Symptoms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindutva_pseudohistory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffronisation

New Zizek movie screened at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival! Arguably the only good thing to have happened this year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pervert's_Guide_to_Utopias

Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins (1940)

Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins (1940)

PPS/23, Review of Current Trends: U.S. Foreign Policy (1948)

Vol. I of the journal that established Lacanian psychoanalysis as a primary interlocutor with Marxism, structurralism and other discourses. Contains the fascinating paper by Miller, Suture which established the 'logic of the signifier'.

Gabriel Tupinamba, The Desire of Psychoanalysis (2021)

History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now [Jetztzeit]. For Robespierre, Roman antiquity was a past charged with the here-and-now, which he exploded out of the continuum of history. The French revolution thought of itself as a latter day Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past costume. Fashion has an eye for what is up-to-date, wherever it moves in the jungle [Dickicht: maze, thicket] of what was. It is the tiger’s leap into that which has gone before. Only it takes place in an arena in which the ruling classes are in control. The same leap into the open sky of history is the dialectical one, as Marx conceptualized the revolution. Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1940)

The Eurocentric version of the same Hindutva Islamophobia we see in India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_genocide_conspiracy_theory It'll be nice to debunk our homegrown versions of these of the Hindutva ones against Muslims, the casteist versions where people associate beneficiaries of caste affirmative action with "degradation in skill quality".

Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1993)

From my last vacation where I went to some old bookstores and blindly bought a whole lot of my literary favorites: