Peter Linebaugh: The Magna Carta Manifesto

Rather than the separation of economic or social rights and civil or political rights that is familiar to us from the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and its Convenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), in the two charterts [ Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest ] political rights in [...]

Saturday, July 14th, 2012

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Michel Serres: The Natural Contract

The new counterpart of these new plates of humanity is global nature, Planet Earth in its totality, the seat of reciprocal and crossed interrelations among its local elements and its giant components-oceans, deserts, atmospheres, or stocks of ice. The human plates themselves are the seats of reciprocal and crossed interrelations among individuals and subgroups, their [...]

Saturday, July 14th, 2012

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Dipesh Chakrabarty: The climate of history: Four theses

While freedom has been the most important motif of accounts of human history since the Enlightenment, there has never been an awareness of the geological agency human beings were gaining through processes linked to their acquisition of freedom. Whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions that [...]

Thursday, July 12th, 2012

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Mike Davis: Dead West: Ecocide in Marlboro Country

Was the Cold War the Earth’s worst eco-disaster in the last ten thousand years? The time has come to weigh the environmental costs of the great ‘twilight struggle’ and its attendant nuclear arms race. Until recently, most ecologists have tended to underestimate the impacts of warfare and arms production on natural history. Yet there is [...]

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

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Eyal Weizman: Forensic Architecture: Notes from Fields and Forums

The pyramids of Gaza, so a Forensic Architect once told me, proliferate throughout the Strip, but are most commonly seen in the camps and neighborhoods that ring Gaza City and along the short border to Egypt. They are the result, he said, of an encounter between two familiar elements in the area—a three-story residential building, [...]

Saturday, July 7th, 2012

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Susan Schuppli: A memorial in exile in London’s Olympics: orbits of responsibility

In 2005 ArcelorMittal made a commitment to finance and build a memorial on the grounds of Omarska, the site of the most notorious concentration camp of the Bosnian war. Twenty years after the war crimes committed there, still no space of public commemoration exists. Grounds, buildings, and equipment once used for extermination now serve a [...]

Wednesday, July 4th, 2012

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Manuel Delanda: Lavas and Magmas

We live in a world populated by structures — a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions of materials shaped and hardened by history. Immersed as we are in this mixture, we cannot help but interact in a variety of ways with the other historical construction that surround us, and in these interactions [...]

Friday, March 16th, 2012

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Waste-Wilderness: A conversation with Peter L. Galison

Interview with Peter Galison by Smudge Studio: Peter L. Galison is a historian, writer, award winning filmmaker and the Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and Physics at Harvard University.  He was appointed a Guggenheim Fellow in 2009, he won the Max Planck Prize in 1999, and was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in [...]

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

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Graham Harman: Rogue Planets

Planets were known to the ancient Greeks as wander stars, and those as far as Saturn could be seen with the naked eye.Thei occasional retrograde motion was explained by Plotemy through epicycles — smaller circles grafted onto larger circular orbits — a useful theoretical fiction. Rogue Planets

Friday, January 20th, 2012

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Peter Sloterdijk: Geometry in the colossal: the project of metaphysical globalization

“The fundamental event of modernity is the conquest of the world as picture.” — Martin Heidegger,  The Age of the World Picture (2002 [1938]) “Geometry in the colossal” (Geometrie in Ungeheurem) appears as pages 47 – 72 of the second volume of Peter Sloterdijk’s Spharen — volume is entitled Globen, “Globes”. The excerpt is a [...]

Saturday, November 12th, 2011

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