Institute for Conjunctural Research

In an old newspaper, I come across a photo of the Paris Commune. It shows part of the barricade in rue de Batignolles, near place Clichy; in the middle of the street, five mortars and three br...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2011/06/maison-marx.html

Franco Fortini Translating Brecht All afternoon a thunderstorm hung on the rooftops, then broke, in lightning, in torrents. I stared at lines of cement, lines of glass with screams inside th...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2011/06/hate-those-who-gently-lead-into.html

"The old mole continues to dig, but he is blind and does not know where he is coming from or going to; he digs in circles. And those who cannot or will not trust to Providence must do their best to understand him, and by doing so help him on his way." (Lucio Magri)

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2011/01/la-crisi.html

STUDENT PROTEST IS NONVIOLENT NEXT TO THE SOCIETY ITSELF Herbert Marcuse The present campus unrest must be seen in the context of a deep-rooted protest against the established society, its i...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2010/11/weitermachen.html

Paul Berman, tireless fustigator of crypto-totalitarian useful idiots spawned by the long tail of the bad 60s, has composed another righteous tract, this time it seems attacking fifth columni...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2010/07/racism-and-abstraction.html

Farewell to one of the most generous and supple minds in the communist Left. Before we had a religion of History telling us: there will be a final struggle and we will necessarily win. Now we...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2010/01/daniel-bensaid-rip.html

From the educational programme L'enseignement de la philosophie, on which see Tamara Chaplin Matheson, 'Embodying the Mind, Producing the Nation: Philosophy on French Television', Journal of the ...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/12/philosophy-and-psychology-badiou.html

Follow this link for videos and mp3's of the symposium for Jameson's reception of the Norwegian Holberg Prize. The elusive Perry Anderson (ending on a rare note of uplift), Michael Löwy and Wan...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/10/jameson-symposium.html

Having made my first ventures to the cinema in the days of Glasnost, my memories of the aesthetics of détente are very much those of a depressing and integrated spectacle: Yanks and Russkis b...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/08/thrill-of-detente.html

'shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition, etc. applied esp. to the spirit and aims of the French philosophers of the 18th c.' Enlightenment,...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/08/turn-out-lights.html

It is perhaps unsurprising that the horror of political upheaval, of plebeian uprisings and the destruction of the old regime in the name of a new order, can be so transfixed by space and arch...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/08/monstrous-architecture-of-revolution.html

"An apocalypse is literally the revelation of the Secret History of the world as becomes possible under the terrible clarity of the Last Days. It is the alternate, despised history of the suba...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/07/prophet-davis.html

We love ideas grafted with violence onto facts, and we enjoy the disparities between what we would like to achieve and what we actually achieve. (Dinamo, May 1919) In Italy’s tricolor there...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/07/burn-your-baedeker.html

An intriguing editorial in the mainstream Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, 'The 18th Brumaire of Barack Obama' , on Leo Panitch , the mirage of the Obama solution, and the current fortu...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/06/on-canada-and-ownership-of.html

Sticking strictly to the spectacular level, I've always had a soft spot for the Colonel's sartorial genius , his predilection for women-only teams of bodyguards , even his tent installations,...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/06/gaddafi-anti-colonial-performance.html

"Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extremely cultic that ever existed. Within it, nothing has meaning that is not immediately related to the cult." - Walter Benjamin, 'C...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/05/bronstein-on-underground-or-religion-of.html

"The Stoic philosopher Posidonius gave an example of the medicinal powers of philosophy when he experimented on his very own person in the presence of the great Pompei ... he was able to overp...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/05/on-physical-effect-of-philosophy.html

Mike Davis , with a characteristic blend of systemic mediation, apocalyptic poetry and a plea for the necessity of socialism. Or, how 'the Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably con...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/04/capitalist-swine-at-our-door.html

] Reading recently the late Georges Labica's defense of Lenin's utopian moment in the acts of the 1975 Cerisy colloquium on utopian discourse (quite a gem), I encountered this superb quotat...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/04/lenins-testament-or-when-money-will.html

I have often felt unsettled, and further unmoored from national allegiance (were that possible or necessary), upon visiting those uncanny establishments where compatriots caught between langua...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/04/and-he-himself-had-become-unplaced.html

"The old mole continues to dig, but he is blind and does not know where he is coming from or going to; he digs in circles. And those who cannot or will not trust to Providence must do their best to understand him, and by doing so help him on his way." (Lucio Magri)

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/04/conjunctural-tv-david-harvey-on-g20-and.html

In the stringent materialist spirit of ‘not telling oneself stories’, K-punk and Owen (and here ) raise some urgent questions about the coherence and efficacy of actions such as yesterda...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/04/right-to-city.html

A play on the Weather Underground now on at the Courtyard Theatre . I'm curious how they'll choose to represent "a misguided orgy of bomb-making".

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/02/when-do-we-start-fighting.html

It stops short of comparing John Denham to Joseph Stalin, but new research suggests that the Universities Secretary presides over a Whitehall regime that has much in common with the old Soviet...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/01/market-stalinism.html

What's the sound of an imminent economic crash? Apparently, low beat variance , as in Beyonce's frantically monotonous paean to matrimonial security (against the crisis?) Single Ladies (Put a ...

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2009/01/beyonc-avec-marx.html