Lois McNay - Foucault and feminism: power, gender and the self

This book offers a systematic attempt to explore the point of convergance between feminist theory and the work of Michel Foucault.

This is yet another addition to a growing body of literature on the French theorist that includes Jana Sawicki's Discipling the Body: Feminism, Power and the Body, James Miller's The Passion of Michel Foucault, Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby's Feminism and Foucault, and Didier Eribon's Michel Foucault. Arguing against critics who believe that Foucault's notion of docile bodies is inadequate for feminist theory, McNay contends that the ethics of the self that emerges from Foucault's later work offers clear convergence between Foucauldian and feminist thought. McNay's detailed argument is often obscured by repetition and awkward writing, but her book offers an important counterpoint to feminist criticism of Foucault.

Joshua Craze - The War They Call Peace

As of 9 July 2021, ten years after independence, South Sudan lies in ruins. A civil war that began in 2013 has razed many of the country’s cities, displaced millions, and left entire regions at the edge of starvation. A peace deal, signed in September 2018, only succeeded in returning the main belligerent parties to Juba, the country’s capital. From their perches in a transitional government, the commanders who waged the last civil war continue to clash across the country. What a difference a name makes. Hostilities are now depoliticized as disarmament campaigns or else dismissed as ethnic violence by the billion-dollar UN mission. The UN is keen to cling onto a narrative that sees the peace agreement as a success, despite the fact that its own agencies have found that the level of violence in the country has increased since 2018. It insists that there has been a reduction in ‘political violence’, points to regrettable inter-ethnic conflicts, and suggests that it is the government’s responsibility to police them. Whenever researchers point out the involvement of national politicians in the supposedly local violence scarring South Sudan, the UN plays a credible Captain Renault at Rick’s, announces its shock, and redoubles its support for the government.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-war-they-call-peace

Rethinking Japan’s Red Years

Interview with Gavin Walker

In The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke University Press, 2016), you write that “Marxism was one of the most dominant strands of theoretical inquiry in Japanese intellectual life throughout the bulk of the twentieth century.” You write something similar in the introduction to your translation of Kōjin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Verso, 2020): “It is probably scarcely believable to the majority of Marxists in North America and Western Europe that in the twentieth century, it could easily be argued that the most Marxist country on earth was postwar Japan.” How would you evaluate the translation and reception of Japanese Marxism outside of Japan? Why is the intellectual history of Marxism in Japan so deeply linked to the Japanese reception of Marx’s work?

https://spectrejournal.com/rethinking-japans-red-years/

Maurizio Lazzarato - Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution

Why we must reject the illusory consolations of technology and choose revolution over fascism

We are living in apocalyptic times. In Capital Hates Everyone, famed sociologist Maurice Lazzarato points to a stark choice emerging from the magma of today's world events: fascism or revolution. Fascism now drives the course of democracies as they grow less and less liberal and increasingly subject to the law of capital. Since the 1970s, Lazzarato writes, capital has entered a logic of war. It has become, by the power conferred on it by financialization, a political force intent on destruction. Lazzarato urges us to reject the illusory consolations of a technology-abetted "new" kind of capitalism and choose revolution over fascism.

Марк Фишер - Призраки моей жизни. Тексты о депрессии, хонтологии и утраченном будущем

Марк Фишер (1968-2017) - известный британский культурный теоретик, эссеист, блогер, музыкальный критик. Известность пришла к нему благодаря работе "Капиталистический реализм", изданной в 2009 году в разгар всемирного финансового кризиса, а также блогу "k-Punk", где он подвергал беспощадной критической рефлексии события культурной, политической и социальной жизни. Помимо политической и культурной публицистики, Фишер сильно повлиял на музыкальную критику 2000?х, будучи постоянным автором главного интеллектуального музыкального журнала Британии "The Wire". Именно он ввел в широкий обиход понятие "хонтология", позаимствованное у Жака Деррида. Книга "Призраки моей жизни" вышла в 2014 году. Этот авторский сборник резюмирует все сюжеты интеллектуальных поисков Фишера: в нем он рассуждает о кризисе историчности, культурной ностальгии по несвершившемуся будущему, а также описывает напряжение между личным и политическим, эпицентром которого оказывается популярная музыка.

Грегуар Шамаю - Теория дрона

Применение военных дронов во время боевых действий запустило общественную дискуссию о правовых и этических вопросах. Американская военная стратегия не обсуждалась так широко со времен дебатов о ядерной войне. Можно ли по-прежнему говорить о войне, когда риск не является взаимным и целые группы людей рассматриваются как потенциальные мишени, перед тем как стать мишенями легитимными? На наших глазах трансформируются законы войны, которые долгое время определяли военный конфликт как прямое столкновение между солдатами.

Задорожнюк Э. Г. От крушения Пражской весны к триумфу "бархатной" революции. Из истории оппозиционного движения в Чехословакии (август 1968 — ноябрь 1989·г.)

Данная работа — первое в отечественной историографии научное исследование, посвященное истории чехословацкого оппозиционного движения и его важнейшей составляющей — диссидентства; анализируются основные формы и направления оппозиционной деятельности; прослеживаются перипетии формирования широкого спектра противостоявших"режиму нормализации" независимых инициатив и структур; дана их типология и эволюция программных установок; зафиксирована смена парадигмы оппозиционной деятельности переход от политической активности к концепции "неполитической политики".

https://inslav.ru/images/stories/pdf/2008_Zadorozhnjuk.pdf

Stephen Kotkin - Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era

No one, not even Mikhail Gorbachev, anticipated what was in store when the Soviet Union embarked in the 1980s on a radical course of long-overdue structural reform. The consequences of that momentous decision, which set in motion a transformation eventually affecting the entire postwar world order, are here chronicled from inside a previously forbidden Soviet city, Magnitogorsk. Built under Stalin and championed by him as a showcase of socialism, the city remained closed to Western scrutiny until four years ago, when Stephen Kotkin became the first American to live there in nearly half a century.An uncommonly perceptive observer, a gifted writer, and a first-rate social scientist, Kotkin offers the reader an unsurpassed portrait of daily life in the Gorbachev era. From the formation of "informal" political groups to the start-up of fledgling businesses in the new cooperative sector, from the no-holds-barred investigative reporting of a former Communist party mouthpiece to a freewheeling multicandidate election campaign, the author conveys the texture of contemporary Soviet society in the throes of an upheaval not seen since the 1930s.Magnitogorsk, a planned "garden city" in the Ural Mountains, serves as Kotkin's laboratory for observing the revolutionary changes occurring in the Soviet Union today. Dominated by a self-perpetuating Communist party machine, choked by industrial pollution, and haunted by a suppressed past, this once-proud city now faces an uncertain future, as do the more than one thousand other industrial cities throughout the Soviet Union.Kotkin made his remarkable first visit in 1987 and returned in 1989. On both occasions, steelworkers and schoolteachers, bus drivers and housewives, intellectuals and former victims of oppression--all willingly stepped forward to voice long-suppressed grievances and aspirations. Their words animate this moving narrative, the first to examine the impact and contradictions of perestroika in a single community. Like no other Soviet city, Magnitogorsk provides a window onto the desperate struggle to overcome the heavy burden of Stalin's legacy.

Garrett Dash Nelson - Redlining, Race, and the Color of Money

Redlining maps document the deep history of institutional racism in the United States. They also reveal how the federal government managed risk for capital a role that has perpetuated inequality long after the end of explicit discrimination in the housing market.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/redlining-race-and-the-color-of-money

Call of Duty Is Imperialist Propaganda

Brandon Sonju breaks down how video games and, in particular, first-person shooters like Call of Duty function as propaganda for American empire, and discusses how people can enjoy entertainment while also recognizing the parts of it that reflect what's wrong with the society in which we live

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VJuDD80J_Jo

Как работают системы распознавания лиц?

В новом видео на нашем YouTube-канале Саркис Дарбинян, глава юридической практики «РосКомСвободы» объясняет, как работают камеры с распознаванием лиц, как устроена система видеонаблюдения в России и почему эта технология нарушает наши с вами права

Распознавание лиц – это технология двойного назначения. С одной стороны, она может применяться для поиска преступников, пропавших детей и обеспечения безопасности.

С другой в действительности используется для слежки, для превентивного задержания активистов и оппозиционеров, а во время пандемии ещё и для поимки нарушителей масочного режима.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QYFdWurOXQ4&feature=youtu.be

Tiqqun - Theory of Bloom

The Theory of Bloom is the theory of the isolated subject of the modern era. This short book lays bare our social isolation and the conceptually simple (yet practically difficult) solution to it. This is a foundational text of Tiqqun's thought, and this version is the translation by Robert Hurley (translator of Anti-Oedipus and multiple books by Foucault, Bataille, and Deleuze). "The Bloom is forced to fixate on certain social roles in order to survive. Worker, housewife, professional, student, citizen, all of the roles are but masks, donned and rarely removed. The Bloom must remain positive while wearing these masks, ignoring its own power and sovereignty

Bethany Moreton - To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

n the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America’s devotion to free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists. Through the stories of people linked by the world’s largest corporation, Bethany Moreton shows how a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad.

While industrial America was built by and for the urban North, rural Southerners comprised much of the labor, management, and consumers in the postwar service sector that raised the Sun Belt to national influence. These newcomers to the economic stage put down the plough to take up the bar-code scanner without ever passing through the assembly line. Industrial culture had been urban, modernist, sometimes radical, often Catholic and Jewish, and self-consciously international. Post-industrial culture, in contrast, spoke of Jesus with a drawl and of unions with a sneer, sang about Momma and the flag, and preached salvation in this world and the next. This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart’s world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization.