“People getting together.” This is a phrase that comes up early and often in Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements (Soberscove, 2017). In the introduction to the book, Daniel Tucker, the curator of the exhibition and … Continue reading “A Politics of Dissonance”
Whoever pride in the face I went for a ride with my friend on the shore of our news where all the objects were and there was no waste to love or be an end for politics in the fantasy … Continue reading “Comrade Love and Comrade Spell”
British election nights have followed a certain pattern for decades. The polling stations close at 10 p.m. The ballot boxes are delivered to municipal sports halls across the country, where local government employees count the votes through the night, before … Continue reading “British Election Nights, Despair, and Hope: A Personal History”
“What if we’re living in a world full of super-social psychopaths?” is the question posed by Tristam Vivian Adams early on in his book The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organizes Empathy. Scary, as the term “psychopath” immediately triggers thoughts about … Continue reading “A New Diagnosis for Capitalism: Tristam Vivian Adams’ The Psychopath Factory“
1. “No matter how much you feel it, you want To feel it even more.” That’s the feeling Tony Bennett says he sees in Amy Winehouse when they meet to record “Body & Soul” in March 2011 For Bennett’s album … Continue reading “Popular Culture”
Note: Since April 25, 2017, eight graduate teachers who are members of UNITE HERE Local 33 have engaged in The Fast Against the Slow, a fast to move the Yale administration to negotiate. For more details, see https://www.facebook.com/local33unitehere/ The global … Continue reading “What Does One Do In the Face of a Lawless Administration?”
All journalists and commentators predicted that the first round of the French presidential elections could bring about real surprises; but, in fact, it didn’t. Well, at least not really. Of course, with the qualification of Macron and Le Pen, it … Continue reading “French Elections: The Hour of Danger”
This edition of Periscope extends a conversation that took place on the occasion of the book launch held at New York University on April 30, 2016 to mark the publication of Allen Feldman’s Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics … Continue reading “Introduction: Degrounding War and the State”
Archives of the Insensible is a book I will turn to again and again, for insight, inspiration, aspiration, a model of indefatiguable critique, and well, just to finish the damn thing. I’ve been reading Allen’s work for a long time … Continue reading “State of the Art of the State of the…Questions from the Real for Feldman’s Archives of the Insensible“
I want to begin by thanking Allen Feldman for asking me to participate in this event to discuss his important new book. Feldman offers us one of the most powerful critiques of violence through what he calls “micrological description.” From … Continue reading “Feldman’s Critique of Violence”
I am struck by the rich and provocative detail of this remarkable book and by the disturbing insights it offers into the performance of violence in our time and how its representations make it banal and acceptable. My observations arising … Continue reading “Remarks on Allen Feldman’s Archives of the Insensible“
Nota Bene: The following dangerous supplement can be read as a resynthesis of one of the core threads running through Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics and Dead Memory (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which engages war as the … Continue reading “The Accidentalization of War”
“Slavery, America’s original sin” is one of the most common ways in which human bondage is invoked in journalism, punditry, and popular history today. What is suggested by this theological metaphor for a brutal history of exploitation—and where does it … Continue reading ““Original Sin,” Slavery, and American Innocence”
Journalist Farhad Manjoo describes the “post-fact society” as “a parallel universe of fact: a place at once part of the mainland but profoundly distant from it, a place where another truth—a truth pocked with holes, but one just true enough … Continue reading “Nonknowledge as Capacity: Randy Martin’s Knowledge LTD and the Limits of Rationality in the Age of the Derivative”
Marquis Bey interviews Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of the poetry collection Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity. Read an excerpt from book here. Marquis Bey: So I want to begin, if I may, expressing to you how utterly thankful I … Continue reading “A Spillage of the Fugitive Variety”
