[ACTION #3] BRITISH SOUNDS | NACH ANNA MENDELSSOHN

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…

Best Books of 2018

Anne Boyer | A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (Ugly Duckling Presse) Leslie Kaplan | Excess — The Factory (Commune Editions) Mark Fisher | K-Punk (Repeater) Bertolt Brecht | The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (W.W. Norton) Wendy Trevino | Cruel Fiction (Commune Editions) Lola Ridge | To the Many (Little Island Press) Auguste Blanqui | The Blanqui Reader | Political Writings (Verso) Jackie Wang | Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e)) Roberto Ohrt, Wolfgang Scheppe | The Most Dangerous Game (Merve Verlag) Arthur Rimbaud | Korrespondenz, Briefe, Texte und Dokumente (Matthes & Seitz Berlin) Nathalie Quintane | Un oeil en moins (P.O.L.) Fred…

riots and/or poetics [10/2018]

“History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, escaped to the desert, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light. Even babies refuse, and the elderly also. Animals refuse: at the zoo they gaze through Plexiglas, fling feces at human faces. Classes refuse. The poor throw their lives onto barricades, and workers slow the line. Enslaved people have always refused, poisoning the feasts and aborting the embryos, and the diligent, flamboyant jaywalkers assert themselves against traffic as the first and foremost visible daily lesson…

Theses on the Paris Commune | Guy Debord, Attila Kotányi & Raoul Vaneigem

The Commune represents the only implementation of a revolutionary urbanism to date — attacking on the spote the petrified signs of the dominant organization of life, understanding social space in political terms, refusing to accept the innoncence of any monument. Anyone who disparages this attack as some “lumpenproletarian nihilism,“ some “irresponsibility of the pétroleuses,“ should specify what he believes to be of positive value in the present society and worth preserving (it will turn out to be almost everything).

Two Poets — Ed Dorn & Sean Bonney

Ed Dorn “He knew that just to wake up in the morning is to be political.“ Jennifer Dunbar “No poet has been more painfully, movingly, political“, writes Robert Creeley: “the range and explicit register of Ed Dorn’s ability to feel how it actually is to be human, in a given place and time, is phenomenal.“ “Ed Dorn (1929-1999) was born and grew up in Eastern Illinois, on the banks of the river Embarrass (a tributary of the Wabash). He never knew his father. His mother was of French-Canadian ancestry, his maternal grandfather a half-Indian Quebecois railroad man (“master pipefitter in…

Louis Auguste Blanqui; Eternity by the Stars

Louis Auguste Blanqui Eternity by the Stars I. The universe – The infinite The universe is eternal in time and space – eternal, boundless and indivisible.1 All bodies, animate and inanimate, solid, liquid and gaseous, are linked by the very things that separate them. Everything holds together. Without the astral bodies [astres], only space would remain, absolutely empty no doubt, but retaining the three dimensions, length, width and depth –– indivisible and unlimited space. Pascal once said, in his magnificent style: ‘The universe is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’2 Could there be a more striking…

Sean Bonney | COMETS & BARRICADES: INSURRECTIONARY IMAGINATION IN EXILE

  Sean Bonney | COMETS & BARRICADES: INSURRECTIONARY IMAGINATION IN EXILE Let every word indicate the most frightening of distances, it would still take billions of centuries, talking at one word per second, to express a distance which is only an insignificance when it comes to infinity. ¹ Louis Auguste Blanqui; Eternity by the Stars Imprisoned on the day before the declaration of the Paris Commune, in a cell in the Fort du Taureau, ‘an ellipse-shaped fortified island lying half a mile outside of the rock shores of Morlaix at a place where, after briefly morphing into the English Channel, the…

Jacques Rancière; The Radical Gap

 The Radical Gap A preface to Auguste Blanqui, Eternity by the Stars Jacques Rancière I leaf through the programme and learn that the very stars themselves – which, I am irmly convinced, should be but rarely disturbed, and even then only for high reasons of meditative gravity … – the very stars are present!1 Mallarmé penned these ironic lines about a ballet performance at the Eden Theatre. Nevertheless, such stellar lights seem as natural to the choreographer as they do to the poet. This is less obviously the case when the one disturbing the stars is a revolutionary leader. Of…

Best books of 2017

Nanni Balestrini; Blackout / Commune Editions Heriberto Yépez; Transnational Battle Field / Commune Editions Attila József; Liste freier Ideen / roughbooks Ursula Andkjaer Olsen; Third-Millennium Heart / Action Books / Broken Dimanche Press Sean Bonney; Ghosts / Materials Georges Didi-Huberman; Die Namenlosen zwischen Licht und Schatten / Fink Pierre Guyotat; In der Tiefe / diaphanes Aimé Césaire; The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire / Wesleyan University Press The Invisible Committee; Now / Semiotext(e) Mark Fisher; The Weird and the Eerie / Repeater François Dosse; Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari / Turia + Kant Harun Farocki; Zehn, zwanzig, dreißig, vierzig. Fragment einer Autobiografie /…