Dinosaur left over from a miniature golf course in Florida. I find myself coming back to one central question, that is at once political and philosophical. Previously on this blog I referred to the political dimension of this transformation as the constitution of a new episteme, a new standard for what counts as truth. This new standard appears primarily as the destruction of the old standards, as…
Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar via Décalages Sometimes I waste time by thinking of classes that I will never get a chance to teach, classes that would be for graduate students (which we do not have at USM), or entail books which have yet to be translated, or classes that are just too long. One class that meets all three would be a class on the dialectic and vicissitudes, this class would…
The merit of Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right lie less in its solutions, constitutional monarchy, than in the way it grasps the fundamental problem of modern politics. Politics does not begin with individuals in some kind of pre-political state of nature, or as some kind of undifferentiated raw material. Politics, the state, comes after the institutions of the family and civil society,…
I teach a philosophy of film class, and have for years now. It is a fun class, I get a lot of students, and I like talking about movies and philosophy. However, every year I wonder if I am talking about an art form that has a future or even a present. Do people even go to movies. I have contemplated switching it, for a few years I thought of replacing film with television, with shows like The…
This is a draft translation of an early review by Yves Citton Published in Multitudes Picture from The Brain from Planet Arous In his latest work, Maurizio Lazzarato proposed designating as " noo-politics " the "new power relations that take memory—and its conatus (attention)—as their object." Noo-politics (as it is currently exercised through "wireless, audiovisual, and telematic networks, and…
Having spent a lot of time thinking about, and thinking with, the concept of " negative solidarity ," it sometimes occurs to me that I should think about its opposite, about solidarity, as the necessary condition for collective action. I have read on the topic from time to time, I read Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix's book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World Changing Idea as…
E.T. The Extraterrestrial Can set design make or break a film? In general, probably not, but it made one film for me. I remember seeing E.T. The Extraterrestrial as a kid and seeing the image of a television set with an Atari 2600 stacked on top, and cartridges underneath. It was the first time that a movie looked like something I recognized, like it could have been my house, my television. This…
The Double Shift had its moment on Brooklyn Coffee Shop My first job, my first real job, was barista . Before that I had babysat, and done a bunch of odd jobs around the daycare center my mother ran, painting, assembling cots, making meals, which involved a lot of fish sticks and mac and cheese. It was my first real job in the sense that I had to apply for it, and received a paycheck (along with…
A detourned Calivn and Hobbes cartoon going viral When I was a kid we received a chain letter. It was sent to our house. It promised untold riches and bountiful luck if we sent money, I am a little unclear on the details, and warned of misfortune and calamity if we did not. I remember that it was adorned with all kinds of images from the world magic, strange symbols, evil eyes, and the like. It…
War and Money is Part of the Pile of Books that I am working on Philosophy is filled with famous breaks. The break between the young and mature Marx, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and Logical Investigations, Heidegger's Kehre, Foucault's transition from archeology to genealogy. Sometimes such breaks are declared by the philosopher in question, other times they are discovered, or perhaps…
Marx wrote, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living," but he neglected to add that it is the nightmare of traditions that weighs the heaviest in moments of crisis. Ever since 2016, we have seen a revival of some of the darkest moments of the imagination, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower has made the best sellers list, and 1984 has been…
As I mentioned when I first reviewed it here, Frédéric Lordon's Figures du Communisme is an oddly titled book. It is not about some communist past or event, about the Soviet Union or China, but what communism must mean if it is to be a force of transformation in the future. Its central topics, the environment, work, and the intersection of race and class, are not exactly topics that immediately…
Something is amiss in society. Many people have noticed a seemingly recent tendency of people acting in such a way in public as to disregard the very presence of other people, listening to music without headphones, having facetime conversations in coffee shops (also without headphones), and so on. Perhaps all of this started with Covid, which exasperated the already existing social distancing of…
Picture of me being handed my diploma by Greg Prince, then President of Hampshire College The slogan "You will not replace us" gained broad recognition after the infamous "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville. It was the distillation of what has come to be known as "Great Replacement Theory" one of the pillars of the modern white supremacist movement. The idea is that the well documented…
In the past few months I have been thinking more about "racial capitalism," or, more to the point, one I alluded to, but did not develop in The Double Shift , and have posted about here, about the intersection between the hierarchies produced in the labor relation and the hierarchies of racism. On what could be called the racial division of labor. I would like to thank Alex Taek-Gwang Lee for…
Chantal Jaquet's first book on what she called "transclasses" took up the subject of non-reproduction, of people who move from the dominated to the dominant class, in part because she argued that such transformations were perhaps the only way to grasp the conditions and forces of social transformation in times that were bereft of revolutionary movements. "In the absence of change on a collective…
We are told again and again that institutions like medicine, journalism, and the university have lost the trust of Americans, and must work to regain that trust. Of course the pundits and politicians that tells us this are more often than not the very ones who have undermined this trust. This is definitely the case with RFK , and, more importantly, it allows me to use one of my favorite memes from…
As has often been mentioned, on this blog and elsewhere , Hegel's famous section on Lordship and Bondage begins with the assertion that "Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness." This has often been interpreted to mean that self-consciousness needs to find itself in being recognized by another. We know ourselves by being recognized by others. Despite this…
I have a lot of books from the Spinoza Studies series One of the best pieces of advice I got in graduate school came from Warren Montag. He was visiting Binghamton University. We were talking about Spinoza and he said to me to the effect of reading Alexandre Matheron, Pierre Macherey, Pierre François Moreau, etc. was absolutely necessary for understanding Spinoza scholarship, and those books would…
2025 will probably go down in history as a pivotal year in the US's decline into a particular kind of media driven twenty-first century fascism. It is the year that Trump got his paramilitary force, in ICE, it is also the year in which we saw the fourth estate capitulate to the administration, turning over CBS news to a bootlicking blogger, firing comedians, and gutting journalism to pour money…
As it has often been said, movies teach you how to watch them. This pedagogy can take on almost Pavlovian forms as in the case of horror movies such as Jaws, which teaches you to treat a few notes on a tuba as terrifying. However, every film instructs you how to view it, and a lot of the struggle with watching different kinds of films has to with learning how to see things differently. If you come…
A few weeks ago I was trying to formulate a pithy little formulation for social media. It went something like this, "Political theory is a matter of determining which principle a polity should follow; political practice is a matter of interpreting a principle differently for one's followers." It did not quite work as a post no matter how I reworked it, but what I was trying to get at is the…
From a presentation I gave at Space Gallery on one of the best scenes of ideology in contemporary film As I said before on this blog, ideology is perhaps better grasped as an intersecting field of problems and questions than a concept or theory. It is a way of thinking together the relation between the question of knowledge , the social order , and political power. Of course, these different…
One of my favorite Toadies from popular culture There is a rather influential thesis that comes down to us from Hegel as read by Kojève and then later Francis Fukuyama and Axel Honneth . The thesis, as it has been interpreted, states quite simply that history is driven by a drive for mutual recognition. In other words, we strive to be recognized by people who we also recognize, to be an equal…
One common refrain one hears about AI is that it is inevitable. It is nothing other than the progressive development of the possibilities of technology. Such an assertion could be considered a version of technological determinism. It is technology, what Marx called the forces of production, that drive history. On this view history proceeds from the engineers workshop to the factory and into…