I've been reading Calvin's 1536 Institutes lately, and the impression I was previously given of him feels quite false. By the end of the book, he seems to be saying that anything in Christianity which contradicts or supercedes love of neighbours is at best adiaphora, and at worst devilry.
I've just received news of acceptance for my abstract for the 'Early Modern Naturalisms' conference in Hungary! I've never been to the country before, but I'm excited to see the place in September.
Yes to this. By the way, if you want to wow your “Continental” friends with your understanding of Heidegger, Arendt, Agamben, and Deleuze, King-ho Leung’s book is the ultimate cheat sheet. It gets across the “deep” points while being perfectly readerly throughout: global.oup.com/academic/pro...
Congrats!
Flyer for event Academic Associations and the Silencing of BDS
I’ll be moderating this panel for the @asanews.bsky.social’s Global and Transnational Section a week from tomorrow, featuring geographer Yousuf Al-Bulushi, anthropologist Sami Hermez, historians Tithi Bhattacharya and Margaret Power, and sociologist @michaelrmuniz.bsky.social
I wonder whether there's any connection between Pope Leo's opposition to Trump and the recent resistance to the USA from more Catholic countries like Italy and Spain. Do Catholic politicians in those countries take their faith seriously in their professional roles?
How we delimit fascism remains a hotly debated question. But unless we ignore that it is a social phenomenon, we have to acknowledge that its meaning can change and evolve as circumstances change. What remains the same is a desire to eliminate excluded, disadvantaged people.
There's a tendency among attempts to identify fascism today to do so based on /strict/ similarities to past fascist regimes. The problem is that modern fascists aren't examining Hitler and Mussolini's policies to make sure that they're doing fascism correctly.
“Fiat ars—pereat mundus,” says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art." From Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.'
It looks like The Routledge Companion to Simone Weil finally has a page on the Routledge website and an official release date! I'm very excited for this to come out - it'll include my first book chapter (on Simone Weil and Italian Theory). www.routledge.com/The-Routledg...
I have a vague memory of us meeting at HM a few years ago, is that right?
I'm considering submitting a paper challenging Horkheimer's criticisms of Montaigne for the Historical Materialism conference this year. Although I'm slightly concerned that it'll be too theoretical of a piece, or that anything I might say about it will already have been written.
I know Gilman-Opalsky's review has already provoked some sharp reactions, but I thought it was pretty good! His point that Rockhill concedes important territory to capital by accepting the CIA's assumptions was helpful, as was his point about Rockhill's binaristic understanding of Marxism.
Some of the people replying to me identify as ‘groypers’ in their profiles, and that group of people are generally known for their bad faith and hideous views, so I disabled comments and have stopped following the thread
I don't think it's inappropriate to see fascist themes in his writings, and I've been looking around for some decent case against this. But he still really just seems like a fascist who tried to hide his views after his movement collapsed at a national level! bsky.app/profile/sadi...
More than anything, I feel baffled by the responses of people insisting that he was not a fascist (in contrast to the other people who are saying that he was one, and that this is a good thing). Is it simply bad faith or historical ignorance, or was his endorsement of the Iron Guard insincere?
Is there any serious debate over Eliade's fascist leanings? He was a supporter of the fascist Iron Guard in Romania. If a German was a supporter of the Nazi pary, they'd be a fascist. Sometimes there can be genuine debate over whether someone is just a conservative, but here it looks clear-cut.
Thanks to all our authors from March! (Nazanin Shahrokni, Justin Reed, @lesja.bsky.social , Brandon Webb, Matthew Penney, Manuel Casique Herrera, and Cinzia Arruzza).
Links to all these pieces in the thread 👇🏽 🧵
In the other place, this same thread has started to get swamped by fascists. Twitter is a cesspit.
I know this is not in any way a hot take - Eliade was a fascist. But it's interesting to see how fascists display their ideas to make them seem compelling. They usually won't say 'I'm a fascist,' but they will introduce distortions that show where they're coming from.
That, in a nutshell, is the theoretical core of the fascist ideology. Eliade doesn't scream it from the rooftops, but it is unmistakeably there in the way he explains the nature of the sacred and the (supposed) risks we face in losing our sense of it. /end
From these claims, a very troubling picture emerges. If we are profane, we live bad lives. But to preserve the sacred, we need to erect barriers against outsiders and exercise extreme prejudice against anyone who arrives from outside of our communities. /5
Furthermore, this feeling requires exclusionary norms. The world, or cosmos, that is founded on the sacred, is (he thinks) always demarcated in a way that literally demonises whatever spatially sits outside of the sacred space of a world. /4
But in the process of offering this phenomenology, he starts working in obviously normative claims about the feeling of the sacred. Those who have lost access to this feeling, 'profane men,' are unmoored, living in a fractured and groundless reality. /3
One thing he seems to be correct about, right at the outset, is that religion is misunderstood if we begin by examining its theoretical claims. So he sets out to provide a phenomenology of the sacred, taking some clear queues from Heidegger. /2
I'm currently reading Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, and it's striking to me how he espouses his hideous fascist ideology, while at the same time trying very hard to appear as though he's giving a politically neutral account of the origins of religion. /1
#OtD 1 Apr 1972 the Situationist International was dissolved. One of the first revolutionary groups to analyse capitalism in its consumerist form, their ideas came to prominence after the France 1968 uprising. Read more: shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/...
It's 6 days until this book comes out and I am stoked for it
The thrust of his point is that unless explicit rules are laid out that establish when someone has been redeemed or not, then nobody will be sure whether they have been. The consequence of that, he thinks, is agony and uncertainty, leading people to exhaust themselves.
