Cinematic space
This is a five week series of films that were selected due to a research on how cinematic space is constructed and with which means the filmic space relates and correlates with the construction of social space. This selection of films wants to draw attention to architecture‘s performative aspect and the space that is constructed in visual media. „The space that appears in the image (…) is concrete and not abstract or purely mathematical space. And it is (…) to a certain degree,

How do these four antagonisms relate to each other? There is a qualitative difference between the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included and the other three antagonisms, which designate three domains of what Hardt and Negri call “commons,” the shared substance of our social being whose privatization is a violent act which should also be resisted with violent means, if necessary:

The interpretative framework here provided stressed the continuity of primitive accumulation and its fundamental persistence in mature capitalist economies. The foundation of this continuity is found once we recognise what Marx calls the “oppositional nature of the capitalistrelation”. The result is, I believe, a picture of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation which gives us insights into the essential character of capitalist accumulation itself −− the divorce between producers and means of production −− and about the limits posed on capitalist accumulation by social struggles.

There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them. It therefore has a combination [chiffre*]. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity is conceptual. There is no concept with only one component. Even the first concept, the one with which a philosophy "begins," has several components, because it is not obvious that philosophy must have a beginning, and if it does determine one, it must combine it with a point of view or a ground [une
raison]. Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin with the same concept, they do not have the same concept of beginning. Every concept is at least double or triple, etc. Neither is there a concept possessing every component, since this would be chaos pure and simple.

It might be said that this simply revives the old distinction between judgements of fact and judgements of value. For my part, I would be more inclined to see this distinction itself as the echo of something invented by the great seventeenth century philosophers, who, for reasons which were largely political, inappropriately crossed law with the emerging laboratory sciences.Indeed, it is strange to note that the scenography of empiricism borrows the definition of a fact from judges as to apply it to science, whereas it in no way defines the articulation between researchers and their objects. In the empiricists' imagination, raw facts, the essential data or 'sense data', have the peculiar virtue of being both insignificant and controversial. They constitute the raw material of judgement.

This notion of the picture plane as an arena of evidence marks a conceptual change in modernism, a movement away from consideration of an autonomous art object to a growing focus on works or environments that bear imprint of prior activities - traces, as it were, of an unseen history. If the canvas could not truly be considered "a moment" in the adulterated mix of the artist's life, it did appear as a kind of plataform or stage on which a certain life has been lived.Ralph

That is why this story from ancient Egypt is still capable after thousands of years of arousing astonishment and thoughtfulness. It resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day.
—Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”1

Information isn’t memory, and it does not accumulate and store for memory’s sake. It works exclusively for its own profit, which depends on the prompt forgetfulness of everything clearing the way for the sole, and abstract, truth of the present to assert itself and for information to cement its claim to being alone adequate to that truth.
—Jacques Rancière, Film Fables2

But what if this distinction between art and war is fatuous, that all along the science of war has been a misnomer, just like the distinction between metaphor and reality? How else to explain the frisson we feel when we come across an ancient Chinese manual of war such as that of Sun Tzu, reeking of the magic of antiquity and Orientalism, and nod our heads in respect? For one of the strangest things about war whether ancient or postmodern is that as a pumped-out, puffed-up “science,” it reeks of craft andwitchcraft, accident and chance, as much as planning. Indeed the more “scientific” or “technological” it appears, the more arcane andmysterious, also. Guerrilla warfare makes this doubly so.

this is the text Zizek presented On the Idea of Communism at Birkbeck. It was recently published at New Left Review .

HOW TO BEGIN FROM THE BEGINNING

In his wonderful short text ‘Notes of a Publicist’—written in February 1922 when the Bolsheviks, after winning the Civil War against all odds, had to retreat into the New Economic Policy of allowing a much wider scope to the market economy and private property—Lenin uses the analogy of a climber who must backtrack from his first attempt to reach a new mountain peak to describe what retreat means in a revolutionary process, and how it can be done without opportunistically betraying the cause:

Interview with Julien Coupat

Here are the responses to the questions that we [Isabelle Mandraud and Caroline Monnot] posed in writing to Julien Coupat. Placed under investigation on 15 November 2008 for "terrorism," along with eight other people interrogated in Tarnac (Correze) and Paris, he is suspected of having sabotaged the suspended electrical cables of the SNCF. He is the last one still incarcerated. (He has asked that certain words be in italics.)

Q. How are you spending your time?

A. Very well, thank you. Chin-ups, jogging and reading.

Q. Can you recall the circumstances of your arrest for us?