Media/Publics

In a recent televised AP interview, Bernie Sanders was asked if he thought the Democratic Party convention this summer would be contentious. He replied, “I think if they make the right choice and open the doors to working-class people and young people and create the kind of dynamism that the Democratic Party needs, it’s going to be messy…Democracy is not always nice and quiet and gentle but that is where the Democratic Party should go…Democracy is messy. Everyday my life is messy. But if you want everything to be quiet and orderly and allow, you know, just things to proceed without vigorous debate, that is not what democracy is about.”

Sanders was right.

A number of Democrat-leaning commentators, most notably MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, were taken aback …

Shakespeare’s ubiquity makes adaptations of his work uniquely instructive: a critical and staging history of a familiar play creates a backdrop against which to see the vision of a filmmaker at work. …

Something of Shia LaBeouf’s name stands in, perfectly, controversially, for what is now happening to us, across us, as a kind of general FKA-transing of all available terms. Around the time Caitlyn Jenner came out, there was talk of an intersectional “trans-”: a trans for race and class and even for ecographic sub-constituencies. During Occupy Wall Street, the same talk happened, and then nothing happened, and a few people said it was still on, and then nothing happened.

Intersectionality seems to be the least sustainable piece …

Walter Benjamin’s strategy in the Theses on the Philosophy of History was to focus on a non-human moment in human time and to present this instance on blast in his prose style. What I mean by “blast” here is the fact that the message had to be pirated past ideological hangers-on and historical barriers, past both Marxist and theotropic renditions, and also past the Nazi episode that might have been his more obvious target in 1940. His prose is clear but depth-charged, resonates at another frequency, still as if exploded past the imaginary proscriptions of Theodor Adorno, who was already in situ in New York …

In a recent article published on Public Seminar, Jan-Werner Mueller affirmed that populism is by its very nature not only anti-elitist, but also anti-pluralist: “Populists claim that they, and only they, represent the people.” He then attacked the undemocratic tendency populist politicians show when they lose the elections: they “begin to question the existing political institutions, which are obviously producing the wrong outcome, or even accuse the winners of fraud, as Donald Trump just did.” Of course, Mueller admitted, unsatisfactory electoral results will not prevent populists from speaking in the name of “real Americans,” but at that point, …

One way of understanding Shia LaBeouf’s “Just Do It” motivational video is as a translation of Bernard Stiegler’s recent work about “escaping the anthropocene.” And vice versa. Reading Stiegler’s essays and watching LaBeouf’s video are essentially the same experience: one feels exhilarated, thrilled, excited (as if one might really do the impossible) and then a little disappointed.

Stiegler’s latest essays, many translated into English by Daniel Ross, sharpen the thought of a new type of urgency and are in some ways quite simple. This thought of urgency — figured as an “alternative” — is expressed succinctly at …

Last Thursday, I received a message via Facebook messenger. The message’s author was (so it read) the Chief Censor of Israel’s Military Censor, one Colonel Ariella Ben-Avraham, and in it she demanded that I submit to the Censor’s warrant. Entering Ben-Abraham’s Facebook page showed a page that was almost empty — her name and picture only. In fact, it seems that the Censor was so embarrassed by all the publicity in recent days that she erased it. When I tried to enter the page today in order to write the post, it …