‘There were many turns not taken, countless alternative routes that would have spared us this outcome. Instead, we kept going, corruption, infighting and sheer obliviousness stopping us from changing course.’ ‘This year, you’d be forgiven for thinking “left” was short for “left behind”’. ‘Millions were asleep at the wheel; the shock has jolted us awake.…
Category: tragic politics
“Inauguration of the Displeasure Dome: Coping with the Election”: screenings
A movie series: “Now that the alternate reality of a certain strand of ‘paranoid’ political films has, to a degree few of us thought possible, come to pass, perhaps it’s time to re-watch these films from our new, disillusioned perspective.”
Jonathan Kirshner: “America, America”
Mourning and melancholy after the defeat: ‘We will now find out. The social experiment on which we are embarking is a treacherous one, from which it will not prove easy to recover. Trump promises a revolution. Trump promises a revolution … Still, even the rhetorical invocation of “revolution” is yet another in an overflowing field…
Adam Shatz on Fanon’s “Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté”
This new volume of uncollected writings “reflects Fanon’s search for ‘freedom as dis-alienation’, itself a response to his experience of what Sartre called ‘extreme situations’: the battlefields of the Second World War, the asylums of North Africa, clandestine anti-colonial work.” His tragedy was that “his vision of freedom and solidarity lost out to the narrower…
Gerald Gaus’s book ” The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society”
The pursuit of idealized and perfect theories of justice—essentially, the entire production of theories of justice that has dominated political philosophy for the past forty years—needs to change. A heterogeneous society—with its various religious, moral, and political perspectives—could never be collectively devoted to any single ideal. In this pluralistic, open society the very clash and…
Kevin Anderson: “Deep Contradictions Facing the Global Movement for Human Emancipation”
“We live in a time marked by the revolutionary upsurge that began in the Arab world in 2011, followed swiftly by Madison, Madrid, Occupy Wall Street, and then a bit later, by Gezi Park in Turkey, the defense of Kobane, Black Lives Matter, and the Sanders and Corbyn phenomena. During this whole period, tiny Greece…