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…
The whole of Marx’s early writings are aimed at the thought that being “woke” is insufficient to transform the world. He knew too, that this infernal politics of insomnia lets us idly drift into some floodlit night of the world,…
Here’s a draft of that new translation of Bertolt Brecht’s poem “On the suicide of the refugee W.B.”, again the original is below in German, with my equally mediocre literal translation, with thanks again to Nelly Sachs, Freddy Nietzsche, Teddy&Max,…
Today thinking a glitch is radical is the surest sign of political and aesthetic conservatism.
There exists a certain tendency on the left, of people who think that all determinations, distinctions, borders just need to be abolished. They then, apparently unconsciously, spend their lives sifting through artworks, pop-songs, films, and cultural critique, accumulating two great…
Moderates are the main reason to be an extremist.
Some students meet a picket line and scream at us “why are you stopping us getting an education?” as though education is a thing within the university that we prevented them getting to. And how you get to it doesn’t…
Shouldn’t Space Invaders have been called “Earth Invaders”?
Make bats by putting rats in cocoons!
Camberwell Green, yesterday. She: Do we get extra pay for working bank holidays? He: yes, but only if it’s on you’re normal shift patterns. You get time and a half. Or you can take a day off. But if you…
In London “bare life” means “lots of life.” On the difference between philosophy and real life: in real life being impotent means you can’t come; in philosophy being impotent means you can’t become.
The night in which A.C.A.B. G.W.F. Hegel
Long past four in the morning an old man sits at the piano. Outside the shaded sky turns azure, its mottled urban-orange clouds invisible from within the concert-hall, windowless as the rest of them. His fingers have struck the same…
I think the best thing about Hillary Clinton is definitely that she’s nothing but an enormous accumulation of dead people, whose lives were ended through those modes of oppression that could most appropriately attach themselves to whatever in them might…
Most of the world’s population is divided into nihilists and magicians, but occasionally you meet someone who can be both: a materialist.
I know I don’t say things about politics/political theory much, but one of the advantages of Marxist accounts of society is that we can recognise that practical claims to a politics of inclusion before communism (a state of absolute inclusion)…
When I think about the history of 20th century philosophy I am glad that the angel picture by Paul Klee that Walter Benjamin owned was not the one called “Engel, noch hässlich” [“Angel, still ugly”]. But it looks a bit…
A little aphorism I wrote a while ago, ‘Elbow communism: a late night thought’, has just been translated into Greek by the αμφιφλοξ blog (where it is posted next to some poetry by the excellent Nikos Karouzos.) The translator tells me that…
Sitting in a café near an older French couple on holiday – the sort that Haneke’s Amour would have us believe is the height of humanity – they are kind to each other in the distance they leave, the respect…
Someone at αμφιφλοξ blog has written a Greek translation of the Dream Fragment I wrote a few months ago (reposted here beneath the translation). Enjoy. Συναντηθήκαμε ξανά στον δρόμο που είχαμε βρεθεί την τελευταία φορά. Κανείς από τους δυο μας δεν μπορούσε να…
The entire Teutonic history is recapitulated in miniature in crisps, which, in Germany, are available in only two flavours: Natural and Hungarian. Prolapsarian, 2014
We met again in the street where we last met. Neither of us could remember how long it had been. It was night again. You had aged a lot and I was a little younger than I had been. In…
Keep your mind in Hull and despair not. Prolapsarian, 2014
I remember that during fourteen years of school someone would occasionally say, “did you know that it’s impossible to lick your own elbow?” This would normally result in everyone spending a few minutes trying to lick their own elbows. It…
I have an interview this afternoon for teaching work in my department. I am considering turning up and answering all of the questions with quotations from Walter Benjamin’s The Destructive Character. I imagine it will go something like this: Are…
I am tired of taxonomies of alterity, as if they were a substitute for difficult discussions of history and social activity. I am tired of questions about how oppression functions and oppressive relations are constructed being left unanswered by words…
When you put a potato in the oven it forms a hard shell to protect itself from the overstimulation of the heat. This much I have extrapolated from Freud.
Such a shame that owls aren’t mammals. Imagine how much truth there would be in owl cheese.
Mass unemployment is the greatest of all the modernist projects.
1. When was the last time you read an issue of an academic journal cover to cover? Do not include issues that you have edited. 2. If you ever have read an issue of an academic journal cover to cover, how…
I have been living in Berlin for a few weeks now (doing some boring library work, visiting some archives etc.) The thing I don’t understand about Germany is how a place of such extraordinary high culture can so fundamentally misunderstand…