Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Matthew MacLellan - Foucault Against Neoliberalism?

In the late 1970s, Michel Foucault dedicated a number of controversial lectures on the subject of neoliberalism. Had Foucault been seduced by neoliberalism? Did France’s premier leftist intellectual, near the end of his career, turn to the right? In this book, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie argues that far from abandoning the left, Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism was a means of probing the limits and lacunae of traditional political philosophy, social contract theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. For Lagasnerie, Foucault’s analysis was an attempt to discover neoliberalism’s singularity, understand its appeal, and unearth its emancipatory potential in order to construct a new art of rebelliousness. By reading Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism as a means of developing new practices of emancipation, Lagasnerie offers an original and compelling account of Michel Foucault’s most controversial work.

Жиль Делез о том, как стать разумным. Из сборника «Лекции о Спинозе»

Для французского философа Жиля Делеза Бенедикт Спиноза — фигура знаковая. Помимо того, что Делез посвятил ему две своих книги, он еще и прочитал курс лекций о Спинозе с 1978 по 1981 годы. Анализируя основные концепции нидерландского философа (отсутствие свободы, аффект и аффекция, смерть), Делез воспроизводит их через призму современного общества.

https://admarginem.ru/2021/05/25/zhil-delez-o-tom-kak-stat-razumnym-iz-sbornika-lektsii-o-spinoze/

Aaron Tauss - Colombia Is in Revolt Against Neoliberalism

More than five million Colombians — 10 percent of the country’s total population have taken to the streets over the past two weeks to protest neoliberal policies, government corruption, police brutality, and the systematic murder of activists.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/05/colombia-neoliberalism-ivan-duque-revolt-uprising-socioeconomic-reform

Rowland Atkinson - Alpha City. How London Was Captured by the Super-Rich

How London was bought and sold by the Super-Rich, and what it means for the rest of us. Who owns London? Today, the city is the epicentre of the world’s financial markets, an elite cultural hub, and a place to hide one’s wealth. In Alpha City, Rowland Atkinson tells the story of eager developers, sovereign wealth, and grasping politicians, all of which paved the way for the plutocratic colonisation of the cityscape. Atkinson moves through the gated communities and the mega-houses of the urban elite, charting how the rich live and their influence on the disturbing rise in evictions and displacements from the city. The book, fully updated, also looks at the capital’s prospects in the aftermath of Brexit and the pandemic, showing how the super-rich may capitalise on the crisis, increasing inequality and hardship.

Rodrigo Nunes - Neither Vertical nor Horizontal. A Theory of Political Organization

How do we organise in a world after both Occupy and the Sanders campaign? For something so often described as essential, political organisation remains a surprisingly under-theorised field. Nunes redefines the terms of organisational theory, and argues that organisation must be understood as always supposing a diverse ecology of different initiatives and organisational forms. Drawing from a wide array of sources and traditions Nunes develops a grammar that eschews easy oppositions between ‘verticalism’ and ‘horizontalism’, and offers a fresh approach to enduring issues like spontaneity, leadership, democracy, strategy, populism, revolution, and the relationship between movements and parties.

Karen Dawisha - Putin’s kleptocracy: who owns Russia?

The raging question in the world today is who is the real Vladimir Putin and what are his intentions. Karen Dawisha’s brilliant Putin’s Kleptocracy provides an answer, describing how Putin got to power, the cabal he brought with him, the billions they have looted, and his plan to restore the Greater Russia.

Russian scholar Dawisha describes and exposes the origins of Putin’s kleptocratic regime. She presents extensive new evidence about the Putin circle’s use of public positions for personal gain even before Putin became president in 2000. She documents the establishment of Bank Rossiya, now sanctioned by the US; the rise of the Ozero cooperative, founded by Putin and others who are now subject to visa bans and asset freezes; the links between Putin, Petromed, and “Putin’s Palace” near Sochi; and the role of security officials from Putin’s KGB days in Leningrad and Dresden, many of whom have maintained their contacts with Russian organized crime.

Putin’s Kleptocracy is the result of years of research into the KGB and the various Russian crime syndicates. Dawisha’s sources include Stasi archives; Russian insiders; investigative journalists in the US, Britain, Germany, Finland, France, and Italy; and Western officials who served in Moscow. Russian journalists wrote part of this story when the Russian media was still free. “Many of them died for this story, and their work has largely been scrubbed from the Internet, and even from Russian libraries,” Dawisha says. “But some of that work remains.”

The Mayfair Set, E4: Twilight of the Dogs

the Rise of Business and the Decline of Political Power, is a series of programmes produced by Adam Curtis for the BBC, first broadcast in the summer of 1999.

The programme looks at how buccaneer capitalists of hot money were allowed to shape the climate of the Thatcher years, focusing on the rise of Colonel David Stirling, Jim Slater, James Goldsmith and Tiny Rowland, all members of London's Clermont Club in the 1960s. It received the BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series or Strand in 2000.

Twilight of the Dogs

By the 1980s the day of the buccaneering tycoons was over. Tiny Rowland, James Goldsmith and Mohamed Al-Fayed were the only ones who were not finished.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PdQ3ztGk0D4

Marco d’Eramo - The World in a Selfie. An Inquiry into the Tourist Age

A spirited critique of the cultural politics of sightseeing. Or, why we are all tourists who hate tourists. We’ve all been tourists at some point in our lives. How is it we look so condescendingly at people taking selfies in front of the Tower of Pisa? Is there really much to distinguish the package holiday from hipster city-breaks to Berlin or Brooklyn? Why do we engage our free time in an activity we profess to despise?

The World in a Selfie dissects a global cultural phenomenon. For Marco D’Eramo, tourism is not just the most important industry of the century, generating huge waves of people and capital, calling forth a dedicated infrastructure, and upsetting and repurposing the architecture and topography of our cities. It also encapsulates the problem of modernity: the search for authenticity in a world of ersatz pleasures. D’Eramo retraces the grand tours of the first globetrotters from Francis Bacon and Samuel Johnson to Arthur de Gobineau and Mark Twain before assessing the cultural meaning of the beach holiday and the ‘UNESCO-cide’ of major heritage sites. The tourist selfie will never look the same again.

Rodrigo Nunes - The Scale of Things to Come: The Local, the Global, and Organization

The following is an excerpt from Rodrigo Nunes’ new book, Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation, out now with Verso. Part balance sheet of the struggles of the last decade, part diagnosis of the left’s traumas and melancholias in the last forty years, part attempt to develop a theory of organization that avoids sterile oppositions between ‘horizontalism’ and ‘verticalism’, the book draws from different sources and traditions from Spinoza to cybernetics via Marx, Bogdanov, poststructuralism and Simondon to propose a new grammar with which to think questions like spontaneity, leadership, democracy, strategy, populism, revolution, and the relationship between movements and parties.

https://viewpointmag.com/2021/05/27/the-scale-of-things-to-come-the-local-the-global-and-organization/

Nivedita Majumdar - The World in a Grain of Sand

Radical universalism vs postcolonial theory The World in a Grain of Sand offers a framework for reading literature from the global South that goes against the grain of dominant theories in cultural studies, especially, postcolonial theory. It critiques the valorization of the local in cultural theories typically accompanied by a rejection of universal categories - viewed as Eurocentric projections. But the privileging of the local usually amounts to an exercise in exoticization of the South. The book argues that the rejection of Eurocentric theories can be complemented by embracing another, richer and non-parochial form of universalism. Through readings of texts from India, Sri Lanka, Palestine and Egypt, the book shows that the fine grained engagement with culture, the mapping of ordinary lives not just as objects but subjects of their history, is embedded in much of postcolonial literature in a radical universalism - one that is rooted in local realities, but is able to unearth in them the needs, conflicts and desires that stretch across cultures and time. It is a universalism recognized by Marx and steeped in the spirit of anti-colonialism, but hostile to any whiff of exoticism.

Charles A Prusik - Adorno and Neoliberalism: The Critique of Exchange Society. Bloomsbury, 2020. 188 pp.

Reviewed by Iaan Reynolds

In Adorno and Neoliberalism: The Critique of Exchange Society, Charles A. Prusik argues that Adorno’s critical theory can provide crucial resources for an understanding of neoliberal political economy and the forms of thought it generates, weaving an impressive knowledge of Adorno’s works and their reception with deep familiarity with Marxist and classical political economy, neoclassical and neoliberal economics, and political history. Prusik’s book is valuable for the way it works against the customary interpretation of the early Frankfurt School as a group of theorists departing from rather than deepening Marxist social theory. The Adorno of these pages is not so much an elitist forebear of apolitical aesthetics as a critic of capitalist society.

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19255_adorno-and-neoliberalism-the-critique-of-exchange-society-by-charles-a-prusik-reviewed-by-iaan-reynolds/

Жак Деррида - Несколько положений и трюизмов по поводу неологизмов, новизмов, постизмов, паразитизмов и других небольших сейсмизмов

Когда я начал готовиться к настоящему симпозиуму, то понял, что неверно прочитал предпосланное ему название. Возможно, по невнимательности вместо «The States of “Theory”» (states во множественном числе и theory в кавычках) я прочитал «The State of Theory» (state в единственном числе и theory без кавычек).
И я подумал, что ответ на такой вопрос — What is the state of theory today? — был само собой разумеющимся и очевидным, hic et nunc. Разве штатом (state) теории теперь и в дальнейшем является не Калифорния? Даже Южная Калифорния?

https://syg.ma/@noodletranslate/zhak-dierrida-nieskolko-polozhienii-i-triuizmov-po-povodu-nieologhizmov-novizmov-postizmov-parazitizmov-i-drughikh-niebolshikh-sieismizmov

Bruno Bosteels - From Zapata to the Zapatistas: Mexico’s “other” Commune

Revising the history of the Commune from the Americas transforms our geopolitical outlook and the manner in which we articulate the commune’s political form.

https://roarmag.org/essays/mexico-other-commune

More Worker Injuries at Amazon Warehouses with Robots — Alex Press

On Jacobin's original series Weekends, Jacobin staff writer Alex Press explains why rates of worker injuries are higher at Amazon warehouses that use some automation.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gGhIqvb4uNk