“The history of philosophy is buried in Gaza, but philosophy lives on in the gesture of the Global Sumud Flotilla.”
In this article, historian and philosopher Luca Salza[1] reflects on what he sees as the political, philosophical and strategic significance of the Gaza flotilla: “What did they betray? They betrayed the reality imposed by those in power: the economy above all else, even at the cost of genocide (…), democracy as the unsurpassable form of government, endemic racism in the West, the beauty and righteousness of war for domination, and all the other simulacra on which politics and the way of life in the global North are based.”
From lundimatin #497, 17/11/2025
I just want the world to see what I see.
Fatma Hassouna
Nothing happened.
Nothing.
In Gaza, nothing happened.
Nothing.
Palestinian men and women can return to their homes. Their children are going back to school. Shopkeepers are reopening their shops, farmers are returning to work the land. The olive harvest will soon begin.
The storms of steel, the blocking of food aid, the shooting of starving crowds, terrorist incursions into hospitals and classrooms, the targeted assassinations of poets and journalists, the destruction of universities, and the devastation of the few remaining arable fields did not happen: these events evaporated.
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Mario Tronti: Towards a Critique of Political democracy
Democracy has problems with freedom. if it is true that real democracy is configured as liberal-democracy and that in the end this has been the winning solution, it is precisely this conjunction, binding together freedom (or liberty) and democracy, that must be critically attacked. It is a matter of detaching and juxtaposing the two terms—freedom versus democracy—because democracy is identity to the same extent that freedom is difference. The problem of democracy must then be confronted on two sides: a deconstructive critique of democracy must be accompanied by a constructive theory, what I would call a foundational or re-foundational theory of freedom, of the concept and practice of freedom. As we elaborate the figure of the subject, we should keep in mind that the subject needs to retrace the form of freedom. Because it is precisely difference that is the foundational element of freedom and the dislocating element of democracy.
A reflection for our times …
(Source: Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 1, 2009)
A word of warning: my argument will involve a deconstruction of the theme of democracy. I will seek to clear the field of the conceptual debris that has accumulated around the idea and practice of democracy, so that our discussion can then take up—in a more constructive and also more programmatic manner—the identification of further directions of inquiry, especially in what concerns that crucial passage represented by the construction of the subject.
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