Imperial powers will continue competing over resources to maintain the uneven development of the world. Many intellectuals unfortunately share the illusion that these powers will come to the table, listen to each other, work out their differences, and collaborate. But neither culture nor understanding are at stake in this larger power struggle, and those who have not woken up to this will only repeat the “clash of civilizations” cliché by insisting on respect for cultural differences. The East and the West are in fact developing the same plan, the same technology, and the same philosophy of history for domination, and are thus no longer distinguishable in this world process.
In the current political climate, neither your average plutocrat nor cultural administrator is ready to tolerate the “autonomy” of cultural and educational institutions, whether in the vein of pluralism or partisanship, even when a genocide is unfolding before our eyes. (And forget about enjoining historical and geopolitical context.) This makes it ever more clear that autonomy’s philosophical aesthetics should be approached in a spirit of genealogical-critical inquiry but also contested—not just discursively, as it has been for years, but also practically.
Benjamin’s concept of experience, Erfahrung, remains speculative in the best non-positivist sense of the word. Its speculative ground, however, exceeds the speculations of theory. But what is left for the materialist intellectual who is to theorize the political, economic, social, and aesthetic conditions of poverty, deprivation, and precarity in the age of “very-late” capitalism? Eventually, Benjamin’s materialist argument comes down to a simple insight: the combination of poor experience and rich thought is poor in social consequences. Instead of gradually enriching thought through inclusive multidirectionality, radical thought must insert reductive shortcuts, one-sided interruptions.
Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism
Long before Nazi violence came to be conceived as beyond comparison, Black radical thinkers sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an anti-fascist left by detailing how what could be perceived from a European or white vantage point as a radically new form of ideology and violence was in effect continuous with the history of (settler-)colonial dispossession and racial slavery.
Screening and discussion: Marta Popivoda, Landscapes of Resistance
Screening and discussion: Clemens Von Wedemeyer
According to the ministry’s description, the colony was designed “not only for therapeutic goals, but also for those of education and propaganda.” It had to be “welcoming and reassuring in order to leave an indelible trace in the mind of the Italian youth” and create fascist political consensus.