“The Power of the Powerless” by Vaclav Havel. “To the memory of Jan Patocka,” October 1978 —
To think about how solidarity is expressed as a relationship with others— and a relationship between the mind and its private commitments.
“Solidarity” by Adam Mazur —
To remember that thinking, itself, makes ethics possible.
“Dissidence and Rhetoric” by Slavenka Drakulic —
To acknowledge that thinking is a duty humans must exercise.
“The Inferno of Saviors: Notes in the Margins of Elias Canetti’s Lifework” by Corina Stan —
To refuse the thoughtlessness of Elias Canetti’s crowds. And to accept the loneliness that comes from such refusals.
“Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work” by Kathi Weeks —
To read against the grain. To theorize the impossible possibilities.
“Crip Negativity” by J. Logan Smidges —
To study and learn from heteropessimism, crip negativity, and various forms of skeptical inquiry that reject the affective gestures and hierarchies of late capitalism.
“A Bus Full of Prophets: Adventures of the Eastern-European Intelligentsia” by Adam Zagajewski —
To get off the bus advertising salvific promises. To question the premises of ‘saviors’.
“A prehistory of post-truth, East and West” by Marci Shore —
To speak from within Elias Canetti's "Ovidian ideal of mutual imagination and inhabitation," as imagined by Joshua Cohen.
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—
To interrogate the narrative source in relation to power. To ask who benefits from a particular narrative history.
“Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’)” by Hélène Cixous —
To note who determines which part of a social movement or gesture becomes an “event.”
“Lying and History” by Cathy Carruth—
To read every single national border as one would read the sky for weather.
“Mark Fisher and Reimagining Postcapitalist Geographies” by Callum Sutherland—
To engage nostalgia in order to resist its pernicious formulations.
“Resisting Left Melancholy” by Wendy Brown—
To situate the reading among the complex forces that determine human behaviors rather than attempt to “rise above” such determinants.
“Voices From Chernobyl” by Svetlana Alexievch —
“A poet should try, no matter the cost, to preserve a gift that once was inherent but now has atrophied, and he should do so in order to keep open the doors between people—himself and others. He must be capable of becoming everyone: the smallest, the most naive, the most powerless. But this desire to experience others from within can never be determined by the goals that compose what we call our normal or official lives. This desire would have to be completely free from any hope of success or achievement; it would have to constitute its own desire: the desire for metamorphosis.”