Mark Fisher Pdf

[Lotte Donohoe]

Mark represents some of the largest banks and insurance companies as well as smaller financial, manufacturing and real estate firms who face an opportunity or challenge with financing or insolvency matters. He continues to lead a joint defense group facing a $450 million fraudulent transfer and breach of fiduciary duty claim. He also obtained, from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, en banc, vindication of a trademark licensee against a bankrupt licensor who could have put it out of business by using bankruptcy to reject key licenses. Mark has crafted laws that benefit commercial and industrial landlords regarding rejection claims, post-petition administrative claims and other issues across the United States.

Mark has had numerous representations in mass tort bankruptcies, including the ongoing representation for 15 years of a leading liability carrier in the bankruptcies of numerous dioceses and archdioceses throughout the United States and the representation of the Roman Catholic Ad Hoc Committee in the pending bankruptcy of the Boy Scouts of America.

Mark is general counsel to the chapter 7 trustee and local counsel in litigation that recovered $28 million from insiders of a large Chicago homebuilder that, through a variety of corporate restructurings and intercompany transactions, left the debtor and its operating subsidiaries cash poor and undercapitalized by distributing millions as compensation and other distributions to themselves and family members.

Mark led the defense and successful settlement of two clusters of fraudulent transfer litigation seeking a total of over $350 million against a major insurance company in chapter 7 bankruptcy of the holding company of a national chain of dialysis clinics that was restructured and sold and against wealthy investors in a chapter 7 bankruptcy of a leading algorithm based commodities trading platform. Both engagements required mastery of the law, the complex documentation of the underlying transactions and the identification of key leverage points to strike good deals.

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.2

Hello there! We take your privacy seriously, and want to be as transparent as possible. So: We (and our partners) use cookies to collect some personal data from you. Some of these cookies we absolutely need in order to make things work, and others you can choose in order to optimize your experience while using our site and services. It's up to you!

Additionally, we and our advertising partners store and/or access information on your device and also process personal data, like unique identifiers, browsing activity, and other standard information sent by your device including your IP address. This information is collected over time and used for personalized ads, ad measurement, audience insights, and product development specific to our ads program.

If this sounds good to you, select \"I Agree!\" below. Otherwise, you can get more information, customize your consent preferences, or decline consent by selecting \"Learn More\". Note that your preferences apply only to Tumblr. If you change your mind in the future you can update your preferences any time by using the Privacy link beneath each ad. One last thing: Some of your data may be processed by our advertising partners based on legitimate interests instead of consent, but you can object to that by choosing \"Learn More\" and then disabling the Legitimate Interests toggle under any listed Purpose or Partner on their respective settings pages.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre famously uses the example of the waiter: someone who overplays the role of waiter to the extent that they (to outside appearances at least) eliminated their own subjectivity:

Let us consider this waiter in the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too forward. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe. (Being and Nothingness: An Essay On Phenomenological Ontology, Routledge, 2000, p59).

Pikul: You know, I do feel the urge to kill someone here. Geller: Who? Pikul: I need to kill our waiter. Geller: Oh. Well that makes sense. Um, waiter! Waiter! [she calls over waiter] Geller: When he comes over, do it. Don't hesitate. Pikul: But... everything in the game is so realistic, I-I don't think I really could. Geller: You won't be able to stop yourself. You might as well enjoy it. Pikul: Free will... is obviously not a big factor in this little world of ours. Geller: It's like real life. There's just enough to make it interesting.

Dystopia has returned to cinema in three recent films - most spectacularly in the blockbuster The Hunger Games but also in two lower profile films, Never Let Me Go, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, and In Time, written and directed by Andrew Niccol. In these three films, class and precariousness are forced into the foreground. To be in the dominant class is, in each film, to achieve a certain liberation from precariousness; for the poor, meanwhile, life is harried, fugitive, a perpetual state of anxiety. Yet precariousness here is not a natural state which the rich are fortunate enough to rise above; on the contrary, precariousness is deliberately imposed on the poor as a means of controlling and subduing them. Pre-existing shortages provide the pretext for deliberately depriving the subjugated class: of time, of their organs, or of their lives. In an inversion of Hobbes, the war of all against all emerges as an artificial condition rather than a state of nature. Strategic deprivation and enforced competition (in some cases to the death) make solidarity impossible: each must face death on their own.

Danny Baker's breakfast shows on BBC Radio London are delightfully and genuinely anarchic: unscripted, unplanned, interrupted only by the station's de rigeur News and Weather slots (which, like the nagging awareness in a dream that you will awake, are irritating emissaries from the Real World which you must soon re-enter), the show is held together by the charismatic sorcery and joyful force of Baker's cracker-barrel personality. Baker is the Borges of breakfast, a connoisseur and inventor of unlikely taxonomies: famous Doctors, celebrity teeth, the greatest ad slogans ever, fictional characters who wear three-quarter length trousers, the strange routines of other families (tiny details which suddenly reveal that Other People's Houses are really Other Worlds), Baker lures you into fixating on these categories that you couldn't even have dreamt of. His mind tirelessly pursues these non-topics, which have nothing in common with each other apart from the fact that they are all 'objectively' of no possible importance. The carnival king of a world turned upside down, Baker, thankfully, makes you forget what's really important. He is genuinely Surrealist in a way that the actual Surrealists - too po-faced and programmatic - seldom were, serious about the silly. It's the seriousness that Nietzsche recommended: the seriousness of the child at play. What you're suddenly aware of, when you're cast out of Baker's wonderland, is the insufferable adult weight of the rest of the culture, with its neurotic faux-sophistication and prurience. There's not a trace of irony, not a shred of meta-self consciousness, in Baker's curatorial craziness. This is radio as a Situationist derrive, wandering without premeditated purpose through London's unconscious. The only guiding thread through this funhouse London labyrinth is Baker's enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, enthusiasm: enthusiasm is obsession gone liquid, its calcified, one-eyed fixity transformed into a foaming, teeming froth. Exactly what you need in a morning.

"Is Nick Land the most important British philosopher of the last twenty years?," asks Kodwo Eshun. On the face of it, the question might seem an odd one - Land only published one book, The Thirst For Annihilation : Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism and a series of short texts, most of which had a limited circulation when they first appeared. Nevertheless, Eshun's question makes sense because that small canon of texts - which have been collected for the first time in a recently published volume Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 - have had an enormous but up until now subterranean influence. Their impact was first of all felt beyond philosophy - in music (Steve Goodman aka Kode 9 studied with Land in the 90s), in art (Jake Chapman has long been an admirer of Land's "technilism"; Eshun, in the 90s one of the most important writers and theorists on music, is now is now a member of the Turner Prize-nominated Otolith Group), in the rogue media theory of Matthew Fuller, in the inhuman feminism of Luciana Parisi's Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire, and in the unclassifiable theory-fiction of the Iranian writer Reza Negarestani, whose astonishing Cyclonopedia was rated by Artforum as one of the best books of 2009. But Land's influence is now infesting the philosophy departments which tended to scorn it in the rare cases they were aware of it. Some of the philosophers at the forefront of the most exciting movement in current philosophy, speculative realism - Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant - studied with Land, and their work is still marked by that encounter. The re-propagation of Land's work via speculative realism has led younger theorists such as Ben Woodard, author of the forthcoming Slime Dynamics - which crossbreeds philosophy, science and horror fiction - back to Land. "Land's work was a welcome respite from much of the philosophy I had been reading at the time," says Woodard, who encountered Land via Reza Negerastani. "His Thirst for Annihilation is one of the more interesting texts I've read in several years as it viciously lampoons the hubris of philosophers and other intellectuals while managing to be a work of theory at the same time. Land demonstrated that one could make rigorous and important theoretical arguments without abandoning style or without being afraid to engage strange and unorthodox materials."

c80f0f1006