Lars Iyer's Blog, page 61
March 14, 2013
Our age is not the epoch of faith and not even the epoch ...
Our age is not the epoch of faith and not even the epoch of incredulity. It is more than anything else the epoch of bad faith [in which] the first duty of the intellectual must consist in the nonparticipation in this lie.
Agamben, untranslated article from the '70s, cited here.
We are so accustomed to the old opposition of reason vers...
We are so accustomed to the old opposition of reason versus passion, spirit versus life, that the idea of a passionate thinking, in which thinking and aliveness become one takes us somewhat aback.
Arendt, 'Martin Heidegger at Eighty'
Official translation of Vila-Matas's review of Magma (Spu...
March 10, 2013
Do come to this conference:
The British Society for Phen...
Do come to this conference:
The British Society for Phenomenology 2013 Annual Conference
Remembering the Impossible Tomorrow: Italian Political Thought and the Recent Crisis in Capitalism
5th- 7th April, 2013
St Hilda’s College Oxford
During Marx’s time radical thought was formed from a convergence of three sources: German philosophy, English economics, and French politics. In the introduction to Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (1996) Michael Hardt argued that these tides had shifted, with radical movements drawing from French philosophy, US economics, and Italian politics. More recently, Matteo Pasquinelli has argued that ‘Italian theory’ has attained an academic hegemony comparable to that held by French philosophy in the 1980s.
But despite the proliferation of analysis and organizing drawing from and inspired by the history of autonomous politics in Italy, where are these voices today? In 2012, if you listened to the mainstream politicians and economic experts and no-one else, you would hardly know that there was any financial crisis in 2008. You might have a faint recollection that for a brief moment alternative voices were heard in the media, but now it as if nothing at all had happened. The waters that once had parted have now engulfed us again. It is the same voices articulating the same tired ideas as the whole of Europe slides into the nightmare of austerity, despite the fact they do not appear to have any relation to reality, and even those who speak them seem exhausted and worn out.
For some time now, many of us have noticed that there have been different voices, and they began speaking many years before 2008 warning us of an impending disaster. These voices were coming from Italy. Perhaps because of their own experience, the radical Italian thinkers never believed the logic of the market could solve its own problems or that life and capital were one and the same. Our hope is to draw from this history as well as listen to some of the new generation of Italian political thinkers, to share their ideas, offer an alternative diagnosis of the present, and perhaps even a suggestion of what different future might look like.
Confirmed Speakers:
Dario Gentili
Paolo Do
Federico Chicchi
Christian Marazzi
Anna Simone
Franco Berardi
Tony O’Connor
Sinead Murphy
Franco Barchiesi
Full programme details and registration forms can be found at the society's website http://britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Any issues or questions concerning registration please contact wlarge@glos.ac.uk
March 8, 2013
Brian Howton reviews the trilogy interestingly at The Hai...
Brian Howton reviews the trilogy interestingly at The Hairy Dog Review.
March 6, 2013
Daniel Rivas translates Vila-Matas's response to Magma in...
Interview with Jonathan McAloon at The Spectator.
March 4, 2013
Magma, José Luis Amores's Spanish translation of Spurious...
Magma, José Luis Amores's Spanish translation of Spurious, is published today.
Alberto Francisco reviews Magma at the blog, Culturamas, casting W. as Jiminy Cricket, and comparing the novel to Josipovici's Moo Pak.
'Last Clowns Dancing': Tom Cutterham very interestingly r...
Historically, any simple avant-gardist idea of a new lite...
Historically, any simple avant-gardist idea of a new literary practice necessarily reconsolidates the traditional institution of literature that it claims to critique. A literary practice that is ostensibly “outside” literature posits an “inside” of literature. By disobeying the police who maintain the borders of literature, they simultaneously confirm the role of those police; avant-garde practices depend on them. But what happens when the police leave their posts? What happens when no-one mans the border—when the sanctity of literature becomes a matter of indifference? There can no longer be an “outlaw” avant-gardism, because there is no law to transgress. But nor is there a literature self-certain enough, secure enough, to arrest, domesticate or tame its “outside.” The authority of literature has vanished. The house of literature is deserted. Granted, that house is haunted. There are such things as literary ghosts, even a literary “hauntology,” as Gallix calls it.
New long interview in The Quarterly Conversation. Tim Smyth asks the questions.
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