated, and—on the other hand—living in a time-&-place that is itself senile, tired, and defeated. Sometimes I think it’s just me—but then I find that some younger, healthier people seem to be undergoing similar sensations of ennui, despair, and impotent anger. Maybe it’s not just me. A friend of mine attributed the turn to disillusion… …

Theory

“Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium” by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

QUESTION: When you describe capitalism, you say: “There isn’t the slightest operation, the slightest industrial or financial mechanism that does not reveal the dementia of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality (not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of *this* pathology, of *this madness*, for the machine does work, be sure of it). There is no danger of this machine going mad, it… …

Theory

WHAT ARE YOU DOING AFTER THE ORGY? or Does the consumer really behave (well)? by Ahmet Suerdem

“In the middle of the revelries, a man whispers into the woman’s ear: What are you doing after the orgy?” (Baudrillard 1990) In his “Cool Memories” on America, the French writer Jean Baudrillard discusses through his anectodes some of the problems that contemporary societies of mass consumption are facing: In an endless schema of frustration/gratification, is human desire kidnapped and turned into a hostage without exchange? Aren’t we sacrificing something… …

Theory

“Life as Totality” by Vagabond Theorist

Perhaps one of the greatest difficulties anarchists face on a day to day level is that of finding reliable comrades with whom to carry out ongoing projects of revolt that are integral to their lives – projects that go beyond the customary formulas that can be found everywhere (Food Not Bombs, Critical Mass, collective businesses…). These formulaic projects develop easily because they require little thought. For the same reason (no… …

Theory

“The Anarchist Revelation: Being What We’re Meant to Be” by Paul Cudenec

  An important new book on anarchist thought is now available from Winter Oak Press. The Anarchist Revelation:  Being What We’re Meant to Be  is the latest work by activist and writer Paul Cudenec. Here, he turns his back on contemporary trends of anarchism in a bid to reconnect with the primal force of its root ideology. Cudenec notes the significance of its refusal of the state and its judicial… …

Theory

“An Anarchy of Every day Life” by Jeff Shantz from Philosophers for Change

Contemporary anarchism offers a mid-range movement organized somewhere between the levels of everyday life, to which it is closest, and insurrection. Rooted in the former they seek to move towards the latter.  Anarchists look to the aspects of people’s daily lives that both suggest life without rule by external authorities and which might provide a foundation for anarchist social relations more broadly.  This commitment forms a strong and persistent current… …

Theory

Debord, “Theses on Cultural Revolution,” Internationale Situationniste #1

1 The traditional goal of aesthetics is to produce, by means of art, impressions of certain past elements of life in circumstances where those elements are lacking or absent, in such a way that those elements escape the disorder of appearances subject to the ravages of time. The degree of aesthetic success is thus measured by a beauty that is inseparable from duration, and that even goes so far as… …

Theory

“Michel Foucault: Free Lectures on Truth, Discourse & The Self” from Open Culture

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was an enormously influential French philosopher who wrote, among other things, historical analyses of psychiatry, medicine, the prison system, and the function of sexuality in social organizations. He spent some time during the last years of his life at UC Berkeley, delivering several lectures in English. And happily they were recorded for posterity: Four Lectures on Truth and Subjectivity (1980) Six Lectures on Discourse and Truth (1983)… …

Theory

“The Privatisation of Stress”, by Mark Fisher from Soundings magazine

                      Ivor Southwood tells the story of how, at a time when he was living in a condition of underemployment – relying on short-term contracts given to him at the last minute by employment agencies – he one morning made the mistake of going to the supermarket.1 When he returned home he found that an agency had left him a… …

Global movement

There is no Authority but Yourself: Reclaiming Krishnamurti for Anarchy

“All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.” — J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known “Having realized that we can depend on no outside authority in… …

Events/Void Network News

Kostas Axelos: A Night at the Horizons of the World / Void Reading Group Night

Void Network proudly presents a multi media philospophical retrospective for Kostas Axelos, the thinker of the Vast Open Horizon, the enigmatic thinker of the Planetary Age.Void Network people will read fragments from his books : “Open Systematic”(Systematique Ouverte), “This Questioning”(Ce Questionnement), “Heraclites and Philosophy” (Héraclite et la philosophie) and “Towards the Planetary Thought” (Vers la pensee planetaire) Void Optical Arts Laboratory will take care of the multi media environment and… …

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