teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he co-directs the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea, and Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle). He is a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism and is series editor of The Italian List at Seagull Books.
The incoherence, heterogeneity, non-contemporaneity, contradictoriness and “bizarre” historical sedimentation that Gramsci once discerned in the phenomena of subaltern folklore is now spread across the social field, and pathological disorganization and disorientation is by no means the sad monopoly of the dominated.
A hypothetical “Algerian history of French philosophy” elicits a variegated but in many ways opaque picture. Arguably, it is only the generation that came of political age in the late 1950s and early 1960s – the generation of Balibar and Rancière – that, with considerable delay, incorporated the questions raised by the decolonization of France and Algeria into their thinking, but when they did so it was not in terms of the problematic of revolutionary anti-colonial violence, but in terms of the antinomies of citizenship.
Leadership can serve as a privileged prism to revisit, in this theoretical homage to the work of Cedric J. Robinson, his own encounter with C.L.R. James’s work.
Can the riots really express and explicate our historical moment, serving as the “holographic miniature of an entire situation, a world-picture?” What I want to address here is the overarching principle that governs the composition of the book’s various conceptual elements, and which in the final analysis is Clover’s name for theory: periodization.
Lineament. noun. GEOLOGY. A linear feature on the earth’s surface, such as a fault. “State space subordinates both chaos and difference to its implacable logistics.” – Henri Lefebvre, “Space and the State” (1978) Logistical revolts Sometimes, we have to look in unlikely places for news that can nourish a radical political imagination. 1 World Cargo News, for instance: According to The Strike… Read more →
We are fortunate to now have in a French edition a collection of the five booklets produced by the GIP between February 1971 and January 1973 – Intolérable, numbers 1 through 4, and a collection of prisoners’ demands – combining questionnaires and inquiries on prison conditions, texts and declarations from prison uprisings, reports by prison psychiatrists, a dossier on the killing of George Jackson and the black prison movement in the US, and correspondence and information about the wave of suicides in French prisons.
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