This was just recommended by someone at the BNF who noticed what else I was reading – missed it when it came out (2015-2016) but as it turns out it’s quite good

"Mental life in its earliest stages is infinitely delicate. [...] Stupidity is a scar." (Adorno and Horkheimer, DoE)

The herostratic impulse: to burn the world as a final act of self-assertion

Starting today in Frankfurt: Kritische Theorie der Endzeit, a promising three-day conference on Günther Anders as critical theorist of the present. My talk, which concludes the conference programme on Saturday, will focus on the theme of extinction in Anders' early genealogy of the human.

Long in the making, out now: the latest issue of Diacritics, dedicated entirely to Walter Benjamin's "Fate and Character" (1919) – his dense reflection on fate, escape and liberation, written in a world in the grip of war, failed revolutions and erupting fascism

“Satisfaction” seems the most striking affect on this list – the brutal, state-sanctioned violence on the streets and in the camps offered as satisfaction for a perceived wrong/intrusion/dispossession

solidarity to those who fight fascism everywhere

The new issue of Diacritics is on Walter Benjamin's short text "Fate and Character", edited by @tomvandeputte.bsky.social and others. I was so happy to contribute a text on "Liberation" muse.jhu.edu/issue/56198

Simone Weil commenting in the early 1940s on Thucydides’ “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” alongside its complement, “each human being always commands when he has the power to do so”:

“The desire to possess is only a specific form of the hunger for power: the desire to make the world congruent to oneself, or more precisely, to coerce the world to become me. That it can, at most, become *mine* instead of *me*: this is […] already the first scandal and comprise.” (Anders, 1936)

This selection of essays and interviews reflects the wide range of scholarship published on the blog in 2025.

Annual Christmas break reading: Gillian Rose

Günther Anders’ 1936 review of Bloch’s now famous analysis of fascism and non-contemporaneity: “For those interested in a concrete philosophy of history […] reading the chapter on Ungleichzeitigkeit, which is unfortunately buried underneath the others, will be indispensable.”

Klossowski, “Time and Aggressiveness” (1936): “In the individual, aggressiveness presents itself as a struggle against the long time constituted by the resistance of the world, a struggle against the evolution demanded by the laws of species, the laws of the social milieu.”

The blatant lie as primal expression of sovereignty: “[The human being has] the tremendous power of being able to lie. [B]y virtue of asserting its own independent existence, it can declare to the existing that it does not exist, not in that way; [...] it can deny (verleugnen) what is." (GA, 1930)

An absolutely devastating loss. Such a lucid thinker and speaker, maintaining his enthusiasm and love of the age-old game despite his obvious struggles. Rest in peace.

“Facts of murder and even genocide […] are the themes of preference of this obscene language of denial. [E]ven this denial retains an element of sadistic sweetness: the denial itself becomes a kind of ‘second murder’, eliminating even the undesired facts of murder from the world.”

Günther Anders (1989): “The goal of ‘disinformation’ consists in the emphatic suppression or denial of facts that have come to light or can come to light, but ought not to […]. The goal is […] to keep the interlocutor from seeing certain facts or, once seen, to keep them from bearing these in mind.”

“Official history is believing murderers at their word.” - Simone Weil

Eighty years since Hiroshima – I remember the strangely superficial terms in which the event was discussed in history classes: as a curious moral dilemma, an exercise in moral reasoning and the calculus of human life/death, quick to pass over its monstrosity

“The absurdity […] that the human being can desire – and does desire – more from the world than it offers.” (GA)

Günther Anders’ writings from the early 1940s refer to a primordial, “extreme” concept of freedom that repeats itself in the modern: a “freedom without consequences” - the liberatory experience of unaccountability and impunity that he may have recognised in fascism

“Nothing dies as slowly as a category” – Günther Anders, writing in 1940-41, on the persistence of the category of progress (which, in turn, testifies to the slow death of the category of providence)

Günther Anders’ one-page eulogy to Benjamin focuses entirely on his conception of language and its critique: “The distinction between the truth of the matter and the correctness of syntax left him cold; so deeply was he convinced that, also in language, the untrue could never find the right syntax.”

Anders’ sharp critique of Adorno is a critique of form: “I believe I detect a tone of revenge, of contempt, of violation in your style. […] Because you forgo political action […] you attempt, with linguistic means, to produce something resembling action, to at least inflict something on the reader.”

Of all the thinkers in the orbit of the Frankfurt School, the most careful reader of Anders seems to have been Bloch, who was deeply impressed by his “book of mourning” (the first volume of The Obsolescence of Mankind) and especially the Hiroshima journals, which he called Anders’ “book of peace”

Günther Anders writing to Ernst Bloch in 1959: “Adorno […] regards me as an unpleasant piece of furniture, an uncontrollable one – we don’t make use of each other”

Summer reading from years ago that is back on this year's reading list: early 20C histories/theories of depression

On protest and demonstration:

A striking theme in early 20C French thought that never seems to have been developed: the attempt to base a materialist account of the origin of human societies / social forms not on the need for food and shelter but the need to sleep

Even at its most saturated, our apocalyptic imagination pales in comparison to that of a random fifteenth-century monk

Melanie Klein is so good on envy and its latent destructive impulse: “envy [is] the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something – the envious impulse being to take away or to spoil it”

Günther Anders’ theory of first drafts: “To hope that the text arrives directly would be naive. […] You may never expect that your first draft produces the text or something resembling a text. At first this draft is only pulp […] which, in the best cases, appears to desire that it *becomes* a text.”

Greasy spoon breakfast cafés are easily the best thing about the UK

Simone Weil arguing that laws do not demand to be respected (but only connect cause and effect quasi-naturally): "Written laws do not demand at all that actions conform themselves to what they prescribe. [...] When I steal, I will be imprisoned; when I put my hand in a fire, I will burn myself."

Looks promising:

Reportedly the largest public demo in the Netherlands over the last two decades, with up to 100k protestors heading toward the seat of the International Court of Justice in The Hague

Today at 5pm, for those in Amsterdam:

Benjamin’s definition of politics as ‘experimentation with the explosive “world”’ seems to describe the stakes of this political endgame quite aptly

Today at 5! Open to all - feel free to stop by if you’re in Amsterdam

Utopian nature in the Old Testament, where not only the human domination of nature but all struggle among species is abolished (Isaiah 11:6-8)

Jameson's "Archaeologies of the Future" on the structural ambivalence of utopian thought: "the more surely a given Utopia asserts its radical difference from what currently is, to that very degree it becomes, not merely unrealisable but, what is worse, unimaginable"

Continuing my series of public philosophy seminars on Bloch and utopia today. Meeting this afternoon, April 11 and May 16 (13-16) at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.

Striking that there is – as far as I know (?) – no interest in the possibility of human extinction in Marx, especially in the early writings on species-being. Extinction had become a key theme in the popular imagination of the early 1800s; Shelley's apocalyptic novel The Last Man appeared in 1826.

Today at 5pm: a public talk by Søren Mau (@sorenmau.bsky.social) drawing on his current work on utopian thought and the Marxist critique of utopianism. Open to all, but please register attendance with an email to [email protected]

"Fate" may have become a central category in 1920s German critical thought because it captures an experience of "improper temporality" (Benjamin): the course of history becomes so forceful and unidirectional that it is as if the future has already happened

Karl Kraus on the "discovery of the North Pole" (1909): "The thought that, up there, a few square miles existed that no human foot had trodden seemed unbearable. [...] It was a disgrace that that we, whom the world belongs to, must withhold its last bit from ourselves."

Thinking: a ‘desperate attempt to escape the danger of stupidity’ (Horkheimer)

"The world is going to end. The only reason it could last is because it exists. How feeble that reason is, compared with all those that announce the contrary..." (Baudelaire, Fusées)

Günther Anders (1959): "We are inverted utopians. This is the basic dilemma of our age: we are smaller than ourselves, unable to form an image of that which has been made by us. Whereas utopians could not bring about what they imagined, we cannot imagine what we bring about."