Radical Philosophy

Franco “Bifo” Berardi The Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica was essentially a process of symbolic and cultural submission. The “superiority” of the colonizers lay on the operational effectiveness of their technical production. The colonization destroyed the cultural environment in which indigenous communities had been living for centuries: the alphabetic technology, the power of the written word overwhelmed, jeopardized and finally superseded the indigenous cultures. The conquistadors re-coded the cultural universe of nowadays Mexico and Central America.

BEING THERE: EDINBURGH To the outside world, it’s a festival, a castle, a university, a tin of shortbread and a drone of bagpipes. To Jackie Hunter, it’s home, and it’s more about coping with the weather ... From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2009 On the short, steeply curving street where I live, the neighbourhood shops offer an unexpectedly refined display of goods: between my front door and the pub on the corner it’s possible to buy Yohji Yamamoto’s artfully cut menswear, cherry-red rubber shoes by Vivienne Westwood, Tom Dixon armchairs and Ingo Maurer lights, Gothic tattoos, a pierced nipple (or two), quirky Scandinavian kitchenware and even a tubby-bellied woodburning stove, one of which would nicely warm my crow’s-nest flat, where on windy nights the sash windows rattle like a box of cutlery as easterly gales blast in off the North Sea. Adapting your personal sense of style to Edinburgh’s many idiosyncrasies and paradoxes is no easy task.

Speculative Non-Buddhism New Left Review - NLR 75, May-June 2012 Running Along the Disaster: A Conversation with Franco “Bifo” Berardi LaborinArt Önder Özengi & Pelin Tan (LaborinArt): You wanted to speak about the European crisis, especially its effect on the Mediterranean, the Near East, and the Middle East. What does the collapse of social welfare mean for these territories and countries? Franco “Bifo” Berardi (FBB): After May 25, we must be able to say that the “European experiment” is over. The impressive result that the National Front will have in the French elections is going to add the word “end” to this expression. The European Union was based on the alliance between France and Germany, after two centuries of war.

The Global Dialogue Platform - StumbleUpon Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy blogging from a marxist economist Franco Berardi aka Bifo: MANIFESTO DEL DOPOFUTURISMO Cento anni fa Filippo Tommaso Marinetti pubblicò sulla prima pagina di Le Figaro il manifesto che inaugurò, nella coscienza estetica del mondo, il secolo che credeva nel futuro. Col Manifesto del 1909 iniziò il veloce processo del divenire macchina dell'organismo umano collettivo. Il divenire macchina è giunto al suo compimento con il concatenarsi della rete globale, e si rovescia oggi, dopo il collasso del sistema finanziario fondato sulla futurizzazione dell'economia, sul debito, sulla promessa economica. Quella promessa è finita.

Andrej Blatnik Bleak is the new red. Noam Chomsky - Creating the Horror Chambers We’re pleased to publish another interview with Professor Noam Chomsky. In this recent conversation with Dan Falcone, a Washington DC–based high school history teacher, Chomsky builds on our last interview, discussing everything from Scott Walker to the Monroe Doctrine, from Citizens United to for-profit colleges. We hope you’ll share it widely. Weekly Worker The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek by John Gray Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism by Slavoj Žižek Verso, 1,038 pp., $69.95