Berfrois

March 2015

Three Ways of Arguing With a Communist

Three Ways of Arguing With a Communist

They do not seem to see that, to such young people, the Capitalist in question only seems to be saying, "I am a greedy old scoundrel, and I forbid you to be anything else."

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Neither Cheerleader Nor Prophet

Neither Cheerleader Nor Prophet

Literature on the social impact of the internet has always struggled to keep up with the breakneck pace set by its subject.

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Dada’s Sex

Dada’s Sex

We are getting close to the 100 year anniversary of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and I dedicate my post to Tzara while reading the recent biography about him.

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Has American poetry become more politically relevant lately?

Has American poetry become more politically relevant lately?

The claim for a “new” American poetry of engagement would seem to imply an earlier American poetry that lacked such engagement.

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Street Fighter: Berfrois Interviews Tariq Ali

Street Fighter: Berfrois Interviews Tariq Ali

The extreme centre is a form of government that arose out of neoliberal economics and exists today in virtually the whole of Europe, North America and Australia.

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Performing Gender

Performing Gender

Carlos Motta has spent the past few years creating an archive of documentary video portraits of activists and people who perform gender as a personal, social and political opportunity rather than as a social denunciation.

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“It’s difficult to remove intransigence from political thought”

“It’s difficult to remove intransigence from political thought”

You use the expression "antinomies of fanaticism", which we might rephrase as the paradoxes or inherent contradictions of fanaticism: on the one hand, fanaticism as the opposite of reason and, on the other, fanaticism as an excess of reason.

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Volker M. Welter on Michael Graves

Volker M. Welter on Michael Graves

The designer Michael Graves, who passed away at the age of 80 on March 12th, was widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of postmodernism in architecture.

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Society for the Confused

Society for the Confused

Drawn by caricaturist John Leech, the illustrations of Gilbert Abbott à Beckett’s The Comic History of Rome are a Victorian fever dream of ancient Rome.

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Don’t Mention the Dawn

Don’t Mention the Dawn

I had never seen a neo-Nazi before. On a cloudless Sunday morning in January, the day of the Greek elections, I was making my way through people holding cups of coffee and pushing strollers in a polling station.

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Pittsburgh Publisher-Poet

Pittsburgh Publisher-Poet

Vladimir Nabokov was hiking down a mountain on a summer afternoon. It was 1943, and he and his companion, James Laughlin, had made their way up a peak in northern Utah to find butterflies for Nabokov’s collection.

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Joel Gn on Henri Lefebvre

Joel Gn on Henri Lefebvre

How may we speak of that which goes off the record in an age of digital colonisation?

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Philosophy as It Is

Philosophy as It Is

Williams had a famously adversarial relationship toward some leading philosophical movements of the modern era, particularly Utilitarianism and Kantianism.

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