The Sacred Dilemma of Inoperosity. On Giorgio Agamben’s Opus Dei
Antonio Negri

From Uninomade 2.0
Translated by Jason Francis Mc Gimsey. Originally published on il manifesto on the 24th of February 2012. Italian version here.

With this book, the journey Agamben began with Homo Sacer seems to have come to an end. It was a long road, from the early ‘90s until today, nearly twenty years. An archeology of ontology conducted (with a rigor that not even the bizarre and misleading game of little numbers put in order over different stages of his research could render opaque) – up to the reopening of the problem of Sein. A dig that not even Heidegger (in the words of the author who claims to be a young student of the German philosopher) was able to complete – because here ontology is freed from any remaining “operativity” of every illusion that can be tied to will and control. What is left? “The philosophical question that appears is that of conceiving of an ontology beyond operativity and command, and an ethics and a politics totally freed from the concepts of duty and will”.

No Poetry After Adorno
Niall McDevitt

10 Problems with Adorno’s Dictum “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch” (To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric)

1. Adorno’s dictum is like Fukuyama’s ‘the End of History’, an infuriatingly untrue soundbite that only makes the philosopher look ridiculous. Melodramatic, arrogant, obsolescent, it looks ever more wrongheaded as the decades roll on. A groan of despair, it might have been excusable as a Facebook status update, but not as serious philosophy.

UK Launch, Expect Anything Fear Nothing, MayDay Rooms,
Saturday September 22, 8pm



Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere

This volume is the first comprehensive English-language presentation of the Scandinavian Situationists and their role in the Situationist movement. The Situationist movement was an international movement of artists, writers and thinkers that in the 1950s and 1960s that strived to revolutionize the world through rejecting bourgeois art and the post-World War Two capitalist consumer society.

The evening will include interventions from Peter Laugesen, Stewart Home, Fabian Tompsett, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen.

n - 1. Making Multiplicity: A Philosophical Manifesto
Gerald Raunig

Occupation without subject. Movement without subject. Asubjective composition. The current occupation movements are characterized by their dispensing with any subject. No unity, no wholeness, no identifiable class. Classical theories of revolution would see this as a problem, the (revolutionary) subject being a condition for the possibility of revolt, insurgency, revolution as a fixed component of a theory of stages: only once a uniform subject appears on the horizon, a molar block, the working class, a united front, only then – seen from this angle – can the revolution get going.

The Combustible Campus
From Montreal to Mexico City, Something Is Stirring in the University
Enda Brophy

For three decades now, the neoliberal restructuring of post-secondary education has sought to implant market logic and corporate-style management into the academy. The systematic defunding of public education that enables this process has only intensified in recent years with the global financial crisis and the austerity measures imposed in its wake. The resulting transformation of public university systems has brought us corporatized administrations, rising tuition, departmental closures, expanded class sizes, noxious corporate food, offensives against academic workers, and ethically dubious corporate donations.

In its current form, one could argue that the academy produces little that extends our collective social capacities and much that diminishes them: hierarchy, exploitation, debt, individualism, precarious employment, and cynicism. At a time when knowledge is increasingly seen as a commodity to be produced in accordance with the demands of profit, and public education is decried as an unjust fetter on the ruthless pedagogy of the free market, the private sector has turned its attention to the university and is fervently dedicated to its transformation. The state has mostly obliged, with centre-right and centre-left governments across the world taking turns at accelerating this epochal shift in post-secondary education.

Michael Wreszin, Biographer of American Radicals, Dies at 85
Paul Vitello

Michael Wreszin, a biographer of radical 20th-century American intellectuals who were prominent antiwar activists, among them the social critic Dwight Macdonald, died on Aug. 12 in Manhattan. He was 85. His son, Dan, announced his death this week.

Mr. Wreszin, a history professor at Queens College and an antiwar activist himself, was a student of the American left and the many ideological movements competing for dominance of it between the 1920s and 1960s, including socialism, communism, libertarianism and anarchism.

His subjects were cosmopolitan, humanist thinkers who saw a growing militarism in American political culture but whose scrupulous habits of mind could make them misfits in the ideological camps they joined.

Grabbing ‘Green’: Questioning the Green Economy

17 May – 19 May 2013
University of Toronto, Canada

Abstracts due: Nov. 7, 2012
Papers due: March 1, 2013

Description:

Over the past two decades 'the market' has increasingly been represented as the solution to issues of sustainability and conservation, leading to a reimagining of 'nature'. Market forces are now deeply embedded in the policy, planning and practice, of environmental management and conservation leading to constructs such as ecosystems services (and payments for them), biodiversity derivatives and new conservation finance mechanisms like REDD, REDD+, species banking, and carbon trading. These changes reflect a larger transformation in international environmental governance—one in which the discourse of global ecology has accommodated an ontology of natural capital, culminating in the production of what is taking shape as “The Green Economy.” This “Green Economy” is not a natural or coincidental development, but is contingent upon, and to varying degrees coordinated by, actors drawn together around familiar (UNEP, States, World Bank, etc) and emergent institutions of environmental governance (TEEB, WBCSB, investment companies, etc). While case studies have begun to reveal the social and ecological marginalization associated with the implementation of market mechanisms in particular sites, this conference seeks to explore the more systemic dimensions involved in the production, circulation and consumption of “The Green Economy,” and the neoliberal 'logics' within environmental policy, conservation, development, and business that are mobilizing it.

Global Anarchisms:
No Gods, No Masters, No Peripheries

2012 Annual Conference,
Institute for Comparative Modernities
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Friday, September 21
Saturday, September 22, 2012

Organized by Barry Maxwell
(Comparative Literature and American Studies, Cornell University) and Raymond Craib (History, Cornell University)
All events will take place at
Africana Studies and Research Center,
310 Triphammer Rd.,
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

[Autonomedia will have a book table at this event.]

Anarchism: no gods, no masters. Enough with religion and the state. This workshop makes an additional demand: no peripheries.

"Cannabis Chassidis: The Ancient and Emerging Torah of Drugs"
Book Presentation with author Yoseph Leib ibn Mardachya

7PM, Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2012
Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen Street
New York City, NY

Is marijuana kosher? Please join Autonomedia and Atzmos Press from Jerusalem for a presentation of "Cannabis Chassidis: The Ancient and Emerging Torah of Drugs" with author Yoseph Leib ibn Mardachya.

Is Marijuana Kosher?

Repairing the Sacred Hoop
Native American Wisdom for a Post-Capitalist Future

Scientific Soul Session #12
St. Mary's Church
521 W. 126th Street between Old Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue
Manhattan, NYC

6pm to 8pm, Monday, October 8, 2012 (anti-Columbus Day!)
$10 admission. Contact: 973.896.7697.

Join us for a historic anti-Columbus Day rejection of "Manifest Destiny Marxism" replaced by an INDIGENOUS-CENTRIC MARXISM featuring:
Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Lakota, radio host of WBAI's First Voices
Daystarr, Black-Cherokee Woman Revolutionary
Firewolf Nelson-Wong, Navaho Woman Communist
Dr. Evan T. Pritchard, Micmac-Celtic, Native American Studies Scholar

Performers: Fred Ho's Saxophone Liberation Front BEYOND COLUMBUS AND CAPITALISM: Civilization or Syphillisation and Ghost Dance On the Grave of Capitalism! featuring Bhinda Keidel, Darius Jones, David Bindman and Fred Ho; Mixashawn, Algonquin Tenor Sax-Flutist, Story Teller

Nana Soul and Fred Ho's premiere of native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) Wayne Westlake's D is for Disgusting

On Monday, October 8, 2012, from 6pm to 8pm, at St. Mary's Church in Harlem, 521 W. 126th Street (between Old Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue), Harlem, New York City, Scientific Soul Sessions will present an anti-Columbus Day Celebration extolling native North America as the "original communism and matriarchy" in which human society enjoyed egalitarian social relations, respect and balance with Mother Earth, so much so that virtually no "carbon footprint" was left after the genocide, ecocide and matricide wrought by the European Invasion and settler-expansionist colonialism.