English

It all started with a siege: what happened in Italy on October 18th and 19th

Written by Oana Parvan, 29.10.2013
Hopes and dreams in the Susa Valley
Some two months ago the national housing activists met the NO TAV* movement in the sunny green Susa Valley. The plan was a week of national mobilization culminating with a general strike (of the rank-and-file unions) followed by a mass demonstration against austerity and precarity in Rome. Putting together the whole Italian movement sounded like wishful thinking. No one could imagine what was going to happen.
 
Weeks of hard work and national coordination followed. Bit by bit the 19th October general uprising was taking shape. The week before was marked by numerous appropriation events: from empty buildings being squatted by students to families sieging shopping centers for food at fair prices.
 

The Cyrenaics: the ultra-hedonists of ancient anarchism

Written by Federico Campagna, 22.10.2013
Featuring thinkers such as Theodoros ‘the Godless’, Hegesias ‘the Death-Persuader’ and Aristippos the Elder a.k.a. ‘the Royal Dog’, the Cyrenaics have always been the most vilified and neglected among the many philosophical schools of the Hellenistic age. Initiated almost informally by Aristippos the Elder, one of the companions of Socrates, the Cyrenaic school found its structure only two generations later at the hands of Aristippos’ grandchild, Aristippos the Younger. Unlike the majority of philosophical movements of the time, which sprung mostly in Athens or in the coastal part of modern Turkey, the Cyrenaics take their name from the North-Eastern area of today’s Libya. Perhaps because of their distance from the increasing dogmatism of Platonic/Aristotelian Greece, the Cyrenaics promoted a sophisticated form of ultra-hedonism which sounds remarkably free and audacious even to our postmodern ears.
 

Fragments on the zombie myth: the mortification of general intellect and the half-life of the cognitariat

Written by Toby Austin Locke, 14.10.2013
The only modern myth is the myth of zombies—mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason.
- Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 
 
The zombie is the point at which power’s domination, the domination of the state and of capital in all its shades - subjective, existential, epistemological, even ontological - has entered so completely into our communities that the unquestioning automaton is the most recurrent and common form-of-life to be encountered. It is the point at which subjectivity has been so deeply infested by the love of power, the micro-facism that is diffused across the global bio-political mass, that life only appears as a half-death, an existence the potential forms of which are predetermined, prelimited, constrained. The images of loved ones appear, but terrify; intimacy gives way to disgust, and those who break free of their cages of isolation, who demand to reclaim life from its half-death, are confronted by the utter terror that surrounds them.
 

The sadness of “I Quit” videos

Written by Paolo Mossetti, 06.10.2013
Like many other viral videos on Youtube, this liberating, mildly choreographic effort to say “goodbye” to a despotic boss made me release more depressant toxins that it apparently did to other million viewers.

The story behind it is now a popular fabula: Marina Shifrin, 25, was employed by “an awesome company” (her words) that produces animation videos. “For almost two years”, she explains, “I’ve sacrificed my relationships, time and energy for this job”.

It’s 4.30am and she’s still at work. It doesn’t seem to be an exception.

She positions her camera in strategic spots, looking straight into it with her thick glasses, then she unexpectedly starts to dance around the office, lonely yet glowing. “I quit”, is the caption flashing multiple times under her moves.

Cynics: the radical atheism of the heavenly dogs

Written by Federico Campagna, 02.10.2013

Dressed in rags, if dressed at all, their heads half-shaved, eating, defecating and masturbating in public, ranting in the middle of the marketplace, the Cynics are among the most controversial figures of ancient Western philosophy. With a move that long predated the witty self-deprecation of groups like the Cubists or Afroamerican ‘nigga’ rappers, Cynic philosophers presented themselves as ‘dogs’ (kynoi) – and as such they behaved in public. By taking their place just under the bottom of the social order, the dog-philosophers simultaneously declared themselves to be above it: such was the most famous thinker of the early Cynic school, Diogenes the ‘son of Zeus’, the ‘heavenly dog’, the ‘king’. According to a famous anecdote, when Diogenes – who at some point was captured and sold as a slave – was asked by the trader in what he was proficient, he replied: ‘In ruling men’. Then he pointed to a rich man in the crowed and said.  ‘Sell me to this man; he needs a master.’[1]

Syndicate content