The Uses of Horror: Obsession and Get Out

I teach a philosophy of film class, and have for years now. It is a fun class, I get a lot of students, and I like talking about movies and philosophy. However, every year I wonder if I am talking about an art form that has a future or even a present. Do people even go to movies. I have contemplated switching it, for a few years I thought of replacing film with television, with shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, etc., but time moves fast, and those seem as dated as Hitchcock or even Tarantino. I cannot imagine teaching a class on TikTok or other short form videos. However, just as I am about to relegate film to something from the past, to part of the history of media, there is a sudden revival of interest in movies, even going to the movies. Years ago it was Barbenheimer. This year, it has Obsession and Backrooms.

Translation: A Spinozist Noo-Politics: Reconsideration of two recent books on Spinoza by Lorenzo Vinciguerra and Pascal Sévérac by Yves Citton

This is a draft translation of an early review by Yves Citton 

Published in Multitudes 

Picture from The Brain from Planet Arous

In his latest work, Maurizio Lazzarato proposed designating as "noo-politics" the "new power relations that take memory—and its conatus (attention)—as their object." Noo-politics (as it is currently exercised through "wireless, audiovisual, and telematic networks, and through the constitution of public opinion, perception, and collective intelligence") effects "the modulation of flows of desires and beliefs, as well as of the forces (memory and attention) that circulate them within the cooperation between brains" (This neologism—which, as a footnote clarifies, is to be situated at the intersection of the Greek noûs ("the highest part of the soul, the intellect") and the Internet service provider Noos—is rooted in a tradition of thought that the author explicitly traces back to Gabriel Tarde and Leibniz. Just as Tarde took pains to clarify his relationship to Leibniz in a lengthy essay devoted to the link between "Monadology and Sociology," so too does Maurizio Lazzarato propose a "neo-monadology" that draws upon Leibniz for the concepts of "event" and "possible world"—the very concepts upon which he constructs his political analysis of early twenty-first-century social movements. 

Working Together: on Fischbach's Faire Ensemble (and the question of solidarity)

Having spent a lot of time thinking about, and thinking with, the concept of "negative solidarity," it sometimes occurs to me that I should think about its opposite, about solidarity, as the necessary condition for collective action. I have read on the topic from time to time, I read Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix's book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World Changing Idea as soon as it came out. However, I struggle to say anything interesting about it for two reasons. First, as I argued in The Double Shift, capitalism has so undermined our imagination that it is difficult to think of any model of action than a purely individualistic one, everyday people deal with poverty, precarity, and insecurity, by endeavoring to work harder, to hustle, to find a side gig or scam. Working with others collectively is unimaginable, especially when that collectivity is mediated not by the wage form. Second, I am not sure if this default in the imagination can be addressed theoretically, or even through a historical recounting of times in which solidarity seemed easier to imagine, it is not a matter of theory, but of practice. Solidarity increasingly seems like something to do rather than ponder.