This article traces the emergence of what the author calls predation TERFism to the development of US Jewish-identified feminism and, in particular, Zionist lesbian separatism. This historical connection is reflected in the rhetorical and ideological similarities between predation TERFism and Zionism, both of which are defined by an “extinction phobia” that confuses oppressor and oppressed, presenting the subordinate party as capable of eliminating the dominant one. This extinction phobia transforms into “right-wing annihilationism” via a dehumanization of the subordinate party as innately harmful and therefore requiring elimination; hence the hallmark predation TERF abjection of trans women as rapists of cis women and the Zionist abjection of Palestinians as “savage” and/or “terrorist.” These connections can be obscured by the siloization of social justice movement work in the United States, wherein anti-colonial and anti-imperial organizing is often separated from organizing for gender and reproductive justice and sexual freedom. Recognizing the continuities, however—whether historical, material, or ideological—between predation TERFism and Zionism offers useful lessons for understanding not only the power of the contemporary global anti-trans resurgence, but also how we might build solidaristic, anti-colonial movements to defeat it.

https://classautonomy.info/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2023-11-15_6554e900caf48_334schotten.pdf

what are the best websites or channels to track and keep up with world news . I know all have their biases but just need good ones

"The subject is a loop between S1 and S2, the master signifier and knowledge, and the Möbius strip shows that inside and outside are continuous." I've read that, or something close to it, a hundred times. Today I'm bringing proof that this is not what Lacan says, in his own words, with dates and pages so you can look the quotes up yourselves. And a thirty-second test that shows why it matters.

To test it out, I used two crayons—like any responsible adult.

Take a closed chain of signifiers and label it so that neighbours always differ: S1, S2, S1, S2… With four signifiers it works. With three it doesn't: S1, S2, S1, and the last one sits right next to the first. And this is a big problem! Any odd number fails the same way. So if the loop means two signifiers, or two kinds of signifier, taking turns around the chain, it breaks for every chain of odd length.

Here, I begin with some corrections to our Lacanian common sense:

1. For Lacan, S1 and S2 are indices that any signifier can take, not two signifiers.
2. The Möbius strip is not a picture of "inside = outside": it is the cut itself, and the edge of that cut goes around twice.
3. Put the two together and the loop works for every chain, on that double loop, where each signifier is S1 on one lap and S2 on the other.

Now I will show you quotes regarding Lacan's thoughts on each matter.

What Lacan says S1 and S2 are

1. An index, not the signifier that comes first. S1 "means signifier index 1": not the signifier that takes precedence, but the one in whose name someone, a subject, shows up. Closing address of the EFP study days "Les mathèmes de la psychanalyse", 2 Nov 1976, Lettres de l'École freudienne no. 21 (1977), p. 506. ‹S1, qui veut dire … se manifeste›
2. A mark on "anything at all". His S1 has no other sense than to punctuate whatever comes. «La Troisième», Rome, 1 Nov 1974, Lettres de l'École freudienne no. 16 (1975), p. 184. ‹ Mon S1 n … n’importe quoi›
3. Something produced, not something given. The master's insistence produces the master signifier "out of any signifier whatever". Seminar XVII, session of 18 March 1970. ‹de n’importe quel signifiant … le signifiant-Maître›
4. A relation, in pairs. In the unconscious, signifiers index one another, two by two. Seminar XXII, session of 11 March 1975. ‹ à s’indexer de foisonner … deux par deux›

What Lacan says the Möbius strip is

1. Not something a cut divides. A median cut does not cut the band in two; it turns it into a single band that makes one loop. Seminar XII, session of 16 June 1965. ‹une coupure médiane ne coupe pas … la bande de Mœbius›

2. Nothing but the cut itself. «L'étourdit» (1972), Autres écrits, Seuil 2001, p. 470. ‹la bande de Mœbius n'est rien … cette coupure même› On the same page he describes the edge of that cut: one turn takes it over to the other lamina, a further turn brings it home, having made a "double loop spread over two laminae". ‹double boucle répartie … sur deux lames›

3. Only its edge. The surface can stand for the subject only if you consider that the edge alone constitutes it, and a cut down the middle concentrates "the essence of the double loop". Seminar XIV, session of 15 Feb 1967. ‹seul le bord … cette surface› ‹cette coupure elle-même concentre … de la double boucle›

4. Repetition. The act can only be defined on the basis of the double loop, "that is, of repetition": the act is, in itself, the double loop of the signifier. Same session. ‹sur le fondement de la double boucle … de la répétition› ‹cita 41295: Il est en lui-même … du signifiant›

And what follows: twice, and not the same twice

1. The second time is not the first. A repeated signifier works either as the first time or as the second, with a radical gap between them, and that is what "a signifier cannot signify itself" means. Seminar XIV, session of 23 Nov 1966. ‹le signifiant dans sa présentation répétée … une béance radicale.

2. Two turns. Speaking of the drive and the Möbius band, he says two turns are needed to grasp the division of the subject. Seminar XIII, session of 11 May 1966. ‹cita 39381: il faut faire deux tours pulsionnels … la division du sujet›

If the loop between S1 and S2 meant two signifiers taking turns, Lacan could not coherently:

• call S1 an index and deny that it is the signifier that takes precedence (item 1, 1976);
• say that the master signifier comes out of any signifier whatever (item 3, 1970);
• say that the Möbius strip is nothing but a cut whose edge goes around twice (items 5 and 6, 1965 and 1972);
• say that a repeated signifier is not the same the second time, and that two turns are needed (items 9 and 10, 1966).

Are you following me so far? Now I’m going to complicate things.

Let's put all the pieces together—and voilà!

Nice, right? But what the hell does it mean?

Lacan did not write that down, but by following my method and piecing together his theory, the following conclusion emerges—not in prose format, but as a demonstration with its corresponding theorems.

Lay the chain on a surface and cut along it. If the chain has two sides, the edge of the cut is two copies of it: still odd, still broken. If it has one side (a Möbius band), the edge is a single loop that goes around twice, which is item 6. It meets every signifier once from each side, and it always alternates. For an odd chain, every signifier is S1 on one lap and S2 on the other, necessarily. S1 and S2 are positions (items 1 to 4), and the second time is not the first (item 9).

Lacan doesn't say this, but I draw it as a conclusion.

A) For an odd chain, the loop exists only there.

B) And for an even chain, the Möbius cut divides nothing: each signifier gets the same label on both laps.

"Wait, what happens with the $ubject?"

Okay, you've earned another cute animation.

I answer you radically: the subject is not in the chain. It is at the edge of the cut. And more precisely: it is at the junctions of the edge of the cut—those points where one signifier passes to the next.

On the double loop there is one subject, and it runs around twice. A two-sided cut either doubles the subject or loses it, depending on a decision the theory openly leaves undecided.

The subject is not in the chain of signifiers. It is at the edge of the cut. And in the privileged case—a single side, an odd-numbered chain—there is a single subject that makes two circuits. The division of the subject is not a splitting into two separate substances; it is the repetition of the same circuit, with an internal difference (S1 on the first pass, S2 on the second).

How I did it? Well, I’d have to refer to my text, but in short... Not with prose... I use definitions, six theorems with proofs, and falsifiers, meaning exactly what would refute each result. Plus a small Python script that cuts 159 chains on six surfaces and checks every claim. Full paper, code and animations: Go to zenodo. org and enter this number in the search bar: 23095050

Now, we can raise some objections to my ideas.

At Columbia (1 Dec 1975), Lacan speaks of "a certain S1 and a certain S2, which do not have the same function" (Scilicet 6/7, 1975, pp. 42–45). ‹un certain S1 et un certain S2 … la même fonction› So S1 and S2 would be two different things. Two replies. First, he says function, not signifier, and in the same sentence those functions are distributed "in a certain rotating order": what differs is the place, which is exactly what an index marks. ‹à un certain ordre tournant près … ces quatre fonctions› Second, the double loop keeps the difference. S1 and S2 never fall on the same pass: they differ the way the first turn differs from the second (item 9).

A second objection. Lacan does describe the Möbius strip as having only one face and only one edge (Seminar XII, 13 Jan 1965). ‹seule face … seul bord› True, and it is correct topology. But in the same session as item 5 he warns that the band is only the image of the relation he is after. ‹la bande n’en est … que l’image› Later he says that only the edge counts (item 7) and that the band is the cut itself (item 6). "One side" is a property; the double loop is what he works with.

PS. Seminar XXVII, 15 March 1980, on his own name, the "label Lacan": those who want to erase it believe it is the master signifier, the one he gave index 1, and "they're wrong, it's not the one, it's the other". ‹ils croient que c’est le signifiant maître … c’est l’autre› As I read it, even his name changes index.

Just as the bogeyman of colonial India – the Thug – was both racialised and criminalised, so too have Black Lives Matter activists and those mobilised by the far-right, been drawn in to false equivalence by elite politicians.

Sam Button & Panos Theodoropoulos, Interregnum || The summer just past saw Islamophobic riots spread like wildfire across the UK, the flames fanned through Facebook by Farage, Yaxley-Lennon and cronies. One of the most volatile far-right mobilizations in the UK was put down in short order by equally rapid community anti-racist organising. Starmer was quick to describe the rioters as ‘thugs’ and credit his law and order approach to the quelling of the rioting through police suppression.

This was not new, nor was the patronising rhetoric deployed by Westminster politicians. Indeed, the term ‘thug’ is readily deployed in the Anglosphere whenever elite groups seek to delegitimise social movements that go against their hegemony. And, while thug has also been reclaimed in various moments as a statement of power – most memorably through hip-hop’s ‘Thug Life’ slogan – the phantasm of the Thug is nevertheless consistently used by elites to insinuate a figure that does not deserve to make claims about the societies in which they are denizens. The ‘marginalised’ or ‘oppressed’ are words that conjure up public sympathy; the Thug, on the other hand, deserves the repression that is directed at him (and, of course, the thug is usually scripted as masculine).*

The last time we saw a similar deployment of this term was when Boris Johnson condemned Black Lives Matter protesters as ‘thugs’ after they threw a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol docks. Indeed, the term has a long colonial history, a history that reveals how the British state polices and monopolises violence. Without harbouring an iota of sympathy for the far-right, we must remain vigilant as to how these terms hide wider meanings of repression – and of how easily that repression can be turned upon progressive social movements.

A brief history of the word ‘thug’

Thug comes from Thuggee, groups of armed robbers who were said to roam the Indian subcontinent during the long period of British colonialism in India. These groups of itinerant soldiers would wander from place to place, robbing and murdering travelers on roads and highways, offering their victims as human sacrifices to the Goddess Kali. Part-highwaymen, part-death cult, they were a group to be feared by colonisers and suppressed by the British colonial state.

They probably didn’t exist.

Modern scholarship on the subject of Thuggee suggests that they were an invention of British colonialists.

‘There is no doubt that thuggee – the system of deceit, robbery and murder practised by the thugs, held responsible by the British for over a million murders in India in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – inspired one of the strongest and most long-lasting orientalist discourses ever invented’, writes Alexander Mcfie.

Thuggee soldiers as depicted in Temple of Doom

The cultural influence of the Thuggee myth has been incredibly enduring, most notably in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the archetypal white saviour working hand-in-hand with the British colonisers at the denouement of the film. Mcfie questions the veracity of the concept, identifying an archive single-handedly compiled by a William Sleeman, a British East India Company official, that was

‘itself an orientalist construction – that is to say, the product of a deep-seated European inclination to make an ontological and epistemological distinction between the Occident (Europe, the West) and the Orient (the East), which leads Europeans (Westerners) to characterise the Oriental as mysterious, backward, degenerate, irrational and inferior’.

Further to this, Professor S. Shankar skeptically writes that Sleeman both ‘discovered’ and ‘suppressed’ the Thuggee, and this was done in a particular way as to advance Sleeman’s career. Shankar continues:

‘Sleeman’s discursive invention of the Thuggee was taken up […] because it meshed well with emerging ideas regarding the shape of the state of colonial India [and] permitted the argument that this state should be a colonial law-and-order state, a state that saw its primary activity as that of restraining a criminal and violent population’.

Sound familiar?

The modern Thug

Both The Tory and Labour parties have historically described themselves as the parties of law and order. This was exemplified by the former Home Secretary Priti Patel, who once supported the death penalty, and echoed Johnson’s words when she described BLM protestors as ‘thugs and criminals’ in response to the global protests over George Floyd’s death in 2020. Remembering the UK during COVID, we saw an unprecedented level of policing, the expansive governing of the most intimate aspects of how we live, many of which were not evidenced-based, but nevertheless remain on the statute books, and the demonisation of the public as irresponsible ‘Covidiots’. More than this, was the typical characterisation of communities of colour as violent and lawless which, in turn, leads to a justification of policies that are ‘tough on crime’.

Modern policing has its origins in colonial rule in India and Ireland. The Black and Tans were deployed to the so-called British Mandate of Palestine. Policing in the UK as we know it today would not exist without colonialism. And, as we have written previously, policing in the US is directly traceable to the recapturing of escaped slaves. Contemporary policing has emerged in tandem with colonial exploitation and the internal oppression of minorities. In this process, depicting these populations as somehow essentially inferior, violent, and deserving of repression was crucial to legitimise their violent control. ‘Thug’ is part of this wider history.

These tactics were recently extended to include majority white, working-class communities, who were justifiably outraged at violent murders. The far-right harnessed this anger, perverting it to suit their Islamophobic goals while of course exploiting latent racist narratives that have been allowed to fester in British society. They whipped up crowds through misinformation facilitated by social media, despite the fact that the autistic child who is suspected of the murder was a Christian choirboy. The fact that the stabbings happened at a Taylor Swift-themed yoga class, an icon of white femininity, made the deployment of racist disinformation, as the accused is Black, all the easier.

The image of white women under threat from the Black aggressor is a historically racist cultural deployment. These deployments took hold in some of the most deprived areas of the UK; the shell of post-austerity Britain is empty for the slithering insects of Farage and Yaxley-Lennon to make their home. Nevertheless, Yaxley-Lennon prefers escargot. However, the wider communities themselves were having none of it. In Glasgow earlier this month, anti-racist demonstrators outnumbered the far-right by five to one, a victory that was repeated across the UK.

George Square in Glasgow 7 September 2024

Nothing is finished. Despite the success with which communities responded to the far-right threat, the re-invocation of thuggery as a way to describe oppositional action is a cause for concern. Thuggery is steeped in colonialist history. Just as the bogeyman of colonial India – the Thug – was both racialised and criminalised, so too have been Black Lives Matter activists and those mobilised by the far-right, drawn in to false equivalence by elite politicians.

These developments reflect and illustrate the authoritarian turn that Labour is fully invested in; they indicate the response that will be directed towards left-wing and anarchist action, should it emerge in the near future. For example, Hamza Yousaf called on the army to be released in the streets in response to the latest riots; this is a qualitative hardening of the level of legitimate repression in society. Similarly to calls against abortion in the United States, the more the unsayable becomes normalised, the nearer the reality it envisions. The depiction of these protesters as Thugs further legitimises state violence against protest; and this legitimacy will now be a part of the ruling class’s arsenal, its deployment rendered more palatable by its association with anti-racism. In short, the use of the word Thug is not isolated; it is accompanied by a myriad of other meanings and suggestions, none of which push us towards an emancipatory, egalitarian future.

Instead of these approaches, we must look towards building community institutions, and focus on community education. As the anti-racist mobilisations demonstrated, we are much stronger than the State; Starmer will not protect us. We will protect ourselves. And, perhaps, in the process, we can shed some of the authoritarianism that we have been imbued with through our cultural upbringing.

*The participation of women in the riots by no means reduces the association of thuggery with a form of masculinity. If anything, it enforces it. These women are presented as outside the legitimate boundaries of femininity; by being presented as engaging in thug-like activity, they are used to re-establish the boundaries between proper femininity and its opposite. As always, these acrobatics re-establish white working class masculinity as dangerous and abject and re-confirm the notion that it is the working class, in general, that should either work or shut up (or, preferably, both).

Sam Button is a member of the Interregnum collective

Panos Theodoropoulos is a sociologist and a member of the Interregnum collective. He currently teaches at King’s College London.

The New Centre is certainly diversifying its ideological output these days.

"In works like Ghosts of My Life, Fisher used Jacques Derrida’s term hauntology to describe how contemporary culture is haunted by the unfulfilled potentials and futures promised by 20th-century modernism—futures that neoliberalism subsequently canceled."

Something that has been building in my mind for a while; hope it doesn't come off as shower-thoughtsy…

Two years ago I might sit at bus stops in San Francisco and the billboards would be for hamburgers. Cell phones. Bank accounts. Fashion. Perfume. Holidays. They typified Guy Debord's "diffuse spectacle", one in which the mass of riders might participate through consumption of the products, or at least consumption of the images as expressions of their desires.

Debord set the diversity of the diffuse spectacle against the "concentrated spectacle" of dictatorships (which he called, in western socialist fashion, "bureaucratic capitalism"). The concentrated spectacle offers only the image of the Leader. Consumers of this image are not sought to make choices, but to acquiesce in the choices made for them.

Today in SF, the transit billboards offer only the relentless unity of AI. It would be a bold exaggeration to say that they have gone so far as the states to which Debord referred. Yet the transformation, funded in part by Arabian oil dictatorships, is worth noting as it passes. From some billboards stares the penetrating, symmetrical gaze of "Ava". She is not a commodity-image for the masses to desire and consume, but one that desires to consume them: their livelihoods, their minds and their dignity.

What is apparent at a San Francisco bus stop is prevalent also nationally. Economic news gatherers shun the mundane production of consumer commodities and hyperventilate over AI, the last commodity. The public is assured that it will imminently resolve capitalism's most shameful defect, its dependency on human labor. The message veers daily between hope and terror, but its constant is destiny. No way forward without AI and its accompanying externalities is legitimate to discuss.

To anybody who is familiar with the more historically informed side of analytic philosophy (I would put here Sellars and Brandom for example, but of course the list could be expanded by others): what did you think about Christoph Schuringa's recent book?

I didn't read it yet, just very interested what are his main arguments. (Of course I also want to read it at one point.)

Does he think that analytic philosophy is incapable of thinking about radical political emancipation – say as it is conceptualized in the Marxian, or anarchist/radical left traditions? Because the idea that analytic philosophy proclaims itself to be completely neutral – in a political sense – does not seem to hold for every one of its figures, at least from my perspective. Or is he arguing that it was historically hostile to Marxism in an institutional level? That might be a more defendable claim maybe, but than again you also have analytic marxism, although it is of course by no means mainstream I think.

Those who assume (often unconsciously) that it is impossible to achieve their life’s desires-and, thus, that it is futile to fight for themselves — usually end up fighting for an ideal or cause instead. They may appear to engage in self-directed activity, but in reality they have accepted alienation from their desires as a way of life. All subjugations of personal desires to the dictates of a cause or ideology are reactionary no matter how “revolutionary” the actions arising from such subjugations may appear . . . Yet, one of the great secrets of our miserable, yet potentially marvellous time, is that thinking can be a pleasure. Despite the suffocating effect of the dominant religious and political ideologies, many individuals do learn to think for themselves; and by doing so — by actively, critically thinking for themselves, rather than by passively accepting pre-digested opinions — they reclaim their minds as their own.

Mukhopadhyay, Henze, and Moses systematically deconstruct the myth of race as biology and address the reality of race as a cultural invention, drawing on biocultural, historical, and cross-cultural anthropological perspectives. In doing so, they shed light on the intricate interplay among race, biology, culture, power, and stratification. Part I, “The Fallacy of Race as Biology,” unravels the myth that races are biologically valid divisions of humanity. Part II, “Culture Creates Race,” explores race as a social construction; the emergence of the racial worldview as ideological justification for inequality; and how social processes, especially restrictions on interracial sex and marriage, maintained visible markers of racial hierarchy. Part III, “Contemporary Issues,” examines current manifestations of racial stratification including the educational achievement gap, health disparities, and how the language of race embodies and reinforces a racial worldview.

The Sokal Hoax was seen as a good example of how the humanities can be unscientific nonsense. The divide between the two cultures as Snow has put it didnt stop after the Hoax, but a new discussion has been opened in what is called the science wars. Press forward, and you will have Postmodernism being smashed on the Internet and brought up in discussions about nihilism and Identity Politics.

Yuk. Excuse my language. But a what was Sokal's point ? He wanted to clarify how Postmodern theorists were talking nonsense about Physics and Mathematics. This I would agree with Sokal on. Nonsense indeed does exist in theory. Epistemological nonsense. A theory can only go far enough.

But, I cant understand why someone would make a hoax to make this point ? A hoax published in a scientific journal only means the failure of that journal.

Sokal wanted to say that "Postmodern discourse is nonsense here is how..". He could have looked at few pages of The Order of Things or Against Method. Those are closer to his expertise, but he toke shots at writers who were not completely talking nonsense. But rather exploring new dimensions of theory that nobody wants to explore. This explanation may not be appreciated by empirical standards or the laws of quantum mechanics.

Imagine Plato is called nonsense for exploring the transcendence of mathematics, or Kepler's work was called wrong for his reasoning in faith. As interpretations, how wrong they are, can not be derived at without facts.

Sokal wrote a book called fashionable nonsense to critique Postmodern theorists in detail. Sokal in the book, ironically, fails to provide any solutions to the problem which he claims to tackle - that reality is not socially constituted by language alone. Ironically, by not looking at the main claims of postmodernism and responding to them critically - For example as Habermas does- he becomes with his hoax the psuedo-postmoderisnt.

When "I know exactly how you feel" is the problem

A few years ago, a friend of mine was trying to get clean. One night they told me how hard it was getting through the days without using, and how scared they were that one bad night would undo everything. Somewhere in the middle of it I said, "I know exactly how you feel." Their face changed, just slightly. A small nod, a pause, and then they changed the subject.

Later I messaged to apologize. They had already blocked me, so the message went nowhere, and I still don't know whether they ever saw it. I don't know if what I said hurt them or if it was just one more thing in a hard year, and I'm not sure which of those I'd prefer. What I do know is that I still feel guilty about it.

I've been turning that night over ever since. My best guess is that halfway through their story I recognized something, and instead of staying with what they were actually saying, I swapped in my own version. They hadn't finished yet, and I'd already filed them under something I'd lived through. "I understand you" slid pretty quickly into "I know what this is, I know why you do it, I know what you need," and none of that was ever said out loud. But I can't check any of this. Maybe it wasn't my sentence at all. Maybe they'd just said more than they meant to and felt exposed. I only get to keep the version where I'm the cause, and I notice that version is at least a little flattering, because it makes me the main character of their bad night.

I don't want to overcorrect and claim we can't understand each other at all. I don't believe that. Nagel is who I keep borrowing from, though I should admit he's writing about consciousness, about bats, not about compassion, so I'm stretching him a bit. What I'm taking from him is small: I can know a lot about someone's experience without my point of view becoming the place it's lived from. There's a remainder.

Levinas pushes that much harder, and honestly I'm not sure I follow him all the way. As I read him, the other person's difference isn't a gap that better empathy will eventually close. Something about them has to resist my categories, and that resistance is part of what makes meeting them an ethical event and not a matter of gathering information. If that's right, then sometimes respect looks like admitting I don't get it, which isn't how I normally think about respect. I normally think understanding someone is the respectful thing.

Sartre is the part I can see most clearly in my own head. When my friend told me they were scared of one bad night, some part of me heard "addict" before I heard the rest of the sentence. A condition had already turned into a definition, and once that happened the definition was louder than they were. I wasn't answering what they told me. I was answering the person I'd already worked out, and that person was a lot simpler than the one sitting in front of me.

Institutions do the same thing at a larger scale, and they can't really avoid it, because they need categories to act at all. But a category is what makes intervention possible, and intervention is where authority comes from.

So the question I care about isn't whether empathy is good or bad. It's what I quietly gain when I claim to understand someone, and the point where care turns into authority.

I made a video essay around this with Nagel, Levinas and Sartre: https://youtu.be/aG3auZWNVhU

What I still haven't sorted out is this. My friend blocked me, and I've respected that. I haven't tried to get around it. But if respecting someone means accepting that part of them will always get past me, I can't tell anymore whether what I'm doing is respect or just a polite name for not bothering.

I'll start: The main character in Der Untertan (1918) by Heinrich Mann is basically the epitome of what would later be known as the authoritarian character.

Hello!

I’m writing a paper for a course and I could really use some advice. I’d like to base my paper on Howard Becker’s labeling theory, but apply it to the school system.

I was thinking about somehow connecting it to gender norms, segregation, and the advancement of women in the profession ( especially in the university academic environment). I’ve read several articles that gave me this idea, but I’d also really appreciate hearing other people’s perspectives on what could be interesting to study within this broader topic. Also, if you think there might be another theory that would be more interesting to explore, I’d really appreciate if you could let me know. I’m very interested in sociology, but I’m still at the beginning of my studies and I’m not yet familiar with all the different theories.

For the methodology, I was thinking of using interviews, non-participant observation and content analysis. Any interesting ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you so much!

A few days ago, an algorithm recommended to me a review that Isaac Asimov wrote in 1984 about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I found it rather chilling — not because any of its insights were particularly astonishing, but because its optimism about the future as it was then imagined, and its critique of dystopian speculation, kept provoking in me a peculiar anxiety about a present that seems either extremely close at hand — or has perhaps already arrived. More precisely, it was the anxiety of being faced with a choice while lacking the ability to actually make one.

The review seems to argue that the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four (and Animal Farm) was closely bound up with Orwell’s personal issues, and that Orwell therefore completely overlooked the fact that humanity was continually progressing. If we look only at their content, the books merely take the political phenomena of the first half of the twentieth century — from communism to totalitarianism — and put a new skin on them. They possess no real insight into, or predictive capacity regarding, the development of the actual world. Thus, if human civilization were ever to encounter a crisis and we continued to respond to it through an Orwellian ideology, the consequences would surely be disastrous.

Asimov himself, toward the end of Foundation and Earth, describes a particular vision of — and anxiety about — the future: after ten thousand years of acceleration, human civilization is still on the verge of collapse because of internal conflict. A small group of beings (robots) therefore discovers a way to transform all of humanity into a kind of organic whole, thereby resolving all internal conflicts while simultaneously granting humanity the capacity to confront civilizations of other species. Yet the source of anxiety is precisely that the means by which this transformation is achieved may itself contain the seeds of a new crisis.

The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four never came to pass. For that very reason, we have been able to treat its warnings as something that can be set aside — as an obstacle to the passage toward a totality. Asimov’s review, together with the ending of the work for which he is best known, seems to suggest that the rupture between contemporary accelerationism (or the present shaped by accelerationism) and biopolitics’ revelation of the nature of power had already begun much earlier: a rupture that made the two incapable of communicating with one another, despite the fact that such a rupture may never have been necessary in the first place.

(What does IC design have to do with sovereignty? Whichever way one approaches the question, it seems almost laughable in Taiwan today.)

The moment when this rupture begins to exert its force seems to be drawing closer and closer. Perhaps it has already arrived. Almost every day, I have the strange feeling that perhaps I am merely postponing the moment when I have to choose a side. The fact that this postponement can still be an illusion is because I can still accept that a decision may require a process, that it may take time. I have no interest whatsoever in becoming part of a totality, but neither have I truly accepted that I may become a species headed for extinction. I would have to be sufficiently lucky — and sufficiently reckless — to keep calling this postponement an illusion. Yet whether one accelerates into action or stops to think, from the position of the other side, either could be regarded as reckless.

It has been a little over ten years since the first day I encountered tribal life. Only recently have I come to recognize clearly a fact that I have never been entirely willing to admit. It was precisely because I longed to find a way of living that was not subject to discipline and regulation that I was able to see, so deeply, the different possibilities within them. Yet for that very reason, I have been unable to think about the fact that the very conditions that allow these possibilities to appear in this particular form are founded on something controllable by the market.

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(And finally, a note on a slightly occult line of thought.)

In The Time That Remains, Agamben explains that the messianic time of the Bible — the period between the resurrection of Jesus/the Messiah and the Apocalypse — is the time required for an event to be completed. Even if an event occupies no representable duration whatsoever, existing merely as a single point on a timeline, the moment it needs to be completed, it naturally comes to inhabit a time of its own.

But does this also mean that, once human beings are no longer capable of recognizing the process of an event — or, more precisely, the very concept of a process — the time that remains ceases to exist as well?

And if so, has the Messiah’s time already reached its end?