"Historicism starts from the universal and, as it were, puts it through the grinder of history. My problem is exactly the opposite. I start from the theoretical and methodological decision that consists in saying: Let’s suppose that universals do not exist. And then I put the question to history and historians: How can you write history if you do not accept a priori the existence of things like the state, society, the sovereign, and subjects? It was the same question in the case of madness. My question was not: Does madness exist? My reasoning, my method, was not to examine whether history gives me or refers me to something like madness, and then to conclude, no, it does not, therefore madness does not exist. This was not the argument, the method in fact. The method consisted in saying: Let’s suppose that madness does not exist. If we suppose that it does not exist, then what can history make of these different events and practices which are apparently organized around something that is supposed to be madness? So what I would like to deploy here is exactly the opposite of historicism: not, then, questioning universals by using history as a critical method, but starting from the decision that universals do not exist, asking what kind of history we can do."
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Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics (via tiredshoes)
Yes this is the quote this is THE quote this is why Foucault is perfect
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Fredric Jameson: A Collection of Available Texts
Conveniently provided below is a compendium of texts by Jameson for your reading/studying pleasure:
Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (with Edward Said) (1988)
Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (1998)
A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002)
Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005)
The Modernist Papers (2007)
Aesthetics and Politics (with Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács) (2010)
Gilles Deleuze on Cinema - What is the Creative Act? (1987)
This 45 minute talk at a conference in 1987 on the “act of creation” in cinema is perhaps the most intimate capture of Gilles Deleuze on film besides the Abécédaire interview. Gilles Deleuze speaks continuously and fluidly in a raspy but gentle and sincere voice that betrays much reverence for the work of figures such as Bresson and Kurosawa, particularly as concerns what Deleuze claims to be an absolute need of theirs to adapt the works of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky for film. Other figures discussed include Syberberg, Straub and Duras, along with a discussion of Foucault and disciplinary societies. Deleuze concludes with a meditation on what he calls the “mysterious connection between the work of art and the act of resistance.”
i sent a misspelled meme into the tumblr ether. i’m embarrassed. this is the correction.
Looks like you need to go to grad school for spelling.
"Our blindness to the results of systemic violence is perhaps most clearly perceptible in debates about communist crimes. Responsibility for communist crimes is easy to allocate: we are dealing with subjective evil, with agents who did wrong. We can even identify the ideological sources of the crimes - The Communist Manifesto, Rosseau, even Plato. But when one draws attention to the millions who died as a result of capitalist globalization, from the tragedy of Mexico in the sixteenth century through to the Belgian Congo holocaust a century ago, responsibility is largely denied. All this seems to have just happened as the result of an ‘objective’ process, which nobody planned or executed and for which there was no ‘Capitalist Manifesto’ (The one who came closest to writing it was Ayn Rand)"
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Slavoj Žižek, Violence
(via i-ballz)
Yup. Yup yup yup. Violence is one of his best not-theoretically-hyperfocused books.
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(via sterwood)
"People ask, So what is this [Body without Organs]?—But you’re already on it, scurrying like a vermin, groping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic: desert traveler and nomad of the steppes. On it we sleep, live our waking lives, fight—fight and are fought—seek our place, experience untold happiness and fabulous defeats; on it we penetrate and are penetrated; on it we love."
- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. [p. 150] (via manymanywolves)
"My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same a bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make very day is to determine which is the main danger."
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Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Second Edition With an Afterword by and an Interview with Michel Foucault (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 231-232.
(Hat tip to Pritch for this one.)
As social movements waned in the late 70s, the study of Marx seemed to take on a life of its own. Structuralist, post-structuralist, deconstructed Marxes bloomed in journals and seminar rooms across the US and Europe. These Marxes and their interpreters struggled to interpret the world, and sometimes to interpret Marx himself, losing sight at times of his dictum that the challenge is not to interpret the world but to change it. In 1979, Harry Cleaver tossed an incendiary device called Reading Capital Politically into those seminar rooms. Through a close reading of the first chapter, he shows that Das Kapital was written for the workers, not for academics, and that we need to expand our idea of workers to include housewives, students, the unemployed, and other non-waged workers. Reading Capital Politically provides a theoretical and historical bridge between struggles in Europe in the 60s and 70s and, particularly, the Autonomia of Italy to the Zapatistas of the 90s. His introduction provides a brilliant and succinct overview of working class struggles in the century since Capital was published.
(via asthepoemsgo)
