Alain Badiou | ‘We Have to Break Bourgeois Right’

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  In June 2017, Alain Badiou was invited by the ‘Conséquences’ seminar to give a lecture with the title ‘What does a politics outside the state involve?’ The written text was subsequently published by Fayard. Three comrades spoke with him in a preparatory discussion for this lecture; the following text is a partial transcription. Taking stock of the uprisings of recent years on a world scale (from Greece to Egypt, as well as France), Badiou observed that a stumbling block everywhere is the absence of a strategic hypothesis on the question of the state, capable of overcoming the impasse of…

Kristin Ross | Against commemoration: Unearthing the lives and afterlives of May ’68

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Thread:In May ’68 and its afterlives (2002), you described France’s ‘68 as a “union of intellectual contestation with workers struggles.” Left formations today struggle to create programs of action that unite peoples of different sectors of society. What should the Left know about the political struggles that unfolded in May 1968 in France? What thought and action enabled the coalescence of forces in ‘68? Ross: Well, that changes all the time, doesn’t it? The past is very unpredictable and its ability to connect with our current situations is often indirect and somewhat aleatory. When I wrote my book, for example, at…

Tiqqun | This Is Not a Program

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“’77 wasn’t like ’68. ’68 was anti-establishment, ’77 was radically alternative. This is why the ‘official’ version portrays ’68 as good and ’77 as bad; in fact, ’68 was co-opted whereas ’77 was annihilated. This is why, unlike ’68, ’77 could never make for an easy object of celebration.”
— Nanni Balestrini, Primo Moroni, L’orda d’oro

riots and/or poetics [8/2018]

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“he is as a neighborhood beauty queen / lauded with ribbons and canes / and with his lapdogs / who lick at the rottenness / seated at the right side / of mama democracy / he dialogues long / with the mouth of a murderer. / he raises his hand in that sustained and easy style / wiggles his fat ass / and with the boyish brilliance of an ephebe / he shits in the country / with all his soul“ Roberto Jorge Santoro | POETRY IN GENERAL (II)   Manson & Mendoza; Windsuckers & Onsetters: Sonnots for Griffiths Andrea…

Félix Guattari; The Anti-Œdipus Papers

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Félix Guattari; The Anti-Œdipus Papers Full book Notes and journal entries document Guattari and Deleuze’s collaboration on their 1972 book Anti-Œdipus. “The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory,“ wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Œdipus (1972), instigating one of the most daring intellectual adventures of the las half-century. Together, the well-known philosopher and the activist-psychiatrist were updating both psychoanalysis and Marxism in light of a more radical and “constructivist“ vision of capitalism:“Capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies because it has no exterior limit itself. It works well as long as it keeps breaking down.“ Few…

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari | May ’68 Did Not Take Place

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  In historical phenomena such as the revolution of 1789, the Commune, the revolution of 1917, there is always one part of the event that is irreducible to any social determinism, or to causal chains. Historians are not very fond of this point: they restore causality after the fact. Yet the event itself is a splitting off from, a breaking with causality; it is a bifurcation, a lawless deviation, an unstable condition that opens up a new field of the possible. In physics, Ilya Prigogine spoke of states in which the slightest differences persist rather than cancel themselves out, and…

Kristin Ross; May ’68 and its Afterlives

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Kristin Ross; MAY ’68 AND ITS AFTERLIVES (Full book) During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed—no sector of the workplace was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May ’68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications. Kristin Ross shows how the current…

Félix Guattari | IN FLUX

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  Maurice Nadeau: Could you briefly explain how your collaboration came into being? Félix Guattari: This collaboration is not the product of a simple meeting of two individuals. Aside from a combination of circumstances, we were also led to it by a whole political context. Initially it was less a question of pooling knowledge than the accumulation of our uncertainties, and even a certain distress in the face of the turn of events after May ’68. We are part of a generation whose political consciousness was born in the enthusiasm and naiveté of the Liberation, with its conspiratorial mythology of…

Galina Rymbu | Poems

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UNTITLED I change at Trubnaya metro and see — fire I get off at the university and see — fire I go down the escalator at Chistye Prudy and see — fire when we fall at Begovaya, at Vykhino, we see — fire, fire, fire boys and girls their eyes filled with blood (to hell with ’68) students in hats with pompons walking silently next to me and suddenly they start to shout: “FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!” suffocating in dark leggings the universities flare up the textbooks of cowardly literature mixed with lusterless works flare up along with me only tonight we became younger and everyone wants to be…

CELAN SPUREN (2)

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PC Notizen vom 10. Mai 1968 : Nächtliche Herausforderungen, wie Pascals von Feuer illuminierte Nacht vom 23. November 1654 (tief eingenäht ins Futter seiner Jacke), ich spreche und schreibe (durchschreibe) aus einem Ensemble erhoffter Stimmen – aber nie mit gefalteten Händen – von zwei Stunden weißen durchsichtigen Explosionen, ein Vernunftzerkrachen im Jahr der Gnade (magnalia dei), Zündholzgedanken eben. Die imago als genealogische Praxis verstanden. Rembrandt ist einer der Malerkönige. Seine Technik des Verbergens, besonders in den späteren Selbstbildnissen, scheint uns eine umso größere Wahrheit zu offenbaren. Mal Zeuxis, mal Demokrit löst sich bei ihm alles in nichts auf. Die  …

CELAN SPUREN (1)

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FIXIERUNG // LA BEAUTÉ DANS LA RUE 10. November 2013; Pjotr Pawlenski〈Moskau〉  Seine Hoden aufs Pflaster nageln (die Manifestation einer Abweichung) … schließlich, schickt das Volk keine Petitionen an die Kammern  Blanqui … der Staat, mein Lieber, packt dich bei den Eiern dein Körper wird mit weißen Laken verhüllt (die Neutralisierung der Abweichung) Es gibt eine Gesellschaft zur Bekämpfung der Russophobie, Leute, die sich dafür bezahlen lassen, dass sie sich unter die Macht legen (eine Art gesellschaftspolitischer Hurerei) … eine gewisse Dramatisierung, eine Inszenierung des Raumes, das Durchkreuzen einer Sakralität, den Schallraum der Macht zu durchbrechen. * * * Ein seltsamer Reflex,…