Category: Notes
-
Theses on Martyrdom
Do not all uprisings, without exception, have their roots in the wretched isolation of men from the community? Karl Marx, Critical Notes on the Article: “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian” (1844). ‘Don’t mourn,’ goes the Left injunction, ‘organise.’ A bullying disavowal. How can we organise except through mourning? China Mieville,…
-
On lived experience and representation
Notes toward a critique of standpoints §1. What does Experience claim to be? Wilhelm Dilthey, the 19th-century hermeneuticist, coined the term Erlebnis (translated as “lived experience”) to designate the irreducibility of individual embodied, first-person, pre-reflective experience of oneself and one’s world. Dilthey wanted to distinguish the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) from natural science, arguing that understanding…
-
Fragments on Invariance
Notes on the invariance of Marxist doctrine and method, as elaborated in the tradition of the Communist Left Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.…
-
The Political Economy of Corruption
Preliminary notes on corruption and the peripheral-capitalist State; towards a critique of “Anti-Corruption” Metro Manila is drowning in shit and leptospirosis. Recent news, not at all old, believe it or not. A situationer In the recent weeks following sensational media stories and exposé of rampant corruption in flood control infrastructure financing, we have seen the…