Sartre, in his 1960 critique of orthodox Marxism called Search for a Method, has an interesting comment about absent presences that reminds me of my last post about absent militaries, absent militantisms: “The city is a material and social organization which derives its reality from the ubiquity of its absence. It is present in each [...]
Knowledge is a weapon! … The union is a force! This is the continuation of my last post about the visual culture at the University of Toulouse (Mirail). Just having seen the 14 Juillet, i.e. Bastille Day, the national holiday in celebration of the 1789 French Revolution, it’s tempting to draw some comparisons with a [...]
Last week while I was in Toulouse, I went to take a look at the local university (Mirail), to see if it turned out to be the one in the video I posted about last week. And indeed there were a large number of decrepit buildings, occasionally graced by lovely flowers. But the buildings also [...]
Seem to be on a translation kick. Translating is good for me; it makes me read much more closely than I would otherwise. I recently came across the very curious Europhilosophie, which seems to group together a number of philosophy working groups (on Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Bergson, Fichte, phenomenology, materialism, and psychoanalysis, among others). An [...]
A few months ago, Baptiste Coulmont posted a sarcastically titled video called “our beautiful university” that testifies to the squalor and physical deterioration of a university campus in the south of France, Marseille or Toulouse I think. It’s essentially a youtube montage of photos of decrepit university spaces; the photos are also collected at Picasa. [...]
One day a few weeks ago I stopped by a political demonstration against the French university reforms. The organizing group, La Ronde Infinie des Obstinés, specializes in what are essentially indefinitely long circular marches, rather after the pattern of a vigil. Their name amounts to “the infinite rounds of the stubborn,” though someone tried to [...]
A sudden piece of English text inserted in the middle of an exhibition of political photographs at my field site. Paris-8. A charming metacommentary on global reality. Merry crisis! If you wanted to describe this image in the most basic descriptive language you could say: this is a photo of a photo of a graffiti [...]