From Lundi Matin (#420, 18/03/2024), we share below an interview with Luis Andrés Bredlow and a memorial to him by Anselm Jappe (Lundi Matin #115, 30/09/2017) after Bredlow’s death. Our hope is that these may serve as a modest introduction to an author who is largely unknown in the English speaking world.
We take the opportunity of the publication of Luis Andrés Bredlow’s Essais d’hérésie by Éditions Crise & Critique editions, to publish the translation that we received of an unpublished interview dating from 1995 and briefly present this author whose work we have published before, with the article “De la machine sociale à la révolution biologique”. For a more detailed presentation, we refer the reader to the portrait “Souvenir de Luis Bredlow” that his friend Anselm Jappe wrote at the time of his death.
Luis Andrés Bredlow (1958-2017) taught the history of philosophy at the University of Barcelona. Poet, translator, essayist, philosopher, specialist in Parmenides, after having contributed to the dissemination of Situationist ideas in Germany from the end of the 1970s through the journal Ausschreitungen, which he co-founded with the publisher Klaus Bittermann. He also participated in the Barcelona magazines Archipiélago, Mania and Etcétera, in which he published numerous articles of social criticism, as well as translations of texts of critical value theory. We owe him, among other things, a translation of the passage “The fetish character of the commodity and its secret” from Marx’s Capital (introduced by Anselm Jappe), an edition of Max Stirner’s Minor Writings [Écrits mineurs], commented translations of the works of Gorgias and Diogenes Laertius, an introduction to the philosophy of Plato and that of Kant, as well as a critical edition of the Parmenides’ Poem, in collaboration with Agustín García Calvo. In addition to the Essais d’hérésie, the reader will be able to read in French his article “La contradiction et le sacré” published in issue nº 6 of the journal Jaggernaut, as well as his introductions to the works translated into French by Agustín García Calvo (La société du Bien-être, Le pas de côté, 2014; Histoire contre tradition. Tradition contre Histoire, La Tempête, 2020 ; Qu’est-ce que l’État?, Atelier de création libertaire, 2021 and Apophtegmes sur le marxisme, Crise & Critique, 2022).
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Giorgio Agamben: The experience of language is a political experience
From Quodlibet (16/02/2024) …
How would it be possible to really change the society and culture in which we live? Reforms and even revolutions, although they transform institutions and laws, relations of production and objects, do not question those deeper strata that shape our vision of the world and which would have to be reached for the change to be truly radical. However, we have daily experience of something that exists differently from all the things and institutions that surround us and that conditions and determines them: language. We are primarily concerned with named things and, yet, we continue to talk in vain and, as is often the case, without ever questioning what we are doing when we speak. In this way, it is precisely our original experience of language that remains stubbornly hidden from us and, without us realising it, it is this opaque zone inside and outside us that determines our way of thinking and acting.
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