What do you think?
Rate this book
Theory of Bloom
The Theory of Bloom is the theory of the isolated subject of the modern era.
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. -Review of The Theory of Bloom
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. -Review of The Theory of Bloom
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).
162 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
About the author
Tiqqun
25 books166 followersTiqqun is a French collective of authors and activists formed in 1999. Their journal was the first to publish the collective author “The Invisible Committee.” Tiqqun's books include Introduction to Civil War, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, and This Is Not a Program (all published by Semiotext(e)).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
December 14, 2018
Radical collective opens this text with the declaration of the death of the book—instead, this is a “textual virus” (1). The death of the book bears also “the end of an illusion” (i.e., mannheimian disillusionment), and has the purpose to “create a community,” “the Book has always had its existence outside itself” (id.)—the agambenian eidos zoe, necessary to an imagined polis.
The title arises out of the viral epigraph, drawn from the ‘Calypso’ episode of Ulysses, wherein odyssean Bloom feeds his cat and contemplates how stupid we must seem to cats, who understand us when we don’t understand them (3). We are exposed to his stream of consciousness, the innermost beliefs, which reflect upon the ultimate unknowability of the other.
A collection of vignettes overall, loosely related. The first suggests that there is a “healthy and polite indifference” inhabiting the space between people, and that we become “perfect strangers to each other: blank existences, indifferent, flat presences” (7)—but also that we are “intimate within the estrangement” (8). Very much Woolf’s ‘exquisite intimacy’ that exists amidst the ‘complete indifference’ of others. This intimacy in estrangement is the marker of Blooms, but also there is an identification with Nietzsche’s ‘letztermensch’—“Bloom is the name of that particular anonymity” (9).
We see that “real politics, ecstatic politics” commences with the recognition that “we are tenants of an existence that is exiled in a desert world, that we have been thrown into that world without a mission to accomplish” (11)—most succumb apparently to ennui. The concern is Stimmung, “finitude, perdition, separation” (12), an “affective tonality” of “malaise in civilization”; this is not a matter of us having “lost our bearings”—by contrast, people “have positively become Blooms” and “Bloom is the final emergence of the originary” (13). The term therefore “refers to ‘Stimmung,’ to a fundamental tonality of being” (15).
There is a sense that fungibility of persons arises out of capitalist modernity, that “under commodity occupation, the most concrete truth about everything is that of its infinite substitutability” (22). Familiar refrains from Debord and Foucault in developing this point:
Where I get a little jittery is in the deployment of overt and unexamined Heideggerian clichés, such as “we still harbor the deep feeling of an inauthentic existence, an artificial life” (30), wherein “the interior presence of the Other asserts itself at every stage of our consciousness” (id.). I think that the interior/exterior binary makes very little sense, and the continued reliance on it here is a weakness. That said, Bloom also stands for the proposition that, instead of being a dehisced classical subject, “at the basis of human existence there is a principle of incompleteness, a radical inadequacy” (31), which fits nicely with Sloterdijk’s eulogy of Derrida regarding how the postmodern involves a foundation, as it were, of decentered flexibility.
Bloom is also “masked nothingness” (33), a “generic human essence” (which may or may not be Agamben’s ‘bare life’). This arises out of the world wars, it seems: "The generation that glimpsed the face of the Gorgon through its steel thunderbolts, the generation of expressionism, of futurism, of Dada then surrealism, was the first to take on this terrible secret" (38).A bit opaque, but the secret seems to be that Bloom has been almost
Not sure if there’s a touch of rightwing lament, or just standard Marxist synthesis in “just as the individual resulted from the decomposition of the community, Bloom results from the decomposition of the individual” (44)—which kinda assumes that the existence of the abstraction ‘individual,’ which requires the interior/exterior binary, supra, for its existence. To bracket away the binary is to bracket away the doctrine of individuality, which this text, I don’t think, is doing. Rather, this text works the debordian tradition: “The separation between the lifeless forms of the Spectacle and the ‘formless life’ of Bloom, with its monochrome nothingness, yields at many points to indistinction” (49), which certainly appears to be an agambenian argument; we are not dealing with an eidos zoe, are we? Rather, Bloom as life-without-form, zoe itself.
We see how this works out in the analysis of hipsters, who are regarded as the “imperialist faction” of Bloom, one who “presents himself to the world as a viable form of life [NB], and thus constrains himself to a strict discipline of mendacity” (50), which is a lovely phrase, and certainly sounds like an agambenian rule.
Bloom is otherwise characterized by an “atrophy of memory,” confined to an “eternal present” (58); this is promoted universally by “recent mutations of production modes in late capitalism” (59): “everyone stands, finally, in perfect isolation before the crushing autonomous social totality” (61), the great dream of fascist atomization as described by Neumann, perfected by what Fisher designates as ‘market Stalinism.’ Similarly evokes Frankfurt fellow Fromm even while invoking Debord: “The Spectacle has relieved Bloom of the burdensome obligation to be” (64).
It is a matter of ‘Total Mobilization’ of commodity domination, hoping to “contain the overflowing accumulation of its incongruities by appealing to a state of exception, sometimes manifest, other times latent, but in any case permanent” (66), which should sound very familiar. Domination builds out a “categorical imperative of transparency and traceability” (id.).
Bloom as Arendt’s banality of evil (78). Despite my critique above, we have comments on “the pure exteriority of the conditions of existence also forms the illusion of pure interiority” (80), the condition of possibility for Bloom. Bloom as “indispensable to commodity production” (95), which is ahistorical, it seems, and inconsistent with statements above. However, “at the same time, it’s certain that Bloom bears the potential for bringing down commodity society” (96)—a revolutionary agent, then? Not really—rather, what might “justice signify for an indifferent being?” (98), which reduces Bloom to the status of lumpenized antisocial nihilism, the fertile ground for fascist thuggery. The writers think it differently however: “Bloom forms part of the tiqqun. Precisely because he’s the man of complete nihilism, his lot is to open the way out of nihilism or perish” (102), which strikes me as a non-sequitur. However, this theory is an articulation of a “more modern serfdom” (115). What way forward? “In a world of slaves without masters, in a world of collaborators, in a world dominated by a veritable tyranny of servitude, the simplest surrealist act is governed by nothing less than the ancient duty of tyrannicide” (125). How so? Bloom is apparently also homo sacer, “a creature that has no place in any system of law, that cannot be judged or condemned by men, but that anyone can kill without however committing a crime” (126). This is not normally the revolutionary agent in marxism—so some innovation here, even if it is not fully signifying for me.
Postscript re-urges the agambenian notions that the Spectacle/Biopower want “to convert Bloom into a stabilized form of life” (144), which of course under proper agambenian principles is an impossible project—even though these types mobilized for Berlusconi:
The title arises out of the viral epigraph, drawn from the ‘Calypso’ episode of Ulysses, wherein odyssean Bloom feeds his cat and contemplates how stupid we must seem to cats, who understand us when we don’t understand them (3). We are exposed to his stream of consciousness, the innermost beliefs, which reflect upon the ultimate unknowability of the other.
A collection of vignettes overall, loosely related. The first suggests that there is a “healthy and polite indifference” inhabiting the space between people, and that we become “perfect strangers to each other: blank existences, indifferent, flat presences” (7)—but also that we are “intimate within the estrangement” (8). Very much Woolf’s ‘exquisite intimacy’ that exists amidst the ‘complete indifference’ of others. This intimacy in estrangement is the marker of Blooms, but also there is an identification with Nietzsche’s ‘letztermensch’—“Bloom is the name of that particular anonymity” (9).
We see that “real politics, ecstatic politics” commences with the recognition that “we are tenants of an existence that is exiled in a desert world, that we have been thrown into that world without a mission to accomplish” (11)—most succumb apparently to ennui. The concern is Stimmung, “finitude, perdition, separation” (12), an “affective tonality” of “malaise in civilization”; this is not a matter of us having “lost our bearings”—by contrast, people “have positively become Blooms” and “Bloom is the final emergence of the originary” (13). The term therefore “refers to ‘Stimmung,’ to a fundamental tonality of being” (15).
There is a sense that fungibility of persons arises out of capitalist modernity, that “under commodity occupation, the most concrete truth about everything is that of its infinite substitutability” (22). Familiar refrains from Debord and Foucault in developing this point:
Whatever self-esteem we wished to preserve, we are not subjects, that is, autarkic and sovereign completeness, down to our allegiance. We move in a space that is completely controlled, entirely occupied, by the Spectacle on the one hand and Biopower on the other. (27)This then is the meaning of ‘Bloom’: “we don’t belong to ourselves, that this world is not our world” (29): “estrangement from the world consists in the fact that the stranger is inside us, that in the world of the authoritarian commodity, we regularly become strangers to ourselves” (29), which is a pleasant way to make an old Marxist point.
Where I get a little jittery is in the deployment of overt and unexamined Heideggerian clichés, such as “we still harbor the deep feeling of an inauthentic existence, an artificial life” (30), wherein “the interior presence of the Other asserts itself at every stage of our consciousness” (id.). I think that the interior/exterior binary makes very little sense, and the continued reliance on it here is a weakness. That said, Bloom also stands for the proposition that, instead of being a dehisced classical subject, “at the basis of human existence there is a principle of incompleteness, a radical inadequacy” (31), which fits nicely with Sloterdijk’s eulogy of Derrida regarding how the postmodern involves a foundation, as it were, of decentered flexibility.
Bloom is also “masked nothingness” (33), a “generic human essence” (which may or may not be Agamben’s ‘bare life’). This arises out of the world wars, it seems: "The generation that glimpsed the face of the Gorgon through its steel thunderbolts, the generation of expressionism, of futurism, of Dada then surrealism, was the first to take on this terrible secret" (38).A bit opaque, but the secret seems to be that Bloom has been almost
the sole ‘hero’ of all literature, from Jarry’s Sengle to Michaux’s Plume, from Pessoa himself to The Man without Qualities, from Bartleby to Kafka, not to mention of course The Stranger by Camus and the New Novel. […] it was not until 1927, with the treatise Being and Time, that he became, properly speaking, under the threadbare frock of Dasein, the central non-subject of philosophy. (39)Part of this process is that “every development of commodity society requires the destruction of a certain form of immediacy” (41)—welcome to the world market of the Commie Manifesto, I suppose, but also cf. Benjamin’s 9th Thesis.
Not sure if there’s a touch of rightwing lament, or just standard Marxist synthesis in “just as the individual resulted from the decomposition of the community, Bloom results from the decomposition of the individual” (44)—which kinda assumes that the existence of the abstraction ‘individual,’ which requires the interior/exterior binary, supra, for its existence. To bracket away the binary is to bracket away the doctrine of individuality, which this text, I don’t think, is doing. Rather, this text works the debordian tradition: “The separation between the lifeless forms of the Spectacle and the ‘formless life’ of Bloom, with its monochrome nothingness, yields at many points to indistinction” (49), which certainly appears to be an agambenian argument; we are not dealing with an eidos zoe, are we? Rather, Bloom as life-without-form, zoe itself.
We see how this works out in the analysis of hipsters, who are regarded as the “imperialist faction” of Bloom, one who “presents himself to the world as a viable form of life [NB], and thus constrains himself to a strict discipline of mendacity” (50), which is a lovely phrase, and certainly sounds like an agambenian rule.
Bloom is otherwise characterized by an “atrophy of memory,” confined to an “eternal present” (58); this is promoted universally by “recent mutations of production modes in late capitalism” (59): “everyone stands, finally, in perfect isolation before the crushing autonomous social totality” (61), the great dream of fascist atomization as described by Neumann, perfected by what Fisher designates as ‘market Stalinism.’ Similarly evokes Frankfurt fellow Fromm even while invoking Debord: “The Spectacle has relieved Bloom of the burdensome obligation to be” (64).
It is a matter of ‘Total Mobilization’ of commodity domination, hoping to “contain the overflowing accumulation of its incongruities by appealing to a state of exception, sometimes manifest, other times latent, but in any case permanent” (66), which should sound very familiar. Domination builds out a “categorical imperative of transparency and traceability” (id.).
Bloom as Arendt’s banality of evil (78). Despite my critique above, we have comments on “the pure exteriority of the conditions of existence also forms the illusion of pure interiority” (80), the condition of possibility for Bloom. Bloom as “indispensable to commodity production” (95), which is ahistorical, it seems, and inconsistent with statements above. However, “at the same time, it’s certain that Bloom bears the potential for bringing down commodity society” (96)—a revolutionary agent, then? Not really—rather, what might “justice signify for an indifferent being?” (98), which reduces Bloom to the status of lumpenized antisocial nihilism, the fertile ground for fascist thuggery. The writers think it differently however: “Bloom forms part of the tiqqun. Precisely because he’s the man of complete nihilism, his lot is to open the way out of nihilism or perish” (102), which strikes me as a non-sequitur. However, this theory is an articulation of a “more modern serfdom” (115). What way forward? “In a world of slaves without masters, in a world of collaborators, in a world dominated by a veritable tyranny of servitude, the simplest surrealist act is governed by nothing less than the ancient duty of tyrannicide” (125). How so? Bloom is apparently also homo sacer, “a creature that has no place in any system of law, that cannot be judged or condemned by men, but that anyone can kill without however committing a crime” (126). This is not normally the revolutionary agent in marxism—so some innovation here, even if it is not fully signifying for me.
Postscript re-urges the agambenian notions that the Spectacle/Biopower want “to convert Bloom into a stabilized form of life” (144), which of course under proper agambenian principles is an impossible project—even though these types mobilized for Berlusconi:
what’s actually involved instead is a takeover of the social by a form of life: the manager. There’s nothing less personal than Berlusconi. Nothing more corrupting than the uninhibited pragmatism, the easy-going vulgarity, that infantile authoritarianism, that anesthetizing of the sense of history. Nothing more corrupting than opportunism, than that cynicism, than that fear. […] Disobedients are so amazingly incapable of mustering anything against Berlusconi, owing to their equal immersion in the ethical continuum of management, the problem of running the country, or managing the ‘movement of movements.’ There’s some Berlusconi everywhere you look. (148-9)Berlusconi then, but Trump now.
February 6, 2013
The theory of Bloom regards an ethical position (or lack of one) of extreme indifference to what one is to be in the world. Bloom emerges at a time when the processes of subjectification and desubjectification are in rapid flux. One is broken down to be built anew concurrently, since what is prized above all within this phase of capitalism is the human being's malleability, a constant availability to be anything at any given moment. Beings with an attachment for their content and form act as barriers to this. What is useful in the concept of Bloom as a condition? Tiqqun argue that Bloom represent in their extreme alienation from alienation an inessentiality, or nothingness, that is free to burst forth from anywhere and introduce an extreme hostility to the world that makes them. Though, so long as Bloom remains lone gunmen they are easily neutralized as the mass shooter, or incomprehensible anti-social terrorist, as the madness that is easily unexplained away and separated out from the mass. Bloom coming to recognize Bloom as a common condition would inaugurate something altogether different and terrifyingly wondrous.
Of the essays of Tiqqun, this is perhaps more literary and often less dense than their other writings and is aside from 'This is not a Program' what I would recommend for people as an introduction. The translation by Robert Hurley is also a huge improvement on the coherence and beauty of text, compared to the earlier Tiqqunista version, which was rather mangled.
For example:
"Empty angels, creatures without a creator, mediums without a message, we walk among the chasms. Our road, which could just as well have ended yesterday, or years ago, does not have its reason in itself, and knows nothing of any necessity apart from that of its contingency. It is a wandering that transports us from the same to the same on the paths of the identical. Wherever we go, we carry inside us the desert whose hermit we are. And if on certain days we can swear that we are “the whole universe” like Aggripa Von Nettesheim, or more ingeneously, “all the things, all the men, and all the animals,” like Cravan, it’s because we see in everything only the nothing that we ourselves so fully are."
"But the world we’re awakening to is a world at war whose brilliance radiates entirely from the trenchant truth of its devision into friends and enemies. Designating the front is preliminary to crossing the line, but only combat can accomplish the crossing. Not so much because it calls one to greatness, but because it is the deepest experience of community, the kind of community that constantly skirts annihilation and takes its measures only from the close proximity of the risk. Living together in the heart of the desert with the same resolve not to make peace with it — this is the test, this is where the light shines."
Of the essays of Tiqqun, this is perhaps more literary and often less dense than their other writings and is aside from 'This is not a Program' what I would recommend for people as an introduction. The translation by Robert Hurley is also a huge improvement on the coherence and beauty of text, compared to the earlier Tiqqunista version, which was rather mangled.
For example:
"Empty angels, creatures without a creator, mediums without a message, we walk among the chasms. Our road, which could just as well have ended yesterday, or years ago, does not have its reason in itself, and knows nothing of any necessity apart from that of its contingency. It is a wandering that transports us from the same to the same on the paths of the identical. Wherever we go, we carry inside us the desert whose hermit we are. And if on certain days we can swear that we are “the whole universe” like Aggripa Von Nettesheim, or more ingeneously, “all the things, all the men, and all the animals,” like Cravan, it’s because we see in everything only the nothing that we ourselves so fully are."
"But the world we’re awakening to is a world at war whose brilliance radiates entirely from the trenchant truth of its devision into friends and enemies. Designating the front is preliminary to crossing the line, but only combat can accomplish the crossing. Not so much because it calls one to greatness, but because it is the deepest experience of community, the kind of community that constantly skirts annihilation and takes its measures only from the close proximity of the risk. Living together in the heart of the desert with the same resolve not to make peace with it — this is the test, this is where the light shines."
August 14, 2022
The Theory of Bloom is a theory of the crisis of the modern subject under late capitalism
The dominant feature in the figure of the Bloom is the loss of experience because, within the Spectacle, we never experience concrete events, but only conventions, rules, a fully symbolized, fully constructed second nature.
The loss of experience and the loss of community go hand in hand, are one and the same. Yet, there's no nostalgia in Tiqqun, because there has never been before our time a true community; it is based on the assumption of separation, exposition, and finitude. Filled with the emptiness that surrounds it, the Bloom is permanently placed out of itself, its essence is literally ecstatic while its human existence becomes manifest in the form of a generalized schizoid state.
The dominant feature in the figure of the Bloom is the loss of experience because, within the Spectacle, we never experience concrete events, but only conventions, rules, a fully symbolized, fully constructed second nature.
The loss of experience and the loss of community go hand in hand, are one and the same. Yet, there's no nostalgia in Tiqqun, because there has never been before our time a true community; it is based on the assumption of separation, exposition, and finitude. Filled with the emptiness that surrounds it, the Bloom is permanently placed out of itself, its essence is literally ecstatic while its human existence becomes manifest in the form of a generalized schizoid state.
July 5, 2021
Achei interessante e muito engajante. Ainda não tenho opinião formada, devia ter lido o Introdução a Guerra Civil antes, mas achei muito manero, vou voltar a ele logo mais. Real não sei direito o que pensar sobre como eles desconsideram raça, classe gênero e absolutamente todo “predicado” que um sujeito pode ter numa relação política como dada pelo Espetáculo e o sujeito só passivamente recebendo como uma etiqueta que não vale nada. Acho que isso tende a calar a diferença, mas talvez seja minha pouca compreensão do conceito de forma-de-vida, e tambem isso pode ser específico do Bloom, aquele que tem um gosto pela negatividade, cuja única determinação é o negativo, que o Espetáculo tenta recobrir desesperadamente enquanto dele ainda depende. O homem comum é vigiado como um possível terrorista, porque por baixo de suas máscaras do dia a dia, nada há, coisa que o Espetáculo não pode suportar (Vai ser bem maneiro tentar conectar isso com Fanon, espero que consiga).
September 6, 2020
L'uomo-massa nell'analisi di un collettivo radicale
Tiqqun è il nome di una rivista della sinistra radicale-anarcoide francese che è divenuto anche l'identità anonima e collettiva del gruppo di attivisti politici dietro al sedicente "Partito Immaginario". Siamo dalle parti del situazionismo, del surrealismo politico e di quella ribollente galassia di sinistra anarchica o post-comunista. Come da aspettarsi, i testi sono contorti e avvolti su se stessi, basati su paradossi e (sembrerebbe) sforzi linguistici e logici per portare l'analisi un pò più in là.
Il libro è basato su brevi paragrafi che presentano il concetto di Bloom : l'uomo annullato nella massificazione capitalista e consumista, la sua perdita di senso, di identità e di sostanza ontologica stessa. In mezzo estratti di letteratura (a volte a proposito, altre volti poco sensati).
Alcuni elementi in qualche pagina mostrano una capacità di osservazione critica del reale interessante e colgono alcune effettive deviazioni dell'individuo nelle nostre società: peccato, però, che tutta l'analisi rimane ancorata ai rigidi schemi di una visione post-comunista ormai asfittica e noiosamente manichea- il BioPotere, la società borghese, il Capitale rimangono come entità quasi fisiche e moloch da abbattere (quando è ormai chiaro che non c'è nessuna Spectre che muove il mondo, ma solo tutti noi che contribuiamo alla direzione generale della realtà).
Quindi, questo schematismo ideologico finisce per offuscare del tutto le argomentazioni e a fallire completamente sul piano pratico-propositivo, arrivando ad individuare nelle follie omicide come Columbine o Littleton segni di una incipiente rivolta sociale (come se i folli assassini non fosse mai esistiti) facendo cadere Tiqqun nella trappola dello Spettacolo (come viene definito il meccanismo mediatico e di divertimento necessario per soggiogare le masse). Inoltre, fa abbastanza specie che le previsioni del futuro (nel 2004!) siano state erronee: il Bloom è stato compreso e sfruttato molto bene per i propri fini dall'area reazionaria di destra con il populismo anti-democratico e "rivoluzionario" di un Trump, un Orban, un Salvini (mentre Tiqqun asserisce qui che la reazione non può comprendere il Bloom).
Una lettura faticosa e raramente scorrevole, ma comunque interessante per tentare di capire come ragionano dalle "parti estreme".
Tiqqun è il nome di una rivista della sinistra radicale-anarcoide francese che è divenuto anche l'identità anonima e collettiva del gruppo di attivisti politici dietro al sedicente "Partito Immaginario". Siamo dalle parti del situazionismo, del surrealismo politico e di quella ribollente galassia di sinistra anarchica o post-comunista. Come da aspettarsi, i testi sono contorti e avvolti su se stessi, basati su paradossi e (sembrerebbe) sforzi linguistici e logici per portare l'analisi un pò più in là.
Il libro è basato su brevi paragrafi che presentano il concetto di Bloom : l'uomo annullato nella massificazione capitalista e consumista, la sua perdita di senso, di identità e di sostanza ontologica stessa. In mezzo estratti di letteratura (a volte a proposito, altre volti poco sensati).
Alcuni elementi in qualche pagina mostrano una capacità di osservazione critica del reale interessante e colgono alcune effettive deviazioni dell'individuo nelle nostre società: peccato, però, che tutta l'analisi rimane ancorata ai rigidi schemi di una visione post-comunista ormai asfittica e noiosamente manichea- il BioPotere, la società borghese, il Capitale rimangono come entità quasi fisiche e moloch da abbattere (quando è ormai chiaro che non c'è nessuna Spectre che muove il mondo, ma solo tutti noi che contribuiamo alla direzione generale della realtà).
Quindi, questo schematismo ideologico finisce per offuscare del tutto le argomentazioni e a fallire completamente sul piano pratico-propositivo, arrivando ad individuare nelle follie omicide come Columbine o Littleton segni di una incipiente rivolta sociale (come se i folli assassini non fosse mai esistiti) facendo cadere Tiqqun nella trappola dello Spettacolo (come viene definito il meccanismo mediatico e di divertimento necessario per soggiogare le masse). Inoltre, fa abbastanza specie che le previsioni del futuro (nel 2004!) siano state erronee: il Bloom è stato compreso e sfruttato molto bene per i propri fini dall'area reazionaria di destra con il populismo anti-democratico e "rivoluzionario" di un Trump, un Orban, un Salvini (mentre Tiqqun asserisce qui che la reazione non può comprendere il Bloom).
Una lettura faticosa e raramente scorrevole, ma comunque interessante per tentare di capire come ragionano dalle "parti estreme".
February 18, 2022
i will be reading more tiqqun
November 10, 2021
posting a positive rating and review of this defeats the purpose. bloom time
March 5, 2022
i think it’s simply not my type of book, that’s a big statement but even though it may be very interesting it just made me feel dumb because i couldn’t understand 90% of what was written.
March 8, 2018
To take up the nothing that you are, the elision that each one of us most properly is - only this may open onto the revolutionary reinscription, the experimental existence of exilic entities which shatter and stall out the tired workings of the spectacular and spectral economy whose ordering law leaves us homeless, selfless, and unknown.
Take up what you have been forced to become, take it back, this nothing that you are yet cannot be. Desubjectified, subject the system to its own destructive (un)workings. Together, though always apart, at a distance, in proximity, we stand as no one, under the eliding slippage of the non-sign of the Bloom. Everyone is no one, and no one holds the power. Friends to those without friends, a community without community, communicating through sacrifice and abandonment, in a terrifying and rupturous field of faulty discourse, we must make our home - in the desert wastes of the crumbling capitalist world, awaiting the coming insurrection; the revolution always already underway for us, the dying beings who find our place in the loss of place, the displacement, that this dying relation discloses.
Take up what you have been forced to become, take it back, this nothing that you are yet cannot be. Desubjectified, subject the system to its own destructive (un)workings. Together, though always apart, at a distance, in proximity, we stand as no one, under the eliding slippage of the non-sign of the Bloom. Everyone is no one, and no one holds the power. Friends to those without friends, a community without community, communicating through sacrifice and abandonment, in a terrifying and rupturous field of faulty discourse, we must make our home - in the desert wastes of the crumbling capitalist world, awaiting the coming insurrection; the revolution always already underway for us, the dying beings who find our place in the loss of place, the displacement, that this dying relation discloses.
January 30, 2020
Idk. I didn't feel this was their best work. Spends far too long in an essentially existential mode, while I feel the strength of their thought lies elsewhere than in their ability to trash things and declare everything to be empty, which is kind of the bulk of the book. Maybe it's just that I'm in a different place in my life from when I read the other works of theirs I've read so far, but for most of the middle section I just felt like I was listening to my own depression from two years ago, and thought to myself "if there are only so many tonalities of Bloom, why this one?"
July 21, 2016
It's becoming a pattern: Agamben says something confusing ("the whatever subject"), then Tiqqun storms in, radicalizes it and explains it. I'm not sure I'm on board with their argument here about the revolutionary potential of the Bloom, but it was original, challenging and exciting, what more do I dare to ask from a book?
December 4, 2013
What a scoop to get the translator of Deleuze, Foucault, Bataille and others to put this text to English.
Read
August 10, 2022OG.
February 26, 2026
Un llibre-manifest que no és merament polític, sinó que és existencial, estic absolutament fascinada. Des de l'anonimat, Tiqqun no és ningú, s'escriu una teoria (molt divertida i que fa bastanta por) de l'humà contemporani o la condició humana en el tardocapitalisme. La construcció d'una ètica (preocupada per les formes de vida) pròpia que serveixi per a superar la condició d'"humà sense atributs (bloom)" a partir d'una visió marxista. Segurament he entès poc!, perquè diu molt i és condensat i complex. Realment és molt difícil d'explicar, us poso uns fragments perquè ho llegiu vosaltres mateixes:
"La dominación mercantilista debe pues producir, al mismo tiempo que una sobreabundancia de medios, la sobreabundancia de terror necesaria para que nadie se sirva de ellos. El Bloom es el hombre de este terror, quien lo infunde y quien lo sufre: el colaborador".
"Esta promesa es todo lo que UNO constantemente pretende conjurar. Su maniobra consiste, como resultado de la coalición entre el Espectáculo y el Biopoder, en reducir lo común a lo vulgar. De hecho, UNO querría convertir el Bloom en una forma-de-vida estabilizada. Se trata de mantener el Bloom en el Bloom. Se trata de atrofiar cualquier atisbo de sensibilidad ética".
Un gran descobriment d'aquest any, sens dubte.
"La dominación mercantilista debe pues producir, al mismo tiempo que una sobreabundancia de medios, la sobreabundancia de terror necesaria para que nadie se sirva de ellos. El Bloom es el hombre de este terror, quien lo infunde y quien lo sufre: el colaborador".
"Esta promesa es todo lo que UNO constantemente pretende conjurar. Su maniobra consiste, como resultado de la coalición entre el Espectáculo y el Biopoder, en reducir lo común a lo vulgar. De hecho, UNO querría convertir el Bloom en una forma-de-vida estabilizada. Se trata de mantener el Bloom en el Bloom. Se trata de atrofiar cualquier atisbo de sensibilidad ética".
Un gran descobriment d'aquest any, sens dubte.
May 27, 2021
This was always one of LBC's favorite of our own titles. It is arguably the most anarchist-friendly of the Tiqqunist titles, and there's an elegance to both the prose and the translation (by Robert Hurley, friend of the show) that requires and rewards careful reading (echoes of Society of the Spectacle, but don't tell anyone I said that).
The scene is repeated ad infinitum in all its banality. It's a new fact of life. It's shocking at first, like a slap, but we've had to spend years preparing for it, scrupulously, by becoming perfect strangers to each other: blank existences, indifferent, flat presences. At the same time, no part of this situation could be taken for granted if we were not *absolutely intimate* within the estrangement. It was necessary, therefore, that the estrangement also become the index of our relationship with ourselves, that we become, in every aspect, *blooms*.
April 13, 2025
Attention, les revendications politico-philosophiques de Tiqqun sont aiguisées.
Ce collectif anonyme et autoproclamé "organe conscient du Parti Imaginaire" est désormais l'une de mes principales inspirations.
La justesse douloureuse avec laquelle est présentée le concept de Bloom pourrait s'assimiler à une chute, ou à une envolée.
A lire absolument.
Ce collectif anonyme et autoproclamé "organe conscient du Parti Imaginaire" est désormais l'une de mes principales inspirations.
La justesse douloureuse avec laquelle est présentée le concept de Bloom pourrait s'assimiler à une chute, ou à une envolée.
A lire absolument.
June 30, 2018
Trošku dost mě štve to meziřádkový schvalování a omlouvání násilí (včetně ohavnýho) jako prostředků penetrace spektáklu. Jinak v pořádku.
January 6, 2022
Apart from some good post-debordian analysis, the rest is just a collection of varied quotes intermingled with incomprehensible ideas.
May 22, 2022
Very unique perspective on Being, Capitalism, and revolution.
Read
May 5, 2023Closet humanists
February 5, 2024
Interesting but not as satisfying as the Tiqqun works published by Semiotext(e).
April 7, 2024
This book could say what it wanted to in a page.
August 9, 2024
An interesting theory overall but in the wrong (impressionable) hands, this nihilistic approach to modern society and our place in it could be very destructive.
July 8, 2025
Que coño acabo de leer
November 6, 2025
Ce livre a un être-jeté-par-moi-dans-la-poubelle
May 1, 2020
Se recomienda leerlo de una sentada, en alguna noche febril donde las estrellas parezcan obstruidas por sendos nubarrones y un hálito de tormenta anegue el ambiente. Leerlo con devoción pero con un cariñoso recelo, devorarlo aunque sea de mordisco a mordisco, vivirlo, gritarlo y, al final, olvidar cada palabra leída. Olvidar qué es eso llamado Tiqqun; un sujeto, un colectivo, o un millar de anónimos sujetos mecanizados y alienados redactando la Rebelión indecible cada noche.
Una vez hecho esto, volver a las primeras páginas, y así ad infinitum.
Una vez hecho esto, volver a las primeras páginas, y así ad infinitum.
January 6, 2015
I can't get behind TNI's man-child piece (Jaleh Mansoor's rebuttal is definitely worth reading) but there is a sense that Tiqqun writes about the Bloom figure, gendered male, in a much more sympathetic manner.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews