Jacob Bard-Rosenberg

I recorded a version of the guest lecture I gave to art students at Edinburgh last week. I hope you all enjoy it. Includes all sorts of fun stuff about rats, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, arte povera, Otto Rene Castillo, and more! youtube.com/watch?v=i3mNus…

the more unconscious.

so doing sacrificed truth for pragmatism. That, in itself, is the greater irrationality. This irrationality shows up in the account of institutions and legitimation, which is haunted by a replay of Nietzschean psychology, now dressed in the garb of objectivity, and therefore all

Guess I should say something about Habermas, but not much to say. I think if you think experience is simply a source of irrationality then there isn’t a good reason to do Frankfurt School-style philosophy. He ultimately spent his life defending philosophy against poetry, and in

Habermas is dead.

@thezachloeffler Depends who is saying it. I have some respect for it out of a certain Thompsonite tradition (people like Linebaugh) and people who become convinced of this (Fred and Silvia). But broadly, yes, it is now used by people who are not communists.

Whenever I hear “the commons,” I want to be like say the word that wounds instead of its anodyne surrogate

How much novi would a novichok chok if a novichok could chok novi?

Outside agitator of the murmuration

Can’t believe it’s a decade since Boulez died.

I was thinking last night about that moment in the long history of culture when the question was invented. So wild.

Went to London for the weekend and lost my copy of Walter Benjamin - Gretel Adorno correspondence somewhere in the crowds. If anyone picked it up, it has marginalia in it that I will have trouble rewriting.

Shocked and upset to hear that Asad Haider has died. Viewpoint was really important for lots of us during a cycle of struggles in the 2010s. We hadn’t spoken for quite a lot of years now, but I had continued to read his stuff. Sending love to all of you who were close to him.

A couple of years ago Anne and I decided we would embrace austerity and have only a single wooden table and wooden chairs. This turned out to be a terrible idea. So now I have got us some fancy furniture from the 1970s for our library.

I hate the word ‘cremains’. Wish they were called ‘cremnants’ instead.

@fordprefect71 I’m ferociously against it.

@Prolapsarian "Whatever you think about Russias Imperial expansion...' Your thoughts are clear.

Whatever you think of Russia’s imperial expansion, the last week has only shown liberalism’s psychotic commitment to the forever war. This is why liberalism governs only Europe, and not the rest of the world. The catastrophe is the Left has not found a foothold in its stead.

Had to explain the Y2K bug to one of my fourth year university students today. She was like “OMG this is so amazing. I’ve never heard of that. I’m going to tell all my friends about it.” Makes me feel very old.

Countries like the UK, France, and Germany are less attached to Ukrainian sovereignty and integrity than an economy of arms sales and a future of lucrative reconstruction contracts. They are willing to stake endless lives of young Russians and Ukrainians on this.

@thezachloeffler There are more things that really ought to be translated. The one that stands out for me is the two vols of Philosophische Terminologie and then the letters with Horkheimer as really central untranslated texts. And a functional translation of Negative Dialectics would be nice.

@Prolapsarian But point taken. It’s for a general audience. So I amend my initial tweet: there’s a book that’s entirely untranslated in the GS. One wonders if there are more!

Crazy that there are whole monographs in the Gesammelte Schriften that aren't translated.

“Treading in two different ways: to touch one point of the earth—to touch the earth at one point. The first type is ours. When one sees Gothic decoration, one knows that older epochs possessed the second form.” — Walter Benjamin (trans. @afoggyplace)