Why Obama will not release the torture photos: Because, as Andrew Sullivan succinctly puts it, he “now realizes he cannot prosecute Bush’s wars with Bush’s military while exposing Bush’s war crimes.”
Which means, as Chalmers Johnston explains in this interview, he’s likely to end up as another Lyndon B. Johnson, albeit much better mannered.
… the obsessional neurotic … is frantically active in order to prevent the real thing from happening. Say, in a group situation in which some tension threatens to explode, the obsessional talks all the time in order to prevent the awkward moment of silence which would compel the participants to openly confront the underlying tension. [...]
The proper Deleuzian paradox is that somethinmg truly New can ONLY emerge through repetition. What repetition repeats is not the way the past “effectively was,” but the virtuality inherent to the past and betrayed by its past actualization. In this precise sense, the emergence of the New changes the past itself, that is, it retroactively [...]
In March, the Birbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London organized a symposium “On the Idea of Communism.” Speakers included the usual suspects: Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, Jacques Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek and others. A summary with videos of the proceedings is available here.
Jean-Luc Nancy’s contribution, “Communism, the Word” merits close [...]
Jacques-Alain Miller on the financial crisis (courtesy of lacan.com):
What do we see in this moment of truth about the financial crisis we are in? That it is worthless; that money is like shit! Here is the real which unsettles all discourses. One calls that, politely, “the toxic assets”…
Per Martin Puchner in Apr/May Bookforum:
On November 7, three days after Election Day, Alain Badiou gave a lecture at New York University on theater and philosophy. The discussion afterward, conducted in a mixture of French and English, quickly turned to the president elect. “Obama?” Badiou replied. “As actor or as politician?” When the audience laughed, [...]
Per Douglas Brinkley in the May issue of Rolling Stone:
Dylan spends most of the afternoon of April 9th at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I am not allowed to come along. But later he recaps to me what crossed his mind, like who his favorite artists are. “Well, of course, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko are [...]
Above all, the flu that has changed the life (and death) of our country is a cry to the world to denounce the systematic and merciless pillage that we, millions of Mexicans, have suffered over the last 27 years—years that today have turned us into the source of infection for all of humanity. What [...]
Glendale
Arnold Boecklin, Island of the Dead, 1883
Health scares are like terrorist ones. Someone somewhere has an interest in it. Simon Jenkins