Recording Surface

This morning, shortly after reading this and this, I walked out my front door and was met by a gentle breeze–from the north! (more…)

From The New York Times, August 28, 2006 (via): (more…)

I usually don’t announce such things, mostly since no one, including myself, probably cares, but I’ve added two links, one of them to a new blog I recommend highly, the other to a history that’s been online for nearly a decade. (more…)

Two things I read today about those crazy Arabs, who will do anything to destroy America: (more…)

Since I’m perennially behind on my reading, I’m just now getting to the interview with Wendy Brown in the January issue of Contretemps, the one other people were talking about six months ago. (more…)

Here

What I’m talking about is recovering a certain openness that I actually associate with the foundations of radicalism or leftism. This openness often collapses soon after the left or a radical justice project attaches itself to a certain vision, to a certain end or to a certain practice. What we might need to give now, or what we might need to inhabit now, is that founding openness to possibility, to seeing the world differently, to seeing power differently, to seeing the future differently. This involves a brave and humble intellectual and political openness. It also means refusing the dichotomy between the local and the global, the national and the transnational, the intellectual and the practical… I actually think that it’s the only way through or out of the melancholy that has to do with the lost objects and attachments of the left and the despair for the possibility of change. I think that the only way out of that kind of melancholy and that kind of despair is not by darting towards yet another answer but by opening up to a different reading of the present, a different reading of our attachments and possibilities.

Here is where Foucault’s notion of genealogy is so important. It is a way of refiguring the present through a past, telling the present’s story differently. This democratic future that we’re after is actually a future that we will only be able to make by opening the present differently. I think that many of us experience the present as terribly closed—not just closed because certain options have been foreclosed, but also closed because of certain stoppages in progressive history. I think the opening that we have to cultivate is a kind of affective and intellectual opening to political possibility that would help us read the present differently.

The thoroughly irritating first two-thirds of Monster House, produced by archboomers Spielberg and Zemeckis, is, like the last animated move I saw, Pixar’s Cars, a giant playground for baby-boomer solipsism. (more…)

Everything I’ve read about Lebanese citizens’ “support” for Hezbollah indicates that it’s tempered with a great deal of ambivalence. (more…)

The Class War Federation has issued a statement on Israel-Lebanon, in its, um, two-fisted style. (more…)

From the visitor logs during my absence:

Location
Continent: Asia
Country: Israel
State/Region: Hefa
City: Haifa
Search Engine: google.co.il
Search Words: agamben

Not sure if complete surprise or complete lack of it is the proper response here.