I am delighted the people in America delivered a crushing blow to Trumpism. Until a certain point, I found it difficult to believe that it was possible and was preparing for the worst.

My conviction is that during second Trump’s term the concentration camps would have turned into full-blown extermination camps. Given the disastrous denial of COVID-19, many more people would have died, not only tortuously but entirely unnecessary.

The struggle for power was incredible and went right through the bodies of millions of people participating in or witnesses the events. The American informational field was a war zone for…

The United States of America or what was once known by this name is still trying to put together what happened and make sense out of 1/6/2020, and the reason for this is not that it is difficult to realize what happened, but because it makes sense in multiple frameworks simultaneously. For some, it is an excess of patriotism that led heroes on storming the building where a certification of the election that they believed to be fraudulent was taking place, for others, a group of disgruntled teenagers wandered into the Capitol (and carried tasers, weapons, and handcuffs with them)…

1/6/2021 was a 9/11 of this generation; Americans simply may not have grown into the realization of it yet.

Funding, defunding, seating, unseating, trifles of the electoral process, opinions, analysis: it is all irrelevant. The project of the USA is over, symbolically and effectively.

The Capitol, the main temple of democracy throughout the world, we have been told, was defiled and befouled by a bunch of white people of assorted trades. They hold ordinary professions: they are teachers, lawyers, and even elected officials. At least one House of Representatives participated in the siege that was broadcast all over the world.

…

Having a fireplace video with timber cracking loudly probably on repeat (but long enough so that I am not annoyed with pattern) is so strange. I am taking a pause trying to contemplate the strangeness of this.

My parents house has a fireplace, and I had a fireplace in Anosovo. Wouldn’t it be strange to imagine that I will have videos with cracking wood on for two first days of 2021 running in the living room? It never occurred to me to set it before although it was a technical possibility.

But what does this prosthetic fire mean? Why do…

Affect theory is an attempt to understand the elusive poetics of French philosophy by an Anglo-Saxon brain, which produces hilarious literal readings of great metaphors.

Latour: “the missing masses” (inanimate matter participating in human life, and, in particular, in the organization of urban space).

Anglo-Saxons: How can we understand “the missing masses” to account for the materialities influencing our lives in addition to the discursive and the political?

Well, if this is what you are going to derive from it, try no further. The “missing masses” is the gesture to the “masses” of Socialist transformations, of Marxist visions, in which…

“Post-Sovietness” typically encompasses the condition of contemporary life in Russia (Pop-Eleches, Tucker, 2017). From Tsiolkovsky to Tatlin, from Vertov to Shklovsky, the Soviet theorists envisioned the Soviet project as one of universal happiness, even if at times they themselves were prone to despair seeing that their ideas had a hard time being implemented (Oushakine, 2016).

The places of my fieldworks, Anosovo and Bratsk, emerged as Soviet “cities of the future.” Yet in terms of biopolitical governmentality, the modernity of Soviet Communism did not differ greatly from the modernity of capitalism and especially of fascism, according to Foucault (2003): these regimens…

“The President and Senate Majority Leader are willing to spend $2.5 billion to build a wall to keep Latin American asylum seekers from “invading” our country, but NOT $1 to keep Russian cyber terrorists from invading our elections!”

-the web

I still can’t decide if I like Russians being demonized anew for the last three years 😈 or not 👿.

That reminded me how the beautiful A.L. came to UT and at her talk quoted Marquis de Custine. He wrote, in beautiful prose, that the Russian human bears are hibernating in their winter palaces and huts.

I confirmed for everyone…