In this piece, I want to explore the distinction between the “state of exception” and the “disaster.” In doing so, I am also drawing on an interesting seminar that Joshua Ramey has been providing online for the general public called “Debt as Original Sin.” Following arguments in Devin Singh’s Divine…
Surveillance Society – Panopticon In The Age Of Digital Media (Donna Susan Mathew), Part 2
The following is the second of a two-part series. The first can be found here. Surveillance in a Post 9/11 World It is rather difficult and impossible to impose regulation on mass surveillance technologies as they evolve at a rapid rate, making any law or regulation redundant in a span…
Surveillance Society – Panopticon In The Age Of Digital Media (Donna Susan Mathew), Part 1
The following is the first of a two-part series. “The social technologies we see in use today are fundamentally panoptical – the architecture of participation is inherently an architecture of surveillance.” – Joshua-Michéle Ross The concept of the “Panopticon” as derived by Jeremy Bentham is one of the most significant…
Disaster Communism, Disaster Capitalism, Or Simply Disaster? Thoughts On Žižek’s PANdemIC! (Carl Raschke)
“There is no return to normal, the new ‘normal’ will have to be constructed on the ruins of our old lives, or we will find ourselves in a new barbarism whose signs are already clearly discernible.” Thus writes the Slovenian philosophical “rock star” Slavoj Žižek in his quick and dirty…
Indigenous Land-Grabbing In Brazil Amid COVID-19 (Roger Green)
A recent article in The New York Times by anthropologist Bruce Alpert relays the story of a fifteen-year-old Yanomami boy, Alvaney Xirixana, who died from Covid-19 earlier this month. He notes that part of the disaster that the Yanomami and other Indigenous Peoples comes from “the absurd negligence of local…
A World Glimmers Beyond The Still Black Horizons Of “Pandemia” (Carl Raschke)
The Great Global Covid-19 Pandemic has functioned in recent weeks as a gigantic, media-tinged Rorschacht ink blot upon which anyone and everyone is invited to project both their deepest political fears and their most cherished fantasies. That the effects of the pandemic are totally unprecedented, at least for modern times,…
CoroNations – Notes From The Quarantine (John Panteleimon Manoussakis )
Oedipal Disease A plague has befallen the city. It is the nature of any sickness to reveal what lies hidden under one’s body. For through its symptoms the sickness manifests what has remained invisible, hidden inside the body—or, to be precise, because it is hidden by the body. It is…
Divine Judgement And The Ethics Of Authenticity -Unsettling Thoughts On The Covid-19 Virus (Paul Tyson)
The very idea of divine judgement expressed in natural disasters seems outdated and, at the least, unpleasant to us. There are three basic reasons for this: science, ethics and theology. Thanks to modern science we have a pretty clear idea about the natural causes of droughts, floods and other disasters.…
The Angel Of History And The Ruins Of Paris – Walter Benjamin In France, Part 3 (Emma Fiedler)
The following is the second of a two-part series. The first can be found here, the second here. A previous version of this article provided an incorrect name and bio for the author. We apologize for the error. The Eternal Return of the Same, or the Temporality of Hell “Fashion:…
Anne Waldman’s A Dark Flower For The End Times (Roger Green)
In times of crisis, we turn to art. Today, Meep Records in Denver has released A Dark Flower For The End Times. This week, as many of us sit at home amid an international pandemic, we at The New Polis invite you to listen to Waldman’s words commenting on our…