January 3rd - Endnotes on the the UK riots

 
 

"A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats", from EndNotes #3.
Available here http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/20

Meeting at 8pm, Tempest Library.

Friday December 6th: Two texts on struggles in Barcelona

"The Rose of Fire has Returned: The Struggle for the Streets of Barcelona"
Available here: http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/rosefire.php

and a text from a series by crimethinc on post-struggle de-mobilization, "After the Crest Part III: Barcelona Anarchist at Low Tide" available here:
http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/atc-barc.php

Bartleby: a Negativism Beyond all Negativity

This week we will explore the disturbing, disruptive, and tragic refusal of Hermann Melville's character of Bartleby, from his story "Bartleby the Scrivener".  The Melville text is here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/827051/melville-herman--bartleby-the-scrivener.pdf

We offer four optional commentaries on the text, which people can read at their will, and raise during the discussion.

-Agamben "Bartleby or On Contingency" (in: Potentialities, p. 243-271)

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Agamben_Bartleby.pdf

-Rancière "Deleuze, Bartleby and the Literary Formula" (in: The Flesh of
Words. The politics of writing, p. 146-164)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/827051/Ranciere%20-%20The%20Flesh%20of%20Words.pdf

-Deleuze "Bartleby; or 'The Formula'" (in: Essays: Critical & Clinical, S. 68-90)
 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/827051/Deleuze%20-%20Essays%20critical%20and%20clinical.pdf

-Zizek: "Notes towards a politics of Bartleby: The ignorance of chicken" (in: Comparative American Studies 4(4), p. 375-394

http://archive.totalism.org/Zizek%20-%20Notes%20Towards%20a%20Politics%20of%20Bartleby%20-%20The%20Ignorance%20of%20Chicken.pdf

Thursday Oct. 17: Race and urban guerilla groups

What role does social death and anti-Blackness play in militant politics? This week's reading, written by an American Afropessimist theorist, juxtaposes three urban guerrilla groups (the German Red Army Faction, the Black Liberation Army, and the Irish Republican Army). It attempts to think their difference from the point of view of race, social death, and the 'capacity' or incapacity to enact a dialogical play of recognition with the State and civil society.
Text:
Imp
Read

For a bit of background on the Afropessimist perspective on the significance of the legacy of slavery and Blackness for contemporary radical political theory, the same author has a well-known essay from 2003, entitled "Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave In Civil Society?"
A read version is here,
A zine version here.

Meeting 8pm, Tempest Library

3rd of October: Tiqqun´s Sonogram of a Potential

Since we were only a few people to discuss this a few meetings ago, and only got through half of it, we´re going to discuss this Tiqqun text again that relates to feminism and queer theory:

Text is available here https://sonogram.jottit.com/

Reading for Thursday the 19th - Critique and Historical Transformation

Pdf available: Moishe Postone - Critique and Historical Transformation

September 5th: Tiqqun Sonogram of a Potential

PDF available here

August 15th: Negativity in Deleuze and the politics of active nihilism

Reading available here.
Meeting at 8pm, Tempest library.

August 1st: A Theory of Shattered Fragments

Text on the fragmentation of Berlin´s radical left into groups and factions, by Club Für Sich.
Reading available here.

Meeting at 8pm, Tempest Library.

July 18th: Félix Guattari on Molecular Revolution

Following on from our discussion of Badiou´s book on riots (whose Maoist overtones left us unsatisfied), for our meeting on July 18th we will discuss Félix Guattari on molecular revolution and his analysis of protests in Brazil in the 1960s.

The readings are:

"There is no scope for futurology; history will decide"; extracts from Molecular Revolution in Brazil with an introduction by Ben Trott and Rodrigo Nunes, available here

"Molecular Revolution", Chapter 20 from Chaosophy -  a pdf of the book is available here

July 4th: Badiou and the Logic of Riots

On July 4th we will meet at Tempest Library to discuss the recent and ongoing riotous events in Brazil and Turkey. People are encouraged to come with anecdotes or short videos of interest drawn from these struggles.
In addition, we will collectively discuss the threefold distinction French philosopher Alain Badiou has recently proposed for analyzing the international "riots" of the past three years, i.e. the difference between "immediate", "latent", and "historical" riots, as well as the "rebirth of history" Badiou argues they might potentially signify, if linked to a new "Idea of Communism."

Readings for this week:

A short text by Badiou on Taksim Square and the Turkey insurrection:
http://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/alain-badiou-on-the-uprising-in-turkey-and-beyond/

A review of Badiou's book, The Rebirth of History, Times of Riots and Uprisings, written by some American anti-State communists in the wake of the Oakland Commune:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=949&fulltext=1

Finally, chapters 2-6, and 9 [which summarizes his larger argument] of Rebirth of History, or else as much as people feel like reading. A pdf of the book will be temporarily available at this link: http://bit.ly/1cDrBug

May 16th: The ZAD and the rise of struggles against transportation infrastructure projects (and their worlds)

Suggested reading:

"Against the Airport and Its World - Texts from an Intensification of Struggle in the Zone À Défendre" available here http://hophop.noblogs.org/post/against-the-airport-and-its-world/

"ZAD, Commune, Metropolis" available here  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2013/04/509012.html

As with the NO TAV movement in Italy (an on-going struggle against the construction of a high-speed train line in the Susa Valley in Northern Italy), the ZAD is a struggle against a large-scale transportation infrastructural project intended to serve the interests of the urban elites who extract profit from such projects, as well as to facilitate the global circulation of capital.

Some themes we may want to consider in our discussion are: the hypothesis developed within the NO TAV movement "that power lies within the material infrastructure of the world itself, in the way that every local situation is configured, and not in political representation."* and therefore it makes sense to attack the construction site in the Susa valley. The way in which struggles such as the ZAD and NO TAV disrupt distinctions between urban and rural, centre and periphery.  For example, these infrastructural projects can be seen as an urbanization of rural space while the movements against them transform what are considered "peripheral" areas, into centres of struggle which give rise to new rebel cultures and insurrectionary practices which are then spread back to the metropolitan centres ("Bring the valley home!", "Block everything!" "Le ZAD est partout!"). And finally we can think about how the focus on attacking and blockading the sites of the circulation of capital (rather than of production and reproduction) "leads us to rethink what an actual strike could mean when the terrain is neither the factories, the sites of production, nor the political representation, but the whole metropolis (intended as a certain intensity of circulation, a certain rhythm, and all the ensuing modifications of subjectivities, which means nothing less than an anthropological revolution)"*.

*quotes from "Italy 2011-2012: from the No TAV struggle to the metropolitan strike."

Thurs May 2: Communism of Attack, Communism of Withdrawal

On Thurs May 2 we will discuss a text called "Communism of Attack, Communism of Withdrawal", which originally appeared in 2005 in the Swedish journal Riff Raff. 

Cpu version (EN)
Printable zine (EN)
Swedish Version

8pm, Tempest Library

April 18, 2013: Call

Late post of the reading! But this week we will be reading "Call"

at the Tempest Anarchist Library, 8pm

A nice zine of the text is here 

Thurs April 4: Against The Legalization Of Occupied Spaces

This thursday we will read an Italian piece entitled "Against The Legalization Of Occupied Spaces". The text can be found here.

Tempest, 8pm.

See you then!

Thursday March 7th: Lazzarato, "The Making of Indebted Man"

IMPORTANT NOTICE

we will not be able to use the Tempest space this thursday, meeting at lulus.

Maurizio Lazzarato will be in Berlin later this week, speaking at a conference on the "Pathologies of Cognitive Capitalism". Lazzarato has recently broken with several of his compatriats in the Italian immaterial labor school of analysis, rejecting the thesis of a "cognitive capitalism." This rejection and re-evaluation can be seen in his recent book The Making of Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition.

This thursday at 8pm, we will meet at the Tempest Library to discuss chapter Chapter 2 of this work, which revolves around Nietzsche, social indebtedness, and Deleuze and Guattari's usage of this Nietzschean analysis in the third chapter of Anti-Oedipus. A pdf of the text is here.

See you then! 

Reading for Thursday 21:th - Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

Text can be found here: http://rymdkoloni.se/ideology.pdf

January 17th: The Allure of Insurrection

The text for the next meeting is The Allure of Insurrection by Leonard Williams and Brad Thomson.
Available here. 
Meeting will take place at the Tempest library at 8pm.