Peter Bouscheljong | Die Verweigerung oder Anmerkungen zu “communismus der geister/dokumente #1 – #3”

1 A Lass die Welt zugrunde gehen [M. Duras // press kit, Les Films Molière, 1977, fonds Jean-Pierre Joncolas, archives de la Section d’histoire et esthétique du cinéma, Université de Lausanne]. Man muss die Kraft zur totalen Kritik, zur Verweigerung, zur verzweifelt sinnlosen Anklage aufbringen. Es gibt keine politische Lösung, die uns wesentlich berücksichtigen würde. 1 B Zwecklos noch an ein planetarisches, ökologisches Gleichgewicht zu glauben. Weil uns ein falsches Denken und Verständnis im Wege steht. 1 C Machen wir uns nichts vor. Man muss den Mut besitzen, an nichts zu glauben. Sich frei machen von jeder Form von…

reading list [6/2025]

2025-06-072025-07-23 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: Anna Mendelssohn · Annie Bourneuf · Chantal Akerman · Dante Alighieri · Eleanor Careless · Jean Daive · Leslie Kaplan · Stéphane Bouquet · Walter BenjaminLeave a comment

Leslie Kaplan | Miss Nobody Knows Chantal Akerman | Eine Familie in Brüssel Jean Daive | Antonio Gramsci Jean Daive | Le Nœud EDITION RETOUCHES / ÄNDERUNGSSCHREIBEREI N°1 & N°2 Georg Wiesing-Brandes | Walter Benjamin. Das Pariser Adressbuch Lectura Dantis. Zeitgenössische Dichtung im Dialog mit Dante Alighieris “Commedia” Stéphane Bouquet | Tout se tient Stéphane Mandelbaum | Katalog. Museum für Moderne Kunst Annie Bourneuf | Im Rücken des Engels der Geschichte Eleanor Careless | Incarceration in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn

Peter Bouscheljong | invisible relations

2023-07-192025-06-07 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & Poetics · WorksTags: Aimé Césaire · André Breton · Édouard Glissant · Communism · La Révolution Surrealiste · Peter Bouscheljong · Revolution · Sean Bonney · Surrealism · The Paris Commune · Walter BenjaminLeave a comment

:: translated by mathilda cullen they say i was having a wank in the royal parks. gunfire is a streetplan, i say. so is marx. so the type of equotations they call pistol-whips. sean bonney in june 1935, shortly after midnight, when most of the delegates had already left the huge salle de la mutualité, paul eluard delivered a speech written by andré breton at the “international writers’ congress in defense of culture” in paris. it was a reckoning with an increasingly degenerate policy of the french communist party, which had been reduced to an auxiliary wing…

Peter Bouscheljong | die unsichtbaren verhältnisse

2022-06-072025-06-07 Categories: WorksTags: Aimé Césaire · André Breton · Édouard Glissant · Communism · Revolution · Sean Bonney · Surrealism · Walter BenjaminLeave a comment

they say i was having a wank in the royal parks. gunfire is a streetplan, i say. so is marx. so the type of equations they call pistol-whips. sean bonney im juni 1935 kurz nach mitternacht, als ein großteil der delegierten die riesige salle de la mutualité bereits verlassen hat, trägt paul eluard auf dem »internationalen schriftstellerkongress zur verteidigung der kultur« in paris, eine von andré breton verfaßte rede vor. es wird eine abrechnung mit einer zusehends degenerierten politik der kommunistischen partei frankreichs, die zu einem hilfstrupp der udssr und des stalinismus verkommen war und sich von dem…

Peter Bouscheljong | ACTION #5 [THE POET AS PRODUCER] & ACTION #6 [THE BUSINESS OF MR JULIUS CAESAR AFTER BRECHT OR THE MIGRANTS OF REGGIO CALABRIA]

2022-05-182025-06-07 Categories: Poetry & Poetics · WorksTags: Arthur Rimbaud · Bertolt Brecht · Sergei Tretyakov · Walter BenjaminLeave a comment

“Poetry has to be made by everyone, not just one.” [Lautréamont] The “interruption” is a process of shaping, i.e. the political function of separating causalities [certainties of everyday life / political life] from one another. Like Brecht’s theory of the alienation effect, which is used in epic theatre [non-Aristotelian, because empathy is a suggestion]. How assembly in the Arcades Project is not only used as a turning point, but also as a construction principle. In 1934 Benjamin wrote the essay “The Author as Producer” for the anti-fascist writers’ conference at the “Institut pour l’étude du fascisme” [the text…

Georges Didi-Huberman | Hells? (On Pier Paolo Pasolini)

2022-05-11 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: Dante Alighieri · Georges Didi-Huberman · Guy Debord · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Walter BenjaminLeave a comment

Well before he described the great light of Paradise shining out in all its eschatological glory, Dante decided to reserve a quiet but significant fate, in the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno, for the “tiny light” of those glowing worms, the fireflies. The poet is observing the eighth bolgia of hell, a political bolgia if ever there was one, since we can recognize a few eminent citizens of Florence gathered there, among others, all under the same condemnation as evil counselors. The entire space is scattered—constellated, infested—with small flames that look like fireflies, just like those that people see…

Georges Didi-Huberman | The Supposition of The Aura: The Now, The Then and Modernity (Walter Benjamin)

2021-08-302022-08-31 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Abstract Expressionism · Aby Warburg · Ad Reinhardt · Barnett Newman · Carl Einstein · Charles Baudelaire · Erwin Panofsky · Georges Bataille · Georges Didi-Huberman · Karl Marx · Kazimir Malevich · Maurice Merleau-Ponty · Minimalism · Walter BenjaminLeave a comment

Walter Benjamin and History Edited by Andrew Benjamin Continuum 2005

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…

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;…

Peter Bouscheljong | DIE AFFÄRE LEBOVICI | PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIE [ACTE XVIII]

2019-03-272025-06-07 Categories: WorksTags: Bertolt Brecht · Gérard Lebovici · Guy Debord · Situationist International · Walter BenjaminLeave a comment

Zum Umsturz aller bestehenden Ordnung aufzurufen / Scheint furchtbar. / Aber das Bestehende ist keine Ordnung. // Zur Gewalt seine Zuflucht zu nehmen / Scheint böse. Aber da, was ständig geübt wird, Gewalt ist / Ist es nichts Besonderes. Bertolt Brecht Die ganze Affäre [wie auch der modus operandi] ist geprägt von einem Klima persönlichen Verrats und politischen Hinterhalts: Gérard Lebovici [Herausgeber der Editions Champ Libre, Produzent und Freund Guy Debords] in einer Tiefgarage in der Avenue Foch, Chaillot. Porte Dauphine mit vier Kugeln im Hinterkopf auf dem Vordersitz seines Wagens; Polizei, D.S.T. & Renseignements généraux zeichnen eine…

UNE INSULTE À LA REPUBLIQUE: AIMÉ CÉSAIRE AND FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN …

2019-02-192019-09-20 Categories: DériveTags: Aimé Césaire · Éric Hazan · Frantz Fanon · Friedrich Hölderlin · Gilets Jaunes · Giorgio Agamben · Nicole Loraux · Walter BenjaminLeave a comment

UNE INSULTE À LA RÉPUBLIQUE: AIMÉ CÉSAIRE AND FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN DECLARE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION A TRAGEDY, VOW TO SUPPORT #GILETSJAUNES MOVEMENT INSTEAD | by H. Bolin I. Introduction The study that follows concerns two tragic plays that treat the emergence and aftermath of a single global revolutionary horizon which included both the French and the Haitian revolutions. As the tragic genre suggests, Friedrich Hölderlin’s The Death of Empedocles (1799) and Aime Césaire’s And the Dogs Were Silent (1956) stage reflections on the initial successes and subsequent defeat of their respective revolutionary moments. What can tragedy or art offer to thinking…

riots and/or poetics [10/2018]

2018-10-032018-10-03 Categories: Reading ListTags: Anne Boyer · Archie Shepp · Cecil Taylor · Grachan Moncur III · Karen Brodine · Lola Ridge · Louis Auguste Blanqui · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Walter Benjamin · Wendy TrevinoLeave a comment

“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…

Sean Bonney | Notes on Militant Poetics

2018-06-152021-11-12 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: Aimé Césaire · Arthur Rimbaud · Frantz Fanon · George Jackson · Jean Genet · Militant Poetics · Revolution · Sean Bonney · Sergey Nechayev · Soledad Brothers · Walter BenjaminLeave a comment

Notes on Militant Poetics 1/3 “There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity when an authentic upheaval can be born . . . . (a) descent into a real hell” (Fanon) “Truth content becomes negative. [Poems] imitate a language beneath the helpless language of human beings: it is that of the dead speaking of stones and stars” (Adorno) The Situationists called poetry the “anti-matter of consumer society”, a fairly questionable claim, but one that is at least expressive of the chasm that operates between official reality’s definitions of poetry and those…

Georges Didi-Huberman; To Render Sensible

2018-01-182019-03-01 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Alain Badiou · Georges Didi-Huberman · Jacques Rancière · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Sergei Eisenstein · Vladimir Mayakovsky · Walter BenjaminLeave a comment

Representable People, Imaginary People? Representation of the people comes up against a double difficulty, if not a double aporia, that comes from the impossibility of our subsuming each of the two terms, “representation” and “people,” into the unity of one concept. Hannah Arendt said that we will never manage to think about the political dimension as long as we stubbornly persist in speaking of man, since politics is interested precisely in something else, which is men, whose multiplicity is modulated differently each time, whether it be in conflict or community. (1) Likewise we must say, and forcefully, that we…

BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics))

Tag: Walter Benjamin