By the 1980s, the center of radical activity had moved away from working-class organizations and toward what came to be called the “new social movements.” Problems of race, gender, and sexuality were generating the most self-conscious, committed, and consequential political subjects. Though economic exploitation remained pretty much what it had been, even its most egregious victims now often thought of themselves first as members of some other category than exploited workers. This story has been told many times, but in very different tones of voice. Democratic pluralists like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe celebrated the shift: We are finally free from the tyranny of “economic determination in the final instance”! Others were more skeptical. Walter Benn Michaels, for example, accused the celebrants of a conspiracy to aid and abet ever-worsening economic inequality. Balibar placed himself between the two extremes: he was hospitable to the new movements, but in Marxism’s name and in Marxist terms. Or to put this another way, the conceptual work he set about doing in these years was a renovation of the house of Marxism so that it could accommodate those who demanded recognition as well as those who demanded redistribution. This double fidelity was not unique, but it continues to set him apart from many of his peers, Žižek and Badiou among them.
— http://nplusonemag.com/balibarism
But whether there are journalists who’re informants, blackmailers, bullshitters, truth-seekers, careerists, philosophers, Arnab Goswamis, Hem Chandra Pandeys, Lingaram Kodopis, stenographers, or downright liars, like the rest of the human race, they don’t deserve to be executed.
— Reporting The Grey Corridor: The Killing of Journalist Nemichand Jain | moonchasing
Žižek, turning to Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács, wrote, “one does not wait for the “ripe” objective circumstances to make a revolution, circumstances become “ripe” for revolution through the political struggle itself
— The beginning is nigh | Screen Machine
The comrades of his revolutionary days were now editors, executives, professors, businessmen or expatriates. The spring thunder was over and everyone had returned to the comfort zone of their class structures.” Nirupma Dutt on Lal Singh Dil
— Jabberwock: Spring thunder - Lal Singh Dil ki ajeeb dastaan
When cinema seeks to become an exact replication of a novel then it fails as cinema - John Bradburn on Bela Tarr’s ‘The Man from London’
— VERTIGO | The Man from London
I am delighted Girish broke that Code. I wish others would do the same. It’s time we had sharper critics who used every platform available to us to stand up and speak our mind. That alone can raise the level of public discourse, teach us that in a free society there’s nothing wrong in slaying a few sacred cows. That’s why I love what Karnad did. Now let’s go out and get some more.
— Pritish Nandy
Naipaul is a foreigner and he is entitled to his opinion. But why give an award to a man who calls Indian Muslims ‘raiders’ and ‘marauders’? I have Muslim friends and I feel strongly about this
— Girish Karnad
On the one hand a kind of materialism, which includes
the Marxist view of history. On the other a sense of the sacred, the religious if you
like. This duality never felt contradictory to me, but most other people thought it
was. It is beautifully resolved by Spinoza, who shows that it is not a duality, but in
fact an essential unity. — John Berger
the Marxist view of history. On the other a sense of the sacred, the religious if you
like. This duality never felt contradictory to me, but most other people thought it
was. It is beautifully resolved by Spinoza, who shows that it is not a duality, but in
fact an essential unity. — John Berger
At its core, making love, wearing blue jeans and buying rock records weren’t just perfectly compatible with capitalism; they fueled its growth. In contemporary America, we can see everywhere a post-68, “post-Fordist” spirit of capitalism that encourages “non-hierarchical” thinking in a new workplace heavily mediated by political correctness. The narcissism buried within the “personal is political” outlook finds its inheritors in those who think drinking “fair trade” lattes from Starbucks or following G20 protests like groupies represents real polit ical action. - Bhaskar Sunkara
— Dances With Anarchists – The New Inquiry
It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.
— Albert Camus. (via dpanjana)
(via actuallyaisha)
