via SHAKESPEARE AND PHILOSOPHY.

James Corby (University of Malta) interviews Simon Critchley (New School) by video link during the Style in Theory / Styling Theory conference in Malta in November 2009 (http://www.um.edu.mt/events/styleintheory2009).

Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called “class struggle essentialism” for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, and other struggles, capitalism is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem. So the first lesson to be taken is: do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not “Main Street, not Wall Street”, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

via Occupy first. Demands come later | Slavoj Žižek | Comment is free | The Guardian.

1989 marked not only the defeat of the Communist State-Socialism, but also the defeat of the Western Social Democracy.

Nowhere is the misery of today’s Left more palpable than in its “principled” defence of the Social-Democratic Welfare State: the idea is that, in the absence of a feasible radical Leftist project, all that the Left can do is to bombard the state with demands for the expansion of the Welfare State, knowing well that the State will not be able to deliver.

This necessary disappointment serves as a reminder of the basic impotence of the social-democratic Left and thus push the people towards a new radical revolutionary Left.

Needless to say, such a politics of cynical “pedagogy” is destined to fail, since it fights a lost battle: in the present politico-ideological constellation, the reaction to the inability of the Welfare State to deliver will be Rightist populism. In order to avoid this reaction, the Left will have to propose its own positive project beyond the confines of the Social-Democratic Welfare State.

via Only Communism can save liberal democracy – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

The conversation continues from where it left off last time. To recap, Simon Critchley quoted Francis Bacon on violence:

When talking about the violence of paint, it’s nothing to do with the violence of war. It’s to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality. We nearly always live through screens – a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that I have been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.

To which Simon himself added:

Existence seems to me ever-more screened and distanced, a shallow shadow world whose ideological patina is an empty empathy. None of us is free of this. Maybe art, in its essential violence, can tear away one or two of these screens. Maybe then we’d begin to see. Because the whole problem turns around what is seen and not seen. We think we see what happens ‘there’ and make pronouncements about ‘them’. But we do not see as we are seen because we are wrapped in a screen. There are tyrants here too. Art might unwrap us a little through its violence.

via Mute magazine PRINT / ONLINE / SUBSCRIBE | Between Baudrillard and the Cave: Alfredo Jaar and Simon Critchley in Conversation.

Part 2

Read an English translation of Alain Badiou’s recent article for Le Monde. Translation kindly provided by Cristiana Petru-Stefanescu.

The Eastern wind is getting the better of the Western one. How much longer will the poor and dark West, the “international community” of those who still think of themselves as masters of the world, continue to give lessons of good management and behaviour to the whole planet? Isn’t it laughable to see certain intellectuals on duty, disconcerted soldiers of the capital-parliamentarism that stands as a shabby paradise for us, offering themselves to the magnificent Tunisian and Egyptian peoples in order to teach these savage populations the basics of “democracy”? What a distressing persistence of colonial arrogance! Given the miserable political situation that we are experiencing, isn’t it obvious that it is us who have everything to learn from the current popular uprisings? Shouldn’t we, in all urgency, closely study what has made possible the overthrow through collective action of governments that are oligarchic, corrupt and—possibly, above all—humiliatingly the vassals of Western states?

via VersoBooks.com.

An ongoing trial in Tel Aviv is set to determine who will have stewardship of several boxes of Kafka’s original writings, including primary drafts of his published works, currently stored in Zurich and Tel Aviv. As is well known, Kafka left his published and unpublished work to Max Brod, along with the explicit instruction that the work should be destroyed on Kafka’s death. Indeed, Kafka had apparently already burned much of the work himself. Brod refused to honour the request, although he did not publish everything that was bequeathed to him. He published the novels The Trial, The Castle and Amerika between 1925 and 1927. In 1935, he published the collected works, but then put most of the rest away in suitcases, perhaps honouring Kafka’s wish not to have it published, but surely refusing the wish to have it destroyed. Brod’s compromise with himself turned out to be consequential, and in some ways we are now living out the consequences of the non-resolution of Kafka’s bequest.

via LRB · Judith Butler · Who Owns Kafka?.

di TONI NEGRI

via Lettera ad un amico tunisino : UniNomade 2.0.

French Version