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LIVE: Radio Benjamin on air, Walter Benjamin on aura
In a pop-tastic twitter and facebook competition starting tomorrow, Friday 31st October, you can win copies of the beautiful books Radio Benjamin and Walter Benjamin's Archive. Read on to find out how to enter!
It's widely known that German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin had a lifelong fascination with pop-cultural phenomena and the detritus of history, often associated with his interest in technology. From the films of Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse to his escapades on Hashish around Marseille, modern experience gives mass culture an increasing power over more “high” cultural phenomena, complicating notions of authenticity and value. As Alex Ross states in a recent New Yorker article, Benjamin's work, and those of his intellectual and cultural heirs, shows that "messages of dissent can emanate from the heart of the culture industry." It’s not surprising, then, that his work has been acknowledged by pop icons (Laurie Anderson etc), novelists and composers (Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Shadowtime) as an influence in their work. Modern pop music would have almost certainly fascinated Benjamin as the site of contradictions and dreams.
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Verso at the Eleventh Historical Materialism Conference
The eleventh annual Historical Materialism conference starts on Thursday 6th November. This year’s conference is titled ‘How Capitalism Survives’. The schedule includes a wide array of different thinkers speaking on everything from social reproduction theory to neoliberalism, from Marxist feminism to Walter Benjamin to the relations between race and capital. Many of the most interesting recent research projects and trends in Marxist and radical theory will be represented and discussed.
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The ancient Alain Badiou responds to the dashing Laurent Joffrin
Alain Badiou, whose most recent book The Age of the Poets has just been published, has written the below response to Laurent Joffrin, Editorial Director of Libération, who has written an article in Libération criticising Badiou for his use of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in a recent debate:
In the context of a debate with Marcel Gauchet on the theme ‘communism and democracy’ I invoked certain characteristics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in service of a complex argument. This proved sufficient for Laurent Joffrin to abandon instantly the toil that doubtless occupies all of his time – the soft laying-off of almost a hundred employees from the Libération newspaper – to give his verdict: Badiou is just a frozen dinosaur. -
Concerning Violence: New Frantz Fanon documentary from the director of The Black Power Mixtape
Narrated by Lauryn Hill, Concerning Violence (dir. Goran Hugo Olsson) is a filmic meditation on colonialism and anti-imperial struggles in Africa, seen through the lens of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.
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Racecraft reviewed in the new Dissent. PLUS: Verso joins Dissent for the fall issue launch party tonight in NYC
What we don’t talk about when we talk about race: racecraft, or the dark magic of racism itself creating and maintaining the illusion of race.