Scattered Thoughts on Streets, Demands and Revolution
‘Demand the Impossible’ is documented as being one part of a slogan graffitied during the French student revolt of 1968. I got to know it via Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible: A history of...
View ArticleThinking of Political Violence: a minor commentary on March 26th 2011, London
Events, by definition, are occurrences that interrupt routine processes and routine procedures; only in a world in which nothing of importance ever happens could the futoroligists’s dream come true. No...
View ArticleDisobedience Workshop
20 – 21 May 2011 Birkbeck College, University of London Malet Street, Rooms G15 & 416 For reservation please contact V.kelley@bbk.ac.uk Friday 20 May Malet street, G15 11.00 – 11.15 Welcome &...
View ArticleStrike for the Present, Perhaps This Is All There Is
José Saramago’s Death at Intervals (2008) tells the story of Death going on Strike. In Saramago’s imagined country ‘since the beginning of the new year, or more precisely since zero hours of the first...
View ArticleRiots and Ineloquence
In Nicholas Ray’s 1955 Rebel without a cause1 we follow the protagonist Jim Stark (James Dean) into delinquency. In this film, Nicholas Ray and the scriptwriter, Stewart Stern, set out to portray the...
View ArticleA Play on Justice: The Trial of Phryne at (Occupied) Old Street Magistrates...
Yet it is precisely the disenchantment of beauty in the experience of nudity, this sublime but also miserable exhibition of appearance beyond all mystery and all meaning, that can somehow defuse the...
View ArticleAsk not what you can do for your country but what we can do for each other
I am thinking of the 77 year old Greek pensioner who took his life earlier today in Syntagma square, Athens. I am thinking of JFK's 20th of January 1961 inaugural address speech where he uttered these...
View ArticleHealth, Safety and Publicness: Athens, August 9–14, 2012
Five days in Athens. Five very varied days. I used to frequent Athens as a teenager with my parents. We were always transit visitors, en route to Kano, Nigeria where my late father used to work. Those...
View ArticleLauren Berlant as Cynical Philosopher: An Introduction
If body, then everything can follow (Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 266) ‘Stray dogs have knowledge,’ the late Greek writer Margarita Karapanou writes, ‘because they have suffered pain… Pedigree dogs in...
View Article‘We are not with the State, We are with the Community’
All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream. — E. A. Poe1 In an interview that Alexis Tsipras gave to the journalist Stavros Theodorakis in June 2012, we hear Tsipras explaining SYRIZA’s...
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