Category Archives: Commentary

Bertolt Brecht: On the Theatricality of Fascism (1939)

Therefore learn how to see and not to gape.To act instead of talking all day long.The world was almost won by such an ape!The nations put him here his kind belong.But don’t rejoice too soon at your escape –The womb … Continue reading

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James Baldwin: The Uses of the Blues

The title “The Uses of the Blues” does not refer to music; I don’t know anything about music. It does refer to the experience of life, or the state of being, out of which the blues come. Now, I am … Continue reading

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For James Baldwin: “Telling it like it is”

If the hope of givingis to love the living,the giver risks madnessin the act of giving. Some such lesson I seemed to seein the faces that surrounded me. Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted,what gift would give them the gift to … Continue reading

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For James C. Scott (1936-2024)

… state-ness is not a binary, where something is a state or not a state, but it’s a continuum. So, things that are more a state or less a state. […] My argument would be that when the state has … Continue reading

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Umberto Eco: Ur-Fascism

… the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change. Umberto Eco Umberto Eco’s essay, “Ur-Fascism” (The New York Review of Books, 22/06/1995) remains a significant text in the cartography of … Continue reading

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Gastón Gordillo: The Fascist Disposition

From the Verso Books Blog, 18/07/2024. This essay is the third in a roundtable discussion of Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism. The others, from Jordy Rosenberg and Lisa Lowe, can be found here and here.  What does the word “fascism” mean today, when fossil capitalism continues its accelerated … Continue reading

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Georges Bataille: The Psychological Structure of Fascism

Fascism attempts to organise the newly proletarianised masses while leaving intact the property relations which the masses strive to abolish. Fascism sees its salvation in granting these masses not their rights, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses … Continue reading

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Georges Bataille: Popular Front in the Street

The opium of the people in the present world is perhaps not so much religion as it is accepted boredom. Such a world is at the mercy, it must be known, of those who provide at least the semblance of … Continue reading

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Giorgio Agamben: Pasiphae’s bull and technique

In the myth of Pasiphae, the woman who has an artificial cow built by Daedalus in order to mate with a bull, it is legitimate to see a paradigm of technology. In this perspective, technology appears as the device through … Continue reading

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Why Stop at Removing Biden?

From the CrimethInc. Collective (07/11/2024). The Center Cannot Hold It would seem like a heavy-handed metaphor if it weren’t our actual reality. A doddering patriarch, representing the collapsing centrist political project, refuses to step aside even as it becomes certain … Continue reading

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