My response to Todd Cronan’s book, Red Aesthetics: Rodchenko, Brecht, Eisentstein, was just published in The Tank via Nonsite, along with several others.

Excerpt: “Indeed, art can draw on the full breadth of sense perception to engage with and remodel people’s lived experience, cultivate an accurate comprehension of the social totality, and ultimately bring them into a collective process of world making. Would Cronan agree with the suggestion that this very expansive understanding of an accurate depiction of reality—which includes a dialectically entwined relationship between perception, comprehension, and practice—is operative in red aesthetics? [read more]”

In my latest article, which is part of my book project on the Intellectual World War, I explain how Žižek rose to fame in the global theory industry by promoting pomo radlib theory against “the global solution-revolution” of “Marxism” (his words). He refers to communism as “maybe the worst catastrophe in the history of humanity” (sic). No wonder he’s the (capitalist) world’s most famous “Marxist”! He’s capitalism’s court jester: aping the figure of the Marxist-qua-antisocial-fanatic, he encourages disdain for the real-world project of socialism, while advancing his career by hawking the wares of Western consumer society & the global theory industry through his pop cultural mash-up.

My article, “The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism,” was just published in the Los Angeles Review of Books’ “The Philosophical Salon.”

Excerpt: “Adorno and Horkheimer thus ultimately played the role of radical recuperators. Cultivating an appearance of radicality, they recuperated the very activity of critique within a pro-Western, anti-communist ideology. Like other members of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia in Europe and the United States, which formed the basis of Western Marxism, they publicly expressed their social-chauvinistic disgust with what they described as the savage barbarians in the East, who dared to take up the weapon of Marxist theory à la Lenin and use it to act on the principle that they could rule themselves. From the relative comforts of their capitalist-funded professorial citadel in the West, they defended the superiority of the Euro-American world that promoted them against what they referred to as the levelling project of the bolshevized barbarians in the uncivilized periphery.” [read more]