Greek Anarchists respond to questions about the current insurrection

Normally I can’t stand anything produced by Crimethinc; but, their reporting on the revolt in Greece has been surprisingly good.

From Crimethinc – by CrimethInc Ex-Workers Collective    We humbly present one of the first inside reports from participants in the upheavals that shook Greece after the police murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in the anarchist neighborhood of Exarchia on December 6. This is only the first set of answers to come in from our Greek comrades. We hope shortly to receive further perspectives from other elements of the Greek uprising, so we can provide a comprehensive background on the context and dynamics of the revolt. If you or someone you know is situated to give your own answers to these questions, please email them to us at rollingthunder@crimethinc.com.

How were the actions coordinated within cities? How about between cities? 

There are hundreds of small, totally closed affinity groups—groups based in longstanding friendship and 100% trust—and some bigger groups like the people from the three big squats in Athens and three more in Thessaloniki. There are more than 50 social centers in Greece, and anarchist political spaces in all the universities of the country; also, the Antiauthoritarian Movement has sections in all major cities, and there is a network of affinity groups of the Black Bloc active in all Greek cities, based on personal relations and communicating via telephone and mail. For all of them, Indymedia is very important as a strategic point for collecting and sharing useful information—where conflicts are happening, where the police are, where secret police are making arrests, what is happening everywhere minute by minute; it is also useful on a political level, for publishing announcements and calls for demonstrations and actions.

Of course, we can’t forget that in practice the primary form of coordination was from friend to friend through mobile phones; that was also the main approach used by young students for coordinating their initiatives, demonstrations, and direct actions.

Steven Poole’s essay on video games as work

Working for the Man: Against the Employment Paradigm in Videogames1

Videogames are often discussed under the concept of “play”, but this is not always how gamers themselves talk about their experience: they use instead vocabularies of desperate competition or violence. Take the very common expression of satisfaction after completing a game: “I beat the game.” What exactly does it mean to beat a game? You can’t have a meaningful contest against an inert digital artefact. From the game’s point of view, you did not beat it. On the contrary, you did exactly what the game wanted you to do, every step of the way. You didn’t play the game, you performed the operations it demanded of you, like an obedient employee. The game was a task of labour. From this perspective, playing a videogame looks as much like work as play.

Uri Gordon on the Greek Revolt

 

“The cardinals of normality weep for the law that was violated from the bullet of the pig Korkoneas [the policeman who shot Grigoropoulos]. But who doesn’t know that the force of the law is merely the force of the powerful? That it is law itself that allows for the exercise of violence on violence? The law is void from end to bitter end; it contains no meaning, no target other than the coded power of imposition.”

 

A road to revolution?

 By Uri Gordon

 Three weeks have passed since the unprovoked police murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in Athens, and the riots engulfing Greece show no sign of abating.

Art, Truth, and Politics… Harold Pinter’s Nobel Speech

 

In 1958 I wrote the following:

‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

Harold Pinter is Dead

 

— “I can sum up none of my plays . . . but my writing life has been, quite simply, one of relish, challenge and excitement”

— “Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living”

— “It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940s, but I felt I had to stick to my guns”

— “The crimes of the US throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless and fully documented but nobody talks about them”

— “I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on Earth – certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either”

— “One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness”

— “I know little of women. But I’ve heard dread tales” Moonlight, 1993

— “Nothing is more sterile or lamentable than the man content to live within himself” Tea Party, 1964

— “I hate brandy . . . it stinks of modern literature.” Betrayal, 1978

— “I would never use obscene language in the office. Certainly not. I kept my obscene language for the home, where it belongs” Moonlight, 1993

— “I made a terrible mistake when I was young, I think, from which I’ve never really recovered. I wrote the word ‘pause’ into my first play” Interview, 1989

— “I don’t give a damn what other people think. It’s entirely their own business. I’m not writing for other people” Interview, 1971

— “I sometimes wish desperately that I could write like someone else, be someone else. No one particularly. Just if I could put the pen down on paper and suddenly come out in a totally different way” 1971

— “I’ve never been able to write a happy play. [But] I’ve been able to enjoy a happy life” Interview, 2007

Images from Greece along with Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “The Parisian Orgy”

This is not my favorite translation, I prefer Paul Schmidt’s, but oh well….

Jacques Ranciere speaking at the Moscow Biennale

 

Jacques Ranciere
Misadventures of Universality

       Thank you to Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Joseph Backstein and to the Biennale foundation. I shall bring out my subject by focusing on some statements and spectacles from another art Biennale that I visited last week in Seville, in Spain. The curator of that biennale in Seville was also the curator of the last ‘Documenta’ in Kassel, Kozui Enwezor, gave to the gathering of the artists and works a far-ranging objective court: “to unmask those machineries that decimate and waste social economic and political interconnection looking for a return to a logics of totalisation .” So, the question which the Biennale should address was: “how could, how can art play an integral and not only peripheral role in relation to the global challenge that affects both the artistic production and reception, especially in light of the damaging effects of reactionary conservative and fundamentalist politics in all social structures of the world today.” So, such statements affirm a will to oppose postmodern scepticism and resume a certain form of “universalist” view of art and politics and of the connection and attempt to challenge the machineries of dissociation, to restore a sense of universality and intelligibility, of the interconnections that frame a global world.

Paul Virilio on the financial crisis

For thirty years now, the philosopher Paul Virilio analyses the
catastrophe as the unavoidable consequence of technological progress. He
sees in the current financial crisis the most accomplished example of
his theory, a catastrophe where the victims do not actually die, but
lose the roof above their heads by the thousands.

Gerard Courtois/Michel Guerrin:
In 2002 you have produced an exhibition at the Maison Cartier under the
title “Ce qui arrive” (‘that what occurs’); It was about the accident in
contemporary history: Tchernobyl, 9-11, the Tsunami… A statement by
Hannah Arendt was the marker of your demonstration: “progress and
catastrophe are the two faces of the same coin”. Is this where we have
come to with the ‘crash of the stock exchange’?

Paul Virilio:
Well, of course. In 1979, at the time of the mishap at the Three Mile
Island nuclear plant in the U.S., I did mention the occurence of an
“original accident” – the kind of accident we bring forth ourselves. I
said that our technical prowess was pregnant of catastrophic promises.
In the past, accidents were local affairs. With Tchernobyl, we have
entered the era of global accidents, whose consequences are in the realm
of the long term. the current crash represents the perfect ‘integral
accident’.

Thomas Frank on the latest dirty job to be outsourced…. Pregnancy! Followed by the offensive NY Times article that inspired him.

Rent-a-Womb Is Where Market Logic Leads

Surrogate motherhood raises troubling issues.

• By THOMAS FRANK

At long last, our national love affair with the rich is coming to a close. The moguls whose exploits we used to follow with such fascination, it now seems, plowed the country into the ground precisely because of the fabulous rewards that were showered on them.

Massive inequality, we have learned, isn’t the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it’s also profoundly ugly.

Some people haven’t received the memo, though. Take Alex Kuczynski, author of the New York Times Magazine cover story for Nov. 30, which tells how she went about hiring another woman to bear her child.

Arundhati Roy on the Mumbai Terror Attacks

 

9 Is Not 11

(And November Isn’t September)
By Arundhati Roy

 

We’ve forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching “India’s 9/11.” And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we’re expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it’s all been said and done before.

As tension in the region builds, U.S. Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that, if it didn’t act fast to arrest the “bad guys,” he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on “terrorist camps” in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India’s 9/11.

But November isn’t September, 2008 isn’t 2001, Pakistan isn’t Afghanistan, and India isn’t America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

Alfredo Jaar Interview: In step with Gramsci

 

“For the last five years I have been rereading Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and reviewing films of Pasolini. In my view, they are the most outstanding thinkers and intellectuals of the twentieth century. Both believed in the capacity of art to affect society and to change the course of history. I think that these ideas are more important than ever, and this is what has prompted me to pay homage through my work to these two illuminating intellectuals.”

In step with Gramsci: an interview with Alfredo Jaar

Yulia TihonovaThe mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence … but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, “permanent persuader” and not just a simple orator …

Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison (1)

These words of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist and humanist, may aptly describe the artistic position of Alfredo Jaar, the Chilean-born, New York City-based artist who has chosen the commutative strategy of being an active intellectual for more than twenty-five years. By virtue of his expressive medium, Jaar creates evocative artworks that not only inform viewers about the tragic events all over the world but also attain a personal meaning for the artist and viewers alike. The artist impels and organizes public perception in such a way that viewers are inspired to take action and confront issues.

Argentinean Writer and Anti-Capitalist Activist Ezequiel Adamovsky on Ethics

For a Radical Ethics of Equality* (in English)

For a Radical Ethics of Equality*

June, 22 2007 

By Ezequiel Adamovsky 

What does it mean today to be Anticapitalist? Today, left identity is an identity in crisis. Reconstructing a movement for radical emancipation is therefore going to require a critical examination of our legacy. This task quickly reveals that one of the biggest shortcomings of the left tradition is to be found in the lack of an ethical dimension to political action. The following essay attempts to analyse the reasons behind this inherited ethical vacuum and its impact on left practices. It goes over some key moments in the history of the relationship between moral thinking and emancipatory politics, including the Marxist tradition’s rejection of moral thinking and some later attempts to recover it. Furthermore, it argues the absolute necessity of anchoring all militant will to radical egalitarian ethics, capable of guiding our actions in a clearly emancipatory direction.

Louise Bourgeois Interview

 ‘My art is a form of restoration’

In a rare interview with one of the world’s greatest living artists, Rachel Cooke asks Louise Bourgeois to reflect on her extraordinary career 

 

RC: You moved to New York early in your career. What effect did this have?

LB: I was a ‘runaway girl’ from France who married an American and moved to New York City. I’m not sure I would have continued as an artist had I remained in Paris because of the family setup. In coming to New York, I was suddenly independent from them. I did feel the affects of being French. There was both isolation and stimulation. Homesickness was the theme of the early sculptures.

Scott McLemee reviews Antonio Negri’s new books

 

 

Empire Burlesque

The master theorist of the resurgent global left may have been outsmarted by the current economic meltdown. But his all-too-perfect system may never have to acknowledge such real-world inconsistencies.

BY SCOTT MCLEMEE

Ten years ago, as the antiglobalization movement began imposing itself on both the windowpanes of Starbucks and the narcotic slumbers of the mass media, there emerged in the United States a certain fable about what was (at the time) the newest New Left. It verged on a belief in the Immaculate Conception.

Hacktivist/Philosopher Xabier Barandiaran on “What is (it like) to be a Hard Problem?

 Here is a bio from 2006:

 Xabier Barandiaran is a PhD student and researcher on Cybernetics, Neurophilosophy and Artificial Life at the University of the Basque Country (Europe), member of the autonomous server SinDominio.Net, the hacktivist laboratory Metabolik BioHacklab (located at the social squat center Undondo Gaztetxea), the spanish and european HackLabs.Org network and the recent copyleft activist campaing “CompartirEsBueno.Net” (SharingIsGood: a spanish network of hacktivists and media-activists against intelectual property regimes and the media-culture industry). He has also been involved on other grassroots movement such as alternative education, social desobedience, anti-war movements and squatting. Xabier has also co-organized and activelly participated on a number of HackMeetings (self-managed technopolitical meetings that take place in squatted social centers in europe), Copyleft Conferences and other parallel events, workshops and seminars. His work has been devoted to development and promotion of free-software tools for social movements, direct action and coordination of autonomous technopolitical networks as research on free technologies & culture, community based digital self-management and hacktivism.

Elliot Carter is still rockin’ at 100 years old

 

 

 

A life in music: Elliott Carter

‘I used to write gigantic pieces that took a long time to compose, if not to play. Now I couldn’t stand working for so long on the same thing’

 

Elliott Carter is sitting at the dining table of his Greenwich Village apartment. In front of him is a large pile of contracts for upcoming performances of his work. As he begins to sign them, he turns quickly to his manager to check the date. “It’s the 22nd, yes?” “Yes,” replies his manager, who adds, with a stage wink: “and the year is 2008”. Carter puts down his pen and laughs. “I really needed to be reminded what year it is.”

UGH!

 

Fem-bot’s my love machine

Perfect couple … Le Trung with Aiko

 

A BOFFIN too busy to find real love has INVENTED his idea of the perfect woman – a female ROBOT.

Inventor Le Trung, 33, created Aiko, said to be “in her 20s” with a stunning 32, 23, 33 figure, shiny hair and delicate features.

She even remembers his favourite drink and does simple cleaning and household tasks.

What makes a biopolitical space? A discussion with Toni Negri

Toni Negri discusses the significance of urban space for new forms of opposition. The city, he says, is where the “political diagonal” intersects the “biopolitical diagram” – where people’s relation to power is most pronounced. Negri’s interlocutors are involved in exploring “soft” forms of activism, urban projects that create collectivities on micro, neighbourhood levels. Negri is critical of “soft” forms, however, preferring rupture and revolution over accumulation and gradual change.

Terry Eagleton on Milton’s 400th Birthday

 

Milton’s republic

Our great dissident poet, born 400 years ago today, did more than just hymn the praises of revolt

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. The two intersect only in such absurd anomalies as the poet laureateship. But whereas Andrew Motion does his bit to keep the monarchy in business, one of the greatest of English poets played his part in subverting it. John Milton, who was born in Cheapside 400 years ago today, published a political tract two weeks after the beheading of Charles I, arguing that all sovereignty lay with the people, who could depose and even execute a monarch if he betrayed their trust.

Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley in conversation: Beckett, Adorno, Blanchot, Comedy, Death, and so on….

 

 

Interview with Simon Critchley, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Essex

Conducted by: Tom McCarthy (General Secretary, INS) 
Venue: Office of Anti-Matter, Austrian Cultural Institute, London 
Date: 29/03/01 
Present: Tom McCarthy, Simon Critchley, Corin Sworn, Anthony Auerbach, Penny McCarthy, Victoria Scott, Paul Perry, Alexander Hamilton, Jen wu, Others

 

Tom McCarthy: You write in your book Very Little… Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature that the task of philosophical modernity is the thinking through of the first death, the über death, which is the death of God. So my first question is: what is the meaning of this death?

Simon Critchley: It’s a big question. Nietzsche said ‘God is dead’, and that’s written on toilet walls all over the world. But he then went on to say: ‘And we have killed him.’

Matt Taibbi on the Minnesota recount

 

 

The Last Recount

In Al Franken’s race in Minnesota, blue and red tangle for the final time in the Bush era

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Dec 11, 2008 12:30 PM

On a Saturday in mid-November, Al Franken stands in front of a roomful of volunteers at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. The former comedian and talk-show host knows that his campaign troops are fired up over the recount of his race to unseat the state’s Republican senator, Norm Coleman. The official tally ended in a virtual tie, with Coleman leading by only 215 votes out of 2.9 million ballots cast — a margin of seven-thousandth of one percent. To Franken’s campaign volunteers, it seems like Florida 2000 all over again.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs- An interview with Simon Critchley on “The Book of Dead Philosophers”

 

Dead Philosophers Society: An Interview With Simon Critchley

By Andrew Gallix.

3:AM: Did the idea for The Book of Dead Philosophers come from theMontaigne quote you use as an epigraph? Was that the first spark?

SC: It was one of the first sparks. As so often happens in writing, it was a coincidence: a close friend sent me that quotation from Montaigne just as I was rereading the latter’s “To philosophie is to learne how to die” inFlorio’s florid translation. Montaigne is really the hero of the book and I love his suspicion of suspicion, his skepticism and the deeply personal quality of his prose, which is never narcissistic. It is ourselves that we find in Montaigne, not him. But I suppose that’s a narcissistic thing to say.

3:AM: Commenting on another passage from Montaigne, you state that “The denial of death is self-hatred”. This reminded me of Dostoevsky’sKirilov who attempts to defeat God by committing suicide. His rationale is that, in order to negate transcendence, Man must learn to love himself for what he is and must therefore embrace his own finitude — desire his own death. (One could wonder if the espousal of death isn’t a form of self-love?) Your own conclusion — “Accepting one’s mortality…means accepting one’s limitation” — isn’t that far removed from Kirilov’s way of thinking, is it?

Roberto Bolano Interview

 

 I am on a Roberto Bolano kick right now, so excuse this indulgence.

Go and read his books; and, will someone please translate his poetry into english.

Roberto Bolaño.

Roberto Bolaño belongs to the most select group of Latin-American novelists. Chile of the coup d’état, Mexico City in the 1970s, and the reckless youth of poets are some of his frequent subjects, but he also takes up other themes: César Vallejo’s deathbed, the hardships endured by unknown authors, life at the periphery. Born in Chile in 1953, he spent his teenage years in Mexico and moved to Spain at the end of the seventies. As a poet, he founded the Infrarealist movement with Mario Santiago. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, previously awarded to Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, for his novel Los detectives salvajes [The savage detectives], for which he also received the prestigious Herralde Prize.

A prolific writer, a literary animal who makes no concessions, Bolaño successfully combines the two basic instincts of a novelist: he is attracted to historical events, and he desires to correct them, to point out the errors. From Mexico he acquired a mythical paradise, from Chile the inferno of the real, and from Blanes, the town in northeast Spain where he now lives and works, he purges the sins of both. No other novelist has been able to convey the complexity of the megalopolis Mexico City has become, and no one has revisited the horrors of the coup d’état in Chile and the Dirty War with such mordant, intelligent writing.

To echo Bolaño’s words, “reading is more important than writing.” Reading Roberto Bolaño, for example. If anyone thinks that Latin-American literature isn’t passing through a moment of splendor, a look through some of his pages would be enough to dispel that notion. With Bolaño, literature—that inexplicably beautiful bomb that goes off and as it destroys, rebuilds—should feel proud of one of its best creations.

Our conversation took place via e-mail between Blanes and my home in Mexico City in the fall of 2001.

William T. Vollmann answering questions about his Book “Poor People”

 

William T. Vollman: I’ll do my best to answer any questions I can. I’m not sure I know any more than anyone else, but I’ve thought about it a bit, so that’s all I can say.

_______________________

Southern Maryland: I have asked myself why am I rich and so many others in the U.S. are rich in comparison to most of the world population. Basic needs met: food, clothing, shelter; stable government; education and literacy; available jobs and transportation to those jobs; health and health care; stable environment/weather. If people do not have their basic needs for survival met or have to expend all resources to meet basic survival needs, it makes for a dire situation.

William T. Vollman: I would say that that’s fairly accurate. One of the most common aspects of poverty I see is lack of access to decent water, and we have fairly decent water everywhere in the U.S. A lot of poverty has to do with how it is perceived in the mind of the poor person as well. Marx talks about absolute vs. relative poverty, and I’m not a Marxist but it’s a good distinction. Someone with enough to eat but who doesn’t have a TV when everyone else does is going to feel a little impoverished, and we can’t say it’s wrong that the person feels that way.

I don’t happen to drive, and I live in a city (Sacramento, Calif.) where most people use cars. If there’s any sort of specialty item I want to buy — a bed or something like that — I have a great deal of trouble. I have to hire someone with a car to get to the store — it’s not something I can do walking around. A common measure of poverty is how much money you have in relation to other people — that is useful as far as it goes, but that excludes the case of, say, a hunter in the rainforest who has no money but is not poor. And there can be a number of people with money but who can consider themselves unwanted or invisible or estranged from society. Those are some of the phenomena of poverty that I have noticed.

I remember a panhandler I saw in Portland a couple of years ago — actually took her photo for the book. She has a sign saying “donate here and get me out of your neighborhood.” She wasn’t wearing rags, didn’t look dirty — but she knew she was unwanted, people didn’t want to be panhandled, and all she could promise was that she could go away and stop bothering them. And that’s sad. They know rich people don’t want them around. When there’s a labor surplus, the people who become unneeded become unwanted and because they’re unwanted they’re unneeded. So there’s a lot of vicious circles in this.

Jonathan Lethem on Roberto Bolano, followed by an interview with Natasha Wimmer, translator of ‘2666’ and ‘The Savage Detectives’

 

The Departed

By JONATHAN LETHEM

2666

By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer

By 898 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Cloth and paper, $30

In Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story “The Preserving Machine,” an impassioned inventor creates a device for “preserving” the canon of classical music — the sacred and, he fears, impermanent beauties of Schubert, Chopin,Beethoven and so forth — by feeding it into a device that transforms the compositions into living creatures: birds, beetles and animals resembling armadillos and porcupines. Outfitting the classic pieces in this manner, then setting them free, the inventor means to guarantee their persistence beyond the frailties of human commemoration, to give them a set of defenses adequate to their value. Alas, the musical-animals become disagreeable and violent, turn on one another and, when the inventor attempts to reverse-engineer his creations in order to prove that the music has survived, reveal themselves as a barely recognizable cacophony, nothing like the originals. Or has the preserving machine revealed true essences — irregularities, ferocities — disguised within the classical pieces to begin with?

Hillel Ticktin Vs Harry Cleaver

 

Harry Cleaver debates Hillel Ticktin on capitalism’s present crisis … danger and opportunity

(part 1)

 It’s not often that you can bring together people from very different revolutionary traditions for a public debate that attracts one hundred and thirty five people who represent most strands of the revolutionary left as it exists in this country today. Harry Cleaver, a former editor of the journal Zerowork and author ofReading Capital Politically (Harvester/Humanities, 1979), was one participant in this debate. The other was Hillel Ticktin, editor of the journal Critique and author of a series of important articles on the political economy of the USSR. Cleaver is an American who has drawn on and developed the important work of Italian autonomists such as Toni Negri and Mario Tronti, helping to challenge various ‘orthodox’ versions of marxism and placing class struggle firmly at the centre of his analysis. Ticktin, of South African origin, is closer to the trotskyist tradition (although he carefully distances himself from the orthodox trotskyism of the Fourth International) but no less innovative than the autonomists in his approach which has helped stress the importance of the law of value.

The debate was organised by Radical Chains in conjunction with the autonomist magazine London Notes. The organisers believed that there is not enough interchange between the different fragments of the marxist tradition and when they heard that Cleaver would be visiting Britain in July they decided to ask him if he would debate with Ticktin. While there has always been a degree of criticism within autonomism or within trotskyism or within situationism, critical engagement between different traditions has been rare. It is this engagement of the adherents of one tradition with the ideas of another which is necessary if the fragmentation and dispersal of the revolutionary left is to be overcome

The Two Faces of Amis: An Interview With Martin Amis

 

Martin Amis’ tiny blonde daughter answers the door to their vast Primrose Hill house, beaming and waving — and then a moment later, the 58-year old novelist appears behind her, with his sad, semi-scowling face sucking on another roll-up. He leads me through into his front room, a huge, swollen nest of books: paperbacks, hardbacks, fictions, histories. This is where the novels that thrilled me as a teenager — the bitter genius of Money and London Fields, the novels that distilled the eighties — were born. This is where we are going to have to discuss The Race Row.

Mumbai attacks: Terrorists took cocaine to stay awake during assault

 

Terrorists who battled Indian commandos for 60-hours last week relied on cocaine and other stimulants to stay awake for the duration of the fight.

 

By Damien McElroy in Mumbai 
Last Updated: 12:54PM GMT 02 Dec 2008

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1 of 2 Images

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Commandos battled terrorists in Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel Photo: AP

Officials said drug paraphernalia, including syringes, was recovered from the scene of the attacks, which killed almost 200 people.

MONEY

Jacques-Alain Miller
The Financial Crisis

Question – As etymology would recall, there exist affinities between the word crisis and the word critical. Crisis calls upon judgment, but it is more than anything a swinging point, like a disease which can lead to death or to the cure. For an analyst, what is the meaning of the word crisis?

Jacques-Alain Miller – The psychoanalyst is “crisis friendly”. To start analysis always constitutes for the subject a critical moment, which responds to a crisis, or unveils one. Only, once started, analysis becomes a hard work. A crisis of tears? You wait until it passes. A crisis of anguish, a panic attack? You defuse them. A crisis of madness? You avoid starting it… Besides, each session is like a small crisis, each one undergoing paroxysm and resolution. In short, there is crisis in the psychoanalytical sense, when speech, discourse, the words, the figures, the rites, the routine, all the symbolic apparatus, prove suddenly impotent to moderate a real which makes as it pleases. A crisis, it is the real unchained, impossible to control. The equivalent, in civilization, of these hurricanes by which nature periodically recalls mankind of its precariousness, of its land frailty.

Q – How do you interpret the fear of losing money, our own money? To hoard money, is it the same for a small saver than for a billionaire?

Listen, Little Man! by Wilhelm Reich

Introduction

Listen, Little Man! Is a human and not a scientific document. It was written in the summer of 1945 for the Archives of the Orgone Institute without the intention of publishing it. It was the result of the inner storms and conflicts of a natural scientist and physician who watched, over decade first naively, then with amazement and finally with horror, what the Little Man in the street does to himself; how he suffers and rebels, how he esteems his enemies and murders his friends; how, wherever he gains power as a ‘representative of the – people’ he misuses this power and makes it into something more cruel than the power which previously he had to suffer at the hands of individual sadists of the upper classes.