whatever

Recently i had occasion to write a New Year update for someone far way. This is what i said:

My (intellectual) work has the form of a struggle. A struggle with myself - with my vanity, with my laziness, with my stupidity.

At the moment i am making my way through Deleuze's book, 'Foucault'. A struggle. In part i am thinking about what appears there as the diagram, and what in his later essay, 'what is a dispositif', is given in English as the apparatus (dispositif). Somewhere in the background of all this i am trying to figure the relationship between Agamben's account of the dispositif and that of deleuze.

on the diagram (briefly):

We will miss you

Yesterday's protest outside Wits has made it into the Star and IOL

"Merry Xmas. Wits gift: retrenchments."

This was just one of the posters held up by students and lecturers at Wits University who held a lunchtime protest over the possible retrenchments of cleaning staff.

more

I've been struggling to come up with something to post here. I still haven't sent out the url, or made much progress on improving the look of the place. So, it seems, we not really off to a good start.

I attended a protest today over the retrenchment of cleaning staff at wits. But I have never really gotten into the 'activist blogging' thing, and can't really think of anything I want to say about today's protest. My academic work creeps on, but for a long time it has has inspired little more than annoyance. My camera is lost somewhere in the study and i don't care to find it. I'm not reading anything interesting at the moment, and can think of no obsession that deserves to be communicated.

I have, literally, nothing to say!

"Slowness is one characteristic of the melancholic temperament. Blundering is another, from noticing too many possibilities, from not noticing one's lack of practical sense. And stubbornness, from longing to be superior - on one's own terms"

From Amit Chaudhuri's introduction to Walter Benjamin's 'One-way Street and Other Writings'

I have started many blogs and then later abandoned them. And no doubt, one day i will abandon this one as well. But while it lasts, this blog is for whatever - anything and everything that i am interested in at the moment. I will do my best to make it interesting, and hopefully also useful. In the coming weeks, i will also try to make it look a little nicer.