After beginning with the end, we have ended up at the beginning. The newest of Jacques Derrida’s seminars is the oldest yet published. Encountering deconstruction in the context of this newest older publication can help to shake our conviction that we know what was meant by it.
Jonathan Basile on Jacques Derrida‘s newly published seminar.
Borders: blocking bodies and allowing capital. A border can be innocuous to me because white Americans are capital embodied. The invisibility of the Colorado-New Mexico border disguises a colonial power relation by making it look natural. The US-Mexico border is visible, but we believe it to be natural too. Prehistoric. Foregone.
By Caroline Tracey.
For Catholics it is a moral allegory by one its most famous patron saints; for Communists, the first major proposal for the abolition of private property; for Neo-Liberals, a farce on the absurdity of this proposal. Like the greatest works of political fiction, it has bucked the rhetoric of ideology and managed to resist being coopted.
Jared Marcel Pollen on the 500th anniversary of Thomas More‘s Utopia.
A welfare state can be used as a form of social investment that boosts employment and the economy, whilst funding good education, family and labour market policies. Providing accessible childcare enables more women to enter employment. Employment creates more employment, a virtuous circle increasing the tax base. All these achievements are real. They are not wishful thinking. Yet the neoliberal orthodoxy hides their accomplishments, and the entrenched interests of corporate elites have such influence on politicians that instead of moving towards such models, governments have been moving towards neoliberalism – even in the more socially democratic countries themselves.
Andrew Brower Latz reads Colin Crouch vs Neoliberalism.
Drawing from the work of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, schizoanalysis is a revolutionary political process that seeks to expand upon Reich’s materialist-psychiatric critique of psychoanalysis so as to include the full scope of multiplicitious social and historical factors in its explanations of cognition and behaviour in order to map and thus undermine the causal groundings of fascism.
A.T. Kingsmith on Schizoanalysis.
After reading Gellner it’s clearer what the Brexiteers in the UK and Trump in the USA get right, as well as where they go wrong. They get right that some if not all of the important cogs in the advanced industrial machine have become damaged, some seriously and certainly more seriously than those holding the levers of power have let on. And they are right to identify inequality in its many guises as the defining issue. Where they’re in error is in the options they think they have. What they’ve opted for is a confused mix of neoliberal economics plus the exploitation of nativist, ethnic fissures expressed as belligerent and nasty Nationalism. Neither are sensible choices. Both neoliberalism and virulent nationalism are the subject of Gellner’s work. He helps explain why they seem attractive whilst being exactly the wrong sort of medicine.
Gellner gives us a suggestive picture of our current dilemma. ‘The modern industrial machine is like an elephant in a very small boat. Either the boat is built around it so as to accommodate it, or it becomes an absurdity.’
Richard Marshall reads Ernest Gellner on Brexit and Trump.
If Agnès Varda’s 1985 movie Vagabond is like any other movie, then it would be Citizen Kane. When you’ve seen both, you see that Varda almost certainly used the structure of Orson Welles’ 1941 movie as a blueprint for her own. Both start with a death, both are an investigation into a life, both end inconclusively.
By Richard Skinner.
I want to talk about paragraphs, the shapes paragraphs take in the fiction of some writers I admire, but I probably have to talk first (at least a little) about individual sentences and what goes on in them when a writer is fully awake to their creation. What has struck me is how the writers I return to again and again are uncannily attentive to sound, not just to rhythm and cadence but to the patterns of vowels and consonants. In discussions of prose fiction, we are so accustomed to thinking about plots and characters and themes and such that we often lose sight of the fact that a story proceeds one sentence at a time and that a sentence is ultimately an object, a thing, a layout of language. It took me many years to realize how a sentence in prose can afford the reader many of the pleasures we have been taught to regard as being exclusive to the precincts of poetry.
By Gary Lutz.
Every Black Lives Matter protest against police violence is also a protest against the misery which is inseparable from those communities that exhibit the highest levels of violent crime between black people. Like Republicanism, like Communism, like Representative Democracy, the clue is in the name: to Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter. The movement embodies the same impetus to action as that which inspired The Interrupters, a Chicago-based group poised against the same gang violence which many of its members enacted before converting to their version of urban pacifism.
Jeremy Brunger on race relations in America.
“Ordinary moments make the life.” This is written on page 109 of Zero K. But It’s the abnormal moments that make up DeLillo’s fiction. A death facility in a Central Asian desert, a death facility that will become a life facility in the future, once the means and technology are available — this is the setting of Zero K. DeLillo’s fiction is an assemblage of moments that could be plucked from underground newspaper columns or whispered to you by a nervous, bedraggled man on an unfamiliar street or taken from those compartments of the internet that require a login to a private network.
By Tristan Foster.
Square Wave by Mark de Silva
{Enthusiasm} by Steven J. Fowler
Vertigo by Joanna Walsh
Selected writings by David Winters
A selection of Richard Marshall's End Times interviews published by Oxford University Press
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