Monday, 12 October 2015
Sunday, 1 March 2015
Revanchism
Wednesday, 4 September 2013
mesh
Saturday, 10 August 2013
Giorgio Agamben - We Refugees
Giorgio Agamben. "We Refugees." Symposium. 1995, No. 49(2), Summer, Pages: 114-119, English, Translation by Michael Rocke.
7. Before the extermination camps are reopened in Europe (which is already starting to happen), nation-states must find the courage to call into question the very principle of the inscription of nativity and the trinity of state/nation/territory which is based on it. It is sufficient here to suggest one possible direction. As is well known, one of the options considered for the problem of Jerusalem is that it become the capital, contemporaneously and without territorial divisions, of two different states. The paradoxical condition of reciprocal extraterritoriality (or, better, aterritoriality) that this would imply could be generalized as a model of new international relations. Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, one could imagine two political communities dwelling in the same region and in exodus one into the other, divided from each other by a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities, in which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius of the citizen, but rather the refugium of the individual. In a similar sense, we could look to Europe not as an impossible "Europe of nations," whose catastrophic results can already be perceived in the short term, but as an aterritorial or extraterritorial space in which all the residents of the European states (citizens and noncitizens) would be in a position of exodus or refuge, and the status of European would mean the citizen's being-in-exodus (obviously also immobile). The European space would thus represent an unbridgeable gap between birth and nation, in which the old concept of people (which, as is well known, is always a minority) could again find a political sense by decisively opposing the concept of nation (which until now has unduly usurped it).This space would not coincide with any homogeneous national territory, nor with their topographical sum, but would act on these territories, making holes in them and dividing them topologically like in a Leiden jar or in a Moebius strip, where exterior and interior are indeterminate. In this new space, the European cities, entering into a relationship of reciprocal extraterritoriality, would rediscover their ancient vocation as cities of the world
Wednesday, 26 June 2013
Saturday, 1 June 2013
sibyl
When the urge to play overcomes an adult, this is not simply a regression to childhood. To be sure, play is always liberating. Surrounded by a world of giants, children use play to create a world appropriate to their size. But the adult, who finds himself threatened by the real world and can find no escape, removes its sting by playing with its image in reduced form. The desire to make light of an unbearable life has been a major factor in the growing interest in children’s games and children’s books since the end of the war.” (Benjamin “Old Toys” 100)
Monday, 5 November 2012
Sunday, 21 October 2012
About dates and times, my friends, we need not write to you
The meaning of "to live as an alien" lies behind the use of paroikia [Latin: paroecia], "parish", to designate a group of Christians in a city or territory, with a religious leader at their head and with a place in which to gather for the worship of God. But the term parochus which the Code of Canon Law uses for "parish priest" has a different origin: the parochus is a "provider" one whose function is to distribute [Greek: parechein] spiritual goods to his flock.
The Eucharist of the Early Christians / Johanny / 1992
Paul reminds the Thessalonians, "About dates and times, my friends, we need not write to you, for you know perfectly well that the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night. [1 Thess 5.1-2;262]. In this passage 'comes [erchetai]" is in the present tense, just as in the Gospels the messiah is called ho erchomenos, 'he who comes' - that is, he who never ceases to come. Having perfectly understood Paul's meaning, Walter Benjamin once wrote that 'every day, every instant, is the small gate through which the messiah enters.
The Church & The Kingdom / Agamben
Saturday, 30 April 2011
extraterritorial / peculiars, mints, liberties
Thomas Shadwell, The Squire of Alsatia, 1688.
Sunday, 19 December 2010
the thin fluorescent line/ kettled at the palace 30.11.10


Labour of Dyonisus: Weak subjects and the politics of avoidance.
In the development of the postmodern liberal argument State power is not exerted according to what Foucault calls a disciplinary paradigm […]. State power here does not involve the exposure and subjugation of social subjects as part of an effort to engage, mediate, and organise conflictual forces within the limits of order. The thin state avoids such engagement: this is what characterises its “liberal” politics. […]
The liberal notion of tolerance coincides here perfectly with the decidedly illiberal mechanism of exclusion. The thin state of postmodern liberalism appears, in effect, as a refinement and extension of the German tradition of the science of the police. The police are necessary to afford the system abstraction and isolation: the “thin blue line” delimits the boundaries of what will be accepted as inputs in the system of rule. […]
The crucial development presented by the postmodern Polizeiwissenschaft, is that now society is not infiltrated and engaged, but separated and controlled: not a disciplinary society but a pacified society of control. The police function creates and maintains a pacified society, or the image of a pacified society, by preventing the incidence of conflicts on the machine of equilibrium. […]
The method of avoidance then carries implicitly a postmodern Polizeiwissenschaft that effectively, and in practical terms, abstracts the system from the field of potential conflicts, thus allowing the system to order an efficient, administred society.














