Objects of Political Desire VII – Libraries: Palaces For the People, By the People

  Every 1 July, people in Portugal, Brazil and other Portuguese-speaking countries celebrate World Library Day by posting photos of libraries, bookshelves, books, reading, and, of course, permutations of any of these things and cats. World Library Day is a day to show affection for these supposedly unfashionable institutions. It’s also a day that doesn’t […]

Read more
A política (também na Europa) detesta o vácuo

Esta crónica, escrita antes de se saber o resultado das eleições espanholas, é sobre a viragem tática da extrema-direita europeia — um fenómeno que já se adivinhava há uma década e que eleições recentes, inclusive as de ontem têm vindo a confirmar, e mesmo a acelerar. Como muitas outras tendências na extrema-direita atual, um primeiro […]

Read more
Objects of Political Desire VI: Memory Over Time

This article is the second part of a digression on the relationship between memory and economic structures. The first part is a short story about your dearest memory and the money you did not know it was worth.  From the beginning and until the end, we are memory over time. That is the only way […]

Read more
O geoputinismo na sua espiral justificativa

O apego de muitos seguidores dos temas geopolíticos à ideia de “grandes poderes” vistos como entidades constantes e capazes de moldar a realidade à sua volta leva muita gente a uma posição na qual são forçados a permanentemente arranjar justificações retrospetivas para as ações ou omissões de Putin como se todas elas (ações ou omissões) […]

Read more
Objects of Political Desire V: Is Memory Money? A Digression in Two Parts

We all hold a memory, more powerful than all others, for which we are grateful. It doesn’t have to be an unusual or special memory. It’s simply a happy memory. And when we conjure it, the important part is not to recover the sequence of events that make it, but to relive the feeling we […]

Read more
Objects of Political Desire IV: Democratise, Develop, Decolonise

On 25 April 1974 – 49 years ago – telexes and wire photos in newsrooms across the world started churning out texts and images from a half-forgotten country in the southwestern fringe of Europe. My country, Portugal, was then a 48-year-old dictatorship embroiled in a 13-year-long war in three of its five African colonies, Angola, […]

Read more
Objects of Political Desire III: Everybody’s Right to Beautiful, Radiant Things

In the end, Emma Goldman never said “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution”, though it’s a great maxim and she could definitively have said it. What she did say was much more interesting. Her story begins when she arrives in New York City in 1889 as a 20-year-old with three countries, an authoritarian father, and […]

Read more
Objects of Political Desire II: What’s Stronger Than Fear?

In the first column of this series dedicated to “objects of political desire” I argued for a renewed theory of mobilisation, centred around desire. But that theory is worthless so long as it not does not help us solve the main problem we have in the political arena today. That problem can be summed up in one […]

Read more
Object of Political Desire I: My Hypocrite Reader

Let me start by saying something about you. Yes, you. “— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!” as Baudelaire once called you. There’s one or two things I know about you. You’re reading this article in the Green European Journal, which means that you are interested in environmental questions, European affairs, or ideological […]

Read more
Skip to content