In the beginning of the second chapter of The Return of the Vanishing American, Leslie Fiedler wrote: For a long time, Europeans thought of themselves as inhabiting a world without a West: a threefold oecumene made up of Europe itself, Asia, and Libya, which is to say a ruling and redeemed North plus a subsidiary and […]
Read More American Cartographies 2I’ve recently decided to read through a series of works that could be described as ‘romantic anti-capitalism’ (or subjectivist anti-capitalist, vitalist anti-capitalism, though none of these really capture the nature of this constellation, often Marxist but also proto-Marxist, but whatever): the writings of the young Lukács, young Gramsci, Lucien Goldmann, Ernst Bloch, etc. Lukács’ The Theory […]
Read More Time and EpicSum issues 13 & 14, dedicated to the strange temporalities of Shanghai and Ljubljana respectively, has dropped in conjunction with this year’s Fabula Festival. Sum 13: here Sum 14: here Between the two issues its a fun line-up: Mikkel Bindslev in dialogue with Amy Ireland, Bindslev in dialogue with Anna Greenspan and Nick Land, Primož Krašovec, […]
Read More Sum 13 & 14: Shanghai Frequencies + LjubljanastropheBelow is a translation of ‘General Observations’, the concluding passages of Georges Sorel’s 1903 work Introduction à l’économie moderne. It’s a piece that I find interesting for several reasons. Most importantly, it provides an early sketch of his particular concept of the myth, which will subsequently become important in his much better known Reflections on […]
Read More Georges Sorel: ‘General Observations’ (1903)“[We] should not reduce[conspiracy theorists] to the phenomenon of modern mass hysteria…. the problem is not that ufologists and conspiracy theorists regress to a paranoid attitude unable to accept (social) reality; the problem is that this reality itself is becoming paranoiac” – Zizek Great new post up from Cockydooody on paranoia, the proliferation of conspiracy […]
Read More Paranoid StyleLast night I finished reading Diana Pasulka’s American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology. It’s a fascinating book, written from a religious studies perspective, about a little-known ‘faction’, so to speak, of the ufology community that Pasulka has called the “scientist-believers”. As the term suggests, these are accomplished scientists, often in considerable positions of power,who are not only […]
Read More The New Religion and Its Schisms
Reciprocal Contradiction 