Random
“It is a dangerous book.” – Glenn Beck Reviews The Coming Insurrection
The Coming Insurrection
by
The Invisible Committee
(MIT Press, 2009)
from the “dangerous book”:
“I AM WHAT I AM.” My body belongs to me. I am me, you are you, and something’s wrong. Mass personalization. Individualization of all conditions – life, work and misery. Diffuse schizophrenia. Rampant depression. Atomization into fine paranoiac particles. Hysterization of contact. The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get. We cling to our self like a coveted job title. We’ve become our own representatives in a strange commerce, guarantors of a personalization that feels, in the end, a lot more like an amputation. […] Meanwhile, I manage. The quest for a self, my blog, my apartment, the latest fashionable crap, relationship dramas, who’s fucking who… whatever prosthesis it takes to hold onto an “I”!
You can read the whole thing for free online here. After the jump, check out the concluding thoughts of this “dangerous book,” and watch Glenn Beck review it on Fox News.
The goal of any insurrection is to become irreversible. It becomes irreversible when you’ve defeated both authority and the need for authority, property and the taste for appropriation, hegemony and the desire for hegemony. That is why the insurrectionary process carries within itself the form of its victory, or that of its defeat. Destruction has never been enough to make things irreversible. What matters is how it’s done. There are ways of destroying that unfailingly provoke the return of what has been crushed. Whoever wastes their energy on the corpse of an order can be sure that this will arouse the desire for vengeance. Thus, wherever the economy is blocked and the police are neutralized, it is important to invest as little pathos as possible in overthrowing the authorities. They must be deposed with the most scrupulous indifference and derision.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKyi2qNskJc
At the recent student protests people were using riot shields with book covers painted on the front (inspired by similar sheilds in Italy). The Coming Insurrection was one.
But I thought the book that was angering Beck at the moment was Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich?
“[T]he Left knows the history of America more than most conservatives do.” — Glenn Beck
I want the next edition of this book to come with this quote as a blurb.
I love how of course Beck takes the part about weapons out of context. Even though The Invisible Committee says there is a necessity to take up arms, it is out of having that power as a potentiality, rather than immediately moving towards bloodshed.
Of course, people have been spouting this stuff for ages and nothing has come of it. Ratings, though… .
common sense, dude needs to get a better haircut and take some voice acting lessons or something to help with the accidental stutter.
What the hell are those snowflakes falling through the text on the Tarnac blog? It makes the book utterly unreadable! Is this intentional on the blogger’s behalf or is something more sinister at work?
The quoted bits are hilarious — the type of circular gibberish I’d expect of an overconfident grad student. The coming insurrection will be followed by a carafe of the house red.
HA! Agreed. The prose is laughable at best.
Of course, people have been spouting this stuff for ages and nothing has come of it. Ratings, though… .
it’s funny, people from anarchist publishers mail glenn beck their books as a PR stunt to pique people’s interest and increase sales. he’s bitten the bait several times. all his shit talking just generates more attention. after this beck segment appeared, the the coming insurrection sold out and started being carried in every major corporate bookstore. i have mixed feelings about the text itself…but using glenn beck to go viral is an interesting strategy. glenn beck ranked the college i just graduated from #2 on his list of most hated schools (the students were insulted they didn’t get #1: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=128915407870)
Indeed, Cassandra, except that “tak[ing] up arms” is not a “potentiality”, but rather an actuality that makes possible their not being fired as genuinely pacific action.
Here’s the italicized paragraph that Gleck quoted part of, along with exegesis from the text itself – what Gleck calls “calling for terrorist activity, calling for the end of Western civilization, the end of our economy. […] This is a call for violence.”
A meaning of Marx’s veneration of it: a book terribly dangerous to Gleck’s worldview – and to the ‘world’ he wants to exist – is The Wealth of Nations.
it’s funny, people from anarchist publishers mail glenn beck their books as a PR stunt to pique people’s interest and increase sales. he’s bitten the bait several times. all his shit talking just generates more attention. after this beck segment appeared, the the coming insurrection sold out and started being carried in every major corporate bookstore. i have mixed feelings about the text itself…but using glenn beck to go viral is an interesting strategy. glenn beck ranked the college i just graduated from #2 on his list of most hated schools (the students were insulted they didn’t get #1: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=128915407870)
lol I love the idea of Beck telling conservatives to read ‘The Coming Insurrection’. Here’s hoping it brings in some converts!
His Japanese communist stat is pretty great. At that rate, Japan will be majority communist in a little over 5000 years. The horror.
Jackie, I’d be interested to know more about where and how your mixed feelings fall re: ‘The Coming Insurrection’, if you’d be willing to share.
Shouldn’t the fury of the left be turned against Obama because of the tax deal?
DedRabbit Manifesto.
Hasn’t it been??
– to the point that bend-over-backward-’til-the-spine-snaps “moderate” “journalists” on CNN and the three broadcast sometimes-actual-news networks have been furiously defending Obama’s (latest) “bipartisan” cave-in?
DedRabbit Manifesto.
Who is left?
It’s funny how he (I think) bashed Thomas Paine and what he said in Common Sense/Rights Of Man, but then titles his own book after Paine’s. Even funnier that Paine’s writings are basically why we’re as “free” as we are today (combined with armed revolution). The way Glenn Beck uses historical literature/events and speaks about freedom makes me seriously dizzy. He seems like a dog chasing his own tail. Pretty sure he has a mild case of downs syndrome (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
Alllllsoo… is it kind of ironic that FRANCE got mad at a book? The OG’s of printing books banned in most places… funny stuff.
Supposedly, like Dennis Miller, Glenn Beck used to talk like a liberal and then changed his ‘views’ when he was hard-up for work. Dennis Miller understood that a conservative comedian is gold to conservative media… I guess Glenn Beck just figured that what FOX really needed was 1. somebody who was so fanatical that he could be judged as borderline psychotic (although appearances and reality, especially on TV, are two different things) and 2. somebody who could pass himself off as not just a radical-conservative intellectual (I think the glasses help, don’t you? You think he’s really far-sighted?) but, more valuably (is that a word?), an intellectual with an antenna. (In other words: either a genius or the messiah, take your pick.)
I’d admire him for pulling this off if his position and disposition didn’t make him so fucking dangerous.
Dennis Miller I don’t admire at all. Just an opportunist who made himself a conservative when his career sank and he couldn’t find work. Not too much to admire about that.
I’ll say one more thing: What bothers me here is the conflation between liberals and the radical left. There is a radical left, and it’s just as loony as the radical right. Of course, the social dynamics are such that the radical right ends up being notably more dangerous than the radical left. But . . . I obviously do not like any conflation that is attempted between the radical left and regular liberals.
Did you miss the rebellion in the House? News flash: The left has been furious at Obama ever since he (and Harry Reid, but Obama should’ve strong-armed him) bungled the health care debacle. (And what’s with Democratic presidents wasting all their political capital on the red-hot universal-health-care issue, anyhow?) It’s just that we’ve become more and more incensed every time he bungles something. Dropping the negotiations over the Israeli settlements, and his tax-code capitulation, are just the two straws that broke the ass’s back.
It hurts me to say this because I really believed in this guy. He had every goddamn quality that a great president needed (if you ignore his lack of executive experience… but that’s not a ‘quality’). I did not at all foresee that he would not be able to get himself out of professorial mode and move into presidential mode.
He did really well at the very beginning. It made me so proud, when he went right in there, right after the election, with his economic team, preparing his plan well before he was scheduled to take office. I was so proud. How quickly things can change… .
Umm… MSNBC has not wholely been defending him. Three of their night line-up commentators have been incensed. (Big Ed, Keith and Rachel). On the other hand, Lawrence O’Donnell, who’s awesome and a staunch liberal, has — you’re right — been defending the ‘practicality’ of the situation, in defense of the lower class (I give him credit for that: nobody talks about the lower class, it’s always the middle class, nobody ever utters a word of concern about the lower class unless they’re defending the middle class in the same breath.) …And I think Chris Matthews has been on the fence, himself (and he’s been such a good born-again liberal, too, lately), although I haven’t really been watching his show these past few days.
As for CNN… can’t comment, since I never watch CNN. I hate CNN. They’re a bunch of muffin-heads.
Owen, I was referring to the “three broadcast […] networks”: A-, C-, and N-. MSNBC is, to me, the only actual “news” network – the only news org that’s consistently both a) self-critical, eager to correct its errors; and b) not lemming-stampeded about how crazily skewed to the right the perception of a “moderate center” is. The only people on MSNBC who haven’t promoted the stupid “he has to cave, he simply has to” meme are the house fifth-columnists, like Mrs. Greenspan, and, as you mention, the grievously confused O’Donnell (who’s saying what the left should’ve been understanding in ’93-’94, before the Contract on America pushed Clinton into Dickie Morris’s tentacles). – and, of course, that gruesome morning person.
“There is a radical left, and it’s just as loony as the radical right.”
Is it?
But I agree, I don’t like when people conflate the Left with liberals. Ugh.
I personally think the radical left is less “loony” since it seems to be a lot more inclusive of our entire planet, where the radical right seems to be hardcore isolationists. I think it’s insane to focus solely on our tiny little part of the world when it’s obvious that it’s our entire planet that’s in distress. It’s like putting a fresh coat of paint in your bedroom, even though the rest of the house is about to crumble.