Next year

This what I am currently scheduled to do next year, of course thanks to the cuts I could end up with a lot more time and far less money... I'm also trying to write a review of Blanchot's Political Writings, planning to write an essay on Debord's cinema, specifically In Girum, and working on the spaghetti western paper.

Conjunctural Dilemmas

If one believes that Agamben's notion of the reversibility of 'bare life', abandoned by the state, into stateless potentiality is magical (as I do)...

But one also believes the capitalist tendencies of the present are to produce an abandoned/surplus humanity that at once figures something like the classical (negative) definition of the proletariat but incapacitates politics (Balakrishnan, Endnotes)

Then isn't one back to Agamben, but vectored via the tendency and w/o political hope (doh!)

Concrete Problems

I must say that this refusal of abstraction and defense of the concrete seemed essentially abstract to us and of a more dangerous abstraction than the kind we were reproached with, because it is idealizing and, in the end, ethical in nature. (To say: "One must stop being abstract, one must be concrete" without worrying whether such a slogan has the least meaning in the state of exploitation of our societies is what I call pure idealism.)

Blanchot

Mute Launch event - 9 December

Further details here

9 December 2010