“Had he found a way to change life as we know it ? No, he was only searching, he said” -Rimbaud,” Delirium” Why write anything to begin with? Things are looking bad and they don’t seem to be getting better any time soon. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that there is a way out. Are we going to be able to get on the off ramp or will we simply miss our exit? Debates around what to call it seem at this point redundant. Techno Feudalism, political capitalism, and cybernetic capitalism are only terms that point to the fact that something is wrong, profoundly complex and evil. Taking after the Beacon Cinema we should all take a moment to update our about page, to express publicly what exactly it is we are doing. Citing Marx they say that “it will transpire that mankind begins no new work.” In short it's exactly as Audre Lorde puts it “there are no new ideas.” I could post 100 books on instagram and tell you to read them, but that wouldn’t tell you why. If we assume there’s a way ...

The Fall of the Rebel Angels, Pieter Bruegel the Elder “... a person can speak a language badly or not at all and still be able to read it. In any case, there were a lot of dead women.” Any discussion of how to depict violence ignores the fundamental question of what violence is. The fourth part of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 proceeds by detailing a great number of crimes, most of them murders. This is a choice that is confrontational and demands interpretation. In the image conjured by the above quotation a man is reading a newspaper in a language he doesn’t understand yet the point is very clear: violence is legible even from a distance. By contrast we should look at Scorscese’s recent Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorcese is one of the great metaphysicians of violence of our time and Killers… is no exception. By gun, by bomb, and by needle we are witness to the multitude of forms that violence can take, both slow and fast. In some ways it serves Virillio’s notion that “violence can be re...

Paul Klee, Mask of Fear (1932) History has always entailed the task of what Walter Benjamin describes as "wrestling conforming away from tradition." The religious question becomes which commandments still hold sway in the 21st century. Spinoza says that there is in fact only one commandment: respect thy neighbor as yourself. Therefore is it worth rejecting the Jewish theological and ethical tradition if Jews can have a nation state? Phrased this way I think the answer is obviously not. There is first of course the semblance of safety that Israel offers, but does "never again" only mean "never again for some?" It is worth mentioning that in once sense these events are monads in nature, the similarities between inquisition, pogrom, genocide, ethnic cleansing and holocaust only seek to underline not their similarities, but their intense differentiation. Different forms of violence resulting from different historical circumstances. Adam Tooze finds it more pro...