New Simon Critchley book just out:

The remarkable resurgence of interest in religion has become one of the defining issues of our time. Whether approached from a “post-secular” perspective, or fanatically affirmed/denied by fundamentalists of both religious and atheistic persuasions, we are living in a moment where religion and a wider constellation of its concerns have an inescapable hold over us.

Simon Critchley's new book The Faith of the Faithless attempts to philosophically re-frame the nature of the current debates over the role of religion in the 21st century. In the book, out today, Critchley proposes a new perspective on belief – one that attempts to avoid the obstacles that have increasingly hobbled serious reflection and constructive dialogue about religion in our world.

Together with the book's release, Critchley will be speaking at the New York Public Library tomorrow night with Mark Mazower, where he hosts the next installment of his ongoing conversation series On Truth (and Lies). The topic of the conversation is The Historian's Truth. Next Tuesday, February 7th at 7pm, Critchley will appear at BAM with the ever profound and provocative brother Cornel West, where the two will discuss the concept of religion and faith in secular society (more over at VersoBooks.com...)

Literature Across Frontiers will be presenting the report Literary Translation from Arabic into English in the UK and Ireland at the Free Word Centre, in London, tonight (from 6.30pm).

Back in 2005 I interviewed Dai Vaughan. Neal Ascherson once called Dai ‘one of the most imperiously intelligent fiction-writers alive’, he could have added one of the most gracious and charming too...

Great news, then, that the excellent CB editions has just published Dai's latest book Sister of the artist:

A cloaked figure sweeps towards her. It has the features of Viktor, who she knows is far away. But they are only a painted oval held on a wand, which he flicks aside to reveal, under the sacking cowl, her own double; and she hears a voice – her own? – croak, ‘Who leads in the dance?’

Prompted by the example of the composer Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny, Sister of the artist addresses the injustice of a brother and sister, both artists, whose talents are respectively encouraged and thwarted by the conventions of their time and place. Their story is layered with fragments of more ancient narratives that explore the mysteries of sibling love and the wellsprings of creativity.

Sister of the artist is prefaced by two stories of a writer and her sister, guests returning from Dai Vaughan’s first novel, The Cloud Chamber (1993).

Wikipedia is protesting against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out the English Wikipedia for 24 hours:

Wikipedians spend thousands of hours every week working tirelessly in reviewing and removing infringing content. Wikipedia talk pages show tremendous care about protecting copyright and sophisticated study on the many nuances of what constitutes infringement as opposed to legitimate speech. Wikipedia is based on a model of free licenses. Every Wikipedian is a rights owner, licensing their work under free licenses. Infringement harms our mission; free licenses do not work with infringement. Wikipedia has a mission of sharing knowledge around the world, and that is not possible when the knowledge is tainted with infringement. So, yes, Wikipedians care deeply about protecting the rights of others and ensuring against infringement.

But this does not mean Wikipedians are willing to trample on free expression like SOPA and PIPA. The proposed legislation seeks to take down sites entirely, because courts and others simply don't have time to worry about the nuances of copyright law and free expression. That is what is troubling. When the remedies are bludgeons, when entire sites are taken down, when everyone assumes that all content is infringing because some is, we lose something important. We lose the nuances of copyright about which our community cares, we lose our values based on protecting free speech, we lose what we represent. The Internet cannot turn into a world where free expression is ignored to accomodate overly simple solutions that gratify powerful rightowners who spend lots of money to promote the regulation of expression. There are better ways, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to find the right approach to legitimate copyright enforcement without trampling on free expression. SOPA and PIPA don't represent these values, and for that reason we ask you to oppose these bills (read more...)

Just commissioned this for work (at Quercus) and am very proud of it – so thought I'd share here!

There’s a gap between literary and political responsibility, there must be. But literary responsiveness has ethical and political stakes of its own. Here, it is not a matter of producing particular values or norms, not a matter of producing a morality, but literature can enlarge the scope of what we call ethics and politics.

What does this mean with respect to the Arab Spring, and to the protests in Greece, Spain, Britain and the U.S.? These revolts all ask a question about what is allowed to count as politics, about the political as such. This question is posed by way of what you call a ‘popular resistance’ — by way of the creation of a people, the creation of a commons. And that, for me, is where politics — real politics — begins: in the opening of a space in which we can be political. This is quite different from our ordinary understanding of liberal democracy. Politics is renewed in the streets, the squares, in the open air. I think there is something similar here to the responsiveness we find in the work of Lispector and Cixous.

The Situation in American Writing: Lars Iyer

Debt is the most effective way to take a relation of violent subordination and make the victims feel that it’s their fault. Colonial regimes did this all the time; they would charge people for the cost of their own conquest, via taxes. However, using debt in this way also has a notorious tendency to rebound, because the subtle thing about debt relations is that, on a certain level, they are premised on equality—we are both equal parties to a contract. This both makes the sting of inequality worse, because it implies you should be equal to your creditor but you somehow messed up, but also, makes it possible to start saying ‘wait a minute, who owes what to who here?’ But of course once you do that, you have accepted the idea that debt really is the essence of morality. You’ve accepted the masters’ language.

Artists, writers and curators today, more than ever, take part in a time-pressured culture of high performance. One is constantly expected to be productive, professional, and to deliver good work. Is this the way we really want to work? How do people working within the arts manage the imbalance between work and life? Can one be productive by being less productive? Are there creative possibilities in exhaustion, failure and laziness? Writer and critic Laura McLean- Ferris, Paul Pieroni, curator of Space, and writer and philosopher Lars Iyer, author of Spurious, discuss the potentials in being less productive.