An Imagined Community
All politics are identity politics.
I grew up in Minnesota, but moved away in 1998; today my connection to the state is not much more profound than following the local news and avidly watching Minnesota Twins baseball games.
Responsible Imperialism
[...] there was no other remedy for a wrong than British justice – just as today it is usually taken as read that the proper answer to the problems of indigenous peoples are intervention by government programs or even the armed force of the “international community.
Questioning October
This approach is correct about one thing: the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks did resort to Marxist concepts such as these in their 1917 polemics. Yet doctrinal arguments of this kind were far from the heart of the matter.
Ulyanovsk
Lenin is likened to the Biblical Noah, confidently building his revolutionary ark as the flood waters of political, social and economic catastrophe rose higher and higher. “As it turned out, the ark was leaky because it was built on unsound assumptions, the voyage involved more suffering than anyone had bargained for, and the ark ended up far from where its builder planned.
Rosa’s Mail
Reading The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg one sometimes feels like a voyeur. Tender love notes are mixed in with daily triumphs and tragedies, accounts of visits with friends, what was had for breakfast, nervous missives to one lover written while hiding from another, romantic longings, and multiple self-deprecating jokes about her small stature and ungainly looks.
An Unauthenticated Avant-Garde
The paintings in the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art’s winter exhibition, Orphan Paintings: Unauthenticated Art of the Russian Avant-Garde were found, as if in a time capsule filled with Adorno’s fantasies of late capitalism, in an “unclaimed shipping container in German customs.
Two Steps Back
In the face of this degeneration, how do we assess whether or not any self-purported Left either by “carrying on” with the political “struggle” or by returning to “the legacy of socialist thought,” is actually working towards social revolution? Writing amid the sound and fury of the Cold War, Mills was plagued by a sense that both the Right and the Left had become obstacles to transformative possibilities.
The Power of Nonsense
The only ‘realistic’ prospect is to ground a new political universality by opting for the impossible, fully assuming the place of the exception, with no taboos, no a priori norms (‘human rights,’ ‘democracy’), respect for which would prevent us from ‘resignifying’ terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of sacrifice … if this radical choice is decried by some bleeding-heart liberals as Linksfaschismus, so be it!
~ Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek’s diagnosis of late capitalism is of genuine interest.
The Frick Collection at 75
The Frick Collection is celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary this year. To commemorate opening its doors in 1935 the Collection is showing a few elevation sketches of the building’s transformation from the home of Henry Clay Frick into the museum we see today.
Zombie Marx
The arrogance of Marxist economists.
Issue 3-4: Liberalism is Dead
Issue 3-4
