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Category Archives: Commentary

The Social

Tuesday, April 4, 2006

Radical politics and neo-liberalism most fully interpenetrate one another in the figures of Ernesto Laclau and Margaret Thatcher. (One shudders at the thought of their bastard offspring — and rightly so, do we not find that figure in Tony Blair’s ideologue, Anthony Giddens?) Making parallel but inverse claims, both Laclau and Thatcher assert the death [...]

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Tronti Symposium at Long Sunday

Sunday, March 26, 2006

My half-assed and late contribution to the otherwise excellent symposium on Mario Tronti’s essay, “The Strategy of Refusal“, at Long Sunday has finally been posted.  My title: “Refusing to Engage“.  The title, really, says it all!

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Day After President’s Day

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Harvard University, in a post-President’s Day gift to the world, announced today that the second most controversial President in the United States would resign from his position effective the end of the current the academic year.  While not quite as famous as the most controversial President in the United States, who has instituted a torture [...]

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Alain Badiou’s History of French Philosophy

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Alain Badiou’s “The Adventure of French Philosophy” from the current issue of the New Left Review attempts to define and defend the legacy of French philosophy, which he defines as occuring between the publication of Being and Nothingness (1943) and What is Philosophy? (1991). This legacy — or moment — he says is equivalent in [...]

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Management and ‘the Mob”

Sunday, November 20, 2005

The Economist is a great magazine. Great, not because it has interesting things to say or is in any way allied with the truth, with demoracy, with freedom, and what have you. It is a great magazine because it literally speaks capitalism. It is the voice of capitalism. Were Marx writing another volume of Capital [...]

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Colin Powell

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Astute readers will no doubt note that I have thus far successfully avoided contributing to the already-too-much that has been said about New Orleans. I was tempted to make a few comments on the early assessment that ‘New Orleans was like Baghdad’ and the relation between poor African-American soldiers dying in Iraq (which we all [...]

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