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The Øther 2009-2010 READ LATER By Daniel Tutt, American University Comments and or questions are welcome. Please direct them to danielp.tutt@gmail.com Proximity towards the jouissance of the Other, or the neighbor, in Lacan's seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis becomes a matter of ethical concern because the Other as das Ding (the thing) poses problems outside of the moral relationship. In this paper I will examine the ethical positions of two psychoanalytic theorists, Eric Santner and Slavoj Žižek. The proximity towards the excessive jouissance of the neighbor as das Ding presents a number of interesting ethical problems. Žižek's confrontation with das Ding is a complex procedure that remains ambiguous, particularly in light of his sympathies towards the Christian Pauline agape version of radical love. Žižek's treatment of proximity towards the Other seeks a total escape from the fantasmatic symbolic coordinates of the oppressive symbolic order, whereas with Santner, in his text The Psychotheology of Everyday Life, the "mental excess" of jouissance caused by confrontation with the Other as das Ding is sought to be converted into an owning of the excessive proximity into a "blessings of more life." This paper first identifies and describes the Lacanian subject - a subject rooted in lack and the crisis of symbolic investiture and argues that Lacanian subjectivity is capable of radical freedom from the fantasmatic symbolic coordinates that sustain its relationship to its own freedom. There are several meta-ethical questions that arise in light of Lacan's notion of ethics for subjectivity inhabited by fantasmatic symptoms and a symbolic order structured by oppressive fantasy relations. These problems will be explored in this paper as they guide both Žižek's and Santner's work, particularly the superego demand to "love thy neighbor as thyself." The question of politics in relation to the Other for Santner is centered on how to convert

What is the Revolutionary Subject? Posted on November 11, 2011 by Daniel Tutt The revolutionary subject, who defines its politics in terms of the lack of the system's structural excesses, is always caught between impatience and courage in Badiou's Theory of the Subject. We should not forget that Badiou is developing a subject outside of identity, class, and gender. Badiou presents two primary historical and structural versions of the subject, that of Aeschylus and that of Sophocles. Of the four mathemes that constitute the subject, (courage, justice, anxiety and superego) it is courage that sustains the division of the one that founds political subjectivity writ large, and it is courage that sustains allegiance to the event for the revolutionary subject. If we lean on Holderlin's reading of Sophocles, which articulates precisely how the subject formation is always rooted in an insurrection from the law, we find a subject that is rooted in a split subject. Knowledge, for Oedipus is posed to an object that Oedipus knows not (the Sphinx), from which the unknown is generated. Aeschylus' subjet is on the side (to the contrary) of the thinkable and on the side of right, of being diverted from the law. It is Sophocles' subject that is rooted in overcoming the superego, that argues the subject is subverted by the law of superego (Creon or the state) and the law of anxiety (Antigone or the subject before the law) where the internal division of that which constitutes them, is a division beyond the law of anything that can have a legal value (TOS, 164). The political locus that constitutes the subject for Sophocles is two, not one. Aeschylus, on the contrary, posits that the subjects interrupts, through justice, this division of the One that the political subject is founded upon. How else did Freud choose Oedipus as the subject of two, of a subject that is constituted by the law of the unconscious, of the internal split? In the Aeschylian subject formation, th

Charting Hybridised Realities:  Tactical Cartographies for a densified present In the midst of an enquiry into the legacies of Tactical Media - the fusion of art, politics, and media which had been recognised in the middle 1990s as a particularly productive mix for cultural, social and political activism [1], the year 2011 unfolded. The enquiry had started as an extension of the work on the Tactical Media Files, an on-line documentation resource for tactical media practices worldwide [2], which grew out of the physical archives of the infamous Next 5 Minutes festival series on tactical media (1993 - 2003) housed at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. After making much of tactical media's history accessible again on-line, our question, as editors of the resource, had been what the current significance of the term and the thinking and practices around it might be? Prior to 2011 this was something emphatically under question. The Next 5 Minutes festival series had been ended with the 2003 edition, following a year that had started on September 11, 2002, convening local activists gatherings named as Tactical Media Labs across six continents. [3] Two questions were at the heart of the fourth and last edition of the Next 5 Minutes: How has the field of media activism diversified since it was first named 'tactical media' in the middle 1990s? And what could be significance and efficacy of tactical media's symbolic interventions in the midst of the semiotic corruption of the media landscape after the 9/11 terrorist attacks? This 'crash of symbols' for obvious reasons took centre stage during this fourth and last edition of the festival. Naomi Klein had famously claimed in her speedy response to the horrific events of 9/11 that the activist lever of symbolic intervention had been contaminated and rendered useless in the face of the overpowering symbolic power of the terrorist attacks and their real-time mediation on a global scale. [4] The

Transcript: Slavoj Zizek at St. Mark's Bookshop BY SARAHANA » Fake leftist melancholia; obscene Zionist pact. Slavoj Zizek at St. Mark's Bookshop First part of the talk is a theoritical discussion on melancholy, mourning and prohibition, addressing Judith Butler and Freud. It's followed by a discussion on Wall Streets protests, including (1) a dissection of Anne Applebaum's recent column in the Washington Post that claims democracy is incompatible with globalization, but also that the Occupy protests (which react to the consequences of globalized economy) are incompatible with democracy (2) the idea of a fake leftist melancholia as it applies to these protests (3) the need to preserve the vacuum the protests create, by refusing to engage in a dialogue with those in power, just yet. Later parts of the unscripted talk discuss the obscene pact of Zionism that allows pro-Zionism and anti-Semitism to co-exist in the same group (like American Christian fundamentalists). Towards the very end, there's a brief mention of the anticipated pact between the Egyptian army and the Muslim Brotherhood. October 26, 2011 at St. Mark's Bookshop. -- TRANSCRIPT -- I will simply begin by certain historical observations. You probably notice how some people, and I think precisely the wrong people, started to celebrate the Wall Street events as a new form of social carnival: so nice, we have there this horizontal organization, no terror, we are free, egalitarian, everybody can say whatever he or she wants, and so on, all that stuff. It is as if some kind of a carnivalesque collective experience is returning. And this tendency, much more than here, is alive, as you can expect, on the West Coast. A couple of days ago at Stanford they told me that - the other Sunday, about 9 days ago - that in the center of San Francisco, a guy speaking on behalf of those who occupy, said something like, "They are asking you what's your program. They don't get it. We don't have a program. W

he International Journal of Badiou Studies The International Journal for Badiou Studies is an international, peer-reviewed, open-source journal dedicated to the philosophy and thought of, and surrounding, the French philosopher Alain Badiou. The IJBS is dedicated to original and critical arguments that directly engage with the works of Badiou, as well as pertinent intellectual colleagues and related concepts. The aim of the IJBS is to develop a clear and transparent site for scholars interested in his ideas to come together from around the world to share their research and develop productive dialogues.   The IJBS is particularly concerned with maintaining a fidelity to Badiou's thinking without collapsing into hagiography or celebrity fetishism. We therefore encourage papers that actively critique Badiou's currency as an established philosophical figure. In this, we share similar aspirations with our partner the International Journal of Žižek Studies. Badiou's engagement with a variety of different fields also demands an interdisciplinary forum. Thus, the editorial staff and board is formed of scholars from a variety of disciplines across the Humanities and the Sciences. Call for Papers: Badiou Now!   The inaugural issue of the IJBS will be dedicated to the idea of 'Badiou Now!'  Why?  Because Badiou's philosophical interest is fundamentally contemporary and political. The notion of Badiou Now! captures the urgency that Badiou sees in combating the 'Thermidorian' spirit, reactive and obscurantist subjects that deny the necessity of rupture, events, acts, new truths, who replace action with political apathy, and radical democracy with a return to 'pure' transcendental notions.  In contrast to the Evental-negating/denying subject, Badiou is concerned with the question of how to maintain fidelity to the event, while remaining aware of competing subjective forces and of the materialist dialectical need for endless events, for perpetual breaks

Occupy Wall Street: Beyond the Rhetoric Matthew Flisfeder One of the distinguishing features of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is its apparent lack of central leadership. Not only does the movement seem leaderless; it does not appear to be organized around any clearly defined 'demands.' This has been perceived as something quite positive for participants and supporters of the movement, while being the primary point of criticism from opponents, particularly the mainstream media. Clearly, OWS stands against the unfair balance of wealth distribution in the United States (and around the world, for that matter), the unfair neoliberal politics that have swept the globe over the last four decades, corporate greed (especially in the financial sector), and various forms of systemic violence resulting from structural inequalities built into the capitalist system of exploitation. But what media pundits are looking for is something that they can represent: something, that is, with a timeline, that defines when the protestors will be 'satisfied.' This makes OWS qualitatively different from the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings that took the world stage last winter, popularly touted as the 'Arab Spring.' These groups had clearly defined 'demands': first and foremost was the overthrow of their political leaders. OWS is distinguished from the Arab Spring to the extent that its definitive aims and goals have yet to be defined. Activists meet October 7th in Toronto, in a pre-October 15 General Assembly. The movement has gone beyond the various '-isms,' labels that media pundits and the corporate elite find easy to dismiss: 'communism,' 'socialism,' 'anarchism,' 'Leftism,' etc. Commentators outside the United States have started to take notice. CBC business personality, Kevin O'Leary made a mockery of himself last week during a live interview with the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Chris Hedges, by referring to him as a "Left-wi

May 1, 2012 Pt.1 A Call To Strike To friends who don't live in the US, or others who have not yet been touched by the call for a General Strike on this day, we write this short note, as a kind of update. Some of our earliest discussions in the space began with considerations of what could or could not be considered work; who is included and who is excluded when we talk about labor. And what constitutes labor today in this everywhere and nowhere paradigm of production. Moreover, we have reflected together on what could potentially constitute a political activity today? It is no surprise then that the most intensive global attempts at responses in recent memory come precisely when the living labor of humans is in its most deformed and devalued form, and political space everywhere appears the most foreclosed, by a logic that would prefer to reduce politics to a managerial task of order and administration. A call for a national general strike in the United States has happened perhaps only once, for May 1st, 1886 [to be expanded by historians?]. In our January retreat/seminar, The Crisis of Everything Everywhere, we had a session, "On the General Strike". We asked: How it could be deployed? What are our historical and political conceptions of the strike, how do they relate to our present contexts, and what forms of communication and solidarity are necessary to see the strike we want to see? Who calls for the strike, who strikes, what do we do during the strike, and is there an AFTER the strike? What activities do we expect to precede this call, and what do we expect to follow? Can we have a general strike which is not instrumentalized, but is a political act, a step towards definitive refusal or revolt? The efficacy of this meeting was to be found neither in its valor for organizing, nor the theories we developed together. Its efficacy came in its indiscernibility between intellectual work, cultural work, and political work. To

Cooperation Law for a Sharing Economy A new sharing economy is emerging-but how does it fit within our legal system? Time for a whole new field of cooperation law. Document Actions Email Print Feed  Share by Janelle Orsi posted Sep 23, 2010 Residents of cohousing communities could benefit from the advice of "sharing lawyers." Photo by Joe Behr What do you call a lawyer who helps people share, cooperate, barter, foster local economies, and build sustainable communities? That sounds like the beginning of a lawyer joke, but actually, it's the beginning of a new field of law practice. Very soon, every community will need a specialist in this yet-to-be-named area: Community transactional law? Sustainable economies law? Cooperation law? Personally, I tend to call it sharing law. We need sharing lawyers to help people like Lynne: Lynne lives in an urban cohousing community and shares ownership of a car with two neighbors. Every day, she fluidly shares, borrows, and lends (rather than owns) many household goods, tools, electronics, and other items. She is a member of a cooperative grocery, through which she receives significant discounts in exchange for putting in a few monthly work hours. She grows vegetables on an empty lot and sometimes sells the veggies to neighbors. She has a successful rooftop landscaping business, which she launched using 20 microloans and investments from friends and family. She often barters, doing odd jobs in exchange for goods and services. She also owns a 5 percent share of a hot springs retreat center outside of town, which she acquired through sweat equity. With the help of sharing, cooperation, and collaboration, Lynne has managed to craft an affordable, comfortable lifestyle, put her skills to use, do varied and self-directed work, and live/work in a supportive community. She has "financed" property ownership and launched a thriving business off of the traditional financial and banking grid. Lawyers Are Going to Have a B

lexander C. T. Geppert.  Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siecle Europe.  New York  Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.  424 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-230-22164-2. Reviewed by Jill Steward (School of Historical Studies, Newcastle University) Published on H-Urban (March, 2012) Commissioned by Alexander Vari Laboratories for Scrutinizing Modernity: Imperial Exhibitions The great world and imperial exhibitions of the second half of the nineteenth century, sometimes described as one of the era's most distinctive products, were made possible by innovative technologies in transport, building, and communication and given the oxygen of publicity by the world's media industries. An urban phenomenon, they were visible signs of the transnational mobility of people, goods, and information made possible by technical innovation, industrial development, and commercial enterprise. Supported by the press, they contributed to the dissemination of knowledge and information across national boundaries and encouraged economic and cultural transfers. They made an enormous contribution to the growth of urban tourism and the spread of new and distinctively modern forms of visual culture and mass entertainment. It is not surprising therefore, that exhibitions could be seen not only as indications of modernity, but also its catalysts and agents. As we contemplate the intense media excitement aroused by the mega-events of our own time, notably the Olympic Games (which were merely sideshows at the 1900 Exhibition Universelle in Paris and the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition), we can understand the impact made by their nineteenth-century predecessors on the public imagination by the "fleeting cities" of the title of Alexander Geppert's study of imperial exhibitions, an allusion to Baudelaire's characterization of modernity as a set of representational practices embracing "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent," which involved the temporary occupation of acres of

Strengthening Occupy for the Future 6 ways to stop the movement from becoming institutional BY HARRIET BARLOWSHARE      Print Harriet Barlow, co-founder and Senior Fellow of the On the Commons, sends a warning that the creeping institutionalization of the Occupy movement- suggested by many well-meaning supporters as a way to strengthen its impact- will undermine what has made these protests so powerful and effective. Photo by Tom Giebel under a Creative Commons license. If we institutionalize Occupy, so that its spirit will succumb to the politics of the possible rather than continuing to create new possibilities, we will have missed an opportunity that history seldom offers. It's worth a long night's conversation over your beverage of choice to explore the history of how becoming institutionalized affected the course of the civil rights and women's movements, among others. Was the radical spirit of each distracted or stifled? Each of those movements came out of the gate with a powerful set of demands. Yet, once organizational dynamics took hold and divisions were confirmed by structure (think SCLC vis-à-vis SNCC, or NOW vis-à-vis NARAL) the chance of maintaining one strong voice committed to radical change diminished. Radicals became captive to a mindset dominated by the imperatives of competitive fundraising and institutions, rather than movement building. There were payrolls to be met, auditors to be satisfied, board members and donors to be placated. To be clear, there is a stage when that evolution is inevitable in order to make the shift from fostering outrage to changing policy. At their best, strong, transparent and accountable formal organizations are essential building blocks for social change. But is this the appropriate role for Occupy? My eloquent colleague, On the Commons Program Director, Alexa Bradley wrote: "The beauty of Occupy is that it is popular, wild, free. I don't mean that in a romantic sense, although

David Graeber: anthropologist, anarchist, financial analyst* By gregdowney Posted: October 15, 2011 Wall Street is in the grips of an 'occupation,' and activist and anthropologist, David Graeber, now at Goldsmiths, University of London, is in the centre of the action.  Graeber has been doing a few television and radio interviews of late (check here for his interview on ABC Radio National, Australia), talking about the organization of the Wall Street occupation as well as his new book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House). The juxtaposition of Florida Governor Rick Scott's recent comments about anthropology and the fact that Graeber is offering what may be among the most penetrating and accessible analyses of an important dimension of the current global debt crisis is striking. Of course, maybe clear-eyed analysis of our current economic situation, and the ability to point out that other societies do perfectly well with other sorts of economic and political systems, is precisely the sort of academic work that Gov. Rick Scott thinks universities should give up.  After all, no one needs to understand why US firms are shedding jobs, or take a sober look at the current financial regime in the light of the 5,000-year history of debt.  Students should just put their heads down and do the sorts of degrees that will give them technical jobs.  Pay no attention to The Man behind the curtain! Graeber is doing exactly what many of us want university-based social and cultural anthropologists to do more of: not just doing outstanding, useful applied work (which is bloody brilliant, of course), but also showing how our distinctive intellectual perspectives - comparative, evolutionary, cross-cultural, critical, even deconstructive (and 'post-modern') - provide academic analyses with important, 'real world' implications. After all, part of the current problem in the global economy is not just that we have bad applications of economic theory-we have b

Underlying Ideology of the 99 Filed under: American Revolution, Land Recourse, Neo-feudalism, Reformism Can't Work - Tags: occupy wall street - Russ @ 2:53 am > Rortybomb had this interesting analysis of the "Ideology of the We Are 99% Tumblr." Konczal ran the HTML text which accompanies many of the images through a program to assemble data on age and keywords. He found two age clusters, around 20 and 27.   The 25 most common "words of interest" all involve the necessities of a decent life (except that several like "jobs" and "debt", the two most common, are endemic to capitalism and other economic hierarchies). One important finding is that none of the key words are characteristically "consumerist". This plus the overall impression of the images is that, contrary to the fears or scoffing of detractors, the 99ers are not thinking primarily in terms of being gipped consumers who just want to go back to the 1990s. They're not thinking in terms of a more inclusive neoliberalism whose crimes would continue but merely trickle more of the loot to them, the way previous more fortunate consumers allegedly benefited. So we can take this as a piece of evidence which is promising in light of the previous discussion on this blog of consumerism as a movement.    Instead, they're thinking in terms of survival amid permanent dispossession. Their first concern is to be free of the oppression of unemployment and debt, which are the only modes of exploitation the decrepit system has left. So although they don't know it yet, anything they say about jobs and debt is already tantamount to the call to abolish Wall Street and debt as such.   Indeed, Konczal himself acknowledges but only dimly envisions the radicality of the implicit ideology here.   With all due respect to DeBoer, the demands I found aren't the ones of the go-go 90s-00s, but instead far more ancient cry, one of premodernity and antiquity. Let's bring up a favorite quote around

"Comuns": novo projeto para a revolução? BY ADMIN - 16/08/2011 POSTED IN: POSTS 1 Por Ed Emery*, na edição inglesa do Le Monde Diplomatique | Tradução: Vila Vudu Quando Toni Negri, agora aos 78 anos, escreve e fala, há sempre algum latim na sua fala profunda, mas o discurso é claro, disciplinado, lúcido e prazeroso. É como um abraço viril, muscular e poderoso, como tudo que sua formidável inteligência produz. Precisamos muito desse tipo de pensamento, porque os modelos esquerdistas do passado já não funcionam e algo novo tinha, sim, de ser inventado. Seu livro Império não sai das listas de mais vendidos nos EUA, mas Negri não tem partido, nem organização, nem legiões de seguidores. Diz ele: "Sinto-me um pouco isolado, porque sou e sempre fui extremista. Quem queira fazer carreira, ou manter relacionamento 'estável' com o mundo da política ordinária evita envolver-se comigo." Seu trabalho é teorizar as práticas passadas e as possibilidades futuras da revolução. Já há mais de vinte anos, escreve que as "classes" deram lugar à "multidão" como conceito e termo analítico. Seus adversários e detratores dizem que as massas não estão nas ruas, nas barricadas, aos gritos de "Somos a multidão". A Primavera Árabe pareceu bom momento para visitar Negri, uma vez que o que se vê nas principais praças de várias capitais em torno do Mediterrâneo é bem semelhante à multidão em ação, o que Negri disse em inúmeros artigos para vários jornais. Conversar com ele é diferente de ler o que ele escreve, sobretudo no meu caso, que traduzo seus escritos para o inglês. Num trem para Veneza, no trevo ferroviário de Mestre, esse espaço paradisíaco de terra, vento e água, dou-me conta de que já fazem 40 anos que traduzo o que o Negri escreve. Vejo-me outra vez em Londres, no início dos anos 1970, ambos ativistas recém-saídos da universidade, vivendo numa comuna frequentemente visitada pela polícia. Tính

Elinor Ostrom Outlines Best Strategies for Managing the Commons Nobel Prize winner headlines the Minneapolis Festival of the Commons, co-sponsored by On the Commons BY JAY WALLJASPERSHARE Print Elinor Ostrom details the importance of commons management at the Minneapolis Festival of the Commons, co-sponsored by On the Commons and Augsburg College (Credit: Augsburg College) Ostrom cited Jane Jacobs- who believed that local people usually know more about what's best for their communities than expertly-trained planners-as an influence on her work. A breakthrough for the commons came in 2009 when Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for Economics. The first woman awarded this honor, the Indiana University political scientist not only made history but also helped debunk widespread notions that the commons inevitably leads to tragedy. In 50 years of research from Nepal to Kenya to Switzerland to Los Angeles, she has shown that commonly held resources will not be destroyed by overuse if there is a system in place to manage how they are shared. How such systems work around the world was the topic of Ostrom's keynote address at Minneapolis' Festival of the Commons at Augsburg College Oct. 7-co-sponsored by On the Commons, Augsburg College's Sabo Center for Citizenship and Learning and The Center for Democracy and Citizenship. Ostrom explained there is no magic formula for commons management. "Government, private or community," she said, "work in some settings and fail in others." The most effective approach to protect commons is what she calls "polycentric systems," which operate "at multiple levels with autonomy at each level." The chief virtue and practical value of this structure is it helps establish rules that "tend to encourage the growth of trust and reciprocity" among people who use and care for a particular commons. This was the focus of her Nobel Lecture in Stockholm, which she opened by stressing a need for "developi

Thomas Sowell Delivers Inconvenient Truths By Heather Wilhelm Economic Facts and Fallacies By Thomas Sowell Perseus Publishing, December 2007 -------------------------------------------- Want to be a real hit at a cocktail party? Try bringing up politics, preferably with someone who disagrees with you--and if they're an emotional sort, even better. Proceed to delve into controversial issues of the day (the politics of race and gender, for instance) and, as you do, back up each point with lucid economic facts. After thorough research and a calm, learned presentation, odds are that you'll make a real impact. An impact, that is, in the form of gigantic tufts of steam shooting out of your audience's ears. Thomas Sowell's new book, "Economic Facts and Fallacies," is much like that cocktail party guest: cool, logical, informative, insightful, and, for some sides of the political aisle, a major irritant to be blocked out of the mind. Indeed, Sowell is the first to admit that facts, though the subject of his book, aren't always enough when it comes to winning the debate. He quotes Henry Rosovsky, a Harvard economist: "Never underestimate the difficulty," the professor once said, "of changing false beliefs by facts." Sowell's book dismantles many of the pervasive fallacies running rampant in politics today, broken into categories of urban life, gender, academia, income, race, and the problems of the third world. Some of these fallacies stem from false assumptions; others from faulty economics; still others from dodgy definitions. "Undefined words have a special power in politics," Sowell writes, "particularly when they evoke some principle that engages people's emotions." He mentions "fair" as a prime example. In the charged political milleu of 2008, "change" is surely another. Sowell packs the book with salient facts--that less than 5% of all American land is developed, for instance, or that the percentage of American families with incomes over $75,000 has tripled ove

Radical Thinking To Recreate And Reimagine Our Cities By Anthony Cuthbertson on Sep 4, 2011 Does this look like your average mayor? It is estimated that by the year 2050, eighty percent of the world's population will be living in cities. Unfortunately, modern-day cities are often crime-ridden, chaotic, and in some form of decay. The Torre de David, the world's tallest squat, which has emerged in Caracas, could be a precursor of things to come if something isn't done about expanding urban populations. One answer is to build brand new cities, such as Iskandar in Malaysia, soon to be home to 3 million people. However, if governments don't have a few trillion dollars to spare, there is a slightly cheaper solution. Follow in the footsteps of others. A series of films commissioned by the Danish Film Institute and national broadcaster DR, focusing on four mega-cities that faced extreme problems, sought out and gave recognition to inspired visions for an urban future. Of the four cities dealt with in Cities on Speed, the most incredible story of transformation comes from Colombia. Bogotà Change tells the tale of two unorthodox politicians, Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa, whose successive mayoralties transformed the Colombian capital from a city plagued by crime, poverty and corruption to one of social equality and relative harmony. The political metamorphosis in the place once dubbed 'the worst city on the planet' was, bizarrely enough, when Mockus pulled down his trousers and mooned 2000 students who were booing and insulting him. He was chancellor of the university at the time and was soon forced to resign-though remarkably this action became a symbol of his candor, which was seen as part and parcel of a larger integrity. Within a few months he was running to become the first independent mayor in Bogotà's history. Campaigning in spandex 'super-citizen' suits, he won. Immediately, he put into action a behavioral philosophy that turned Bogot

The Situationists and the Occupation Movements (1968/2011)   One of the most notable characteristics of the "Occupy" movement is that it is just what it claims to be: leaderless and antihierarchical. Certain people have of course played significant roles in laying the groundwork for Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations, and others may have ended up playing significant roles in dealing with various tasks in committees or in coming up with ideas that are good enough to be adopted by the assemblies. But as far as I can tell, none of these people have claimed that such slightly disproportionate contributions mean that they should have any greater say than anyone else. Certain famous people have rallied to the movement and some of them have been invited to speak to the assemblies, but they have generally been quite aware that the participants are in charge and that nobody is telling them what to do. This puts the media in an awkward and unaccustomed position. They are used to relating with leaders. Since they have not been able to find any, they are forced to look a little deeper, to investigate for themselves and see if they can discover who or what may be behind all this. Since the initial concept and publicity for Occupy Wall Street came from the Canadian group and magazine Adbusters, the following passage from an interview with Adbusters editor and co-founder Kalle Lasn (Salon.com, October 4) has been widely noticed: We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings all over the world. All of a sudden universities and cities were exploding. This was done by a small group of people, the Situationists, who were like the philosophical backbone of the movement. One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote The Society of the Sp

Ernesto Laclau An interview with Ernesto Laclau READ LATER Ernesto Laclau talks to the Greek journal Intellectum about the uses of populism, why radical democracy has nothing to do with liberalism, and how lack of political competition benefits the far-Right. Intellectum: In probably your most famous book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, co-authored with Chantal Mouffe, you attempted to deconstruct both Marxist theory and liberal democratic thought in order to reinterpret them in such a way that they could contribute to a more sufficient understanding of contemporary politics. What is the significance of the concept of identity for the comprehension of modern reality? Ernesto Laclau: Well I think that the concept of identity can be analysed from different sides. One side would be to identify identity with particularity. There are some difficulties obviously in this type of identification of the two categories. But there are also advantages, because obviously the political problem that presents itself is a problem of general articulation, and general articulation has to rely on some kind of category of identity. So this is the way in which the question of identity emerges today. It can be related to a variety of intellectual contexts, but I think that the essential point is that there are no obvious forms of universality that can replace the notion of identity. Intellectum: In your first book Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), you discussed the phenomenon of populism. In 2005 you published On Populist Reason. It seems that populism has remained at the centre of your interest. In a country that is governed by a populist party, what can we assume about the political identity of that people? How is popular subjectivity constructed? EL: I think we have to introduce a classical distinction: the distinction between populus and plebs. Populus is the totality of the community; plebs are those at the bottom of the social pyramid. A characteristic of plebeian