Discontinuity and Continuity: On Reading (and Rereading) Lazzarato

 

War and Money is Part of the Pile of Books that I am working on

Philosophy is filled with famous breaks. The break between the young and mature Marx, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and Logical Investigations, Heidegger's Kehre, Foucault's transition from archeology to genealogy. Sometimes such breaks are declared by the philosopher in question, other times they are discovered, or perhaps invented, by readers and interpreters who have no other way of making sense of a philosopher. Which means that breaks only become legible, only become visible, when enough people read them, or worry about how they fit together. I have often thought that those of us who write philosophy, or theory, should think about our own writing when we read others. I say this because I imagine that most of us do not have radical breaks, but odd intersections of continuity and discontinuity as we try to think about whatever in the world we try to think about. 

Through A Google Glass Darkly: On The Draw

 

Marx wrote, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living," but he neglected to add that it is the nightmare of traditions that weighs the heaviest in moments of crisis. Ever since 2016, we have seen a revival of some of the darkest moments of the imagination, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower has made the best sellers list, and 1984 has been reread, made the subject of a documentary, which I have not seen, and also to some extent remade, as The Draw, which I did see. 

Structured and Structuring: Lordon and Éwanjé-Épée on Race and Class

 

As I mentioned when I first reviewed it here, Frédéric Lordon's Figures du Communisme is an oddly titled book. It is not about some communist past or event, about the Soviet Union or China, but what communism must mean if it is to be a force of transformation in the future. Its central topics, the environment, work, and the intersection of race and class, are not exactly topics that immediately come to mind when perusing the history of communist thought. Or all of the sections, the long discussion of race and class is the most interesting (and the reason why I agreed to translate it).