#sorentino

[slayercain]

The general oscillation across and within [Sylvia] Wynter’s work can be engaged as the more abiding aesthetic problem of the extimate structure of slavery that carries over and shapes the totality of social fields. When Wynter expresses the “Black/white code” as “the central inscription and division that generates all the other hierarchies,” and slavery as the unspoken “secret” that makes its theoretical integration into capitalism impossible, that leaves its structure impenetrable to the legal and intellectual forces of abolition, the question becomes pitched at a different, autopoetic order of priority than that of Marxism or “racial capitalism.” Instead of slavery being adjunctified to capitalism, Wynter’s slavery was made global because it consolidated and preserved the unthought as its central constitutive feature—manifest in the explosive and never legitimated “soldering” of blackness to slaveness. This new abstraction of slavery at the level of ontology was the expression, in Wynter’s frame, of the immanent working through of signs of Christian theological collapse, over which the bioeconomic description of man came to preside. Because Wynter understands the economic to be the way the unthought is socially expressed in figures of man, the soldering of blackness and slaveness not only accompanies capitalism and racism; the attempt to materialize blackness as the sign of negation logically and historically prefigures and accompanies them.

Sara-Maria Sorentino, Expecting Blows: Sylvia Wynter, Sociogeny, and Exceeding Marxist Social Form

[pinktinselmonstrosity]

had big plans for dinner tonight but the Sickness has hit so alas. plain spaghetti it is 😔

[communistkenobi]

the gold standard of academic articles responding to a bad argument for me is Garba & Sorentino’s Slavery is a Metaphor, responding to Tuck & Yang’s Decolonisation is Not a Metaphor. If I ever write something a tenth as cutting and decisive as that paper I will have achieved my dreams

[metamatar]

In disentangling decolonization from the impulse to make it a species of a larger struggle, Tuck and Yang differentiate between an “indigenous politics” (which would integrate land with life) and a “western doctrine of liberation” (instrumentalizing land for life). The prioritization of land, however, problematizes the efficacy of the distinction, for, as Jared Sexton (2014) addresses, regardless of the approach to land (Indigenous or otherwise), the issue for critics of settler colonialism remains primarily a “problem of the terms of occupation”:

> “This frames the question of land as a question of sovereignty, wherein native sovereignty is a precondition for or element of the maintenance or renaissance of native ways of relating to the land” (Sexton 2014:5).

The danger is that, while admitting “denial of sovereignty imperils native ways of relating,” the configuration of sovereignty as a positive claim to land “does not thereby guarantee this way will be followed” (Sexton 2014:5). Tuck and Yang’s argument subordinates this risk to a problem they see to be much more fundamental and abiding: that recognizing life (which becomes a stand-in for symbolization) may not materialize (and usually actively impedes) the repatriation of land.

To return to the problem of *via negativa*, Tuck and Yang cannot positively address what Indigenous approaches to land are, without complicating how land is the ground upon which decolonization hinges. In this way, they succumb to the seduction described by Katherine McKittrick in the epigraph—“the idea that space ‘just is’” (2006:xi). Their critique of metaphor serves as a counterfactual to what they see to be the central problem of (and solution to) settler colonialism—land—even as this single focus undercuts what might differentiate settler sovereignty from native sovereignty. By making metaphor “bad,” Tuck and Yang illustrate a reinvestment in sovereignty as an empty vessel, whose substantial difference from property orientations becomes indiscernible, except in the fleeting accelerationist fantasy later posed by Tuck and McKenzie that “decolonization may be something the land does on its own behalf, even if humans are too deluded or delayed to make their own needed changes.”

__

Garba, T. P., & Sorentino, S.-M. (2020). Slavery is a metaphor: A critical commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Antipode, 52(3), 764-782. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12615

[gravalicious]

“The difference that historiographers have identified in the slave market, where slaves were being produced for circulation in a complicated causal relationship to blackness, is explicitly disavowed, its qualitative difference repressed.[57] Slavery’s modes of subjection, then, never become the Marxist premise from which to re-think the condition of production of knowledge and social life, of mind and matter, of freedom and necessity. A large determinant of this repression is that Marx never theorizes race as a productive force. In a key fragment found in Marx’s “Wage Labor and Capital,” Marx parrots Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to ask (and answer) “What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other.”[58] His critique of Proudhon’s tautology does not fare much better, as Marx continues: “A Negro is a Negro. He becomes a slave only in certain relationships.”[59] Blackness is naturalized apart from the economy, and slaveness is contingent on broader relations of production. By naturalizing, and thus neutralizing, the power of racial slavery, capitalism’s disavowal of its own conditions of reproduction is theoretically carried over into Marxism, insofar as, to be a little glib, Marx is himself a product of capitalism and immanent to its standpoint. Or, as Hortense Spillers suggests with respect to Freud, Marx “could not ‘see’ his own connection to the ‘race’/culture orbit, or could not theorize it, because the place of their elision marked the vantage point from which he spoke.”[60] Because Marx’s method expresses the political ontology of the human (only), it is one-sided: Slavery, as a real abstraction, goes behind Marx and Marxists’ backs.”

Sara-Maria Sorentino - The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx’s Method [International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 96, Fall 2019, pp. 17–37]

[brbljivica]

Bio je to jedan od najlepših trenutaka u mom životu.

Bio je to jedan od najlepših trenutaka u njenom životu.

Jer smo se smejali i zaljubljivali u isto vreme.

Paolo Sorentino - Toni Pagoda i njegovi prijatelji

[fundgruber]

"Black aesthetic practices described as formless embrace a deform that already constitutes blackness, and not formlessness as a visual/performance motif, as is often the case in Western aesthetics’ “epistemic turns and revolutions.”1 The “West,” here, is not a specific geographical location; rather, as Édouard Glissant describes it, “it is a project, not a place.”2 The condition of “being without form,”3 as Calvin Warren theorizes, marks historico-political maneuvers of violence that rendered corporeal integrity an impossibility for African-derived people.4 Black corporeal/figural form's equivalency to humanity or personhood can neither be presumed nor incontrovertibly substantiated. The figuration of “the black body” does not allow entry into the category of the human, and it is not a “body” in the same way that other bodies are bodies. Its emergence deranges the very meaning of what constitutes a body, since, as Thomas DeFrantz has argued, it comes before the law already as both its antithesis and condition of possibility."

Mlondolozi Zondi: “An Impossible Form”: The Absence That Keeps on Giving. liquid blackness (2024) 8 (1): 24–43. doi.org/10.1215/26923874-11005943

"Es liegen weder genügende Untersuchungen darüber vor, ob sich durch moderne Formalisierungstechniken die philosophische Logik etwa in einem Sinn, der den Hiatus von "Form" und "Stoff" wenn auch nicht aufhebt so doch wenigstens mildert, generalisieren ließe; noch können wir heute mit Zuversicht behaupten, daß es unmöglich sei, wenigstens eine begrenzte Zahl der Stufen des dialektischen Prozesses zu formalisieren. (Eng zusammen damit hängt das Problem, was aus der Antithese von "Form" und "Stoff" wird, wenn wir eine Logik mit abzählbar unendlich vielen Werten einführen. Die Zahl der Funktoren eines solchen Systems ist dann von der Mächtigkeit des Cantorschen ℵ1, d. h. die Funktoren repräsentieren ein den reellen Zahlen äquivalentes Kontinuum. Es ist kaum wahrscheinlich, daß unser aus der zweiwertigen Logik abgeleiteter kategorialer Gegensatz von "Form" und "Stoff" in dieser transfiniten Dimension der Funktorenlogik noch den gleichm Sinn hat wie in endlichen Wertsystemen.)"

Gotthard Günther, Formalisierung der transzendental-dialektischen Logik, in: ders. Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Dialektik I. [1976] 1985, S. 195

"Capitalist totality totalizes through its claim of capacitation (determinate negations and the possibility of their sublation being the staging ground for dialec- tical conflicts of the human), such that incapacity, as indexed by racial blackness and natural necessity, is violently filtered through the re- duced capacities of race and gender in ways that haunt contemporary imaginative intersectional and abolitionist horizons."

Sara-Maria Sorentino, Abolish the Oikos: Notes on Incapacity from Antiquity to Marxist Feminism, Black Feminism, and Afro-pessimism. Qui Parle (2023) 32 (1): 199–243, 202

[laaldunatedepirque]

Silvia

Después de la muerte de su padre y un retiro indefinido a Grecia logró que sus ideas por fin tomasen un rumbo como tal. Aún quedaba vino. Aún quedaba algo de Chile en ese rincón de Zaragoza, explotado, quizá, otra vez, pero de una forma en la que ninguno de los dos terminaba más afectado que el otro. El día de su cumpleaños número veintisiete, en lugar de celebrar, lo que hizo fue poner su plan en marcha. Ese plan por el que su cabeza tanto le había presionado. Comenzó la renovación de los viñedos en paralelo a sus estudios. También renovó los terrenos en Pirque, más de forma anónima y desinteresada.

Estudia por y para ella misma, lo mismo con el trabajo, por lo que los galpones que alguna vez sirvieron para reservar el vino, ahora estaban cubiertos de murales, colores, libros y salas de estar. Sillones en los cuales descansar y por supuesto, también zonas de diversión más extrovertida. Uno de los galpones funciona como galería de arte, siendo esta una de las más solicitadas del país y los países vecinos por su intrigante paisaje a las ruinas de Zaragoza, ciudad que le vio crecer, ganar, equivocarse y caer. Ciudad que le hizo perder parte de su vida que creía sería para ella, pero acabó encontrándose aún más en medio del país europeo. Más la sangre tira y no logró darse cuenta de su amor a Zaragoza hasta que su padre murió. Hubiese deseado que fuese diferente. Ambas cosas.

Aún guarda buenos recuerdos de Chile, de su pueblo al interior, pero con mucho menos énfasis con el que lo hacía. Se graduó con horones y un post grado en religión, mismo que le llevó a dar clases en pequeñas escuelas alejadas de la sociedad, o fácilmente volver a Chile y recorrer sus cerros para poder llevar el conocimiento hasta más lugares. Profesora por pasión, de alguna forma calma todas sus ansiedades el poder enseñar. Se dedicó por dos años a hacer variedades de cursos y el tercero para reclutar al grupo de gente idóneo para su primer proyecto como Aldunate’s Gallery, siendo su padre quien inspiró ese cachito de su vida por la gran amistad de compartió con Samuel Nitzana, un coleccionista español que deliraba con sus raíces egipcias, con aires de superioridad al punto de ser desagradable. Más era un buen profesor, y un buen contacto cuando las cosas se ponían tensas al punto de necesitar una salida más fácil. A ella le unía eso de él. Su padre los había presentado luego de que Silvia fuese una de las privilegiadas por la historia al encontrar una momia en el norte de Chile, junto a su equipo de la Universidad de Atacama y otros gringos que conoció a lo largo del camino seco, arenoso, con una vista a ese Pacífico que se volvía violento. Quizá ella era Chile y no lo sabía. Quizá era tanto que debía dejar de preguntarse de dónde era cuando al final, siempre será de ella. Además de Saard Nitzana, estaba al familia Sorentino, italianos de la élite, ella no se sentía parte del grupito de oro por lo que mantenía su anonimato en la mayoría de sus obras públicas, casi como escondida en su fachada de historiadora y geóloga. Familia de mala fama, terrible si le preguntaban a ella, pero debía reconocer que de ellos había recibido regalos indescriptibles, tal como el baúl en el que María Estuardo guardó sus cartas durante el cautiverio. Lo mantiene guardado dentro de un cristal. Le prometió a la madera descuidada usarlo en algún momento.

Acompañó sus estudios con cursos menores como lo es el paisajismo, el diseño de exteriores e interiores, con el único fin de lograr darle un mayor y mejor uso a los galpones heredados, manteniendo la armonía por más diferencias y variedad que hubiese. Nitzana se encargó personalmente de enseñarle paleontología, antropología, egiptología y pues lenguas antiguas ya era parte de ella desde que inició como principiante como licenciada de historia en Madrid. Fuertemente conectada con lo espiritual. Ha estudiado sobre varios temas esotéricos, tanto como de magia tradicional y ceremonial..

[lilyelle123]

Identical twins Maiah Claire and Naiah Grace are inseparable. They are each other’s halves, until a tragic accident took one of them, leaving the other to drown herself in grief and guilt. Her world dark and stagnant. Until one day, she runs into Kyros Aleksander Sorentino, her dead twin’s ex back in high school. Don't miss today's update of #ONCE WE WERE US! #webcomic #WEBTOON

#pinoymanga #pinoykomiks #teenromance #drama #webkomiks #graphicnovel

[slayercain]

Here is the first big stumbling point for solidarity: it is not only that we are not transparent to ourselves; it is that our awareness of this lack of transparency, our gateway to critical thought, is articulated through concrete social forms whose mythic substance so often takes the form of race. To understand how antiblackness creates a field of distortion for the political, we can trace its symptoms, with one of the most persistent being the failure of inter-racial class solidarity. Huey P. Newton echoes the social and psychological wage that Du Bois imputes to white workers when he magnifies how ‘many times the poorest White person is the most racist because he is afraid that he might lose something’. This something, in the most expansive sense, may be understood as ‘possibility’. Possibility is the glue that binds consent to the labour contract, a ‘world that is owned by some but not all’. Freedom for those who are not-all—labourers—is secured by the guarantee that they are not-slave. The not-slave’s capacity to consent is wrapped up in possibility, the possibility of owning the world and what remains in possibility of dissolving it. For the non-black working class, solidarity and abolition have to tarry here, with how ‘the exploited love being exploited by their exploiters’ and how these desires ‘are sublimated in rules of order or laws’. Slaves, as raw material for this sublimation, sit in an impossible positionality with respect to libidinal and political economies—in moving to owning oneself as property, the slave, void of substance, is suddenly force-fed the spirit of law, transmuted from nothing to the something condensed in the labour contract. The ‘black worker’ remains stubbornly impossible throughout this theoretical convergence, bending the apparatus of labour history, the purchase of Marxist theory and the salience of class-first politics through the excess of blackness to labour.

Sara-Maria Sorentino, Impossible Labour History: Solidarity Dreams and Antiblack Subsumption

[karakalpink]

The New Pope (2019): Official Tease 2 | HBO

[communistkenobi]

thank you so much for the transmisogyny reading post! im definitely gonna be reading into those. in a similar vein, do you have a recommended reading list for decolonization/anti-imperialism?

Do you mean molsno's post? def cannot take credit for that but yes I have a couple!

high-level recommendation is discourse on colonialism by aime cesaire (this link goes to a pdf that is a collection of essays, you can skip to cesaire's essay). probably one of the most formative essays for me personally in terms of how i think about colonialism

decolonization is not a metaphor by Tuck & Yang is a famous article in decolonial scholarship and will likely come up pretty frequently if you're reading academic work. if you read that article, i recommend following it up with Slavery is a Metaphor by Garba & Sorentino - its a Black critical commentary by two marxist scholars i believe on Tuck & Yang's work, working through the anti-Black thinking that is present in the work, particularly the deeply problematic conceptual attention given by Tuck & Yang to slavery when historicising and analyzing settler colonialism in North America. These are both academic articles and they're both jargon-laden so your mileage will vary

I originally included decolonizing transgender 101 by b binaohan on here before realizing that it's already in the linked post above lol. in that post is a link to the full book that i'll repost here (usually you can only find the introduction online) so definitely make use of that. anyway great work, very accessible and insightful, makes direct linkages between white supremacy, settler colonialism, and transmisogyny in a way i found extremely helpful

i read beyond white privilege: geographies of white supremacy and settler colonialism during my master's about four years ago (jesus christ the passage of time!!!) and found it very insightful - the authors talk about white supremacy as a process rather than a historical event, as well as talk about some of the conceptual limitations of the popular focus on white privilege (as opposed to white supremacy) that i found very helpful for me personally. its another academic article

I've been recently introduced to Anibal Quijano's work, particularly the Coloniality of Power. this is an extremely theoretical work that focuses on the construction and universalization of race, the 'invention of Europe,' modernity as a colonial construction, and a bunch of other pretty dense topics. thats not to scare you off, but its probably the most theory heavy article i've linked here

this list skews towards academic work because that's what im most familiar with (all the links i provided are open-access links so you should not need institutional access to read them). For books, you can read Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon or Orientalism by Edward Said, they're both pretty foundational decolonial texts and are also pretty formative for me. Fanon's work is on decolonial struggle and the pathologization of colonized people, Said's work is on the construction of "the East" to justify and reproduce Western hegemony.

Hope this was helpful! I'm by no means an expert and this is only scratching the surface of scholarship on the subject. I'm still in the process of reading, but hopefully this is a good starting point for you!

[newintrigue]

The World According to Paolo Sorentino

The World According to Paolo Sorentino

I first discovered the films of Paolo Sorentino in university, when I watched his most famous work, The Great Beauty (In Italian, La Grande Bellezza).  The film begins in Rome, with the protagonist Jep Gambardella at his birthday party. The party is a spectacle of dance and depravity, a joyous celebration of a man that has reached his prime of middle age.  But even as he celebrates, Jep is less…

[gravalicious]

“Marx explains the global transformative effects of the Civil War on the First International in Capital’s 1867 preface: “Just as in the eighteenth century the American War of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil War did the same for the European working class.”[78] This claim has been used to internationalize what is usually considered Marx’s restricted British vision. Note, however, that the Civil War is posed primarily as a teaching tool for a nonblack working-class, with slavery as a drag on the (contradictory) advancement of both competitive accumulation and working-class consciousness. For this paradigm, abolition, I will explain, can inform English workers but only if it moves the slave from the problematic of blackness and to the position of the worker and revolutionary-subject-in-waiting.[79] It is in this vein that Marx celebrates abolition as a social precipitate for the wage struggle. Marx’s Tribune writings venerated the “iron character … and purest conviction” of abolitionists like Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and Gerrit Smith.[80] Because abolitionists saw capitalism as the most important step towards black liberation, the prime boon for emancipated slaves was that “labor is no longer the badge of his servitude, and the consummation of his misery: it is the evidence of his liberty … For the first time in his life, he is a party to a contract.”[81] It may seem strange that Marx would endorse such abolitionist reform, which approximated liberalism at best, as more than masked class interest. After all, Marx chides those liberals who “overflowed with moral indignation at the preposterous notion of making a man work for nothing,” but who could not perceive the domination of waged work.[82]”

Sara-Maria Sorentino - The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx’s Method [International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 96, Fall 2019, pp. 17–37]

[brbljivica]

Život je, recimo istinu, baš gnusan. Kao dete, sećaš se svega ali nemaš čega da se setiš Kada si star, ne sećaš se ničega,a imao bi čitave reke stvari da smestiš na stočić nostalgije. Sećanje na udaljene trenutke rasipa ti se kroz prste, kao osušen kroasan od pre tri dana. Sve se pretvori u nepokretnu uobičajenost. Kada starac plače, on se ne seća više zašto plače. Kada dete plače, to je zato što želi zvučne trenutke kojih se neće sećati. Život je pomalo seratorska izmišljotina.

Paolo Sorentino - Toni Pagoda i njegovi prijatelji

[unetealombre]