Recording Surface

And the people cheered, not because they did not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of others. Like a will to wager everything you have every hand, to stake your own death against the death of others, and measure everything by “deleometers.”

I watched only four speeches at the Republican convention — Thompson’s, Giuliani’s, Palin’s, and McCain’s — and I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve just witnessed a well-lit, hood-free Klan rally. (more…)

The lesson from the Palin affair seems to be that if you are white, Christian, and have smalltown values, an unmarried pregnant minor in the family is a private matter. But if you are black or brown and “urban,” an unmarried pregnant minor in the family is symptomatic of a social epidemic, a scourge afflicting the body politic. (more…)

We’ve been in election mode for some time now. Elections are not a particular locale, nor a particular day in the calendar. They are more like a grid that affects the way we understand and perceive things. Everything is mapped back on this grid and gets warped as a result. The particular conditions of the elections today have elevated the usual level of bullshit.– Gilles Deleuze

As a sort of followup to the previous post comes this bit of news: (more…)

In his essay “Deleuze and Democratic Politics,” from the collection Radical Democracy: Politics Between Obstinacy and Laclau Abundance and Lack, Paul Patton writes: (more…)

I’m sure there’s a theme in here somewhere. (more…)

Posthegemony has an excellent analysis of the Venezuela referendum and what the results might say about constitutions, constituted and constituent power, and related. (more…)

Am I being churlish — especially on this beautiful Thanksgiving morning where the temperature is holding fast at a perfect 40 degrees and the sun is mostly hidden — to be kind of annoyed by the following, the first paragraph from Mark Devenney’s “Thinking the Postcolonial as Political,” in the most recent issue of Borderlands? (more…)