Why the U.S. stimulus package is bound to fail

MUCH IS TO BE GAINED by viewing the contemporary crisis as a surface eruption generated out of deep tectonic shifts in the spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development. The tectonic plates are now accelerating their motion and the likelihood of more frequent and more violent crises of the sort that have been occurring since 1980 or so will almost certainly increase. The manner, form, spatiality and time of these surface disruptions are almost impossible to predict, but that they will occur with greater frequency and depth is almost certain. [Read More]

Remarks on Chris Cutrone's 'Iraq and the election: the fog of 'anti-war' politics'

I WAS INTRIGUED TO FIND in The Platypus Review #7 a commentary by Chris Cutrone on the U.S. role in world politics. I found it more sophisticated and original than anything I had previously come across in the mainstream media either here or in Europe. Before launching my machine, I would like to situate myself. I’m a foreigner, philosopher of sorts, and not a student any more (That means I’m old. [Read More]

Going it alone: Christopher Hitchens and the death of the Left

Book Review: Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman (eds.). *Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left*.

Going it alone: Christopher Hitchens and the death of the Left
New York: New York University Press, 2008. IF IT DID NOT COME TO END IN 1989, as conservative critic Francis Fukuyama expected, this is because, in Hegel’s sense, as freedom’s self-realization in time, History had already ceased. Long before the new geopolitical configurations and institutional forms of the post-Soviet world, a new and unprecedented, though scarcely recognized, political situation had taken shape: The last threads of continuity connecting the present with the long epoch of political emancipation were severed. [Read More]