Chris > Recent Status Updates

“Believe it or not, I forgot the notes for my lecture!”

What stands out most about this book’s first two chapters are the way the Zionist project was founded on Labor. The way Unions in America were used as both fund raising vehicles for Zionists to buy up land in Palestine so that a nascent settler colony could be formulated and also a political advocacy tool to alter US policy. The Nakba was the result of this groundwork laid by US Labor.

One has to appreciate seeing a plan come to fruition, especially when it has to deal with contingencies. I also appreciate how knowing the rules of the game allows you to break the game.

It’s not a bad idea to take over an organ of the labor movement no matter how diseased and dysfunctional it has become. As a practical activity it provides work to be done and experience for those needing to learn lessons in organizing. It provides a strategic point to hold so that workers can build independence from mainstream politics.

A great book about some shitty things.

Exemplar.

“All history can therefore be read under the
sign of classes, but by observing the rules set forth by Marx, and bearing in mind
that classes are the "negative" of castes and ranks.”

Uhh…

Reading Žižek or reading block quotes by Kant?

I can see what Laruelle does with the One, separating it from Being and allowing it to be without the philosophical burden, but I’m still not seeing the big picture and so I’m keeping my judgment in suspense.

“…whereas he doesn't know all that much himself - is he who takes upon himself the task of propping up the subject-supposed-to-know.”

“What constitutes an effect of the symbolic on the field of the imaginary?”

Badiou absolutely shitting all over vitalism.

Badiou reverses Hölderlin on Heidegger.

Badiou deals with Heidegger so thoroughly and in such a way that he ruins everything mystical in Heidegger’s thinking. No more destiny. No more messianism.

“Staging also involves this ability to achieve a disjunctive synthesis.”

Badiou takes Foucault and Heidegger to task on their apolitical nature of power.

“The violence that forces a person to become a commodified body is not exactly a violence against the body. It's a violence against the body's capacity for ideas, its capacity to serve as a support for more than just its own interests, its enjoyment, or its self-preservation. It's a violence that imposes the imperative: "Enjoy yourself however you like, enjoy yourself however you can!"”