“The first city attacked by land is called Happiness.”
This is probably the first and last thing we need to be informed for by the press today. Nothing else is that important as the fact, that Happiness was attacked by land. It could be attacked by air, by sea, but it’s not, it’s attacked by land.
Continue reading “Viral Movement”“Western civilization has been extraordinarily expansive in the last five hundred years, creating numerous give-and-take relationships between society and disease, as disease and concepts of it followed in the path of imperialism, diverted its course, and were diverted by it. And while the age of formal imperialism has largely passed, the world is more closely interlinked than ever, thanks to the combined pressures of aggressive commerce, swift transportation, and phenomenal contemporary communication and information technology. Disease history in the twenty-first century will be global.”
The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Responses in Western History by J.N. Hays
Wars don’t only change our habits and biographies, our everyday existence and those of the ones directly involved in fights; wars also change political, social, and economical realities beyond the boundaries of the strict events (however prolonged) they are. We might say, following this narrative, that wars are changes-in-continuity. Yet, despite the aforementioned changes, war’s real or objective specifics, don’t exhaust its influence.
Continue reading “Against the Totalitarian Language of History”
Continue reading “COVID-19 and Temporality”“The time is out of joint”: time is disarticulated, dis-
located, dislodged, time is run down, on the run and run down
[traque et detraque], deranged, both out of order and mad. Time is
off its hinges, time is off course, besides itself, disadjusted.Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida; 2006; p.20.
In his book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues, that the new surveillance society that has arisen since 1984 is more “elegantly totalitarian and oppressive than anything described by Orwell or Bentham”. According to him, the neoliberal era made capitalism realise that seduction is a better way of dealing with its subjects than toughness. He calls this “smart politics”. I would call it seductive politics and understood it as an exterior and distinct feature of his concept of psychopolitics.
Continue reading “Onanistic Subject’s Death”