Previously

Rescue the Greek People from their Rescuers!

By
1
24 February 2012
Greek Protestors dressed as Prisoners before Parliament

At a time when one in two young Greeks is unem­ployed, when 25,000 home­less people won­der the streets of Athens, when 30% of the pop­u­la­tion has fallen below the poverty line, when thou­sands of fam­il­ies are forced to give up their chil­dren to save them from dying of hun­ger and cold, when refugees and the newly impov­er­ished fight over bins in pub­lic dumps, the “res­cuers” of Greece, under the pre­text that Greeks “aren’t doing enough”, are impos­ing a new aid pack­age that doubles the admin­istered lethal dose. This is a pack­age that abol­ishes the right to work and reduces the poor to extreme poverty, while mak­ing the middle class disappear. The goal can­not be the “res­cuing” of Greece: on this point, all ...
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The EU & Greece: A capitalism that has persuaded the world that capitalism is the world

By
13
13 February 2012
shapeimage_2

The beha­viour of the EU states towards Greece is inex­plic­able in the terms in which the EU defines itself. It is, first and fore­most, a fail­ure of solidarity. The ‘aus­ter­ity pack­age’, as the news­pa­pers like to call it, seeks to impose on Greece terms that no people can accept. Even now the schools are run­ning out of books. There were 40% cuts in the pub­lic health budget in 2010 — I can’t find the present fig­ure. Greece’s EU ‘part­ners’ are demand­ing a 32% cut in the min­imum wage for those under 25, a 22% cut for the over 25s – the min­imum wage in Greece is around €500 per month, well below a liv­ing wage in that eco­nomy. Already unem­ploy­ment for 15 – 24 year olds was 43.1% last April — it ...
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A Play on Justice: The Trial of Phryne at (Occupied) Old Street Magistrates Court

By
0
23 January 2012
Phryne before the Areopagus

Yet it is pre­cisely the dis­en­chant­ment of beauty in the exper­i­ence of nud­ity, this sub­lime but also miser­able exhib­i­tion of appear­ance bey­ond all mys­tery and all mean­ing, that can some­how defuse the theo­lo­gical appar­atus and allow us to see, bey­ond the prestige of grace and the chi­meras of cor­rupt nature, a simple, inap­par­ent human body. (Agam­ben 2011:90) The het­aera or cour­tesan, Phryne, who lived in Athens dur­ing the 4th cen­tury BC, was known for her beauty, wit and intel­li­gence. In clas­sical Greece, cour­tes­ans were women who used to be slaves and who had man­aged to escape their serf­dom. They became women with inde­pend­ent means and were the equals of the men who cour­ted them. Accord­ing to the comic poets, prior to ...
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Occupy: a brief note on three antique responses to debt crisis

By
3
9 January 2012
Secessio_plebis

It is worth remark­ing that three broad types of response to debt crisis could be found in antiquity, in the Mediterranean-​Mesopotamian area. We say broad types because it is quite pos­sible that the par­tic­u­lar type remarked upon was rather the pre­dom­in­ant or defin­ing char­ac­ter­istic of a move­ment, and could be accom­pan­ied by the other types of action.1 We limit ourselves to this geo­graph­ical region for brev­ity, though sim­ilar responses could be found for example across China (espe­cially mass defection). The three types are broadly: 1) The throw­ing off of burdens 2) Exodus 3) Occu­pa­tion. As an example of the first, in Athens in 594 BC we find that Solon’s reforms amoun­ted to an effect­ive strip­ping of the ‘well-​born’ (eupat­ridae) of ...
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City Rogues

By
0
22 December 2011
Eat the Bankers

Vince Cable in yesterday’s Guard­ian accep­ted that the City is a ‘source of sys­temic instabil­ity, unfettered greed and indus­trial scale tax dodging’ but blamed the prob­lem on a small num­ber of rogue insti­tu­tions. The task it seems is to find the “few rot­ten apples” that some­how man­age to bring an entire sys­tem into dis­rep­ute. The reli­ance on a minor­ity scape­goat in order to cover over much wider spread illeg­al­ity, immor­al­ity and abuse of power is a par­tic­u­larly favoured tac­tic in the fin­an­cial sec­tor. Rogue traders like Jérôme Ker­viel and the recent UBS reneg­ade Kweku Ado­boli along with rogue busi­ness lead­ers like Bernie Madoff and Allen Stan­ford are, we are told, the fly in the oth­er­wise uncon­tam­in­ated oint­ment of late capitalism. The fig­ure ...
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Constitutionalism & the Time of the Political

By
2
19 September 2011
Al-gorithm

In his book The Idea of Pub­lic Law Mar­tin Lough­lin out­lines three ‘orders of the polit­ical’ that under­pin and ori­ent pub­lic law. The first order begins with Carl Schmitt’s fam­ous for­mu­la­tion of the dis­tinc­tion between friend and enemy. Lough­lin con­tends that it is this decision or ‘deed’ that forms the found­a­tions of the polit­ical, upon which the second and third orders rest. As such, this dis­tinc­tion comes before the cre­ation of the state and before the cre­ation of law. The second order goes bey­ond this stage to include a state-​based pro­gram of gov­ernance. Here polit­ics takes its place as the sys­tem that oper­ates between the gov­ernors and the gov­erned in order to achieve a com­mon goal of secur­ity and sta­bil­ity. The ...
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The Heart of the World — Sovereignty & its Ground

By
1
16 September 2011
Makoto Fujimura

This text appears as part of the exhib­i­tion For Inclu­sion in the Syl­labi cur­ated by Five Story Pro­jects at the Pigeon Wing gal­lery in Lon­don (Sept 15th — 30th). The exhib­i­tion also fea­tures work by: Am Nuden Da, Ana Balona de Oli­veira, Thomas Bush, Angus Cameron, Patrick Coyle, FSP, Tim Ivison and Julia Tchar­fas, Sarah Jury, Mikko Kuorinki, Mat­thew MacK­i­sack, Jean-​Pierre Ram­pal, Mat­thew Thompson and Mar­tijn in’t Veld. “We’ll fall into a well without para­chute or com­pass and be the first twin love in the world.” Meta­phys­ics was meant to have died a long time ago, to have been awar­ded an esteemed pos­i­tion in the philo­soph­ical can­non but ushered off the stage of world-​history with the King’s head. But it is still to be found ...
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Tottenham: Neoliberal Riots and the Possibility of Politics

By
11
10 August 2011
Vulture Capitalist

We are delighted to say that this post has been trans­lated into Por­tuguese, Turk­ish, Russian and Croa­tian. One of the many things that we hear repeated ad nauseam in the con­text of the present riot­ing in Lon­don is that the rioters are ‘feral’, ‘yobs’, ‘thugs’ or more gen­er­ously ‘dis­af­fected youth’. All the talk from Cameron and his cohorts is of crime and pun­ish­ment and ‘the full force of the law’ — as if these young people did not encounter the full force of the law on a daily basis. We are told vari­ously that there is no polit­ical con­text, no polit­ical motive, no polit­ical enemy – it is ‘crimin­al­ity pure and simple’. This is because viol­ence against the police (and there­fore the state) is ...
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The pillars of ignorance

By
14
9 July 2011
Time saving truth from falsehood and envy

Deleuze told us that for some­thing to con­sti­tute an event, it must go all the way down. The death of the News of the World (soon to be resur­rec­ted as the undead Sun on Sunday) is not an event of itself, though it does con­sti­tute the sign of an event. This event, how­ever, is not as one might believe the sub­ter­ranean tremors that have struck the Mur­doch empire, but the tec­tonic shifts that brought the ‘Dirty Dig­ger’ to the UK. It is what Mur­doch expresses that goes all the way down – his is but one of the pil­lars of ignor­ance on which rests the Brit­ish state. If we treat Mur­doch as but one pil­lar, we are bet­ter placed meth­od­o­lo­gic­ally to move ...
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Home & Apart: Spatial Justice in ‘Women of Cyprus’

By
2
22 June 2011
Abandoned airport – stark symbol of Cyprus division

On the 16th of June 2011, the West­min­ster Inter­na­tional Law & The­ory Centre hos­ted the Lon­don première of Women of Cyprus, a doc­u­ment­ary dir­ec­ted by Vassi­liki Kat­rivanou and Bushra Azzouz, fol­lowed by a dis­cus­sion with the first dir­ector. The film tries to cap­ture the voices and feel­ings of women both sides of the 1974 Cyp­riot par­ti­tion, namely the North (Turk­ish) side and the South (Greek) side. The main focus of this mov­ing film turned out to be the home and its con­cep­tu­al­isa­tions both as a nation­al­ist strategy and a per­sonal feel­ing, namely as a geo­pol­it­ical line and a cor­por­eal affect. The film and the ensu­ing dis­cus­sion amply show that the two con­cep­tu­al­isa­tions of home can­not eas­ily be told apart. We wit­ness for example how, in ...
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In Greece, we see democracy in action

By
0
16 June 2011
Syntagma Square

When Stéphane Hes­sel wrote in Time for Out­rage! that indig­na­tion with injustice should turn to “a peace­ful insur­rec­tion” per­haps he did not expect that the move­ment of indig­na­dos in Spain and agana­kt­is­menoi (out­raged) in Greece would take his advice to heart so soon and so spectacularly. The Greek res­ist­ance to the cata­strophic eco­nomic meas­ures was expec­ted. Through­out mod­ern his­tory the Greeks have res­isted for­eign occu­pa­tion and domestic dic­tat­or­ship with determ­in­a­tion and sac­ri­fice. The meas­ures imposed by the IMF, EU and European Cent­ral Bank with the full accord, if not invit­a­tion, of the Greek gov­ern­ment, have led to 11 one-​day gen­eral strikes, numer­ous regional strikes and ima­gin­at­ive acts of res­ist­ance. Domestic and for­eign media avidly repor­ted the con­front­a­tions between youths ...
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Ghost Manifesto — Spain’s Real Democracy Now

By
0
20 May 2011
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Items of agree­ment for the plural mani­festo pre­pared dur­ing the morn­ing of the 18th of May in Puerta del Sol. Those assembled in Puerta del Sol, aware that this is an action in pro­gress and of res­ist­ance, have agreed to declare the following: After many years of apathy, a group of cit­izens of dif­fer­ent ages and social back­grounds (stu­dents, teach­ers, lib­rar­i­ans, unem­ployed, work­ers…) ENRAGED by their lack of rep­res­ent­a­tion and by the betray­als that are being con­duc­ted in the name of demo­cracy, have met at Puerta del Sol with regard to the idea of Real Democracy. Real Demo­cracy is opposed to the gradual dis­cred­it­ing of insti­tu­tions that claim to rep­res­ent them, which have become mere agents of admin­is­tra­tion and man­age­ment, in the ...
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Who’s Breaching Whose Peace?

By
1
23 April 2011
Brank

On 14 April 2011, the High Court of Eng­land and Wales ruled, in R (on the applic­a­tion of Joshua Moos and Han­nah McClure) v The Com­mis­sioner of the Police of the Met­ro­polis, that the police had acted unlaw­fully in “con­tain­ing” (aka ket­tling) cer­tain G20 protest­ors on 1 April 2009. It made clear that the police must be in reas­on­able appre­hen­sion of an “immin­ent breach of the peace” before tak­ing “pre­vent­at­ive action”. Pre­vent­at­ive action includes ket­tling, but only “as a last resort cater­ing for situ­ations about to des­cend into viol­ence”. That the police can­not arbit­rar­ily kettle protest­ors can be seen as good news for polit­ical act­iv­ists. The bad news, for those who see ket­tling as an always unjus­ti­fi­ably bru­tal form of col­lect­ive pun­ish­ment, ...
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The End of Sovereignty, in North Africa, in the World

By
6
19 April 2011
Map used by Columbus

Spare a thought for Alain Badiou. He must be busy tend­ing to the sens­it­ive instru­ments of his evento-​graph. As with the seis­mo­graphs of late – all ‘revolu­tion­ary event’ detect­ors have had a busy time. The anti­cip­a­tion must also be dif­fi­cult to bear. Syria is unrav­el­ing. The Road to Dam­as­cus might soon yield another Paul, or indeed a Muhammad, and prefer­ably a Leila, as long as she is hold­ing aloft a ban­ner to which the European philo­sopher can show fidelity. In this blog and else­where the philo­soph­ers of Europe are hav­ing a fraternal spat. What is to be done, they won­der, in this mul­ti­polar world in dis­ar­ray about how to respond to ‘events’ that might become ‘ours’? They spec­u­late earn­estly about whether Arab states are truly sov­er­eign or ...
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Alain Badiou’s reply to Jean-​Luc Nancy

By
13
4 April 2011
Libya Prayers

The fol­low­ing is Alain Badiou’s full reply to Jean-​Luc Nancy’s “What the Arab peoples sig­nify to us”. With many thanks to Verso Books UK. Yes, dear Jean-​Luc, the pos­i­tion you adopt in favour of ‘West­ern’ inter­ven­tion in Libya was indeed a sorry sur­prise for me. Didn’t you notice right from the start the palp­able dif­fer­ence between what is hap­pen­ing in Libya and what is hap­pen­ing else­where? How in both Tunisia and Egypt we really did see massive pop­u­lar gath­er­ings, whereas in Libya there is noth­ing of the kind? An Arabist friend of mind has con­cen­trated in the last few weeks on trans­lat­ing the plac­ards, ban­ners, posters and flags that were such a fea­ture of the Tunisian and Egyp­tian demon­stra­tions: he couldn’t find ...
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