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Come back to Pleasure
Despite his image as the sober genius of high modernism, T.S. Eliot often speaks of art as essentially amusement. The poet, says Eliot, "would like to be something of a popular entertainer,..would like to convey the pleasures of poetry...As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a…
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Report on the Anti-Cuts Campaign at the University of Sussex
Report on the Anti-Cuts Campaign at the University of Sussex  Images: Catarina Neto Carvalho  This report is for information.                                     - HEFCE Strategic Plan, 2010-2011 We begin with a comparison of two proposals. In January 2009 the Vice Chancellor’s Executive Group (VCEG) issued, in an attractive high-gloss brochure, a new strategic plan. Titled Making the Future, the document…
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Chhattisgarh: The Future of India?
NANDINI SUNDAR Chhattisgarh: The Future of India? Interviewed by David Barsamian New Delhi, India  29 November 2009 Nandini Sundar is a professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University.  Let’s start with Chhattisgarh, a state in India where you have spent a great deal of time and you’ve written about. There is an…
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Vortex in Bengal.
Violence in West Bengal's western districts has reached crisis proportions. Each day, one or more cadre member or sympathizer of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPM] is killed either by Maoists or the Trinamul Congress (TMC). The total figure is now over two hundred dead since late 2007 (most are members and supporters of…
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Bad Sufi
The Bad Sufi A look at the practise of Contemporary Sufism in Pakistan.  It is often assumed that Sufism stands opposed to Wahhabism. Wrong. Sufism and Wahhabism, in fact, share a fatal characteristic – they are religions of the status quo.  In Pakistan, Sufism legitimises barbarities of inequality and starvation – ‘do nothing, it’s god’s…
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Christian Communists, Islamic Anarchists?
In Part 1 of this article we argued that Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou's account of the foundation of Communist universalism in the event of Christianity signals a number of inconsistencies immanent to their respective ontologies (Coombs 2009).  For Žižek it appears difficult to reconcile his touted open interpretation of Hegel with the ontological significance he accords…
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Running down the wrong road
Vijay Prashad considers the regional alternative to troop escalation in Afghanistan, and suggests its neighbours are ready to take on the burden of stabilising the country - but only if the US doesn't use their efforts to build its empire. This article has been cross-posted from THE SAMOSA More US troops are being prepared for Afghanistan. The President charged…