Recovering Fredy Perlman’s anarchist social theory, with Uri Gordon
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1º Painel virtual: Recovering Fredy Perlman’s anarchist social theory, com Uri Gordon
YouTube link: https://youtu.be/O2OQFB_6CWc
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Lorraine Perlman (4 texts)
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/lorraine-perlman
Fredy Perlman (20 texts)
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/fredy-perlman
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Uri Gordon starts the presentation about Perlman a little after 9 minutes in if you'd like to jump straight into it. Quick reaction - I thought this was an absolutely wonderful conversation with Uri Gordon as they go over careful insights gleaned from the reading and dissection of various Perlman texts. One point they bring up is that they would like to see more people read and talk about the work of Fredy (and Lorraine) Perlman. Here is a brief start to a Fredy and Lorraine Perlman appreciation thread.
Back in 2010(ish) The Anarchist Library with help from an online reading group called “Insurgent Summer” scanned, OCR’d, and formatted “Letters of Insurgents” as a group project before some of them participated in the online reading group. Each week (or so, probably more) another chapter would be read and participants would write an online entry to share their thoughts about what they just read, often with some kind of prompt to direct input. It carried on all summer, sharing blog like posts from a variety of people commenting about the book and was eventually made into an insert, along with new writing that was included in The Anvil Review. Almost all of these online conversations are now seemingly lost to time, except for a handful – but The Anvil Review insert does remain, if you were lucky enough to get a copy (note: will scan for the library and to see original layout).
Here are some of the entries I wrote for the Insurgent Summer reading group if curious:
“Letters of Insurgents: A brief commentary”
https://stalkingtheearth.net/content/letters-insurgents-brief-commentary
And, here is a review I wrote of one of Perlman’s books (second part coming soon!?):
"Keepers of the Fire"
https://stalkingtheearth.net/content/keepers-fire
The Strait: Book of Obenabi. His Songs
From the pen of Fredy Perlman
Black & Red, Detroit. 1988
399 pages, $6
What are your thoughts about the Uri Gordon’s discussion of Fredy Perlman? Do you have a Lorraine and Fredy Perlman note to add to the thread?
notes:
Fredy Perlman on Portugese Anarchist Library project (1 text):
https://bibliotecaanarquista.org/category/author/fredy-perlman
Nice conference. Uri does…
Nice conference. Uri does seem more infatuated with the earlier Perlman, than the later one (AHAL & Strait would fall into that). He describes it as "I think Perlman starts from a sort of a materialism and ends up you know in his late work with Leviathan and so on to quasi-Manichean spiritual politics" (Timestamp: https://youtu.be/O2OQFB_6CWc?t=2937)
We wants to emphasize something he calls his earlier maximalism, which he claims has had more influence, and has more relevance currently, instead of what he calls primitivism.
He seems to want to…
He seems to want to attribute to Perlman the fact that he was an anarchist (he did not identify as one) that was not obsessed on the primacy of class analysis and could be critical of other forms of oppression. So the big contribution he'd rather to emphasize is simply not being a plain orthodox Marxist (wow, he started translating a heterodox Marxist! and parodied the new left! but translating Debord while he demanded he didn't, and being influenced by Camatte, though still leftist, is somehow less interesting?) and reading more widely, including other sociologists? He begrudgingly acknowledges his influence in primitivists (comments on primitivism starts around timestamp: https://youtu.be/O2OQFB_6CWc?t=3066) and again stains them by association by alluding to ITS, even if not mentioning the name.
I like he mentioned the early playfulness of the collages and comic type images, "memes" we'd call them now, and all the care put into beautiful printed images.
If we were to half Perlman's…
If we were to half Perlman's writing in two, where would you say the split occurs?
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