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What is democracy?
This interview with Jacques Rancière was translated into English from French via Spanish. With thanks to the translator. Rancière: “In Europe we have got used to identifying democracy with the double...
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Two perspectives on ‘the idea of communism’
An interview with Bruno Bosteels Interviewer: … You partially defend Badiou’s quasi-Platonic conception of communism as “tactical ahistoricism,” writing that, “in the present circumstances, the...
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What was Neoliberalism?
Milton Friedman “How did the governments of the Western world come to embrace this radical free market philosophy? Stedman Jones’ answer is: they didn’t. What they did accept was monetarism....
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Who polices words? Totalitarian regimes and Google
The Swedish Language Council has given up on including the word “ogooglebar,” or “ungoogleable” in its list of new words. “‘Ogooglebar’ refers to something ‘impossible to find on the Internet using a...
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There’s no way out of sociology
From N+1: “We live in the emerging mainstream moment of the sociology of taste. … This spread of sociological thinking has led to sociological living — ways of thinking and seeing that are constructed...
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Rancière on Subversion
Art and Politics: Questioning the Sensible By Herselman Hattingh, Published on 26 April 2013 The artist and the schoolmaster For art to be properly subversive, it must undermine, overthrow and destroy...
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Richard Rorty on the poetic turn
“In an essay called ‘Pragmatism and Romanticism’ I tried to restate the argument of Shelley’s ‘Defense of Poetry.’ At the heart of Romanticism, I said, was the claim that reason can only follow paths...
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Antigone in the age of autonomy
“Kierkegaard thought of Socrates as the person who first discovered human autonomy — the fact that we are free to determine our own actions and therefore responsible for those actions. This insight...
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The Letters of Italo Calvino
The New Yorker published excerpts from “Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985″ translated by Martin McLaughlin. They also added an introduction by Michael Wood. Some random quotes from the letters to whet...
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“Blood”, a story by Blake Butler
Over time, he seemed to have less and less control of what he was doing. He watched himself eat food he did not want to eat, read books he did not wish to read, go places even knowing he’d much rather...
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“Three Days” by Thomas Bernhard
“The difficult thing is getting started. For a stupid person that isn’t difficult at all, indeed, he doesn’t even know what difficulty is. He makes children or makes books, he makes one child, one...
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Interview with Cornelius Castoriadis
This interview with Castoriadis was conducted in 1989 by Chris Marker for Marker’s own television series L’héritage de la chouette (“The Owl’s Legacy”). Eighty-one minutes long, the raw footage...
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Compromise and the tension between peace and justice
Read the introductory chapter of Avishai Margalit’s On Compromise and Rotten Compromises. “… rotten compromises are not allowed, even for the sake of peace. … I see a rotten political compromise as an...
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