Jason Read @Unemployedneg Twitter profile

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Jason Read

1 month

The good folks at E-Flux have published an excerpt from The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work. @VersoBooks

Losing Strategies: Spinoza and Marx - Notes - e-flux

Jason Read shows how Spinoza and Marx illuminate the passivity of laboring subject.

www.e-flux.com

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

One year ago today this site peaked.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

The verdict was surprising: if only there was some kind of Theory that could help us Critically understand how the law can enforce Racial hierarchies while supposedly being formally indifferent to them.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

If a picture is worth a thousand words then this one is an entire Philip K. Dick story.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

1 year

Sick days being a perk like health insurance being a benefit just underscores the fact that under capitalism you are a worker first and a living human being second.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 months

RIP Derrida, You would have loved the concept of "truly foreign languages," spoken by nobody.

Acyn

@Acyn

2 months

Trump: People who don't speak languages. We have languages coming in to our country, nobody that speaks those languages. They're truly foreign languages. Nobody speaks them

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

This picture from the aftermath of the Kentucky tornadoes has to be the picture of the year, or the last few years. It is as if the screen that shielded us from seeing so much brutality has been ripped off and we are forced to see what we have for so long avoided.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

We should follow Dicken's example and make Christmas Eve a night of terrifying the ruling class until they change their ways.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 months

This is the current historical sequence we are living in. Someone produces a product that makes a profit; finance or hedge funds take notice and take over with the idea that they could make more money; things gets worse; and then DEI is blamed as the most immediate scapegoat.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

I don't want to kink shame but I think that this publicity still of Spielberg and ET is about 80% more sexy than it really needs to be.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

That a book being banned from a library leads to the same book becoming a bestseller on Amazon might be good news about the limits of censorship, but it is still bad news about the privatization of the cultural commons.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

1 year

The dirtbag left/anti-woke left to fascist pipeline is so fast that it is practically a waterslide.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

4 years

Now might be a good time to permanently abandon the notion that unemployment is some kind of personal moral failure.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

People dying in increasing numbers as a vaccine is on the way underscores one of the basic facts of life under capitalism: no matter what technological wonders the forces of production create, the relations of production will squander it all.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

When I was younger the idea of revolution, a complete transformation of politics and society, seemed rebellious and cool; now that I am older, and more mature, I think a total revolution is necessary if we simply want to go on living at all.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

28 days

If you tell me that you are “against violence” then I will assume that you are against war, police, and prisons; if you have no problem with those things and are only against violence as protest then I will conclude that it is not really violence that you are opposed to.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

1 year

Is there anyway I can opt out of this plan where we all keep getting Covid again and again until we die prematurely of a stroke or heart attack? Is there some box I can check? How do I unsubscribe from the death cult of capitalism in decline?

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

10 months

When people who are well off speak up to criticize the exploitation at the heart of capitalism they are considered hypocrites; when the poor speak up they are considered to be bitter losers. They end result is that no one can say anything at all.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

The opening of Mills' Racial Contract is a powerful indictment of philosophy as it is taught. I always read it out loud to my class when I teach it

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

Even a cursory scan of American culture reveals a people that is at once so soft, incapable of withstanding even the slightest inconvenience, and so hard, brutally indifferent to the suffering of others...

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

I dreamt that someone keyed Derrida's car and he gave a whole lecture about the key as both the condition of the car's ignition and ruination, the thing that starts it is also what destroys it.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

First they came for Kant and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Kantian, then they came for Dickens and to be honest at that point I didn’t understand what the fuck was going on anymore

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

4 years

Judith Butler: “Gender is performative.” Person wiring together an elaborate and dangerous pyrotechnics display that will fill the sky with luminous blue flame: “Well then I will give them the performance of a lifetime.”

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

5 years

Today is Marx's birthday, tomorrow is Freud's. At midnight tonight if you stand in front of a mirror with a copy of Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and say surplus repression three times the ghost of Michel Foucault will appear and lecture you about the repressive hypothesis.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

One of the things that I will always love about the Matrix films is that its villains are evil for keeping the world just as it is in its daily banality rather than for having some grandiose plan to change it.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

8 months

Today is the anniversary of Walter Benjamin's tragic death, an important reminder that you can be unemployable for most of your life, die while trying to flee fascist persecution, and still become an entire publishing niche decades after your death. There is hope, just not for us

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

1 year

Pretty in Pink. This will be the paperback cover coming out in June.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

Walter Benjamin was contemplating some dark stuff when he wrote his famous line that "not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious," but I am pretty sure even he wasn't thinking about cops attacking funeral processions and beating pallbearers.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

Today is Walter Benjamin's birthday, an important reminder that you can be unemployable for most of your life, die while trying to flee fascist persecution, and still become an entire publishing niche decades after your death. There is hope, just not for us.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

1 month

Félix Guattari was born 94 years ago today. He once wrote an essay titled "Everyone wants to be a Fascist" which everyday seems less like hyperbole and more like prophecy.

What Taylor Swift Taught Me About Fascism - Notes - e-flux

Jason Read on Alberto Toscano and micro-fascism.

www.e-flux.com

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

4 years

Not even Theodor Adorno would come up with something as dark as Disneyworld opening in the middle of a pandemic.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

10 months

Today is Walter Benjamin's birthday, an important reminder that you can be unemployable for most of your life, die while trying to flee fascist persecution, and still become an entire publishing niche decades after your death. There is hope, just not for us.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

9 months

I honestly think that faculty in the humanities should be more concerned with how ChatGPT is going to deskill writing than how it is going to enable plagiarism.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 months

I saw Dune 2 this afternoon. I have opinions, but this piece by Vicky Osterweil does a better job than I could do of talking not just about this film, but the particular aesthetic moment we are living in.

Image Without Metaphor

Dune Part Two and the Return of Socialist Realism We are living through an era of thudding cultural literalism. In our narrative products (movies, TV and to a lesser but noticeable extent, novels)...

all-cats-are-beautiful.ghost.io

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

4 years

20th Century: Socialism or Barbarism 21st Century: Communism or Extinction

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 months

I am only half joking when I say that the decline of the training montage in contemporary martial arts films is related to the effacement of work and collectivity in contemporary society. John Wick emerges like a commodity, fully formed.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 months

What pressing questions will the daring minds of the University of Chicago contemplate next?

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

1 year

Badiou and Deleuze were born a day a part (in different years), Foucault and Nietzsche were born on the same day (years apart), and Marx and Freud were born a day a part (in different years as well): the history of philosophy is a conspiracy to get me to believe in astrology.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

"There has not in living memory been a better time to be a fascist. We live in a utopia: it just isn’t ours." China Mieville

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

4 months

The idea that education can produce "good jobs" as a counterweight to capitalism's tendency to make bad jobs (through deskilling, precarity, and outsourcing) is something no educated person should believe. (Yet it is the central mission of every educational institution)

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

1 year

I forget who said this, but someone on this site mentioned that most of what happens in majors like business and leadership are basically watered down humanities, reading, writing, oral presentations, made to look marketable and stripped of any critical dimension.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

Dear Penguin, It would be great if we could pick our own meme covers when we order our course books.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

Today is Walter Benjamin's birthday, an important reminder that you can be unemployable for most of your life, die while trying to flee fascist persecution, and still become an entire publishing industry decades after your death. There is hope, just not for us.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

4 years

@sjjphd I had the exact same thing happen. A student referred to “wages for housework” as a late 1900s development in feminism. I went to correct them, but then realized that there was nothing wrong with making me feel old.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

11 months

In news that will delight about half of my friends on this site (and piss off the other half) this is the image that @VersoBooks is putting out to promote my book coming out this February.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

I think Agamben just seems to be an extreme case of how off the rails and out of touch a political philosophy can be if it focuses on the power of the state and not of capital (which is to say most of what counts as political philosophy).

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

1 year

The idea that students learn more if the syllabus includes clearly stated learning outcomes and objectives is like believing that food is more nutritious if you read the nutrient breakdown on the box while eating it.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

The cultural domination of fantasy over science fiction that we are currently living through just seems to be symptomatic of the broader turn towards fascism.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

4 years

Today is Walter Benjamin's birthday, an important reminder that you can be unemployable for most of your life, die while trying to flee fascist persecution, and still become an entire publishing niche decades after your death. There is hope, just not for us.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

Flashback to that time I went as an Althusser essay for Halloween.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

5 years

Conservatives: “Why do these adjunct professors with no job security, no benefits, and poverty wages find Marx so compelling? It must be a vast conspiracy.”

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 months

Jeremy Bentham couldn't even dream this

H0W_THlNGS_W0RK

@HowThingsWork_

3 months

Dystopian. This coffee shop uses AI to measure the productivity of their employees & also the time spent in the shop per customer. ☕️

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

10 months

If the Napoleon movie does not have a scene of Hegel rushing to finish the Phenomenology of Spirit I am going to be disappointed. It is precisely that kind of easter egg that the fans have come to expect.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

4 years

If your Marxism is predicate on nostalgia for past forms and terms of organizing and struggle with no reflection on how conditions of production have changed the conditions of struggle then it is just moralizing nostalgia or revolutionary cosplay.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

I was able to endure Foucault is a postmodernist, put up with Adorno and Gramsci started cultural Marxism to destroy the west, but this Kant started CRT discourse is going to break me (and I am not even a Kantian)

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

When someone rejects a vaccine because they consider it experimental but embraces experimental or even fringe treatments for the same disease they are not being hypocrites: they are perfectly clear—any risk is too great to help others but no risk is too great to save themselves.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

Apologies for the shameless self-promotion, but I just signed and submitted my contract with Verso books for the forthcoming "The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics and Ideology of Work."

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

Doing this while hoarding the world’s vaccine supply is an impressive accomplishment

Yoshie Furuhashi

@yoshiefuruhashi

2 years

“The Americas and Europe accounted for 80 percent of COVID-19 deaths globally, even though they represent only about a quarter of the world's population.”

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

Apparently this coin is given to Disneyland security employees as some kind of reward. I am unclear on the details, but I feel like it is the entire historical moment we are living through stamped out into a coin.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

Posting some wholesome culture industry content: Lily Latté with her cat, Theodor Adorno with his dog, and Fritz Lang with his pet opossum.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

Yes, I'm into BDSM. Balibar, Deleuze, Spinoza, Marx.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

4 years

What is happening to the US Post Office now is familiar to anyone who has worked a state university in the last thirty years: someone from private industry is brought in with promises of "efficiency" that are nothing other than undermining the very purpose of the institution.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

7 months

Today is Nietzsche and Foucault's birthday. A professor in undergrad once said Foucault was Nietzsche if Nietzsche did his homework, and I still do not know who was supposed to be insulted by that more.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

11 months

"I tried to warn you about mercenaries, bro"

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

4 months

Marx wrote that the in each epoch “the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class,” but he neglected to add that those ideas are dumb as fuck because the ruling class are a bunch of idiots.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

God was the first to invent a guy and then get mad at him.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

6 months

Look what came in the mail today. Coming soon to mailboxes everywhere.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

There are two kinds of students that come to office hours: the first looks at the bookshelves and asks “did you read all of those?” The second is unable to make eye contact because they are checking out the books.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

Jürgen Habermas is an abysmally bad writer for someone who claims to be all about communicative rationality.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

Everyday I come back to the same maddening thought. By all accounts Delta and Omicron were made possible by the prioritizing pharmaceutical intellectual property over global distribution and nothing...almost nothing at all...has been done to change that.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

@adamkotsko I think this also explains the constant panic around higher education. It is not that universities lack a diversity of perspectives; it is that none of these positions can withstand any serious scrutiny.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

10 months

In our language now we have a slew of terms, limousine liberal, virtue signaling, white knighting, etc. which mainly function to illustrate how foreign the concept of solidarity is to us.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

If you got vaccinated, stayed masked, and socially distanced and are frustrated about how little a difference your individual actions made in the face of a collective decision to ignore the pandemic, just wait until you discover the effects of your actions on climate change

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

24 days

You'd think Ivy League schools calling the cops on their own students would at least put an end to the idiotic "woke has overtaken our universities" panic, but it won't.

samuel catlin

@lint_ax

24 days

Genuinely one of the most disgusting documents in the history of American higher education

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

4 years

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” - David Graeber, 1961-2020

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

“You’d be quite mistaken in fancying that I am fond of books; I am a machine condemned to devour them and, then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dung hill of history.” Karl Marx to Laura in 1868.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

Getting closer to being a reality.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

Got my copies today.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

Capitalism’s most pernicious lie is not that the market is human nature, as Jameson once argued, but the idea that suffering and privation are necessary conditions of any progress at all—that without the threat of going hungry no one would do anything

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

10 months

I do not understand how everyone with children is not constantly freaking out about the future of global warming. I am freaking out about my dog's future and he is nine years old.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

"Zoom makes it possible for one to teach classes in the morning, attend a conference in the afternoon, and hang out with friends in the evening--without ever leaving the fucking screen." Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (Translation modified)

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

5 months

First they came for the university Presidents, and although I did not have much sympathy for the way those same presidents had overseen a regime of adjunctification, neoliberal austerity, and gutting of higher education it still seemed really fucked up and scary.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

I still get a laugh out of this

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

5 years

People who dismiss academia as an ivory tower overlook its innovations: universities were paying adjuncts poverty wages when Uber was barely a dream.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

10 months

I got my copy of the beautiful softcover today. @haymarketbooks

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

It is Nietzsche and Foucault’s birthday, if you say “genealogy” in front of the mirror three times someone from Jacobin will smack you with Losirdo’s book and yell neoliberalism

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

Etienne Balibar wrote hundreds of pages arguing that universalism can be a form of racism, drawing from Hegel, Marx, and Spinoza; the "All Lives Matter" crowd made the same point with just three words.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

I think that a life spent studying something, no matter how niche or obscure it might be, is probably better for the individual, for society, and even the planet than developing some new thing to market or produce.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

5 months

It is weird to me that people are writing soul searching essays questioning why students are abandoning the humanities when the answer "going into massive debt to learn skills that have been replaced by a plagiarism machine does not have much appeal" is right there.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

5 months

Criticizing Object Oriented Ontology at this point just seems like flogging a dead horse (of course that dead horse has to be understood as in some sense an agent, situated in a network of relations it transforms the road and is itself an ecosystem for insects and microbes).

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

Etienne Balibar wrote hundreds of pages arguing that universalism can be a form of racism, drawing from Hegel, Marx, and Spinoza; the "All Lives Matter" crowd made the same point with just three words.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

8 months

My forthcoming book is now up on Verso Books website.

The Double Shift

Even as the rewards of work decline and its demands on us increase, many people double-down on their commitment to wage slavery—working harder, doing overtime, and learning to hustle. To paraphrase...

www.versobooks.com

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

"The widespread prejudice that philosophy is something which is very difficult because it is the intellectual activity of a specific category of specialist scholars or of professional and systematic philosophers must be destroyed. -"Antonio Gramsci born January 22, 1891

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

Hegel responds to those who say “I do my own research. “

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

"The liberal outcry after a period of reaction is always in proportion to the enormity of the liberal cowardice that for years left the field clear for reaction." --Marx, Herr Vogt

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

2 years

I just finished the book on the left which makes a strong case that transphobia is the entry point into fascist thought as the naturalization of sex leads to other “natural hierarchies.” Next up the book on the right.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

3 years

Just as Deleuze argued that Foucault saw discipline as it was waning, Mark Fisher's idea of capitalist realism seems more and more like something he glimpsed as it was in decline; it has been replaced by capitalist nihilism.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

4 months

Author copies arrived! Bento added for scale. @VersoBooks

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

19 days

The images of students at the Columbia occupation having a Passover Seder and NYU Faculty forming a line between the police and their students are visions of the kind of solidarity that the entrenched and powerful will tell you is impossible and utopian.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

11 months

It seems unfair that Marxism is the only philosophy that regularly gets the adjective "vulgar" attached to it as if there are not vulgar Nietzscheans saying everything is will to power, vulgar Hobbesians seeing only competition and conflict, and vulgar Foucauldians...etc.

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Jason Read

@Unemployedneg

1 year

@RottenInDenmark I was tired of the virtue signaling of college conversations so I went to a bogus university that is a symbol in a made up conflict about free speech.

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