So this history [link below] is missing from Darkest Hour’s hagiography, which, I admit, I loved (fell for?). The film reduces the internal conflict to Churchill vs. Halifax-Chamberlain-George VI, with the former advocating war at whatever cost and the latter an ostensibly well-stipulated treaty (both sides acting in the nation’s best interests, of course). Jacobin is no doubt correct in its account of Churchill, his personal ambitions, English nationalism, imperialism, racism, and antisemitism. But if it was Churchill and not Halifax et al. who stood up to Hitler’s Germany, is the film then excused for its “portrait of leadership,” its Ciceronian Great Man, even if Churchill in the end fell far short? I think it’s an important question for film. Darkest Hour would be the historical supplement to the beautiful, terrifying, and ultimately vapid Dunkirk, a Cloverfield for war buffs, unless Darkest Hour, too, merely serves the Brexit nation-state and the fiery, white palatines who launch those dreamy Spitfires.
“For the recognizable background to this situation is the fact that ‘the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.’ And if this insight were to become conscious it would indeed entail the self-negation of the capitalist class.”
Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness.
“[B]y equating their different products to each other as values, they equate their different kinds of labor as human labor. They do this without being aware of it. Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic. [ … . ] When, therefore, Galiani says: ‘value is a relation between persons, … he ought to have added: a relation concealed beneath a material shell.’ The determination of the magnitude of value by labor-time is … a secret hidden under the apparent movements of the relative values of the commodities. Its discovery destroys the semblance of the merely accidental determination of the magnitude of the value of the products of labor, but by no means abolishes that determination’s material form.”
Marx qtd. in Sohn-Rethel
“Which days exactly? The ones where half of Westeros fought the other half and millions died? Or before that, when the Mad King slaughtered women and babies because the voices in his head told him they deserved it? Or way before that, when dragons burned whole cities to the ground!”
Renly Baratheon on “Make Westeros Great Again”
Consciousness is not a thing, but a process of inference | Aeon Essays
The Myth of the Given: Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism (Ray Brassier)
Brandom on Intentionality as a Pragmatically Mediated Semantic Relation (with Sebastian Rödl)
Barney Kessel – “St. Thomas” (Sonny Rollins)
Brandom on A.I. and Analytic Pragmatism
“Like classical economists, Marx, too, claimed that commodity was use-value and value at the same time; the difference was that he grasped it as a synthesis that might happen in the future. He saw it ex ante facto. Seen in this way, there is no guarantee as to whether the synthesis is realized. What does this difference—ex post facto and ex ante facto—really mean? We should scrutinize this by returning to Kant.”
Kojin Karatani
STEVEN WEXLER 