EGS

10Aug09

This being my second year hear so of the general weirdness has worn off but still I realize what an odd situation it is. After a film course and a course with the program director (Wolfgang Schirmacher) who said in class that he ‘never wanted to live in Ben Woodard’s head’ I start Avital Ronell and Agamben this week and Badiou and Zizek next week.

What has been most surprising is that when talking to people about my project I am not met (generally) with looks of disgust or any other sort of antagonistic response but instead get a surprised reaction and then questions about it. Given peoples theoretical backgrounds around here this has been a bit shocking – clearly there is more interest in doing new metaphysics, or at least more constructive less deconstructive projects than I thought.

One thing I wanted to comment on was Michael Hardt’s lecture the first night here where he argued that what we need in Marxist critique is a new sense of the common in order to bring back communism. Opposing himself to Badiou and Zizek’s Leninism he said that we need more marxist analysis of labor to understand new class divisions in order to find a common. Much of what he said leaned towards some of the strategies in The Coming Insurrection but what I found disheartening (dishardting!) was that he placed seemingly no influence on the power productivty to decide the value of objects in his push for shared property.

I will post the link when it is up

Filed under: Badiou, marxism, politics, Zizek   |  1 Comment
Tags: egs, grad school, schirmacher