“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…
The Machine Is the Garden – Concepts Of Ecology And Nature In The Anthropocene (Simon Schleusener)
A version of this article was first presented at the 8th Biennial EASLCE Conference (“The Garden: Ecological Paradigms of Space, History, and Community”) at the University of Würzburg, September 26-29, 2018. As scholars in American Studies and related fields will have noticed, the title of the following article refers to…
The Value Of Nature – A Critical Account Of Anthropocentrism In Politics, Part 1 (Anne Fremaux)
The following is part one of a two-part article by Anne Fermaux. If we want to be at home on this earth, even at the price of being at home in this century, we must try to take part in the interminable dialogue with its essence. –Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and…
Craft Theory And The Creation Of A New Capitalism (Jonathan P. Morgan)
This essay is about capitalism. It is not a call for the absolute destruction of it, nor is it a listing and demonstration of its evils and failures. It is a plea for us to heal capitalism rather than abandon it. While rife with opportunities for exploitation and dehumanization, numerous…
Capitalism And Community Health – What We Can Learn From Indigenous Communities, Part 1 (Tony Ward)
The following is the first in a two-part installment. Author’s Note: The late Joe Kincheloe draws our attention to the value that the cultures of the colonised but unbowed indigenous communities have for us in our present world crises. Building upon the work of more than 40 years across indigenous…
The Pharmakon and Ayahuasca Globalization (Roger Green)
Jacques Derrida theorized in an interview on “The Rhetoric of Drugs”: The production and distribution of drugs are, of course, primarily organized by right-wing forces or regimes, by a certain form of capitalism. But in Western Europe drug consumption and certain drug culture are often associated with vaguely anti-establishment, left-leaning…
Call For Submissions – Drugs And Capitalism
Drugs and spices have long been at the center of global trade, but the concept of “drug” in its modern, Western sense is particularly derived from interactions with cultural “others.” Thinkers such as Jacques Derrida have written on the ancient Pharmakon and its relationship to signification and sacrifice. As Richard…
On Marx, Stiegler, And The Neoliberal ‘Commodity’ – Further Conversation With Joshua Ramey (Carl Raschke)
This article is a follow-up to the interview conducted by New Polis general editor Roger Green with Joshua Ramey on neoliberalism and the “politics of divination.” Joshua Ramey’s take on neoliberalism, as laid out in The New Polis interview, as an efficient system for “dividuating” the paradigmatic rights-bearing individual of…
The Meaning Of May 1968 – A Sampling Of Reflections Around The Internet
The editors of The New Polis have gathered below excerpts and summaries of some of the most significant reflections and observations that have been published to date on the long-term historical meaning of May 1968. Per an earlier call, we invite readers to send us their own take, whether it…
On Enduring Borders And The Erasure Of Indigeneity, Part 2 (Roger Green)
The following is the second installment of Roger Green’s article. The first installment can be found here. In my previous post, I argued the necessity of a rigorous notion of Indigeneity if one is going to rethink the polis. I made this claim in light of Thomas Nail’s impressive Theory of the…