Talk at seminar on Intensität in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy, April 2018, at Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie, Hannover, Germany. I. I want to ask three short but complicated questions. But more than this I want to address them not merely with regard to…
Next week the UCU (University and Colleges Union), which represents most people working as lecturers and researchers in universities, is beginning a wave of strikes. The strike is about cuts to pensions. Since there is a large financial hole in…
My ill-advised tuppenceworth on ’Cat Person’: There was a peculiar history in the twentieth century in which, in psychoanalysis, the analysis of the ego turned towards an emphasis on quantitative factors (that is, towards an analysis of ego strength and…
The following text was written for Facebook a week after the fight between trans* activists and transmisogynist feminists in Hyde Park in September. Since these issues have come up once again – this time at the Anarchist Bookfair – and…
For quite some time I believed that Novalis had invented techno. Sifting through fragments in the silence of a library, a single one exploded out of the page at me: “The play of movement – joy at the diverse movements.…
Today is world mental health day. Lots of friends have already posted extraordinary things. I just wanted to write about one point: the ubiquity of cognitive behavioural therapy within current treatments. For nearly all minor mental health problems (anxiety, depression,…
Last week I found myself embroiled in all sorts of arguments around transphobic and transmisogynist feminisms. I find it so depressing that this stuff is still around. I’m also depressed by how discussions around the Gender Recognition Act are being…
1. Contemporary capitalism rarely appears simple. Back in 1848 Marx wrote in the opening of The Communist Manifesto about how “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a…
I might have ruined the mindfulness exercise in my CBT group today. The therapist told us we had to imagine “somewhere we felt relaxed” and he talked us through concentrating on the smells and sounds and sights of this imagined…
I don’t want to hear Theresa May going on about “our values, our country, and our way of life” as though there are a bunch of other places in the world where everyone thinks it’s just fine when children get…