The public and all but violent reaction of readers and theorists alike to the positions of Giorgio Agamben on the measures of the States amidst a pandemic as a state of exception and on the condition of fear that becomes a necessary component to collective panic concerns the hitting of a limit. It is the limit of the living, of living individual experience and of the collective desire for the preservation of our existence. It is this very desire that the positions of Agamben bypass as well as subsume into the politics of security and the state of exception, thus expunging its autonomy. However, the object “epidemic” also comes from a space beyond that of politics, from the animal non-human, and forces us to turn our gaze towards the threshold of the living, while, despite a shared political experience imposed by the epidemic, we find ourselves, as individuals, each “confronted with the adverse values of disease and of death, through which life is confirmed, in the form of an affirmation of negation that expresses the fundamental impulse that drives every living to persevere in its being” (Macherey)

The Austrian turquoise-green government plans a comprehensive amendment of the Austrian Universities Act (Universitätsgesetz, UG). In the middle of the Corona crisis roughly 150 changes are to be rushed through.
With this open letter, we call on the Austrian Federal Government to immediately abort the amendment of the Universities Act. We, lecturers and students at Austrian universities alike, reject the projected changes. Numerous other people also support our open letter.

Sign the petition: https://mein.aufstehn.at/petitions/bildung-brennt-neues-universitatsgesetz-stoppen
List of initial signators via: https://bildung-brennt.at/unterstuetzerinnen-offener-brief-bildung-brennt/

[1] Sie fragt ihn, was er gerade machen würde und er erzählt ihr von dieser Geschichte, die auseinanderfällt und dabei immer mehr Fußnoten hinterlässt, zu einem Textkörper, der zu imaginieren bleibt. Sie ist sich der Bedeutung von Fußnoten nicht sicher und fragt ihn, ob Fußnoten Brunnenvermeldungen seien. Sogleich merken sie, dass mit dem Wort Brunnenvermeldungen etwas nicht stimmt, und brechen in Lachen aus. Sie kennen das schon: ein Wort aus einer anderen Sprache hat sich in ihre deutschsprachige Unterhaltung hineinübersetzt.

Open Call to participate in the queer-feminist Festival Aphrodite* 2020 with films/videos by women* and LGBTQI*+ artists from the Balkan countries who live or have lived in Greece.

Μore than 160 Greek and international organizations,  academics and other actors from all over Europe urge the Greek authorities to revoke decision to close dignified alternatives in accommodating refugees οn Lesvos.

Autorin Sofia Bempeza präsentiert das bei transversal texts erschienene Buch im Wiener Depot im Gespräch mit Tyna Fritschy. Im Zürcher Les Complices* diskutiert die Autorin mit Kerstin Schroedinger; im Anschluss findet ein Screening (She Said von Susan Stein) statt.

Aufgrund der Covid-19-Präventionsmaßnahmen und beschränkter Platzzahl ist für beide Präsentationen eine Anmeldung nötig.

The artist and filmmaker Oliver Ressler (https://www.ressler.at/) has started a YouTube Channel with his films on global capitalism, forms of resistance, social alternatives, racism and the climate crisis. He will add one film every week, available for free. There will be 31 films altogether.
Subscriptions and sharing: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUP958h4uSyvqwM076tqVrw

At a time when 12,500 refugees and asylum seekers are wandering homeless on the roads and hills of Lesbos, when those intoxicated and injured in the fire in Moria are prevented by the police from reaching the hospital in Mytilene, when solidarity groups bringing basic necessities are blocked by the forces of order or attacked by far-right groups, when the Greek government‘s only response to this emergency is national-security
We, as European citizens, can no longer remain silent.

En octubre de 1974, Michel Foucault visitó la Universidad del Estado de Guanabara (que después sería la de Río de Janeiro) en Brasil, donde dictó una serie de seis conferencias en el Instituto de Medicina Social. En la segunda de ellas, titulada «Nacimiento de la medicina social» (Foucault, 2001b), es donde aparece por primera vez la noción de biopolítica. El concepto no era de su invención, lo tomó prestado del filósofo sueco Rudolf Kjellén, y tampoco fue una categoría de batalla al interior de su obra, puesto que lo abandonó muy temprano para dar paso a la idea de gubernamentalidad.

Inmitten der Krisen und Bedrohungen der liberalen Demokratie entwickelt Isabell Lorey eine Demokratie im Präsens, die politische Gewissheiten ebenso aufbricht wie lineare Vorstellungen von Fortschritt und Wachstum. Mit ihrer queer/feministischen politischen Theorie formuliert sie eine grundlegende Kritik an maskulinistischen Konzepten von Volk, Repräsentation, Institution und Multitude. Und sie entfaltet einen originellen Begriff von präsentischer Demokratie, der auf Sorge und Verbundenheit, auf der Unhintergehbarkeit von Verantwortlichkeiten beruht – und ohne vergangene Kämpfe und aktuelle Praktiken sozialer Bewegungen nicht zu denken ist.

En estas semanas se están aclarando los envites políticos de la pandemia del coronavirus, no sólo en el Reino de España, sino en Europa y en el sistema atlántico. Lo que era probable se está confirmando: bajo los diferentes estados de alarma, las medidas de confinamiento y la gestión de la “desescalada”, las élites están aprovechando el recurso a la fuerza mayor para imponer sus agendas de acumulación extractiva de capital; para eliminar contrapesos democráticos; para introducir medidas de restricción de la protesta y de ejercicio de un biopoder “soberano” tanto sobre quienes pueden y tratan de conservar su salario volviendo al trabajo, arriesgando su salud y la de los demás, como sobre quienes quedan fuera del acceso a rentas salariales o rentas del trabajo durante la pandemia.

We are extremely upset and concerned by the recent news about the arbitrary dismissal of the artist, researcher and weaver Elvira Espejo Ayca as the Director of the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore (MUSEF) and the writer, curator and philosopher Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz from his position as Director of the Museo Nacional de Arte (MNA), both in La Paz, Bolivia. We would like to publicly express our disagreement with this decision, taken by the current Bolivian government and executed through the Fundación Cultural del Banco Central de Bolivia and its newly appointed President, the scholar Guillermo Mariaca. We would like to point out that this decision undoes and interrupts the remarkable work both institutions have been developing under the leadership of Espejo and Hinderer, who are celebrated nationally and internationally for their work with programming, research, conservation and education, and for their defence of the museum as a tool for the transformation of society, and as a platform for public service.

This interview with Oliver Ressler provides the context for a huge debate around his piece “Oil Spill Flag” that was on display on a flagpole in front of Tromsø Kunstforening (Norway).

The process of building the common takes place as an ongoing engagement with the question of how to wrest the possibility of this common from its impossibility.

The phrase “corona-crisis” is these days on everyone’s lips, and understandably so. We are faced with a deadly disease that, only a few months ago, was completely unknown and has in the meantime dramatically changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people across the world. They, no doubt, feel the crisis firsthand, but do they—do we?—really know what it means to be “in crisis”?

transversal texts veröffentlicht den einschlägigen Text von Maurizio Lazzarato im 'Around the Crown'-Issue des transversal Webjournals, deutsch, italiano, español: https://transversal.at/transversal/0420.

The enclosure that will be loosened today in Malaga is the most visible and palpable, but it is not the only enclosure from which we suffer. They are many, of very distinct kinds, and none is characterized by its easy legibility. We feel them, we suffer from them, but not very often do we identify them. For this, we need tools. What enclosures are we referring to if we can already move around, if we can go to bars and museums, if we can vote and protest (this only a bit), if we can meet?

Es lebe der 1. Mai,
es lebe der Widerstand, es lebe der Kampf um ein anderes besseres Leben auf diesem Planeten für alle jetzt, jetzt alles für alle!

It becomes impossible to think when COVID-19 turns into a synonym for one’s own death or, worse, for the death of a loved one or the hundreds of thousands of strangers, which is also painful. Uncertainty and anxiety cloud understanding and stifle speech. In spite of this, it is essential to think and to listen.

Raúl Sánchez Cedillo's contribution to the "Technecologies"-issue of the transversal web journal is now available in English.

The transdividual network system is as much a thing as a subject, and thus it cannot be defined by an opposition or dialectic between subject and object. As an assemblage of bodies and machines, algorithms and ideas, it is an inseparable subject-object, a production of subjectivity intimately tied to the forms of political expression of the contemporary multitude.

I am not sure that the best approach to analyzing the current state of liberties and rights in Spain, Europe, and increasingly the rest of the world is that of the rule of law and its enforcement during this pandemic and after it. In the first place, because we immediately arrive at an impasse: the state of alarm (and increasingly, of exception) has been declared in conformity with the constitutional procedure set out in the corresponding organic law. The same could happen with the legal declaration of the state of siege or of exception if there is an absolute parliamentary majority that approves it.

I will dedicate the following lines to introduce my own ranking of universities, the JER™ (Jeffrey Epstein Ranking) of university funding. It is a classification based on my monitoring of the donations that several universities accepted from the financial circle nurtured by Jeffrey Epstein since the early 90s until the end of 2017. I will start explaining where the JER™ comes from, what it is and how it is calculated; then I will present the capital findings extracted from it and I will conclude with some recommendations for university public policies.

#PandemieLocali is a collection of short videos about the pandemic #Covid19 made in the distance, in order to connect points of view, places, experiences and perspectives on the edge of this sudden present. The idea comes from the need and desire to share doubts and questions in order to compose a collective reflection capable of showing the ambivalences, complexities and possibilities of this moment. We share here the first interviews, to which others will be added, and some reflections on our work.

And it happened. The same body that just days ago filled the streets, that went on feminist strike, the one that danced at a party, that produced discourse, orgasms, and life, is today under suspicion. Because it transmits everything – culture, defenses, affects – its capacity to carry and spread a virus poses it as an enemy. Obligatory social isolation, disengagement, red zone, quarantine, cancellation, ban, shutdown, geo-reference, state of exception, swift security measures, national networks, a matter of the state. The army policing the virus, the police patrolling meetings, preventative quarantine, biopolitical control; the virus is a terrorist organization, and every being a suspicious cell. Many of us have been talking about the body; about its centrality and about its neglect; about the necessity of liberating and listening to it, or of disciplining and controlling it, depending on the ideology. Now, when the entire situation is organized around it, we have no fucking idea what to do with it.

COVID-19, the illness caused by coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the second severe acute respiratory syndrome virus since 2002, is now officially a pandemic. As of late March, whole cities are sheltered in place and, one by one, hospitals are lighting up in medical gridlock brought about by surges in patients.

All of a sudden, what we have been thinking for the last fifty years has to be rethought from scratch. Thank god (is god a virus?) that we have an abundance of extra time now because the old business is out of business.

Every day and in every emergency, unwaged or low waged caregivers, urban and rural, mostly women, often immigrant women, struggle to protect and care for people of every age and condition. But this work is kept invisible and therefore there is never a relief package from governments for caregivers, only more work, especially with the advent of Covid-19.
Sign the letter

Below are two texts. Most of the first, “Against Quarantine,” was written in late January and originally published in New Inquiry in mid-February. The second, much shorter text was written in mid-March as a postscript to Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia (2012).

The first text addresses the growing recourse by governments to quarantine measures. It argues that quarantines are ineffective in slowing the spread of the virus, but nevertheless effective in promoting a racialised understanding of health and disease and, moreover, one that converges with both privatised healthcare and authoritarian governance.

… until we no longer have to.” That’s what we have always said. In times of “emergency”, this wording can be expanded to an appeal: “You have to join in!”

La gestión política de las epidemias pone en escena la utopía de comunidad y las fantasías inmunitarias de una sociedad, externalizando sus sueños de omnipotencia de su soberanía política.

With this pandemic, the 21st century begins. A century in which defending the right to live will be a priority.

In May of 1743, a vessel from Corfu carrying bodies of dead crew members who had died of a mysterious disease arrived in Messina.  The ship and cargo were burned, but cases of a strange new disease were soon thereafter observed in the hospital and in the poorest parts of the town; and in the summer, a frightening plague epidemic developed, killing forty to fifty thousand people, and then disappeared before spreading to other parts of Sicily.

It happened as it was to be expected: Four years of standing on the sidelines have resulted in a catastrophe. 40,000 human beings, penned up in hopelessly overcrowded EU-hotspot centres like Moria on Lesvos Island, living under squalid living and hygienic conditions, will soon face the deadly disease.

An initiative to respond to the political and social impact of COVID-19 and the accompanying measures – digitally and on site.

A prolonged wait at the pharmacy, a long queue before entering a supermarket. Experiences like this, today increasingly common, can help us to see how the spreading of Coronavirus is transforming our society. Yet, more precisely, the global pandemic, and the measures put in place by the Italian government to attempt to counteract it, are in fact merely exacerbating tendencies that have already existed for a while.

First premise. We are not conspiracy theorists. Second premise, just to avoid misunderstanding. We are aware of the current medical emergency and convinced that we need to change our habits. With this in mind, we have decided to cancel events and concerts, to do our part to prevent the situation from worsening in the face of an already ailing health system. We are also organizing a relief action for the most affected people in the city, especially the elderly. All this is okay, we know it and we are doing it. And yet…

IV International Symposium
Barcelona, postponed to Oct, 2020
MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Coordinated by Christian Alonso (University of Barcelona)
Keynote by Gerald Raunig (Zürich University of the Arts, eipcp European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies)
Deadline for submissions: February 28th, 2020, 8pm GMT

A new monograph on neoliberalism, the state and affective labour by Otto Penz and Birgit Sauer. The book Governing affects explores the neoliberal transformation of state governance in Europe towards affective forms of dominance, exercised by customer oriented neo-bureaucracies and public service providers.

Oliver Ressler is one of 90 people who participated at a blockade of Bílina coal mine in Northern Bohemia in the Czech Republic in June 2018, against who the company Severočeské doly (“North Bohemian Coal Mines”) filed a lawsuit at the City Court in Chomutov. With legal repression, they think they can silence protests against coal mining.
There is a fundraising campaign running to cover the cost of the court case and attorneys, so please feel free to share and donate:
https://www.darujme.cz/projekt/1201737?locale=en

Am sagenumwobenen 31. Dezember 1999 soll an mehreren Orten zugleich ein Institut gegründet worden sein, das nie Institution werden wollte. Mitten aus der entstehenden Bewegung, die sich im „Feber Null“ zu Gegenschwarzblau und den Donnerstagsdemos ausweiten sollte, entstand das European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. 56 Ausgaben des multilingualen Webjournals transversal, 30 Bücher von transversal books, an die 20 Konferenzen und Workshops, 11 mehrjährige und unzählige kleine Projekte in verschiedenen Teilen Europas später ist es Zeit für ein Fest. Zum 20-jährigen Jubiläum des eipcp feiern wir am 14. Dezember in der Kunsthalle Exnergasse im WUK „Party like its 1999“.

Die edu-factory war ein translokales Projekt zur Krise der Universität und zu neuen Praxen selbstorganisierter Wissensarbeit. Anfangs als Mailinglist gegründet, entwickelte sie sich inmitten der Universitätsbesetzungen der Jahre 2008 und 2009 zu einer Diskursmaschine mit zahlreichen internationalen Meetings, mit Buchpublikationen und einem eigenen Webjournal. Alle Macht der selbstorganisierten Wissensproduktion versammelt Dokumente der Bewegungsgeschichte eines transnational organisierten Netzwerks für Forschung, Bildung und Wissensproduktion am Anfang des 21. Jahrhunderts.

This special issue is interested to map the ways that repair can contribute to organisational models alternative to those centered around growth.

The English version of Die schönen Kriegerinnen, which was published by transversal texts, has now been released by Minor Compositions.

When right-wing politicians increasingly use populist strategies and social media as a platform, seeking to discredit established researchers, scientists, and journalists in order to shake the public's belief in media content, many people end up relying on dubious information sources and no longer know how to distinguish the difference. Facebook and Twitter are viewed by many as legitimate news platforms, whereas news sources that were trusted for decades are being viewed as “fake news” when they do not support populist ideals.

Vom Leben der Kritik ist der Versuch, kritische Theorien und Praktiken in einer Zeit zu sammeln und weiterzudenken, in der einerseits der Tod der Kritik beschworen wird und andererseits die Transformation von (Selbst-)Kritik in Disziplinierungstechniken der neoliberalen Evaluations- und Professionalisierungskultur zu beobachten ist.
Eingedenk der zu Recht vielfach hervorgehobenen Probleme von traditionellen Verständnissen der Kritik – u. a. ihres belehrenden, elitären, autoritären, paternalistischen oder heroischen Charakters – legt dieses Buch den Akzent auf erfinderische Alltagspraktiken der Kritik. Ebenso wichtig wie die Diskussion gewaltvoller Dimensionen von Herrschaftskritik ist dabei die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Superioritätsanspruch westlicher Kritikbegriffe, welcher sich schon darin zeigt, dass die Linie von Sokrates über Kant zu Foucault meist nicht als lediglich ein Verständnis von Kritik adressiert wird, sondern als das, was Kritik nun einmal sei.

Über 40 Jahre nach dem französischen Original erscheint im Herbst Pierre Machereys Klassiker „Hegel oder Spinoza“ in deutscher Übersetzung. transversal veröffentlicht das 2007 erschienene Vorwort für die argentinische Ausgabe von Michael Hardt und Colectivo Situaciones.

¿Así acaba la experimentación municipalista abierta tras el 15M? Una vez apaciguada su virulencia y monstruosidad inicial y después de un lento proceso de degradación y descomposición paulatina, la disolución de los últimos resquicios de lo que en 2011 fue una explosión sin precedentes de deseo revolucionario autoorganizado de forma radicalmente democrática parece clara. Los resultados electorales no son más que la foto fija de la crisis de imaginación política por un lado y de la restauración del juego electoral clásico por otro. Puede que su disolución electoral y su degradación general nos hagan pensar que la experimentación acaba aquí. Pero la monstruosidad de los municipalismos iba mucho más allá del asalto institucional, por eso la experimentación debe continuar inventando nuevos mecanismos para transformar radicalmente las ciudades y nuestras formas de vivir juntxs.

A nivel social existen al menos dos grandes tipos de comunicación: una vertical, concentrada en minorías y caracterizada por el monólogo, que responde al ideal de preeminencia del emisor sobre el receptor y ofrece pocas o nulas oportunidades de diálogo y respuesta crítica. Es la comunicación que ejercen políticos corruptos, empresarios antidemocráticos, medios de comunicación corporativos y hegemónicos, voceros de grandes potencias frente los países pobres, etcétera. Por otro lado está la comunicación participativa e incluyente, que reconoce las diferencias, favorece el diálogo, la construcción de consensos y los procesos de cambio en favor del bien común. Es una comunicación horizontal, donde los emisores y los receptores sostienen una relación de reciprocidad.

This texts relates to the exhibition Rogelio López Cuenca: Yendo leyendo, dando lugar, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Edificio Sabatini, Planta 3), 3 April - 26 August 2019, https://www.museoreinasofia.es/exposiciones/rogelio-lopez-cuenca.

The coexistence of art and philosophy, the concatenation of social and conceptual machines, the combination of art and thought that operated and still operates in and around Bert Theis is not limited to a practice of speaking, discussing, and philosophizing as communication, or to the artist’s more or less obvious knowledge of philosophy, ancient or current. Rather, it is a mode of subjectivation that also has to do with invention and disobedience. (See also the exhibition Arcipelago Bert Theis: https://www.mudam.lu/en/expositions/details/exposition/arcipelago-bert-theis/.)