It’s publication day and Biopolitics as a System of Thought is now out!
Can Agamben, Foucault, Deleuze & Spinoza guide us through the impotence of our present? Are we condemned to be Smart beings? Is the possible unrealisable?
Find out here:
What Deleuze would say on the discourse:
'nothing is sadder for gifted young people, in principle, than growing old without ever having found the books that they really liked ... & then all at once, playing the scholar about all books. That’s a funny thing; it makes you bitter
'Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world'
- happy birthday Walter Benjamin 🎈
Honoured by Agamben’s endorsement of my book, coming soon in May:
‘Serene Richards brilliant, compelling book retraces and masterly detects the genealogy and the ID of this threatening model and with a kind of rigorous humour demolishes one after the other its pretensions’
'this kind of intellectual bitterness that takes things out against others for your not having been able to find what you loved. So… The air of superiority that one acquires by dint of being stupid…. All that is unfortunate'
There's a cover! So very grateful to Mogniss H. Abdallah and IM’média for their kind permission to use this image so dear to me of the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes (1972-76), formerly the Comités Palestine, and to Agamben for his generous comments 💫
Had a lovely time chatting about the connections between foucault, philosophical anthropology and biopolitics with a sprinkle too on the arrogance of Smart Being - have a listen
Happy to share this extract from my book, the opposite of biopolitics as a system of thought it concerns the phantasm, imagination, sensibility and our collective intellect, via Agamben, Ibn Rushd, Dante, Nancy
‘But there is this brilliant, shattering constitution of being. “Love” does not define it, but it names it, and obliges us to think it’ - Jean-Luc Nancy
I’m very excited about our book launch event coming up on 12 November! 💫
@bienmaspreciado
and I will be chatting about biopolitics, technocapital and destituent power. Register here
Nietzsche getting a lot of negative attention on the timeline these days but who among his critics poses amazing questions like this : "When the sleeper awakes, the dream dies. But when the dreamer dies, what becomes of the dream?"
E-book out today….! Hardback soon.. how does biopolitics shape the form of our political & juridical strategies? Is there any way to refuse power’s imperative to manage the annihilation of the living and injunction to take one’s place within it?
'I situate myself in the field of Agamben and of the Invisible Committee... Democracy has turned into the antechamber of fascism, and there will never be a democratic reversal of the biopolitical dimension of contemporary fascism'
- Franco 'Bifo' Berardi
Happy bday Van Gogh, the man, Artaud says, suicided by society:
‘No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modelled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell’
What characterises our way of life? That one is permitted to survive on condition that one is complicit, one way or another throughout the supply chain, with its heinous crimes
Looking forward to this next week, I’ll be talking about my book focusing on the bits on destituent power via Agamben, Spinoza, Benjamin and Deleuze. If in London come along, I believe there is an online link to join as well
'Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one's own ghost... Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way' -Kafka
So many people don’t seem to know that the nation state and the passport are modern inventions and seem to want to square off the past, the present and the future through this prism, why?
‘Behind the powerlessness of
God peeps the powerlessness of men, who continue to cry “May
that never happen again!” when it is clear that “that'' is, by now, everywhere’ - Agamben
@guardian
Subjectivity, famously ahistorical, was discovered by a guy on lsd who, while critiquing governmental techniques of production & subjugation of the living to the demands of capitalism, is to blame for the techniques success amidst a depoliticised modernity forewarned by same guy
For many decolonisation only functions so long as an other can be identified as such, in need of saving and stripped of any political qualities, only in this way can they be spoken for in workshops and careers be built in the name of the ‘good thinker’
Fuck America and Israel and any accomplice whose satanic forces know no limits and whose drive for horror after horror, mutilation and destruction is unmatched anywhere on this planet - soulless, miserable, intent on crushing joy wherever it may flow
Les images sont abominables ⚠️
Des civils, des enfants, brûlent vifs
Israël a bombardé les TENTES des Palestiniens déplacés dans la cour de l'HÔPITAL des Martyrs d'Al-Aqsa à Deir Al-Balah, dans le centre de Gaza.
Imagine taking pictures like this for the world to see and help, meanwhile we’re told this is all normal and to go about our lives that their extermination is a matter of existential necessity and fully in accordance with international humanitarian law and other such fairy tales
Disturbing | The skeletal remains of a Palestinian woman and her children were found following the withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces from the Jabalia refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip.
@OwenJones84
@MazzucatoM
but the troll is wearing a suit, and has serious looking glasses. He's also a 'he' which basically trumps everything else even if he can't and won't read
Israel is not invading Lebanon, it is liberating it.
This is a historic moment, not only for the Israelis, but for the Lebanese, Arabs, and Eastern Christians.
To not understand this is to have lost all moral and political compass.
#StandWithIsrael
#Lebanon
#IDF
my hot take is i don’t think anybody should be dating until their shit is together. eating healthy, working out regularly, having a morning routine, a spiritual practice, a therapist, financial discipline. things like that have to come first.
'Never, I think, in the history of human societies... has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualisation techniques and of totalisation procedures'
-Foucault
"Where are the Arabs? Where are the Muslims?"
A Palestinian child cries in pain after some of his family members were massacred by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.
@audioexpression
The issue is political, there's nothing whatsoever to hijack. All politicians are welcome to speak out and have access to media outlets etc
In the society of the spectacle which demands no reply the mantra ‘right to have my say’ is less an invitation to speak but an injunction to participate in the endless circulation of order words, no matter their content, serving the glorification of the spectacle
'Scientists from the School of Plant Sciences at Tel Aviv University have announced that they have recorded with special ultrasound-sensitive microphones the screams of pain that plants emit when they are cut or when they lack water. In Gaza there are no microphones' - Agamben
Who does it serve to erase from the history of medicine its grounding in debasing humanity and the living in its quest to define the pathological to construct the normal
'Artaud said that the problem (for him) was not to orientate his thought, or to perfect the expression of what he thought, or acquire application and method or to perfect his poems, but simply to manage to think something' - Deleuze, hbd Artaud🎈
on one side we have reactionary bourgeois drives & on the other progressive bourgeois drives.. emotive reflexes, symbolic imaginaries, moved & governed by mass communication. Reactionary & progressive drives which nonetheless share this average bourgeois character - Mario Tronti
It’s great to know how many pages people read in a day but I think the rereading part is the key bit, it takes time and isn’t something that can be assigned or standardised, it’s the magic of study and after some time away from that is what I really miss
stop the waste
it is hard to imagine that all is lost
since the energy of ashes is still here
and blows from time to time
through the rubble
-Aimé Césaire
"it is surplus-value that turns activity into work, or that subjects activity to the rule of work. So that here we better understand the link, if this hypothesis is true, we better understand that, labour, fundamentally belongs to the state apparatus” - Deleuze
using this juncture in history not to slow down an extinction event, but instead to accelerate it, in service of building machines whose primary purpose is to render humans obsolete. silicon valley makes sense as a grand death drive project, a compulsion towards self annihilation
haven’t read all of this but I find it interesting how it is treated as self evident that Heidegger’s thought mirrors his politics so should be ignored while hardly a word is spoken by sociologists on someone like eugenicist and statistician Francis Galton
'Do not delude yourself. Together with school, television, and the calmness of your newspapers, you are the great preservers of this horrid order based upon the idea of owning and destroying' - pasolini
no one has the 'right' to exist at the expense of another, yet this is the modus operandi of the biopolitical era in which we live made apparent from Congo to Palestine
Wrote this piece on how the discourse around single sex spaces misses the assault on public space and how online spaces are regulated where we are always potentially guilty, hope you like it ✨
Academia is good at emptying the stakes that concepts can imply, this then reproduces abstractions where even the simplest thoughts seem outlandish - but the real perversion lies in the injunction to popularise neutered concepts as what is called 'impact' for public ridicule
Every so often a thing is conjured into being as the cause of causes, given a proper name, and resources mobilised to ‘defeat it.’ And every time the ‘end of the thing’ does not take place in the cathartic manner desired, attention simply shifts to the next thing real or imagined
‘This impulse to expel the human being from the ideal, only to formally include through abandonment, to conceal the sweat that goes into the making of ever inventive dispositives, is characteristic of Smart Being's mode of being in the world’ - Biopolitics as a System of Thought
Amazon billed its "Just Walk Out" stores as some triumph of AI. In reality, it was powered by thousands of low-paid Indian workers manually adding up items in your cart as you shopped.
How insanely dystopian.
Persecution delusion is contagious probably because it’s the primary mode of subjectification in, and condition of entry into, the virtual polis; that infinite spectacle of aggrieved voices trading signifier after signifier
it’s deleuze’s birthday today and I forgot to post a nice quote, so in lieu I will say his thought is very profound and many should read him it’s life changing
Had a lovely chat with the brilliant
@thebarronfield
on Smart Being, biopolitics and the present state of things, here’s a little preview on remembering to have some fun
Dystopian. Evil. A checkpoint with a camera/facial recognition and a loudspeaker tormenting Palestinian refugees as they are forced to flee their homes: “Khaled Mashal did you send your suit to the dry cleaning today?” followed by “women and children pass only.” A genocide.
decolonise the curriculum, change the world, diversity, equity and inclusion, so long as all this leads to a movement sur place and things remain the same albeit with a 'modern' sheen decorated with the latest trends in consumer culture
Columbia University denied approval for a student webinar called "Resistance 101." When students held it anyway, the university reported the event to the FBI.
Last week, we submitted a FOIA to find out what Columbia told the FBI, and how the FBI responded.
How anyone can look at this, look around at the total impunity, and not feel an ounce of fear if not shame, are they so arrogant as to think those condoning this will ever hesitate to spare them if the circumstances demanded it
The ministry of health: 400 Palestinians, most of them are children and women, were killed by Israeli bombardment in Jabalia refugee camp, north of Gaza.
at some point in the lectures on Foucault, Deleuze says that critics don't stop to consider that, for one reason or another, an author had to pass this way and not another way, for better or worse but they had to pass through it.. I like this sentiment a lot
Shame on the world and what is done in our name, shame on us for our cowardice, accepting compromise for petty change, shame on our impotence, it will never be forgotten
They cover their ears not because they don’t want to know because they do, they have heard and seen as well, but they don’t care and consider it to be noise, and it’s this noise they want to shut out
"The man who has recognised that he is leading an alienated life in politics, law, etc., is leading his true human life in this alienated life as such. Self-affirmation, in contradiction with itself [...] is thus true knowledge and life" - Marx