The Coming Insurrection

by Red Aegis Sat Jul 21, 2012 2:18 pm

I re-read this book to try to gain something from it, but despite the few historical blips that it mentions it wasn't helpful in my development of anything. It is mainly comprised of changing definitions of words to inferior ones and saying that since society doesn't fall in line with those new, silly definitions it's sick for some abstract reason. All together I wouldn't recommend it. That said, the review done by Glenn Beck is hilarious, especially since he didn't read it.

by Entfremdung Fri Jul 18, 2014 3:25 pm

I read it too but thought it was good. It is very much in the rather poetic French tradition of radicalism (Guy Debord, etc.) ...stylishly and contemptuously diagnosing the sickness of our current society. I know this kind of writing puts some off but I find it effective in its rhetorical style. It's the kind of cultural criticism which was one of the strengths of the Frankfurt School. But crucially it is radical, rejecting the comforts of bourgeois academic Marxism in favour of insurrectionist direct action and the social model of the Commune.

The sphere of political representation is closed. From left to right, it's the same nothingness acting by turns either as the big shots or the virgins, the same sales shelf heads, changing up their discourse according to the latest dispatches from the information service. Those who still vote give one the impression that their only intention is to knock out the polling booths by voting as a pure act of protest. And we've started to understand that in fact it’s only against the vote itself that people go on voting... By its very silence, the populace seems infinitely more 'grown up' than all those squabbling amongst themselves to govern it do.

To work today is less about the economic need of producing commodities than about the political need to produce producers and consumers, to save the order of work by any means necessary. Producing oneself is about to become the dominant occupation in a society where production has become aimless...

the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation comes down to this: a dying entity sacrifices itself as content in order to survive as form... A disintegrated society, [survives] by propagating an epidemic of sociability and entertainment... You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning give its complicit wink of the eye everywhere in the universities and among the literary intelligentsias. No critique is too radical among postmodernist thinkers, as long as it contains a little nothingness of certitude. Scandal for the past century has come from any too noisy negation; today scandal bursts from any affirmation that does not tremble. No social order can be durably founded on the principle that nothing is true. To endlessly contain all affirmation; to deactivate all those certitudes that can’t help but come out: such is the long labor of the western intellect. Philosophy and the police are two of its convergent but formally distinct means for doing so. The imperialism of the relative, in the end, finds a suitable enemy in any and every empty dogmatism: any marxist-leninism, any salafism, any neo-nazism; anything that confuses affirmation and provocation...

The Coming Insurrection

The Coming Insurrection

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