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By quiver
The podcast currently has 9 episodes available.
Reading Group: Exploits
On June 7th, Quiver considered the topic of “Exploits.”
Group: Conspiracy
On May 24th, Quiver continued with a discussion of “conspiracy.”
Updates
On May 3rd, Quiver discussed “Institutional Analysis.”
Our conversation centered on the work of Frantz Fanon.
We provided two readings. The first contextualizes the work of Fanon within social psychiatry, the institutional psychotherapy movement, and his historical context (Caribbean, French, and North African).
The reading visits Fanon during his work at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Blida, Algeria. Inspired by thriving experiments in Saint-Albian led by the anti-fascist Tosquelles, Fanon sought to bring social, cultural, and political methods to the repressive environment of Blida-Joinville. He fought the prison-like atmosphere with a “disalienated psychiatry” through collective works, hands-on activities, group sports, a newsletter that explained treatments, and film club to breathe life into the space. But he considered it a failure, as in the deeply-segregated institution it only seemed to help the white patients and not the Muslim ones. After submitting his resignation, he was expelled from the country and moved to Tunisia where he linked up the Algerian combatants of the FLN.
The second reading is an extended journal that chronicles Fanon’s time at Blida-Joinville in vivid detail. Fanon co-wrote it with Jacques Azoulay (whose dissertation he supervised) to outline the challenges of working at Blida-Joinville with the hopes of finding some theoretical insights. They describe the particulars of the stifling structure of the hospital, practical details of their experimental attempts to combat them, and an insightful post-mortem on why they feel they failed.
On April 19th, Quiver will discuss “Crowned Anarchy.”
This session considers what anarchism can contribute to political thought. We open with a passage from Todd May’s book on “The Political Philosophy of Post-Structuralist Anarchism.” In just a few short pages, he brings up a number of concepts that continue to concern us to this day: economics, politics, change, and power.
To further delve into the distinction he draws between “tactical” and “strategic” approaches, we follow up with the well-worn pages of Michel de Certeau. We are left to wonder, are we still in the age of tactics? And if so, what might be the most important ones for our moment?
On April 5th, Quiver will discuss “Becoming-Woman.”
Rather than discuss the notorious section of A Thousand Plateaus on becoming-woman, we instead consider the woman as an escapee.
Our conversation will begin with a portion of Hélène Cixous’s essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.” With it we consider the practice of writing, the insurgency of the feminine, and the practice of undoing the self.
A selection on wayward lives from Saidiya Hartman’s “A Riot of Young Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner” guides the second half of our discussion. In it, we speculate on the practices of women who lived so fugitively that little of them remains in the archives outside a record of their repression.
On March 22nd, Quiver hosts a conversation about “exhaustion.”
Quiver 3 was lost to the cloud. On March 1st, Quiver continued with a reading group on “Anti-Work.”
On February 15th, Quiver convened its second reading group over Zoom. During that session, we explored the concept of “subjects.”
We started with the infamous short excerpt on voluntary servitude and Reichian group fantasy from Anti-Oedipus. Then, we moved to the distinction between post-Althusserian social subjection and Mumford's machinic enslavement.
Our conversation worked through political concepts of the subject, state, and capitalism. But we also wondered, how must we rethink D&G to confront the intolerable anti-blackness of this world.
This led to a truly rhizome of ideas, texts, references and resonances... here some of them:
- (00:15:30) “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servitude
- (00:18:00) Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (ed.) - ''Who Comes After the Subject'': https://monoskop.org/File:Cadava_Eduardo_Connor_Peter_Nancy_Jean_Luc_Who_Comes_After_the_Subject_1991.pdf
- (00:24:30) The Deleuze dictionary - “molar”: https://deleuze.enacademic.com/110/molar // “molecular”: https://deleuze.enacademic.com/111/molecular
- (01:19:00) Andrew Culp - Draft on Maurizio Lazzarato’s “Signs, machines, subjectivities”: https://anarchistwithoutcontent.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/lazzarato-signs-and-machines-intro-chp-1-chp-2.pdf
- (01:21:30) Jason Read on Sarah Jaffe’s book “Work Won’t Love You Back”: http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/02/whats-love-got-to-do-with-it-on-sarah.html
- (01:32:30) Michael Hardt - “The Withering of Civil Society”: https://sci-hub.se/10.2307/466673
- (01:36:00) Michelle Koerner on Deleuze’s missing quotation of Jackson: https://read.dukeupress.edu/genre/article-abstract/44/2/157/5631/Line-of-Escape-Gilles-Deleuze-s-Encounter-with?redirectedFrom=fulltext
- (01:42:30) Fred Moten & Saidiya Hartman at Duke University | The Black Outdoors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_tUZ6dybrc
- (01:44:00) Daniel Colucciello Barber - On Black Negativity: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/on-black-negativity-or-the-affirmation-of-nothing
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As an experiment in opacity, all voices were modulated. Special thank you to CEER - Quiver
To listen to Quiver as a podcast, visit https://anchor.fm/q-iver/ or find it on any major podcast platform.
To RSVP for future Events, view readings, or subscribe to our mailing list, visit ourquiver.org.
On February 1st, Quiver convened its first reading group over Zoom.
During that session, we explored the concept of “weapons.”
We began by revisiting the dialogue between Deleuze and Foucault "Intellectuals and Power,” in which Deleuze suggests that theory should be understood as a toolbox. Our provocation: today, should it instead be a quiver?
Furthering our study, we continued with Proposition VII from the Nomadology of A Thousand Plateaus in which Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between tools and weapons.
As an experiment in opacity, all voices were modulated. Special thank you to CEER - Quiver
The podcast currently has 9 episodes available.