Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Mao Reloaded in Shanghai and Wuhan, China


From 6th-8th April Marx Reloaded director Jason Barker will be making an "intervention" at The Third Sino-British Bilateral Forum on Marxist Aesthetics. This forum is to be held in Shanghai, at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The title of the forum is "Marxism and the Future".

We have no information at this time regarding the details of Jason's intervention, other than it will be accompanied by a screening of Marx Reloaded. However, while in China Jason will also be speaking at The Second International Conference on Chinese Form of Marxist Literary Criticism at Central China Normal University, Wuhan. Comrades will know that Wuhan was the location of Mao's summer "retreat" during the Cultural Revolution, which he affectionately named "Home of the White Clouds and Yellow Cranes". 

We understand the (ideologically correct) title for Jason's speech in Wuhan will be "Master Signifier: Mao Tse-tung in French Theory". We trust that comrades will greet Comrade Barker's ideas with the correct degree of enthusiasm.  

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Marx Reloaded DVD en Español


Marx Reloaded es un documental cultural que examina de qué modo las ideas del filósofo y socialista alemán Karl Marx pueden ayudarnos a entender la crisis económica y financiera global del 2008-2009. Dicha crisis provocó la recesión global más profunda que se había visto en setenta años e hizo que el gobierno de los Estados Unidos invirtiera más de un trillón de dólares en salvar del colapso a su sistema bancario. Todavía hoy no sabemos hasta dónde llegarán las consecuencias de esta crisis en Europa y en el resto del mundo. Pero, ¿debemos aceptar esta crisis como un desafortunado efecto secundario del libre mercado? O ¿existe otra explicación de por qué sucedió lo que sucedió y de cuáles serán sus posibles efectos en nuestra sociedad, nuestra economía y nuestra forma de vida?

El DVD de Marx Reloaded (con subtítulos en español y nuevo material hasta ahora inédito) está ya a la venta para bibliotecas universitarias en la siguiente dirección:

Friday, March 22, 2013

Anticapitalist Cinema at European Graduate School


Marx Reloaded director Jason Barker will be giving an intensive summer course on "The Cinema of Anti-Capitalism" this coming August at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Past and present EGS professors include Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Nancy, plus a handful of the contributors to Marx Reloaded, including Slavoj Zizek.

The outline at the EGS website describes the course as an exploration of "cinematic representation and crisis capitalism through mutual relations of time, space, subjectivity and revolution". Planned screenings include films by Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Noel Burch and Allan Sekula, and Alexander Kluge, whose formidable News from Ideological Antiquity is cited in Marx Reloaded.