Exactly how little Adorno is read today seems be accurately measured by the fact that none of the Nolan hot takes even bothers to cite the extensive interpretation of Odysseus in the Dialectic of Enlightenment

Europe’s summer of fire

Tomorrow afternoon in Amsterdam: our reading workshop on Evald Ilyenkov’s “Cosmology of the Spirit” - his self-described “philosophical-poetic phantasmagoria” on thought, cosmos and communism. Organised by @angelus-novus.bsky.social and open to all

Into the Wasteland: A Conversation on Fascism and the Crisis of Capitalism, with Alberto Toscano, @vethompson.bsky.social, Bafta Sarbo, Jule Ulbricht et moi, on fascism and fascisization. Looking forward to it (the conversation, not the fascism)! spore-initiative.org/en/programmi...

Into the Wasteland: A Conversation on Fascism and the Crisis of Capitalism

spore-initiative.org

The performance of impunity has really become the defining political gesture of the global right

“Ilyenkov’s Cosmology [of Spirit] presents the first and most radical attempt to philosophically think through the consequences of a new age where the activity of human beings takes on a cosmic dimension”

Worth considering that the expansion of micro-investing is entrenching this perspective into an ever-larger part of the global population

Brandon Friedman@brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 4mo ago

This is real

This was just recommended by someone at the BNF who noticed what else I was reading – missed it when it came out (2015-2016) but as it turns out it’s quite good

"Mental life in its earliest stages is infinitely delicate. [...] Stupidity is a scar." (Adorno and Horkheimer, DoE)

The herostratic impulse: to burn the world as a final act of self-assertion

Starting today in Frankfurt: Kritische Theorie der Endzeit, a promising three-day conference on Günther Anders as critical theorist of the present. My talk, which concludes the conference programme on Saturday, will focus on the theme of extinction in Anders' early genealogy of the human.

Long in the making, out now: the latest issue of Diacritics, dedicated entirely to Walter Benjamin's "Fate and Character" (1919) – his dense reflection on fate, escape and liberation, written in a world in the grip of war, failed revolutions and erupting fascism

“Satisfaction” seems the most striking affect on this list – the brutal, state-sanctioned violence on the streets and in the camps offered as satisfaction for a perceived wrong/intrusion/dispossession

solidarity to those who fight fascism everywhere

The new issue of Diacritics is on Walter Benjamin's short text "Fate and Character", edited by @tomvandeputte.bsky.social and others. I was so happy to contribute a text on "Liberation" muse.jhu.edu/issue/56198

Simone Weil commenting in the early 1940s on Thucydides’ “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” alongside its complement, “each human being always commands when he has the power to do so”:

“The desire to possess is only a specific form of the hunger for power: the desire to make the world congruent to oneself, or more precisely, to coerce the world to become me. That it can, at most, become *mine* instead of *me*: this is […] already the first scandal and comprise.” (Anders, 1936)

This selection of essays and interviews reflects the wide range of scholarship published on the blog in 2025.

Year in Review: Best of 2025

by the Primary Editors

jhiblog.org

Annual Christmas break reading: Gillian Rose

Günther Anders’ 1936 review of Bloch’s now famous analysis of fascism and non-contemporaneity: “For those interested in a concrete philosophy of history […] reading the chapter on Ungleichzeitigkeit, which is unfortunately buried underneath the others, will be indispensable.”

Klossowski, “Time and Aggressiveness” (1936): “In the individual, aggressiveness presents itself as a struggle against the long time constituted by the resistance of the world, a struggle against the evolution demanded by the laws of species, the laws of the social milieu.”

The blatant lie as primal expression of sovereignty: “[The human being has] the tremendous power of being able to lie. [B]y virtue of asserting its own independent existence, it can declare to the existing that it does not exist, not in that way; [...] it can deny (verleugnen) what is." (GA, 1930)

An absolutely devastating loss. Such a lucid thinker and speaker, maintaining his enthusiasm and love of the age-old game despite his obvious struggles. Rest in peace.

International Chess Federation Mirror@fide-chess-mirror.bsky.social · 10mo ago

GM Daniel Naroditsky passed away. He was a talented chess player, commentator, and educator. FIDE extends its deepest condolences to Daniel’s family and loved ones.

“Facts of murder and even genocide […] are the themes of preference of this obscene language of denial. [E]ven this denial retains an element of sadistic sweetness: the denial itself becomes a kind of ‘second murder’, eliminating even the undesired facts of murder from the world.”

Günther Anders (1989): “The goal of ‘disinformation’ consists in the emphatic suppression or denial of facts that have come to light or can come to light, but ought not to […]. The goal is […] to keep the interlocutor from seeing certain facts or, once seen, to keep them from bearing these in mind.”

“Official history is believing murderers at their word.” - Simone Weil

Eighty years since Hiroshima – I remember the strangely superficial terms in which the event was discussed in history classes: as a curious moral dilemma, an exercise in moral reasoning and the calculus of human life/death, quick to pass over its monstrosity

“The absurdity […] that the human being can desire – and does desire – more from the world than it offers.” (GA)

Günther Anders’ writings from the early 1940s refer to a primordial, “extreme” concept of freedom that repeats itself in the modern: a “freedom without consequences” - the liberatory experience of unaccountability and impunity that he may have recognised in fascism

“Nothing dies as slowly as a category” – Günther Anders, writing in 1940-41, on the persistence of the category of progress (which, in turn, testifies to the slow death of the category of providence)