America claims to have the most free markets in the world. It also operates a prison-industrial complex on a scale found nowhere else. According to Bernard E. Harcourt, author of the new book, "The Illusion of Free Markets," these two facts have the same ideological origin. Find out how the cult of free markets and the cult of law-and-order and prisons - the most distinctive features of American society today - mutually reinforce each other.
"Falsify the Currency! Foucault and Crisis" Michael Hardt
Roundtable/lecture 6 p.m., Thursday, February 10, 2011
1 Washington Place, Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts Open to the public
Michael Hardt teaches in the Literature Program at Duke University. His books include Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009), all co-written with Antonio Negri. He is editor of The South Atlantic Quarterly.
Subjectivation and General Intellect in the Age of Semiocapitalism Franco Berardi (Bifo)
A Lecture in Rose Auditorium, Cooper Union, New York City 6:30 PM, March 4, 2011
International School for Bottom-up Organizing
The International School for Bottom-up Organizing (ISBO) had its first meeting in
October, 2008, with representatives from five countries present.
Ours is an international struggle that must be led by the poorest and
darkest, especially women. We all need the same freedom and equality; we
all have the same oppressors, worldwide. Our movement will work toward an
internationalist, egalitarian world. We foresee a world in which the genius
and creativity of humanity is unleashed, in which all humans share and
Dreamweapon: The Art and Life of Angus MacLise 1938–1979 May 10th–29th, 2011
Boo-Hooray presents the rare works of Angus MacLise (1938–79), American artist, poet, percussionist, and composer active in New York, San Francisco, Paris, London and Kathmandu in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
The exhibition series will unfold with an overview of poetry, artwork, and publications in Chelsea, an audio installation in Chinatown, and a night of film screenings at Anthology Film Archives.
Democracy Against the State
Marx and the Machiavellian Moment
Miguel Abensour
Saturday May 7th, 2011 7:00 PM
Brecht Forum
Miguel Abensour with Max Blechman, Martin Breaugh & Simon Critchley
In the "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,” the young Marx elliptically alludes to a "true democracy" whose advent would go hand in hand with the disappearance of the State. Miguel Abensour’s rigorous interpretation of this seminal text reveals an “unknown Marx” who undermines the identification of democracy with the state and defends a historically occluded form of politics.
True democracy does not entail the political and economic power of the State, but it does not dream of a post-political society either. On the contrary, the battle of democracy is waged by a demos that invents a public sphere of permanent struggles, a politics that counters political bureaucracy and representation. Democracy is "won" by a people forewarned that any dissolution of the political realm in its independence, any subordination to the state, is tantamount to annihilating the site for gaining and regaining a genuinely human existence.
In this explicitly heterodox reading of Marx, Miguel Abensour proposes a theory of "insurgent" democracy that makes political liberty synonymous with a living critique of domination.
Author Miguel Abensour will discuss his new book with Simon Critchley (New School for Social Research), Martin Breaugh (University of Ottawa) and Max Blechman (Kingston University & Sorbonne). Miguel Abensour (University of Paris) was an editor of the Paris-based periodicals Textures, Libre and Tumultes. He is the editor of the "Critique de la politique" series (with the Payot & Rivages editions) since 1974, which notably introduced the "Frankfurt School" thinkers to France. He was for several years the director of the Collège International de Philosophie, and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris.
The Libertarian Left:
Free-Market Anti-Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal
Sheldon Richman
Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign introduced many people to the word
“libertarian.” Since Paul is a Republican and Republicans, like
libertarians, use the rhetoric of free markets and private enterprise,
people naturally assume that libertarians are some kind of quirky
offshoot of the American right wing. To be sure, some libertarian
positions fit uneasily with mainstream conservatism—complete drug
decriminalization, legal same-sex marriage, and the critique of the
national-security state alienate many on the right from libertarianism.
"Surrealism in the Arab World"
Maroin Dib, Abdul Kadar El-Janabi, Faroq El Juridy, Fadil Abas Hadi, Farid Lariby & Ghazi Younis
The current resurgence of surrealism in the Arab world is a revolutionary development of the greatest significance, demonstrating once more that the strategy of the unfettered imagination is always and necessarily global.
We publish here in English translation a manifesto in which our Arab comrades express their unequivocal interventionist orientation, sharply defined against their specific political and cultural background.
"Surrealism, Politics and Culture"
Neil Matheson
The celebrated photographs of André Breton, Diego Rivera and Léon Trotsky posing together in Mexico in 1938, at the time of their joint manifesto Pour un Art révolutionnaire indépendant, are usually seen as emblematic of a certain convergence of culture and revolutionary politics – and yet, paradoxically, most accounts of Surrealism’s engagement with politics pose the tide of revolutionary fervour as already receding by 1935, while 1938 has also been viewed as the year that Surrealism made the volte-face ‘from the street to the salon.’ A re-appraisal of Surrealism’s troubled relationship with political activism and organised politics has been long overdue, and therefore a collection which sets out not only to analyse in depth some of the key themes and crucial moments in that engagement, but also to rethink the condition of ‘the political’ itself in its relationship with culture, is to be welcomed.
"The Nile of Surrealism: Surrealist Activities in Egypt"
Abdel Kader El-Janabi
[Part of this paper was read on the 26th September 1987 at the conference: The Triumph of Pessimism, held at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.]
I. In his first letter to Georges Henein, sent on April 8 1936, André Breton had this to say: The imp of the perverse, as he deigns to appear to me, seems to have one wing here, the other in Egypt (1). Here André Breton foretold in a sense the course the surrealist intention would take in Egypt from 1936 to 1952. The purpose of this paper is to present a critical survey of surrealism in Egypt, in which we will see that, in spite of the protagonists’ original aim to allow surrealism to break through Egyptian reality in the hope of making it respond to the needs of a society undergoing what some historians have aptly phrased the crisis of orientation (2), their efforts finally turned out, ephemeral, to be, though very resounding, flappings of Breton’s wing. What seems to have happened was a settling of accounts in favour of surrealist creation as part of the French presence in Egypt, rather than a communication with the native that would take account of the emancipatory message of surrealism. On the contrary, what was communicated to the Egyptian public was rather the narrative of progress under the sign of Reason than the liberating sign of the Irrational. We will see in due course that the blame for such a paradox should not be placed entirely on the proponents of surrealism in Egypt, but rather on the inherently closed character of Arabic society in the face of occidental innovation, the fact being that this society would dismiss any such form of innovation. Our concluding remarks will address the question of the inherent failure of Occidental modernity in so far as it dreams of playing a significant role in an alien context. For though it may play such a role, it is on condition that it renounces, both in theory and practice, its fundamental given.
Pages
