This line from Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War keeps resonating in my mind:

3. Each body is affected by its form-of-life as if by a clinamen, a penchant, a leaning, an attraction, a taste. What a body leans toward also leans toward it. This goes for each and every situation. All inclinations are reciprocal. 

Here’s a beautiful paragraph regarding the clinamen from “Soul on Strike”, the preface by Jason E. Smith in Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. 

The Urban Foraging Group would like to screen The Gleaners and I on either Saturday, August 21 at 6:30pm or Thursday, August 26 at 8:00/8:30pm. All who are interested in attending, please indicate (in the comments section) which date works for you. (Ava Chin can join us on Thursday evening so please consider that date. For newcomers, we’d love to have you meet her in person.)

If you’re interested in joining us, please sign up on the class page by clicking on “+I’m interested”.

The following is a description of the film:

The Gleaners and I (video)

From Wikipedia:

I wanted to offer some food for thought: since we are reading some very contemporary texts about exile as resistance, I would suggest exploring the very ancient Christian Monastic tradition, especially the theology of Hesychasm as it has developed in the Eastern churches.

Here are some excerpts in which Fr. George Florovsky, former prof. of Eastern Church History at Harvard, describes the theory and practice of monasticism...

There is nothing less passive than the act of fleeing...v2 (New York)

Please join us as we respond to the Public School’s 13-day seminar "There is nothing less passive than the act of fleeing..." which took place in Berlin on July 4–18, 2010.

We invite you to sketch, scheme and build new imaginaries at select sites in New York City for the next 6.5 days.

Day 1 | Fleeing
Wednesday, August 4, 2010, 6:30pm at 177 Livingston, Brooklyn
Facilitators: Stephen Squibb and Paris Ionesscu

Introduction to Civil War [Excerpts] 
Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War
(In addition, we highly recommend reading pp. 115–224)

Supplemental readings:

Perhaps this was very precisely what being an emigrant meant: to see a sword where the sculptor, in all good faith, had thought he was putting a torch....

For me it is the very place of exile, that is the place of the absence of place, the place of dispersal. In this sense, it concerns me, it fascinates me, it involves me, it questions me, as if the search for my own identity went via the appropriation of this depository where harassed functionaries baptized Americans by the boatload, as if it were inscribed somewhere in a life-story that might have been mine, formed part of a probable autobiography, a potential memory. What is to be found there is certainly not roots or traces, but the opposite: something without shape, at the limits of the sayable, that I might call a closing-off, a scission, or a break, and which for me is very intimately and confusedly linked to the actual fact of being a Jew.

There is nothing less passive than the act of fleeing...

Deadlock: perpetual war, failing economies, the crumbling of education, capitalist realism, our environment in ruin, hostility everywhere.

Resistance? Confrontation? Insurrection?

Exodus: silence, autonomy, occupation, withdrawl, invisibility, friendship. 

The following are readings that may supplement Perec’s The Scene of A Flight and Kracauer’s Boredom. (Thank you, Paris, for your recommendations.)

From Colors / Black by Paul La Farge
Cabinet, Issue 36, Friendship, Winter 2009/10 

The Urban Foraging Group will be meeting in late July or sometime in August to screen the following film. If you’re interested in joining us, please sign up on the class page by clicking on “+I’m interested”.

The Gleaners and I

From Wikipedia:

The Gleaners and I (French: Les glaneurs et la glaneuse) is a French documentary by Agnès Varda that features the practice of gleaning. It was screened out of competition at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.

The Job Application
By Robert Walser

Esteemed gentlemen,