Esther Leslie | Elective Affinities: The Hunched Man, the Old Man and B.B.

2020-08-212020-08-22 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & Poetics · WorksTags: Bertolt Brecht · Esther Leslie · Leon Trotsky · Vladimir Lenin · Walter BenjaminLeave a comment

Meshwork The relationship between Benjamin and Brecht has often been assessed, including, most notoriously, the charge from both Adorno and Scholem that Brecht’s »exotic« influence was »disastrous« or »catastrophic« for Benjamin’s theorizing. Somewhat more rarely have Trotsky and Benjamin been brought together. Victor Serge in ‘Memoirs of a Revolutionary’, written in Mexico in 1942-1943, brings the two names into a constellation, suggesting the connection between Trotsky and Benjamin to be something more than coincidence, and rather more epochal: »… the poets Walter Hasenclever and Walter Benjamin commit suicide. Rudolf Hilferding and Breitscheid are carried off out of our midst…

Nathalie Wourm | Poetic Sabotage and the Control Society: Christophe Hanna, Nathalie Quintane, Jean-Marie Gleize

2020-08-172020-08-17 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: Alain Badiou · Antonio Negri · Émile Pouget · Christophe Hanna · Deleuze & Guattari · Gilles Deleuze · Jean-Marie Gleize · Nathalie Quintane · Pierre Alferi · Raphaël Kempf · William BurroughsLeave a comment

Parallels can be drawn between Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” and the artistic practice of a number of contemporary French writers, whose works do not only represent the voicing of their political contentions, but also act as verbal objects designed to undermine the mainstream idea of what literature is and should be. [..] Christophe Hanna, Nathalie Quintane, and Jean-Marie Gleize are three authors who share a number of theoretical ideas and political references and have been expressing their opposition to the system in this way.

Raoul Vaneigem | Isidore Ducasse and the Count of Lautréamont in the “Poésies”

2020-08-062020-08-06 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Arthur Rimbaud · Émile Henry · Isidore Ducasse · Jean-Baptiste Troppmann · Lautréamont · Maldoror · Mikhail Bakunin · Raoul Vaneigem · Sergey NechayevLeave a comment

Lautréamont entered literary history by means of Maldoror, and, with the mastery of Isidore Ducasse, the author of the Poésies, he is almost indebted to it for not being excluded from that history.1 Of the judgments made by critics, how many manage to prove their innocence – through embarrassment or the casualness with which they open the “Préface à un livre futur” with a tacit disavowal – an unconfessed disapproval of the Poésies? None, no doubt, as it is true that their disaffection still appears in their will to subject the delicate processes by which multiple aspects of a…

Vladimir Mayakovsky | Revolution | A Poetichronicle

2020-07-18 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Revolution · Vladimir MayakovskyLeave a comment

Revolution A Poetichronicle 26 February. A drunken mix, police and soldiers, opened fire on the people. 27th. Spilled brilliance on barrel and blade – daybreak. Light crimson and prolonged. In a musty barracks sober severe the Volynsky Regiment prayed. Severely they swear to the soldiers’ god, kow-tow each hefty mono-brow. Blood kindled, surging through temple. With malice aforethought hands grip iron. And the first, he who ordered “Shoot the hungry!” – A bullet shut his mouth. Another’s ‘Ten–hut!” was cut short. Yet not at a loss the troops stormed into the city. 9 o’clock. In our usual spot…

riots and/or poetics [7/2020]

2020-07-102020-07-10 Categories: Reading ListTags: Alain Badiou · Émile Pouget · Bernadette Mayer · Bob Kaufman · Caroline Bergvall · Christophe Hanna · George Jackson · Hervé Guibert · Jean Genet · Jean-Marie Straub / Danièle Huillet · Jerome Rothenberg · John Kinsella · Jon Wiener · Kim Myhr · Louis Armand · Martin Nowak · Mike Davis · Moyra Davey · Tripwire: a journal of poeticsLeave a comment

This racism is scattered, diffused throughout the whole of America, grim, underhanded, hypocritical, arrogant. There is one place where we might hope it would cease, but on the contrary, it is in this place that it reaches its cruelest pitch, intensifying every second, preying on body and soul; it is in this place that racism becomes a kind of concentrate of racism: in the American prisons, in Soledad Prison, and in its center, the Soledad cells. If, by some oversight, racism were to disappear from the surface of the United States, we could then seek it out, intact and more…

Sean Bonney | Anna Mendelssohn—”Minds do exist to agitate and provoke / this is the reason I do not conform”

2020-07-042020-07-04 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Anna Mendelssohn · Bertolt Brecht · Karl Marx · Sean Bonney · The Angry BrigadeLeave a comment

If you want to find good poetry written in Britain, you have to go looking for it: with very few exceptions, it is hidden away behind a poetry of more or less genteel self-expression, metrical sentimentalities and easily digested liberal homilies that are essentially reports on police reality. But there is a vast seem of artistically and politically complex poetry also being written here, and Anna Mendelssohn, who sometimes also published under the name Grace Lake, wrote some of the best. It is chaotic, at times manic and compulsive, by turns mocking and playful, hurt and exasperated, and always…

Jacques Rancière & Philippe Lafosse | Politics and Aesthetics in the Straubs’ Films

2020-07-022020-07-02 Categories: Jacques Rancière · Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Bertolt Brecht · Communism · Friedrich Hölderlin · Jacques Rancière · Jean-Luc Godard · Jean-Marie Straub / Danièle Huillet · Marxism · Medvedkin Group · Philippe Lafosse · RevolutionLeave a comment

Jacques Rancière, Philippe Lafosse and the public in conversation about Straub-Huillet after a screening of From the Clouds to the Resistance and Workers, Peasants Monday, February 16, 2004, Jean Vigo Cinema, Nice, France PHILIPPE LAFOSSE: It seemed interesting to us, after having seen twelve films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and talked about them together, to ask another viewer, a philosopher and cinephile, to talk to us about these filmmakers. Jacques Rancière is with us this evening to tackle a subject that we’ve entitled “Politics and Aesthetics in the Straubs’ Films,” knowing that we could then look into other…

Mario Tronti | “In art as in politics there is nothing other than struggle”

2020-07-012020-07-01 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Class Struggle · Classe operaia · Communism · Karl Marx · Mario Tronti · Operaismo · Vladimir LeninLeave a comment

Can you really be outside? This is the question I asked Mario the last time we talked (Francesco Matarrese | Greenberg and Tronti: Being Really Outside?). Today, the eighth of January, his important, extraordinary answer arrived. Now it is here, naturally, in the written struggle, in this paper. In art as in politics there is nothing other than struggle Can you really be outside? This is the question. I answer: yes. I am. I feel I am. For sensibility, even before for reason. This world, as it is, as it is historically organized and dominated, does not…

Georges Didi-Huberman | Light against Light

2020-06-282020-06-28 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Antonio Gramsci · Bertolt Brecht · Federico Garcia Lorca · Friedrich Nietzsche · Georg Simmel · Georges Didi-Huberman · Hannah Arendt · Jacques Rancière · Karl Marx · Maurice Merleau-Ponty · Michel Foucault · Miguel Abensour · Nathalie Heinich · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Rosalind Krauss · Theodor W. Adorno · Walter BenjaminLeave a comment

The disappearance of the fireflies—when the blinding glare of spotlights crushes the weak glimmer of glowworms in the night—is an excellent poetic allegory, a lovely “speaking image” on which to build something like a general poetics of light. This allegory has become familiar to us through the intervention of a great poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini.1 So we cannot be surprised that artists and thinkers have elevated this allegory in the field of aesthetics, and that it may lend itself as the title of an art exhibit. And yet its sole purpose is to ask, stubbornly, over and over…

Julian Murphet | “Wide as Targes Let Them Be,” or, How a Poem Is a Barricade

2020-06-242020-06-26 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Alain Badiou · Amy De'Ath · Andrea Brady · David Brazil · Denise Riley · Fred Moten · Juliana Spahr · Karl Marx · Keston Sutherland · Lisa Robertson · Lyn Hejinian · Max Horkheimer · Percy B. Shelley · Roman Jakobson · Sean Bonney · Silvia Federici · Stefano Harney · Theodor W. Adorno · Viktor Shklovsky · Walt HunterLeave a comment

The commons are what capitalism has always been committed to enclosing within its apparatus of accumulation.1 On their violently vacated place arise the motley privacies of individual contracts, rents, factories, banks, police, and all the interrelated paraphernalia of capital’s machinery of valuation and surplus. The commons themselves cannot be valued—they are beyond, prior to, value. Common land, common air, common water; but also, horticulture, animal husbandry, grain storage. The collective practices developed over millennia to harness the resources of our planet, and maximize human potentiality, form a sometimes vicious, sometimes virtuous feedback loop with the commons and dynamize their…

Stuart Hall | Culture and Power

2020-06-192020-06-19 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Antonio Gramsci · Cultural Studies · Jacques Derrida · Louis Althusser · Marxism · Michel Foucault · New Left Review · Stuart HallLeave a comment

Interviewed by Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal RP: How would you describe the current state of cultural studies in Britain in relation to its past? Hall: Itʼs a question of how far back you want to go, because everybody has a narrative about this and everybodyʼs narrative is different. There was certainly something distinctive about the founding moment in the 1960s, but even during that period, when it was mainly Birmingham, the field was transformed several times by some pretty major reconfigurations; and in any case, there was never simply one thing going on at any one time….

Mario Tronti | I am defeated

2020-06-142020-06-14 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: AUTONOMIA · Class Struggle · Communism · Mario Tronti · Marxism · OperaismoLeave a comment

Under the soles of his shoes, you can still recognise the dirt of history. “This is all that remains. A mix of straw and shit by which we delude ourselves into erecting cathedrals to the worker’s dream.“ Here’s a man, I say to myself, imbued with a consistency that bursts through in a total melancholy. It’s Mario Tronti, the most celebrated of the theorists of Operaismo. He has only recently finished writing a book on this subject: the origins of his thought, how it has changed and what it is today. I don’t know who will publish it (I…

Mario Tronti | Our Operaismo

2020-06-122020-06-14 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Alberto Asor Rosa · Antonio Gramsci · Antonio Negri · AUTONOMIA · Classe operaia · Gramscianism · Mario Tronti · Operaismo · Quaderni rossi · Raniero PanzieriLeave a comment

While most political forms and traditions of the European left cross-pollinated freely across national boundaries, the Italian operaismo of the 1960s was largely a sui generis experience in its time. Credited with a significant intellectual impact at home—transforming Italian sociology, through its project of worker inquiries, and yielding a heady if evanescent crop of theoretical journals: Quaderni rossi, Classe operaia, Angelus Novus, Contropiano—it had less immediate reverberation abroad than the larger current around Il Manifesto, whose cultural breadth and political consistency was of a different order. A condition for operaismo’s existence was the dramatic industrial expansion of the 1950s, within a culture already deeply coloured by two mass…

Amiri Baraka | STOP KILLER COPS

2020-06-032020-06-03 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Amiri Baraka · etc. · Marxism · Resistance · Revolution · SabotageLeave a comment

Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) During the Newark Riots, July 14-1967 [by Fred W. McDarrah] Shortly after the 1965 publication of his novel The System of Dante’s Hell, Amiri Baraka – then still named LeRoi Jones – wondered in an interview whether the energies he had put into writing it might not have been better used to ‘devise a method for blowing up the White House’. Sean Bonney STOP KILLER COPS Gun flash beats the child’s head in, maniac teeth dance in a bloody grin blue lies, badge confessions, yng dude dead just beyond his mama’s arms, In…

GWENDOLYN BROOKS | RIOT

2020-06-022020-06-06 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Gwendolyn Brooks · Riots1 Comment

RIOT A riot is the language of the unheard. —MARTIN LUTHER KING John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe, all whitebluerose below his golden hair, wrapped richly in right linen and right wool, almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff; almost forgot Grandtully (which is The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s, the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri. Because the Negroes were coming down the street. Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty (not like Two Dainty Negroes in…

Nanni Balestrini | “I write to you opposite the balcony from whence I contemplate the eternal light whose radiant fire slowly fades on the distant horizon”

2020-05-272020-07-07 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: AUTONOMIA · Communism · Nanni Balestrini · Potere Operaio · Revolution · SabotageLeave a comment

At one point in ‘Blackout’, Balestrini writes, “This poem should not be published because it is a political manifesto.” The historical events with which ‘Blackout’ is concerned and toward which it is critical began with the wave of conflicts in 1968 at the universities and factories and eventually spread throughout the West. The protests culminated in the “troubled autumn” of 1969, eventually involving the entire Italian working class in strikes, demonstrations, and acts of sabotage.

M. NourbeSe Philip | from ‘ZONG!’

2020-05-252020-10-02 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: M. NourbeSe PhilipLeave a comment

Zong! attempts to not-tell the story that must be told yet can’t be told – the story of the Zong massacre in 1781 in which the captain of the eponymous slave ship throws overboard some 150 enslaved Africans in order to collect payment of insurance monies. Through fragments of words and phrases a contrapuntal rhythm of word and silence is created as the story untells itself. Multilingual, multiethnic and multiracial, the globalised universe of the slave ship is a space of extreme contraction and restriction, it is rule-bound and closely girded and guarded by the law and religion. It is…

Yahya Hassan | Poems

2020-05-182020-05-19 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Yahya HassanLeave a comment

The Danish Palestinian poet, Yahya Hassan (1995-2020) is largely unknown in the Anglophone world and I am only aware of one or two of his earlier poems being translated into English. The nine I have selected here from his two poetry collections have not been translated before. […]

riots and/or poetics [5/2020]

2020-05-142020-05-31 Categories: Reading ListTags: Anna Mendelssohn · Audre Lord · Brendan Joyce · Carla Lonzi · Chris Nealon · Dziga Vertov Group · Endnotes · Heiner Müller · Jean-Luc Godard · Karl Marx · M. NourbeSe Philip · Mustapha Khayati · Nanni Balestrini · Sam Rivers · TiqqunLeave a comment

the high degree of social danger inherent in the choice of implements and the method of execution / expropriations and searches proletarian fires and corruption of the public good kidnappings and sequestering of persons beatings wounds / sufficient evidence of guilt can be inferred from the laws as formulated in the index books / carried out in houses and adjacent rooms in the middle of the night / 1) the copious documentation seized or acquired above all those parts that celebrate and program the violence and the armed struggle / the final goal being the general overthrow of the existing…

Tiqqun | The Cybernetic Hypothesis

2020-05-122020-05-12 Categories: WorksTags: Tiqqun1 Comment

“We can imagine a time when the machine of governance would replace — for better or worse, who knows? — the insufficiency of the minds and devices of politics that are customary today.” — Father Dominique Dubarle, Le Monde, December 28th, 1948 “There is a striking contrast between the conceptual refinement and dedication characterizing scientific and technical reasoning and the summary and imprecise style that characterizes political reasoning… One even asks oneself whether this is a kind of unsurpassable situation marking the definitive limits of rationality, or if one may hope that this impotence might be overcome someday and…

Katerina Gougou | A new translation of her book “Three Clicks Left”

2020-05-012020-05-02 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Katerina GogouLeave a comment

Three Clicks Left: first appeared as Τρία κλικ αριστερά (Kastaniotis Editions, 1978); translated from the Greek by ΔT and JC. Here: Free May Day Book #9: Cherish x Abolish Wage-labor capital and imperialism as the ultimate stage of capitalism betrayed revolutions Hey, comrade, we miss you so much . . . Time is worm-ridden nuclear tests, popular fronts, brothels (the Portuguese regime has fallen too) hyperproductive Catholics and the mafia have become multinationals, they forbid love, comrade. Like dogs on soccer fields agents climb our stairs anytime they want they can yank down our pants and fuck us peace…

Carla Lonzi (Part One)

2020-05-012020-05-02 Categories: Dérive · Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & Poetics · WorksTags: Allison Grimaldi Donahue · Carla Accardi · Carla Lonzi · Karolin Meunier · Pietro ConsagraLeave a comment

Karolin Meunier ON VAI PURE BY CARLA LONZI READING SESSION 1 AND 2. EDIT 2 How to introduce a book that I hardly know, written in a language that I do not speak? The following text is the product of two translation sessions, one with Paolo Caffoni and one with Federica Bueti, as we started to read Vai Pure (Now You Can Go), a conversation between the Italian feminist, writer, and art historian Carla Lonzi and her partner Pietro Consagra, conducted in Lonzi’s apartment in Rome 1980 before they broke up their relationship. Lonzi had used this method—that is…

Carla Lonzi (Part Two)

2020-05-012020-05-01 Categories: Dérive · Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: Carla Lonzi · Claire Fontaine · Federica Bueti · Giovanna ZapperiLeave a comment

FINDING RESONANCES WITH CARLA LONZI Giovanna Zapperi with Federica Bueti I am not quite sure when or how I came across Carla Lonzi’s writing. It happened in the casual manner in which sometimes one’s life changes in unexpected ways. Lonzi’s writing did not change my life, but it offered me an opportunity to reflect upon it. Lonzi’s feminist practice is a work of unearthing, undoing, and undressing that shakes up the foundation of our culture and beings. What has society made of me? Who am I? Lonzi ceaselessly questions her sense of self, the place society had assigned to…

[ACTION #3] BRITISH SOUNDS | NACH ANNA MENDELSSOHN

2020-04-302020-04-30 Categories: Poetry & Poetics · WorksTags: Anna Mendelssohn · Charles Baudelaire · Dziga Vertov Group · Jean-Luc Godard · Louis Auguste BlanquiLeave a comment

indem man [nämlich] aufdeckte, dass die Geschichte der Menschen, wie sie in den BÜCHERN zu finden ist, eben doch kein Text ist, welcher auf den Seiten eines BUCHES geschrieben steht; indem man nämlich entdeckte, dass die Wahrheit der Geschichte sich nicht aus ihrem manifesten Diskurs herauslesen lässt, weil der Text der Geschichte eben kein Text ist, in dem eine Stimme [der LOGOS] sprechen würde, sondern die [als solche] gänzlich unhörbare und unlesbare Notation der Auswirkungen einer Struktur von Strukturen Louis Althusser | Das Kapital lesen Diese Fähigkeit sich durch Literatur zu verwandeln Während du mitten im Gespräch den…

Pier Paolo Pasolini | Poetry [from “Transhumanize and Organize”]

2020-04-292020-11-01 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Pier Paolo PasoliniLeave a comment

Job Request Poetry made to order is a device. The device maker can produce many (only tiring himself out from the manual labor). The subject can, at times, be ironic: the device always is. Gone are the days when I, a voracious economizer, would spend everything, investing my money (a lot of it, since semen was my currency, and I always had an erection) buying up greatly undervalued sectors that would turn a profit some two or three centuries hence. I was Ptolemaic (being just a kid) and counted eternity, you guessed it, in centuries. I considered the…

Félix Guattari | Militant Incidences

2020-04-172020-04-19 Categories: Mille Plateaux · Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Antonin Artaud · Félix Guattari · Franz Kafka · Gilles Deleuze · Karl Marx · The Paris Commune · Vladimir LeninLeave a comment

1 On the Question of “Primordial Bureaucratic States”1 Since you have asked me to elaborate on my thoughts about stylites and other dendrites, I will take a stab at laying out some of the connections here. Mystics—Coptics, Syrians and other, express their desire to return to the roots, the roots of the primordial Empire: the Ur-State (there is a wordplay like this in the book by Lacarrière).2 In their own way, they’re championing the Asiatic State. The Egyptians and the sons of Trojan warriors never could take being fucked with and eliminated by barbarians and pirates like the Greeks,…

Tom Raworth | West Wind

2020-04-142020-04-14 Categories: Poetry & Poetics · VowelsTags: Tom RaworthLeave a comment

the moon is blacker than the sky memories move in abandoned armour corridors of such interest of mirrors and cut glass night a few lights outlining motion a city’s blue glow spikes from shadows fanned by airbrushed fingers restarting ink with a thumb ink dried on the pen distant as walking anywhere having your own body or the thought of imagination an unlimited closed system a flooded market only intellect between you and the image past dreams a different real with body an experience there a yellow building waits description fear’s tidy lines memory’s distance you know so you…

Keston Sutherland | Free Dissociation/Logic

2020-04-022020-10-30 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: Anna Mendelssohn · Friedrich Engels · Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel · Karl Marx · Louis Althusser · Ludwig Feuerbach · Marxism · Pierre MachereyLeave a comment

pladd. (you who say either) nothing can be clear when knowing the associations are read by unread people, exposées, exposures. new poems for old. groovy. associations and world societies of interactive growth. groan. a place full of untrained actors absorbing dimensions of cradling pain securing test periods of temperature change. sewing elbes to harare, scratch luck. nothing matches the theoretical tuck. nutmeg. primus stove. raised eyebrows. work sharing. retreat into the forest. the silver conifers. the crumbs. chums. biceps & musical hairs. plaesthetics. planna vanne. plin plor plon pladverbially plodding along with a net in sturdy boots, add…

[ACTION #2] PASOLINI L’ENRAGÉ

2020-03-292022-12-05 Categories: Poetry & Poetics · WorksTags: Pier Paolo PasoliniLeave a comment

Dieser Film ist auf brennendes Papier geschrieben, wird Pasolini über LA RABBIA sagen / die Verknüpfung politischer Vernunft mittels poetischen Gefühls [das ein entschieden marxistisches ist]. Während sein Zorn sich gegen die täglich gelebte Normalität des Notstands [stato d’emergenza] richtet, die vermessene Ausgestaltung & Verteilung des Mangels [eines dystopischen Beschleunigungsapparates], inmitten neu aufgeputzter Mumifizierungen [Details in rosa Schaumbildung], entdeckt er die Synthese von Politik & Dichtung, also Marx & Rimbaud in der Montage einiger Bilder aus dem Afrika des »Sehers« [zeitweise ein gedanklicher Rückzugsort], der politischen Kartographie Patrice Lumumbas. Die Aufteilung des Menschen in Herr und Knecht [in der…

[ACTION #1] HEINER MÜLLERS INSZENIERUNG DES ‘DER UNTERGANG DES EGOISTEN JOHANN FATZER’ VON BRECHT

2020-03-192020-03-20 Categories: Poetry & Poetics · WorksTags: Bertolt Brecht · Heiner MüllerLeave a comment

Ich mache keinen Krieg mehr, sondern ich gehe jetzt heim gradewegs, ich scheiße auf die Ordnung der Welt. Schwarmstrategien [Smart Mobs] unterhalb des Radars. Die Geschichte von vier Deserteuren im Jahr 1918 [der abgerissene Sehnerv der in seinem Versteck von Revolution träumt]. Etwas das sich innerhalb der Mauern ansammelt, sprechende Wände im »Toten Trakt« / ein diffuses Glühen. Projektion: Liebknecht Luxemburg Meinhof. Jetzt kehrt sich das Leben gegen die alten Gewohnheiten. Niemand sieht jetzt / niemand kehrt zurück / als wäre der Sinn nie entfernt worden / das Gefühl die Schädeldecke müßte eigentlich zerreissen. Die bösartige Leugnung eines Virus…

Félix Guattari | Genet Regained

2020-03-19 Categories: Mille Plateaux · Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Félix Guattari · Jean Genet · The Black PanthersLeave a comment

Perhaps the massacres at Chatila in September 1982 were not a turning point. They happened. I was affected by them. I talked about them. But while the act of writing came later, after a period of incubation, nevertheless in a moment like that or those when a single cell departs from its usual metabolism and the original link is created of a future, unsuspected cancer, or of a piece of lace, so I decided to write this book. The matter became more pressing when some political prisoners urged me not to travel to France. Anything not to do…

Bertolt Brecht | A lesson in sabotage

2020-03-152020-03-15 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Bertolt Brecht · Communism · Sabotage · Vladimir LeninLeave a comment

A lesson in sabotage Modifying a machine After the machine so that it won’t work without you So far improve it that you alone are good enough for it Give it a secret fault that you alone can repair Yes, alter it so that any other man will destroy it If the works it without you That’s what we call: modifying a machine. Modify your machine, saboteur! A lesson in sabotage Sabotage, mother of the factory Just as a mother knows what she has given birth to Wakes in the night at the baby’s slightest…

Jacques Rancière | The Fraternal Image; interviewed by Serge Daney & Serge Toubiana

2020-03-092020-03-09 Categories: Jacques Rancière · Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Collectif Cinélutte · Communism · Dziga Vertov Group · Film · Jacques Rancière · Jean-Luc Godard · Jean-Marie Straub / Danièle Huillet · Jean-Pierre Gorin · Karl Marx · Marxism · Resistance · RevolutionLeave a comment

Originally published as ‘L’Image Fraternelle‘, Cahiers du Cinéma, nos. 268-269, part of a special issue dedicated to “Images de Marque” (July-August 1976). Source: Diagonal Thoughts Cahiers: If we consider two films, ‘Milestones’ (Robert Kramer & John Douglas) and ‘Numéro Deux’ (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville), it seems to us that the first has a genealogical dimension that is completely absent in the second. We could say that ‘Milestones’ has a place in a history of “genres” (American cinema) while ‘Numéro Deux’ has a place in a history of “forms” (European cinema). The result is that ‘Milestones’, but perhaps…

The Power of Political, Militant, ‘Leftist’ Cinema. Interview with Jacques Rancière

2020-03-092020-03-09 Categories: Jacques Rancière · Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Bertolt Brecht · Communism · Dziga Vertov · Dziga Vertov Group · Film · Gilles Deleuze · Jacques Rancière · Javier Bassas Vila · Jean-Luc Godard · Jean-Marie Straub / Danièle Huillet · Jean-Pierre Gorin · Marxism · Medvedkin Group · Pedro Costa · Revolution · Serge Daney · Sergei EisensteinLeave a comment

By Javier Bassa Vila Jacques Rancière’s thought is undisciplined, at least in two different but interlinked senses. On the one hand, in the 1970s Rancière suggested a reading of Marxism that broke with the dominant interpretations of the time, specially with the scientifist Marxism imposed by Althusser (see La leçon d’Althusser, originally published in 1976 and re-published in 2012 by La Fabrique – and due to come out soon in Spanish). On the other hand, the broad interest that his thought has triggered at an international level seems to be also the consequence of another in-discipline: his reflections are…

Jacques Rancière | Circuit Rounds and Spirals [from ‘Proletarian Nights’]

2020-03-082022-11-06 Categories: Jacques Rancière · Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Jacques Rancière · Proletarian NightsLeave a comment

ANOTHER FEVER, ANOTHER EXILE. This printer has gone back out the door he just entered: “On the fifth day we got the sinister message—nothing more to do!”1 These mishaps are frequent in the typographer’s trade, one marked by the singular fact that a day at work is not necessarily a day of work: “It is pretty much only in the printshop that one is permitted the revolting and wicked abuse of hiring people and keeping them behind bars or under lock and key, without feeling obliged to give them any work or remuneration.”2 That is the lot of the…

riots and/or poetics [3/2020]

2020-03-032020-03-04 Categories: Reading ListTags: Alexandra Kollontai · Antonin Artaud · Danielle Collobert · Elena Vogman · Georges Didi-Huberman · Grégoire Chamayou · Kirill Medvedev · Lisa Robertson · Nathalie Quintane · Paul B. Preciado · Roger Gilbert-LecomteLeave a comment

Lisa Robertson | The Baudelaire Fractal I’d never had an idea for writing a novel before, though I’ve been curious about the form. I’m a poet who has always loved writing prose. Essay writing and the writing of verse have been overlapping and interchangeable activities, and the shape of the sentence has always been at the core of my writing practice. This Baudelaire idea was very funny to me, and it kept opening up more pathways of inquiry the more time I spent with it. It was a way to write a bildungsroman in the feminine; it opened questions of…

artaud-theatre-du-vieux-colombier*.com

2020-02-272020-02-28 Categories: Poetry & Poetics · WorksTags: Antonin ArtaudLeave a comment

Die wahre Geschichte von Artaud-Mômo, tête-à-tête. Als würde man ein Bild unterhalb des Augenlids verschliessen. Gewisse Dispositionen zu entziffern, die ausschliesslich Teil eines poetischen Feldes sind [weil Poesie immer Opposition ist]. Abrechnung mit denen, die ihn 9 Jahre in einer geschlossenen Anstalt einsperren //3 Jahre davon in Einzelhaft// während der Zeit seiner Internierung in Sotteville-lès-Rouen [Oktober 1937 – März 1938] systematische Versuche der Intoxikation [vergessen die 40.000 Toten //ein Index verschämter Skelette// der psychiatrischen Anstalten Frankreichs während der deutschen Besatzung]. Sozialer Vampirismus, willkürlich konstruierte Diagnosen, Elektro- & Insulinschocks, weil er sich einer Logik entzieht, die von einzelnen Elementen auf…

Sean Bonney | Notes on Baudelaire

2020-02-24 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Charles Baudelaire · Sean Bonney1 Comment

“I will get a map of London to see where Hackney is” – Ed Dorn “. . . left the ruins, climbed out from under the white stones” – Amiri Baraka (((1))) — think ghost shit as a set of rooftops imposed on other systems of twitching in public. our language is also that debased. think cancer as radical nostalgia for legitimate ruins like the letter I. (((2))) — or put it this way – the coiled voice interferes, & by the fourth day colonies of brightly flourescent cells can be seen gathering…

Sean Bonney | Cancer: Poems after Katerina Gogou

2020-02-242020-11-10 Categories: Poetry & Poetics · VowelsTags: Katerina Gogou · Sean BonneyLeave a comment

Dear Katerina, Yes I know, things are bad for us all these days. I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve disappeared over the past few months. There’s an uneasy nausea settled into the basic awareness of, well, everything. Its not even the news or the weather. Even the raw evidence of our senses – sounds of machinery outside the window, smell of diesel and gas, the elevated railway, bird-song etc – has become sinister. The sunset is a warning. The ticking of the clock a threat. Everything has combined into a pitched malevolent force…

Tongo Eisen-Martin

2020-02-212020-02-22 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & Poetics · VowelsTags: Antonio Negri · Michael Hardt · Tongo Eisen-Martin2 Comments

Faceless A tour guide through your robbery He also is Cigarette saying, “look what I did about your silence.” Ransom water and box spring gold –This decade is only for accent grooming, I guess Ransom water and box spring gold –The corner store must die War games, I guess All these tongues rummage junk The start of mass destruction Begins and ends In restaurant bathrooms That some people use And other people clean “you telling me there’s a rag in the sky?” -waiting for you. yes- we’ve written we’ve set a stage We should have fit in. warehouse…

Alberto Toscano | Mayakovsky at Mirafiori: Operaismo and the Negation of Poetry

2020-02-182021-08-11 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: Alberto Asor Rosa · Alberto Toscano · Antonio Gramsci · Communism · Franco Fortini · Jacques Rancière · Leo Trotsky · Mario Tronti · Nicholas Gorlov · Operaismo · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Potere Operaio · Revolution · Viktor Shklovsky · Vladimir Lenin · Vladimir MayakovskyLeave a comment

Though many of the watchwords and guiding axioms of Italian operaismo and its successors have percolated into critical discourse on aesthetic production, and multiple analyses of its intersections with visual art and architecture in the 1960 and 1970s have been advanced, little has been made of its specific approach to the question of poetics. This chapter aims partially to correct this tendency by exploring the arguments about the unhappy marriage between avant-garde poetry and communist politics sketched out in some interventions by the key literary critic and historian in the collective of militant intellectuals that made up ‘classic’ operaismo,…

Fred Moten | resistances, impromptu

2020-02-082020-02-08 Categories: Poetry & Poetics · VowelsTags: Fred MotenLeave a comment

resistances, impromptu with Tania Bruguera and Fernando Zalamea’n’em When we reverse engineered the movement, we found the moment it became the movement was the moment we stopped moving. A body politic for newly born political bodies in the drawing of one last breath by one. Pear trees full of rivers all tied up in sugar ditch; pulpit gutbucket molasses still in still, strong and good, but gone. I was born in friction, alabama. I voted for drone chalkline. I died in fraction, california. I remain a posthumous citizen. So, resist the reduction of non-meaning. Resistance in poetry…

Bhanu Kapil

2020-02-072020-02-07 Categories: Poetry & Poetics · VowelsTags: Bhanu KapilLeave a comment

What is Ban? Ban is a mixture of dog shit and bitumen (ash) scraped off the soles of running shoes: Puma, Reebok, Adidas. Looping the city, Ban is a warp of smoke. To summarize, she is the parts of something re-mixed as air: integral, rigid air, circa 1972-1979. She’s a girl. A black girl in an era when, in solidarity, Caribbean and Asia Brits self-defined as black. A black (brown) girl encountered in the earliest hour of a race riot, or what will become one by nightfall. April 23rd, 1979: by morning, ant-Nazi campaigner, Black Peach, will be…

Lisa Robertson

2020-02-062020-02-07 Categories: Poetry & Poetics · VowelsTags: Lisa RobertsonLeave a comment

go Venus go vernal go turning go darling by folding sky by buoyant kiss by plenty (I lie in bed and read Marx) by secret breezes twisting, contriving by boulevards by cattle by springle a springald a springet rise agile from water, go down modern to the natal turn by rapacious meetings by luminous flowers – take with you the eagerness of my submission to the proliferate material discipline also called speech as the political feeling lusts for public light by engorged rivers by populated foliage by veering campus the cry of desire a morning blackbird in the city…

José Revueltas | So that Mayakovsky’s Suicide not be Repeated

2020-02-032020-02-03 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Communism · José Revueltas · Marxism · Vladimir MayakovskyLeave a comment

While in Havana for a period of six months in 1961, working at a worthy task at the Cinematography Institute alongside the best youth of Cuba’s film industry, I once suggested to a small group of young intellectuals that we form a club or literary circle to debate the problems a writer must face under socialism. The circle, club, or whatever would develop from that idea, would have the following theme – theme and program at the same time: “so that Mayakovsky’s suicide not be repeated.” The idea did not prosper, although not for any weighty reason. That is,…

Sergei Eisenstein | Notes for a Film of ‘Capital’

2020-01-222020-01-22 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Karl Marx · Sergei EisensteinLeave a comment

October 12, 1927. It’s settled: we’re going to film CAPITAL, on Marx’s scenario—the only logical solution. N.B. Additions . . . those are clips pasted to the wall of montage. October 13, 1927. . . . To extend the line (and to explicate it, step by step) of dialectical development in my work. Let us recall: 1. STRIKE. The order—educational and methodological film on the methods and processes of class and of underground work. Whence—serial film structure and detachment from a specific place (in the project there’s a whole series of escapes, prison life, rebellion, body-searchers, etc.). 2. POTEMKIN. I’m emphasizing,…

‘JEDE REVOLUTION IST EIN WÜRFELWURF’ / EVERY REVOLUTION IS A THROW OF DICE

2020-01-142021-11-27 Categories: Poetry & Poetics · WorksLeave a comment

ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY DAVID VICHNAR ALIENIST 7 1 Die Geschichte eines Typen der Kassiber für Pierre Goldman, Ulrike Meinhof und Toni Negri schmuggelt 2 Kein Schibboleth, das ihm nicht über die Lippen käme, ein linguistisches Chamäleon, mal Jude, dann wieder Anarchist 3 Von den ersten Gesetzen der Könige und Propheten (sowie der Gefängnisinsassen) bis in die Gegenwart sind Mauern und Wände das Fundament politischer Botschaften 4 Er glaubt an die Dichtung, aber die Dichtung ist unzulässig Im übrigen gibt es sie nicht 5 Der Text ist ohne Geheimnis Chaotisch und delirant 6 Eine…

Velimir Khlebnikov | The Law of Generations

2020-01-122020-01-13 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Velimir KhlebnikovLeave a comment

Autobiographical Note I was born on October 28, 1885, in the camp of Mongolian Buddhist nomads—Khanate Headquarters in the steppe—the dried bottom of a vanished part of the Caspian (the sea of 40 names). During Peter the Great’s travels on the Volga, an ancestor of mine presented him with a goblet of coins gotten by brigandage. I have Armenian blood i my veins (the Alabors), also Cossack blood (the Verbitskys), whose special nature is evident in the fact that Przhewalski, Mikluktha-Maklai and other explorers were descendants of the children of the Sech. I belong to the place…

“Ardent Hope” – Interview with Jean-Luc Godard – Cahiers du cinéma

2020-01-052020-01-05 Categories: WorksTags: Alain Badiou · andré Bazin · Anne-Marie Miéville · Arthur Rimbaud · Charles Baudelaire · Charles Péguy · Charlie Hebdo · Chris Marker · Communism · Ernst Lubitsch · Film · Fritz Lang · Fritz Mauthner · Gilets Jaunes · Jacques Rivette · Jean-Luc Godard · Maurice Blanchot · Maurice Pialat · Peter Weiss · Revolution · Robert Bresson · The Aesthetics of ResistanceLeave a comment

Source: KINO SLANG JEAN-LUC GODARD: …we’re not going to talk about the Théâtre des Amandiers. I’ve no idea what happened there. Nicole Brenez is taking care of it. I wanted to see you, actually. It’s a bit like seeing the great grandchildren of Cahiers du cinéma. I was curious to see what became of them. CAHIERS DU CINÉMA: We were very moved, stunned even, by the film at Cannes, especially the whole ending with “ardent hope” that gave a meaning to this journey through the ruins. The entire first section on the eternal remake of war, then Joseph de…

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers | What is the Meaning of the Avant-garde’s Death?

2019-12-202020-01-10 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: Antonin Artaud · Dante Alighieri · Francis Ponge · Georges Bataille · Guy Debord · Jacques Derrida · Jacques Lacan · Karl Marx · Lautréamont · Mehdi Belhaj Kacem · Michel Foucault · Philippe Sollers · Pierre Guyotat · Tel Quel · Vladimir LeninLeave a comment

FIRST PUBLISHED: DIAPHANES How could Dante be avant-garde? Mehdi Belhaj Kacem: Mr. Sollers, for 23 years you were the editor of Tel Quel, doubtless the very last important literary review that can be considered “avant-garde.” It published some of the biggest “avant-garde” writers of its time, like Pierre Guyotat, Maurice Roche, Jean-Jacques Schuhl and yourself, as well as still-unknown academics like Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette. You also published Pierre Boulez and Jean-Luc Godard, who, like the writers and thinkers I just mentioned, were the leading avant-garde figures in their respective fields. In 1983 you left Les Éditions du Seuil,…

Nanni Balestrini | Wer das hier liest, braucht sich vor nichts mehr zu fürchten (Interview)

2019-12-172021-06-10 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: AUTONOMIA · Nanni Balestrini · Potere Operaio · Red BrigadesLeave a comment

Der 1935 in Mailand geborene Schriftsteller Nanni Balestrini gehört zu den wenigen, die, obwohl sie im normalen Literaturbetrieb anerkannt sind, weiterhin über die revolutionäre Bewegung der 60er und 70er schreiben. Selbst Aktivist der sozialen und Klassenkämpfe der Jahre 1968-80 in Italien, hat Balestrini alle seine Romane über die Geschichte der radikalen Linken geschrieben. Seine Bücher handeln von den Arbeiterkämpfen bei FIAT, von den Ursprüngen des bewaffneten Kampfs oder von der Jugendbewegung (Autonomia) Mitte der 70er. Sein Standpunkt bleibt dabei klar, an der subjektiven Sicht der Rebellierenden rüttelt Balestrini nicht. Ihm geht es, auch wenn er nach eigenem Bekunden, „keine…

D.S. Marriott | Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde + Poems

2019-12-092019-12-09 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Aimé Césaire · Amiri Baraka · D.S. Mariott · Karl MarxLeave a comment

What is “avant-garde poetry”? is a question long on answers, if short on consensus. On the one hand, the notion of the avant-garde is invariably seen as a historical category. The history of modernism and the authority of certain authors converge here in a kind of hermeneutic presumption, as if the meanings and values of both constituted readymades. The avant-garde poet emerges as a figure (invariably male, invariably white) that history and culture no longer need to put in question. But on the other hand, those European and American avant-gardes posed a question about the relation between the reading…

Walter Benjamin | The Author as Producer

2019-12-052019-12-26 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: Bertolt Brecht · Communism · Marxism · Sergei Tretyakov (Tretiakov) · Walter BenjaminLeave a comment

II s’agit de gagner les intellectuels “la classe ouvriere, en leur faisant prendre conscience de l’identité de leurs de-marches spirituelles et de leurs conditions de producteur. – Ramon Fernandez You recall how Plato treats the poets in his projected State. In the interest of the community, he does not allow them to live there. He had a high idea of the power of poetry. But he considered it destructive, superfluous – in a perfect community, needless to say. Since then, the question of the poet’s right to exist has not often been stated with the same insistence;…

Devin Fore | Soviet Factography: Production Art in an Information Age (Sergei Tret’iakov)

2019-12-052021-02-18 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Factography · Guy Debord · Jurij Tynianov · Laszlo Moholy-Nagy · LEF · Sergei Tretyakov · Viktor ShklovskyLeave a comment

If facts destroy theory, then all the better for theory. —Viktor Shklovsky, “In Defense of the Sociological Method,” 1927 Any discussion of factography first has to deal with the conspicuous strangeness of the word “factography” itself, an awkward and selfconsciously technicist term coined in Russia in the latter half of the 1920s to designate a certain aesthetic practice preoccupied with the inscription of facts. Those who are familiar with contemporaneous avant-garde movements in other countries and who may also be skeptical of the early Soviet zeal for linguistic invention will wonder if factography is not simply another word…

Best Books of 2019

2019-12-022019-12-02 Categories: Reading ListTags: Adelaide Ivánova · Anne Boyer · Antonin Artaud · Chantal Akerman · Fred Moten · Jay Bernard · Jean-Marie Gleize · Jerome Rothenberg · Karl Marx · Mario Tronti · Marion Bell · Miyó Vestrini · Sean Bonney · Stuart Hall · Zaina AlsousLeave a comment

Miyó Vestrini | Grenade in Mouth Those who write are not even of a race. Nor a caste. Nor a class. Nor are they one. They ruin the point of living, like women in a world of science. Behind thick lenses, the court is never dull. They have all privileges: from philosophy up to anger, passing through conjugal relations, and the length of the paragraphs. Between the rights of man it is figured that the writer should write largely for himself first, then for the others, with a purpose well or poorly defined: to flood the window displays,…

PORNO-TEO-KOLOSSAL ((nach Pasolini))

2019-11-292021-01-24 Categories: WorksTags: Dante Alighieri · Friedrich Hölderlin · Katerina Gogou · Peter Weiss · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Ulrike Meinhof · Vladimir Lenin · Vladimir MayakovskyLeave a comment

Die Verweigerung ist schon immer eine essenzielle Geste gewesen. Denk nur an die Heiligen, die Eremiten, aber auch an die Intellektuellen. Die Wenigen, die die Geschichte gemacht haben, das waren diejenigen, die Nein gesagt haben, nicht die Höflinge oder die Diener der Kardinäle. Pier Paolo Pasolini I. 5:11 am Nachmittag: das Gefühl, dass der Geist, das Bewußtsein wie ein Sprengsatz explodieren / ich schwöre :: die einfachsten Bewegungen des Körpers nicht mehr zu kontrollieren sind und der Blick beginnt sich um sich selbst zu drehen — Einverständnis ist eine Falle. Zeit und Raum ineinander…

Sean Bonney | Heroes

2019-11-212019-12-11 Categories: WorksTags: Militant Poetics · Sean Bonney1 Comment

Heroes 1. Mustapha Khayati, I got a question. When you were writing your dictionary, did you have any sense which words might be snitches and which might be scabs. While the Eiffel Tower continues to mean what it does, sending out signals no-one could ever translate, these questions continue to matter. Mustapha Khayati, say something. Fascism does what it does without a need for language. 2. Jean Genet, if alive today, would be somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, entwined with all the other human bones. No-one would say his name. His fingerprints would be stored in an…

Pasolini on de Sade: An Interview during the Filming of ‘Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom’

2019-11-132019-11-13 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Lautréamont · Maurice Blanchot · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Pierre Klossowski · Sade · TeoremaLeave a comment

by Gideon Bachmann It is reputed that Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, spent only 37 days, writing from seven to ten every evening, in composing his masterpiece, the unsurpassed 120 Days of Sodom, the first psychopathia sexualis ever written, and preserved only in fragmentary form. More than half of what has been left are just lists of perversions, lacking that deep sociological and political insight which characterizes most of the Marquis’s other work, and which assured him his ranking place in prerevolutionary French literature. Nobody has ever used a de Sade book as material for a film. It is therefore all…

Roland Barthes | Sade – Pasolini

2019-11-12 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Pier Paolo Pasolini · Roland Barthes · Sade · Salò · TeoremaLeave a comment

SALÒ does not please fascists. On another side, since Sade has become for some of us a kind of precious patrimony, many cry out: Sade has nothing to do with fascism! Finally, the remainder, neither fascist nor Sadean, have an immutable and convenient doctrine that finds Sade boring. Pasolini’s film therefore can win no one’s adherence. However, quite obviously, it hits us somewhere. Where? In SALÒ, what touches is the letter. Pasolini has shot his scenes to the letter, the way that they had been described (I do not say “written”) by Sade; hence these scenes have the sad, frozen and rigorous beauty…

Harun Farocki | Peter Weiss On Display (The Aesthetics of Resistance)

2019-11-102020-07-10 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · WorksTags: Harun Farocki · Peter Weiss · The Aesthetics of ResistanceLeave a comment

We were visiting Peter Weiss in Stockholm on 17th and 18th June 1979. We talked about his work on the book The Aesthetics of Resistance. Two volumes have already been published and P.W. is currently on the third. He has been working on it for over ten years and not one sentence is unfounded. Weiss has performed an unbelievable amount of research, studied the lives of people serving as models down to the tiniest detail, and attaches great importance to visiting the scenes of the action. The film gives an impression of his work. Harun Farocki, 1979 Harun Farocki:…

Pier Paolo Pasolini | A Desperate Vitality

2019-11-012020-10-07 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Jean-Luc Godard · Marxism · Pier Paolo PasoliniLeave a comment

I (Draft, in a cursus in present-day jargon, of what has just transpired: Fiumicino, the old castle, and a first real idea of death.) As in a film by Godard: alone in a car speeding down the motorways of Latin neo-capitalism — returning from the airport — [where Moravia stayed behind, a pure soul with his bags] alone, “racing his Alfa Romeo“ in sunlight so heavenly it cannot be put into rhymes not elegiac — the finest sun we’ve had all year — as in a film by Godard: under a sun bleeding motionless unique, the canal of the…

Danielle Collobert | It Then

2019-10-282020-05-19 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Danielle CollobertLeave a comment

I met Danielle Collobert in a cafe on the boulevard Saint-Germain in March or April 1958, at which time she was not yet eighteen. We immediately spoke of the essentials: writing, death. Theses two things—or is it one single thing—seemed to occupy her exclusively and with such rigor that one felt from the outset she would proceed in this single and unique direction, that no one could divert her or deceive her as to its end. At most, out of love for her, one could hope, idiotically of course, that sooner or later she would lose track, that her…

Jerome Rothenberg | Revolutionary Propositions & A Personal Manifesto

2019-10-172019-11-05 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Jerome Rothenberg · Manifesto · Revolution1 Comment

1) I will change your mind;
2) any means (=methods) to that end;
3) to oppose the “devourers” = bureaucrats, system-makers, priests, etc (W. Blake);
4) “& if thou wdst understand that wch is me, know this: all that I have sd I have uttered playfully—& I was by no means ashamed of it.” (J. C. to disciples, The Acts of St. John)

Notes on Events ((Lamentation))

2019-10-152019-10-16 Categories: Poetry & Poetics · WorksLeave a comment

Published by: Burning House Press (Guest Editor: Johannes Göransson) “The language of tragedy for the Greeks is lethally factive, because the body it seizes hold of does really kill” — Friedrich Hölderlin Without a doubt this is the most repulsive of repulsive moments :: it’s no longer enough to say :: the goal is the abolition of capitalist realism or to hammer verses on the door of a cell the way you drive a nail into a wall / when disinhibition is rampant among the elite / they engineer new humiliations daily/ & the crumbs left over…

Jazra Khaleed | Poems (“Smashing Fascist Heads”)

2019-10-152019-11-09 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Jazra KhaleedLeave a comment

REFRAIN My name is J-A-Z-R-A Here I’m illegal, in spite of the Left I was born in the dusk of the West And this evening is just splendid For smashing fascist heads TRANSLATED BY SARAH MCCANN SOMEWHERE IN ATHENS Somewhere in Athens December the Sixth The kid will kill the cop before sunup Somewhere in Athens December the Seventh On the streets the banks are burnt one by one Somewhere in Athens December the Eighth Let’s cut a rug in Parliament’s rubble Somewhere in Athens December the Ninth The poets in the streets eulogize fires…

Esther Leslie | Fear Eats the Soul: Walter Benjamin & Baader Meinhof

2019-10-082020-03-17 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Baader Meinhof Group · Bertolt Brecht · Esther Leslie · Harun Farocki · RAF · Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Theodor W. Adorno · Walter Benjamin1 Comment

Neither of the figures in my title – Walter Benjamin and The Baader Meinhof Group – are in any direct way associated with 1968 – indeed each brackets it in time. The one, Benjamin, was long dead by the time of the student and worker revolts, that would undoubtedly have thrilled him, even if they did not thrill his old friend Adorno, who called in the police on his revolting students. Benjamin’s adult thought emerges in the years of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and it reaches its final formulation in the dark days of Nazi rule, his death occurring…

riots and/or poetics [10/2019]

2019-09-302019-09-30 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Albert Ayler · Anne Boyer · Antonin Artaud · César Vallejo · David Rattray · Denise Riley · Dionne Brand · Elvira Hernandez · Irmgard Emmelhainz · Jacob Rogozinski · Jean-Luc Godard · Jodie Dean · Joseph Jarman · Sean Bonney · Steve Dalachinsky · William Rowe · Zaina AlsousLeave a comment

TRILCE XXVII That flood frightens me, / good memory, strong sir, implacable / cruel sweetness. It frightens me. / This house does me complete good, complete / place for this not knowing where to be. // Let’s not go in. It frightens me, this favour / of returning by minutes, by blown up bridges. / I’m not going ahead, sweet sir, / brave memory, sad / singing skeleton. // What content, of this haunted house, / gives me deaths by mercury, and blocks / with lead my conduits / to sheer reality. // The flood that doesn’t know how…

Antonin Artaud | Van Gogh the man suicided by society

2019-09-232020-10-02 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Antonin Artaud · Vincent Van GoghLeave a comment

Apropos of Van Gogh, magic and spells: all the people who, for two months now, went to see the exhibition of his works at the Musée de l’Orangerie, are they really sure they remember everything they did and all that happened to them every evening of the months of February, March, April and May 1946? Was there not a certain evening when the atmosphere of the air and the streets became liquid, gelatinous, unstable, and when the light from the stars and the heavenly vault disappeared? And Van Gogh who painted the café in Arles was not there. But I…

Miyó Vestrini | It’s a Good Machine

2019-09-192020-07-24 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Anne Boyer · Cassandra Gillig · Miyó VestriniLeave a comment

THE TRIP I’ll tell you how I know what I am: they say that I was conceived without sin my cries were answered with other cries people went on vacation and left me gave away my New Year’s clothes disowned the shame when I was absent I had no mourners for my trespasses threw breadcrumbs at watery graves placated my own desires held the ground between myself and the penumbra bought a dog and let it out paid César Vallejo to love me passed without glory or pain beneath the Mirabeau Bridge I don’t have a single friend…

George L. Jackson | Blood In My Eye

2019-09-122019-09-13 Categories: DériveTags: Angela Davis · Communism · George Jackson · RevolutionLeave a comment

My dear only surviving son, I went to Mount Vernon August 7th, 1971, to visit the grave site of my heart your keepers murdered in cold disregard for life. His grave was supposed to be behind your grandfather’s and grandmother’s. But I couldn’t find it. There was no marker. Just mowed grass. The story of our past. I sent the keeper a blank check for a headstone — and two extra sites— blood in my eye!!! Amerikan Justice For their freedom to prey on the world’s people . . . whatever the cost in blood. …

Etel Adnan | MAYAKOVSKY

2019-09-09 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Etel Adnan · Revolution · Vladimir Mayakovsky1 Comment

1 Mayakovsky, where are you? I can go to the train station and pick you up. we can speak of the weather on the way back, and if you’re coming by bus I can wait for you at the terminal and in case that you found enough money to have taken the plane I will get up early and wait for you. Don’t tell me dear Vladimir that you lost my address, and that you won’t come, not tomorrow, not ever, I still wait for you because we’re feeling miserable here, and elsewhere, in Europe or in California. We…

Karen Brodine | Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking

2019-09-022022-10-26 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: David Buuck · Karen Brodine · Marxist-feminism · queer literature · Sam Solomon1 Comment

Karen Brodine: Feminist Poet and Revolutionary KAREN BRODINE was barely 40 years old when she died of cancer on October 18, 1987. Her death was a shock, a misery, an abrupt and unwarranted end to an exceptionally dynamic and productive life. The horrible thing is that Karen’s death was unnecessary. Cancer killed her because the medical profession was too profit-motivated, too sexist, to catch it in time, when they could and should have. And she was mad as hell at the medical automatons who prescribed the massive doses of poison known as chemotherapy when an ounce of prevention could have saved…

Félix Guattari | Schizoanalytic Cartographies

2019-08-292022-03-16 Categories: Mille PlateauxTags: Deleuze & Guattari · Félix Guattari · Gilles DeleuzeLeave a comment

Schizoanalytic Cartographies represents Félix Guattari’s most important later work and most systematic and detailed account of his theoretical position and his therapeutic ideas. // Andrew Goffey identifies the text as being “perhaps one of the last big books of French ‘theory’ – that extraordinary efflorescence of thinking that occurred in the wake of the events of 1968 …

Félix Guattari and Radio Alice

2019-08-162019-08-17 Categories: Mille PlateauxTags: A/traverso · AUTONOMIA · Communism · Félix Guattari · Franco "bifo" Berardi · Molecular Revolution · Radio Alice · RevolutionLeave a comment

La Radio Siamo Noi Félix Guattari | Millions and Millions of Potential Alices Félix Guattari | Popular free Radio etc. ⇒ PDF Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology ⇒ PDF Félix and Alice in Wonderland: The Encounter between Félix Guattari and Franco Berardi and the Post-Media Era Michael Goddard Introduction: The Enigma of the Post-Media Era Towards the end of his life, Felix Guattari made several enigmatic suggestions about the emergence of a Post-Media era that would have the effect of displacing or at least decentring the hegemony of the mass media as we still know them today. Some of these…

Jean-Marie Straub / Danièle Huillet | Hölderlin, That Is Utopia

2019-08-072019-08-07 Categories: DériveTags: Communism · Film · Friedrich Hölderlin · Jean-Luc Godard · Jean-Marie Straub / Danièle Huillet · Theodor W. AdornoLeave a comment

Jean-Marie Straub: Hölderlin experienced the birth of the Wilhelmine Age. He was a young poet, full of high-flying plants; he said that himself. He was twenty-eight years old when he wrote The Death of Empedocles. In Germany between 1789 and 1798 all kinds of things had happened. Things had gone well for the ruling class, less well for other people. Büchner had had to flee, and some others as well . . . Hölderlin dreamed of the revolution—let’s call it that, even if the word is no longer in fashion today—a revolution that did not take place. As an…