Brook Farm Institute for Critical Studies

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After Auschwitz: Adorno's Political Thought - Brook Farm Institute for Critical Studies Theodor Adorno is often thought of as an aloof aesthete, an inscrutable ivory-tower theorist, and a political pessimist. This course seeks to challenge these

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Jodi Dean on AI (so-called):

"When you talk to an LLM, you are talking to capital. Claude is not a person, not your friend, not your therapist. Claude doesn’t care about you. Claude is capital and capital is an acephalous process of accumulation. When an LLM helps a user commit su***de or redesign their living room, it is utterly indifferent to the meaning of the tokens it is producing. They are just tokens, like commodities are just commodities whether they are bullets or babydolls."

AI is Capital Provisional thoughts on the repercussions of this idea

New writing from BFI faculty, Irus Braverman.

"Palestinian shepherds often ride their donkeys when taking their flocks out to pasture. But as settler harassment has increased, frequently carried out by armed settler shepherds riding on donkeys themselves, Palestinians rarely take their flocks out. With grazing routes rendered dangerous, Palestinian-owned donkeys are left behind, often spending their days tied to a tree – still loved, still named, but no longer moving across a landscape that has become hostile. They stand as quiet reminders of a disappearing pastoralist tradition."

Donkeys are a symbol of endurance for Palestinians – they are also a target of settler violence and care From violence to rescue, settler practices involving donkeys are increasingly entangled with Palestinian dispossession.

Seminar begins June 3. Details @ brookfarminstitute.com

The Right to Unsettle • BFI hosts Alex Gourevitch for the latest in our ongoing speaker series, Critical Interventions. IN PERSON • June 1 • 6:30-8:30 PM EST • Cambridge Public Library (Community Room) • Planning to livestream as well!

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In the past few years, we have seen many new constraints imposed on freedom of speech. Some of these express a new hostility to political criticism. But in other cases, they involve a magnification of longer-standing trends. Past decades have seen a growing tendency to classify various kinds of speech as harmful, intimidating or discriminatory. As a consequence, certain kinds of political speech, like protests, get redefined as threatening or civil rights violations. Protests frequently involve hostile, offensive, or uncivil statements and symbolic actions. If we value and want true freedom of speech in this country, then we have to be able to tolerate all kinds of discomfort and unsettlement. This is an issue that no side of the political spectrum has been particularly consistent about, but nonetheless is something about which there could be widespread agreement.