Dérive

A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history. -Walter Benjamin,  On the Concept of History A couple of months ago my reevaluation of Lenin's contemporary role began with an impassioned rejection of his centrality in the "revolutionary socialist" movement. While most of the Left had already written off Lenin, he surreptitiously retained a hegemony on both the hopes of self stylized revolutionary socialists and over their unequivocal failures ever since, say, the wint...

“I’ve never killed anyone.” She thought back to the “Path to Personhood” poster she had seen to reply “Wrong, you kill people all the time. They’re just not really people yet. Your body is constantly killing thousands of people daily and you eat plants, don’t you?” Keegan, grateful for any sort of digression stopped a moment before responding, “I hardly think the inhabitants of my gut can be considered human.” “Well, none of them are ever going to be considered human if you don’t hurry it up.” “Why don’t you do it? You clearly want to eat this guy more than I do.” “I already brought him here and set this all up, didn’t I? And anyways I’ve already shown that you’ve killed someone before. I have never eaten which is why you need to stop chattering.” “You’re the one chattering. I thought normal tourists in Thailand came to do sex crimes, not this. This poor boy has enough problems here I’m sure.” The two girls had been standing over the never unconscious body. Th...

"The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. The Great Revolution introduced a new calendar. The day on which the calendar started functioned as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is fundamentally the same day which, in the shape of holidays and memorials, always returns. The calendar does not therefore count time like clocks. They are monuments of a historical awareness, of which there has not seemed to be the slightest trace for a hundred years. Yet in the July Revolution an incident took place which did justice to this consciousness. During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris. An eyewitness who may have owed his inspiration to the rhyme wrote at that moment: Qui le croirait! on dit,  qu'irrités contre l'heure  De nouveaux Josués  au pied de chaque tour,  Tiraien...