[The introduction to a current project:] There is something nomadic about Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006). While the novel, so far Pynchon’s longest, takes place in a specific context—the Progressive Era in America up to the chaos of World War I—it nonetheless moves back and forth across space—across America, the globe, and beyond, including…
Tag Archives: Violence
[The Tupinambas; Image from wikimedia] In his provocative Society Against the State, Pierre Clastres draws from his ethnographic work to provide a theory of a society that, rather than developing into the state, operates directly against it. By ‘operating against’ I mean, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s reading of Clastres in A Thousand…
In “This Sex Which Is Not One” (an essay in the book of the same title), Luce Irigaray critiques the masculine conception of feminine/female sexuality and proposes descriptions that come from a woman. Irigaray explains that within female sexuality, an opposition is set up “between ‘masculine’ clitoral activity and ‘feminine’ vaginal passivity” in which “the…
What must it feel, in remote corners of the earth when Western bombs fall on their lands? There you are, doing your chores, getting by on a quiet day, breathing in the breeze as you think about them, the people of your house, nurturing something that happened last time, that moment, resenting something else, many…
[This is a quasi-semiotic reading of the UF-Student-Tasered! video found floating on the web on Sept. 17, 2007, to which I was led by a post from Larval Subjects. Also see this brilliant satire by Stephen Colbert.] After the politician answered, in his usual, monotonous, contemplative manner–as though he was still giving his speech–a question…
In his early works (as interpreted by Hardt), Deleuze proposes a (against Hegel) nondialectical, (against Kant) total, (against Plato) materialist critique. “Without first conducting a broad destructive operation” that “draws the total horizon into question and destabilizes previously existing powers” (pars destruens), Deleuze argues, “there is not the space nor the terms for [a] constructive project” (pars construens).
