Carla Lonzi | Let’s Spit on Hegel

The feminine problem is the relationship of any woman – deprived as she is of power, of history, of culture, of a role of her own – to any man: his power, his history, his culture, his absolute role. This problem calls into question the whole of man’s work and thought; man who has had no awareness of woman as a human being on the same level as himself. In the eighteenth century we demanded equality, and Olympe de Gouges went to the scaffold for her Declaration of the Rights of Women. The demand for equality of women with…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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,…

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,…

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…

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem | Tomb for Guy Debord

2019-08-052019-08-05 Categories: DériveTags: Antonin Artaud · Arthur Rimbaud · Gilets Jaunes · Giorgio Agamben · Guy Debord · James Joyce · Jean-Luc Godard · Kazimir Malevich · Lautréamont · Reiner Schürmann · Situationist International · Stéphane Mallarmé · The Yellow Vest Movement · Vladimir Lenin · Vladimir MayakovskyLeave a comment

Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ. Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ. He was immolated by his own ideology, which he more than anyone (Tzara, Duchamp, Artaud, the Viennese Actionists…) had pushed to its extremes. He covered all of its possibilities, all of its impasses. His extreme attempts were neither successes, nor failures. Today, his path should be evaluated through other methods: the ones left to us in the wake of the avant-garde’s disappearance. To put it as Reiner Schürmann does: truth is a “conflictuality without agreements.” It is within Debord’s insurmountable contradictions, whose political, aesthetic, and existential preoccupations were…

César Vallejo | From “Art and Revolution”

2019-07-112020-10-02 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: André Breton · César Vallejo · Class Struggle · Communism · Cubism · Friedrich Nietzsche · Fyodor Gladkov · Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes · Jacques Rigaud · Karl Marx · Lautréamont · Marxism · Michel Leiris · Pierre Reverdy · Revolution · Roger Vitrac · Sergei Jessenin · Sergei Kolbasiev · Stéphane Mallarmé · Surrealism · Vladimir Lenin · Vladimir Mayakovsky1 Comment

THE REVOLUTIONARY FUNCTION OF THOUGHT Confusion is a phenomenon with a permanent, organic character in bourgeois society. Confusion grows ever thicker when it is addressed as already confusing problems by the very historical terms of its utterance. The latter occurs with the brand new and, at once, very old problem of the intellectual’s obligations with regard to revolution. As posed by historical materialists, this problem is already a tangle. When formulated or simply outlined by bourgeois intellectuals, it acquires the aspect of insoluble chaos. *** “The philosophers,” Marx says, “have only interpreted the world in various ways. The…

BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics))

Tag: Vladimir Lenin