Horner's Corner

Here’s a link to the lecture:

Living in the End times: Zizek @ the LSE

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Thinking Through Philosophy: From all good bookshops or from here (UK) or here (USA) or here online.

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Valences of the Dialectic by Fredric Jameson

Verso, 625 pp, £29.99, October 2009, ISBN 978 1 85984 877 7

Fredric Jameson’s pre-eminence, over the last generation, among critics writing in English would be hard to dispute. Part of the tribute has been exacted by his majestic style, one distinctive feature of which is the way that the convoy of long sentences freighted and balanced with subordinate clauses will dock here and there to unload a pithy slogan. ‘Always historicise!’ is one of these, and Jameson has also insisted, under the banner of ‘One cannot not periodise,’ on the related necessity (as well as the semi-arbitrariness) of dividing history into periods. With that in mind, it’s tempting to propose a period, coincident with Jameson’s career as the main theorist of postmodernism, stretching from about 1983 (when Thatcher, having won a war, and Reagan, having survived a recession, consolidated their popularity) to 2008 (when the neoliberal programme launched by Reagan and Thatcher was set back by the worst economic crisis since the Depression). During this period of neoliberal ascendancy – an era of deregulation, financialisation, industrial decline, demoralisation of the working class, the collapse of Communism and so on – it often seemed easier to spot the contradictions of Marxism than the more famous contradictions of capitalism, and no figure seemed to embody more than Fredric Jameson the peculiar condition of an economic theory that had turned out to flourish above all as a mode of cultural analysis, a mass movement that had become the province of an academic ‘elite’, and an intellectual tradition that had arrived at some sort of culmination right at the point of apparent extinction.

Over the last quarter-century, Jameson has been at once the timeliest and most untimely of American critics and writers. Not only did he develop interests in film, science fiction, or the work of Walter Benjamin, say, earlier than most of his colleagues in the humanities, he was also a pioneer of that enlargement of literary criticism (Jameson received a PhD in French literature from Yale in 1959) into all-purpose theory which made the discussion of all these things in the same breath established academic practice. More than this, he succeeded better than anyone else at defining the term, ‘postmodernism’, that sought to catch the historical specificity of the present age.

This was a matter, first, of cataloguing postmodernism’s superficial textures: the erosion of the distinction between high and pop culture; the reign of stylistic pastiche and miscellany; the dominance of the visual image and corresponding eclipse of the written word; a new depthlessness – ‘surrealism without the unconscious’ – in the dream-like jumble of images; and the strange alliance of a pervasive cultural nostalgia (as in the costume drama or historical novel) with a cultural amnesia serving to fragment ‘time into a series of perpetual presents’. If all that now sounds familiar, this owes something to the durability of Jameson’s account of postmodernism, first delivered as a lecture in 1982 and expanded two years later into an essay for New Left Review: a 40-page sketch that caught the features of the fidgety sitter more accurately than many longer studies before and since.

via LRB · Benjamin Kunkel · Into the Big Tent.

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Three..

A little review of a few chapters of Fred Jameson’s new book, Valences of the Dialectic

The first essay or introduction (it borders on both), “Three Names of the Dialectic,” is hard reading. Harder, I think, than Jameson usually is. Things get a much better in the two following chapters on Hegel, and the last chapter (or two) on Ricoeur is a masterpiece, over much quicker than you expected, like a good movie. That said, “Three Names” does excellently what many have tried and few have actually accomplished: a full-on characterization of what dialectic is about. This is, no doubt, why it is so tough, for Jameson is not concerned just with the Hegelian dialectic, but all of it–indeed, when he allows himself the luxury of just confining his analysis to just Hegel, things get more concrete (and that’s saying something, as you’ll soon see). Where Jameson particularly succeeds though is in showing, not how this diversity reduces to one particular thing we can clearly grasp–the dialectic, which is only the first name of the dialectic in this first chapter–but just how diverse this old thing really is. By spraying dialectic around, then sluicing it in certain directions–indeed showing us many dialectics (dialectic prefaced with the indefinite article is the second name) the whole thing seems much richer, more expansive, more exciting, than the old definitions we carried in our heads before picking up the book.

Read the rest at Working notes: Three names.

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‘Imagination enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge the abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair….Without this kind of imagination, which actually is understanding, we would never be able to take our bearings in the world. It is the only inner compass that we have. We are contemporaries only as far as our understanding reaches’. [Understanding and Politics p. 323]

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The contours of a new Cold War are thus appearing on the horizon – and, this time, it will be literally a conflict fought in very cold conditions. On August 2 2007, a Russian team planted a titanium capsule with a Russian flag under the ice caps of the North Pole. This assertion of the Russian claim to the Arctic region was done neither for scientific reasons nor as a political-propagandistic bravado. Its true goal was to secure for Russia the vast energy riches of the Arctic: according to today’s estimates, up to one quarter of the world’s untapped oil and gas sources may lie under the Arctic Ocean. Russia’s claims are, predictably, opposed by four other countries whose territory borders on the Arctic region: USA, Canada, Norway and Denmark (through its sovereignty over Greenland).

While it is difficult to estimate the soundness of these predictions, one thing is sure: an extraordinary social and psychological change is taking place right in front of our eyes – the impossible is becoming possible. An event first experienced as impossible but not real (the prospect of a forthcoming catastrophe which, however probable we know it is, we do not believe it will effectively occur and thus dismiss it as impossible) becomes real but no longer impossible (once the catastrophe occurs, it is “renormalized,” perceived as part of the normal run of things, as always-already having been possible). The gap which makes these paradoxes possible is the one between knowledge and belief: we know the (ecological) catastrophe is possible, probable even, yet we do not believe it will really happen.

And is this not what is happening today, right in front of our eyes? A decade ago, the public debate on torture or the participation of the Neo-Fascist parties in a West European democratic government was dismissed as an ethical catastrophe which is impossible, which “really cannot happen”; once it happened, we immediately got accustomed to it, accepting it as obvious… Or, recall the infamous siege of Sarajevo from 1992 till 1995: the fact that a »normal« European city of half a million inhabitants will be encircled, starved, regularly bombed, its citizens terrorized by sniper fire, etc., and that this will go on for 3 years, would have been considered unimaginable before 1992 – it would have been extremely easy for the Western powers to break the siege and open a small safe corridor to the city. When the siege began, even the citizens of Sarajevo thought this is a short-term event, trying to send their children to safety »for a week or two, till this mess is over. “And then, very fast, the siege was “normalized…”

This same direct passage from impossibility to normalization is clearly discernible in how state powers and big capital relate to ecological threats like the ice meltdown on the poles. The very same politicians and managers who, till recently, dismissed the fears of global warming as apocalyptic scare-mongering of ex-Communists, or at least as premature conclusions based on insufficient evidence, assuring us that there is no reason for panic, that, basically, things will go on as usual, are now all of a sudden treating global warming as a simple fact, as part of the way things are “going on as usual”… In July 2008, CNN was repeatedly showing a report “The Greening of Greenland,” celebrating the new opportunities that the melting of ice offers to Greenlanders – they can already grow vegetables in the open land, etc. The obscenity of this report is not only that it focuses on the minor benefit of a global catastrophe; to add insult to injury, it plays on the double meaning of “green” in our public speech (“green” for vegetation; “green” for ecological concerns), so that the fact that more vegetation can grow on the Greenland soil because of the global warming is associated with the rising of ecological awareness… Are such phenomena not yet another example of how right Naomi Klein was when, in her Shock Doctrine, she described the way global capitalism exploits catastrophes (wars, political crises, natural disasters) to get rid of the “old” social constraints and impose its agenda on the slate cleared by the catastrophe? Perhaps, the forthcoming ecological disasters, far from undermining capitalism, will serve as its greatest boost.

What gets lost in this shift is the proper sense of what is going on, with all the unexpected traps the catastrophe hides. For example, one of the unpleasant paradoxes of our predicament is that the very attempts to counteract other ecological threats may contribute to the warming of the poles: the ozone hole helps shield the interior of the Antarctic from global warming, so if it will be healed, the Antarctic could quickly catch up with the warming of the rest of the Earth.

One thing at least is sure. In the last decades, it was fashionable to talk about the predominant role of “intellectual labor” in our postindustrial societies – however, materiality is now reasserting itself with a vengeance in all its aspects, from the forthcoming struggle for scarce resources (food, water, energy, minerals, food…) to environmental pollution.

So while we should definitely exploit the opportunities opened up by global warming, we should never forget that we are dealing with a tremendous social and natural catastrophe, and that these opportunities are the by-products of this catastrophe which we should fight with all our means. In adopting a “balanced view,” we act like those who plead for a more “balanced view” on Hitler: true, he killed millions in the camps, but he also abolished unemployment and inflation, built highways, made trains run on time… This new constellation provides the starting point for Dipesh Chakrabarty’s elaboration of the historico-philosophical consequences of the global warming, the main being the collapse of the distinction between human and natural histories:

“For it is no longer a question simply of man having an interactive relation with nature. This humans have always had /…/ Now it is being claimed that humans are a force of nature in the geological sense.”) (”The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, Winter 2009)

That is to say, the fact that “humans – thanks to our numbers, the burning of fossil fuel, and other related activities – have become a geological agent on the planet”(209), means that they are able to affect the very balance of life on Earth, so that – “in itself” with the industrial revolution of 1750, “for itself” with global warming – a new geological era began, baptized by some scientists as “Anthropocene.” The way humankind is forced to perceive itself in these new conditions is as a species, as one of the species of life on earth. When the young Marx designated humanity as a “species being /Gattungswesen/,” he means something quite different: that, in contrast to animal species, only humans are a “species being,” i.e., a being which actively relates to itself as a species and is thus “universal” not only in itself, but also for itself. This universality first appears in its alienated-perverted form with capitalism, which connects and unites all of humanity within the same world market; with modern social and scientific development, we are no longer just a mere species among others or yet another natural condition. For the first time in the entire human history, we, humans, collectively constitute ourselves and are aware of it, so that we are also responsible for ourselves: the mode of our survival depends on the maturity of our collective reason… However, the scientists who talk about the Anthropocene ”are saying something quite the contrary. They argue that because humans constitute a particular kind of species they can, in the process of dominating other species, acquire the status of a geologic force. Humans, in other words, have become a natural condition, at lest today.”(214) The standard Marxist counter-argument is here that this shift from Pleistocene to the Anthropocene is entirely due to the explosive development of capitalism and its global impact – and this confronts us with the key question: how are we to think the link between the social history of the Capital and the much larger geologic changes of the conditions for life on the Earth?

“If the industrial way of life was what got us into this crisis, then the question is, why think in terms of species, surely a category that belongs to a much longer history? Why could not the narrative of capitalism – and hence its critique – be sufficient as a framework for interrogating the history of climate change and understanding its consequences? It seems true that the crisis of climate change has been necessitated by the high-energy-consuming model of society that capitalist industrialization has created and promoted, but the current crisis has brought into view certain other conditions for the existence of life in the human form that have no intrinsic connection to the logics of capitalist, nationalist, or socialist identities. They are connected rather to the history of life on this planet, the way different life-forms connect to one another, and the way the mass extinction of one species could spell danger for another. /…/ In other words, whatever our socioeconomic and technological choices, whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions (such as the temperature zone in which the planet exists) that work like boundary parameters of human existence. These parameters are independent of capitalism or socialism. They have been stable for much longer than the histories of these institutions and have allowed human beings to become the dominant species on earth. Unfortunately, we have now ourselves become a geological agent disturbing these parametric conditions needed for our own existence.” (217-218)

In contrast to nuclear war which would have been the result of a conscious decision of a particular agent, climate change “is an unintended consequence of human action and shows, only through scientific analysis, the effects of our actions as a species.” (221) This threat to the very existence of humanity creates a new sense of “we” which truly encompasses all of humanity: “Climate change, refracted through global capital, will no doubt accentuate the logic of inequality that runs through the rule of capital; some people will no doubt gain temporarily at the expense of others. But the whole crisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism. Unlike in the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged (witness the drought in Australia or recent fires in the wealthy neighborhoods of California).” (221) The most appropriate name for this emerging universal subject may be species: “Species may indeed be the name of a placeholder for an emergent, new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of the danger that is climate change.” (221) The problem is that this universal is not a Hegelian one, which arises dialectically out of the movement of history and subsumes-mediates all particularities: it “escapes our capacity to experience the world” (222), so it can only give rise to a “negative universal history” (222), not the Hegelian world history as the gradual immanent self-deployment of freedom.

With the idea of humans as species, the universality of the humankind falls back into the particularity of an animal species: phenomena like global warming make us aware that, with all the universality of our theoretical and practical activity, we are at a certain basic level just another living species on the planet Earth. Our survival depends on certain natural parameters which we automatically take for granted. The lesson of the global warming is that the freedom of the humankind was possible only against the background of the stable natural parameters of the life on earth (temperature, the composition of the air, sufficient water and energy supply, etc.): humans can “do what they want” only insofar as they remain marginal enough, so that they don’t seriously perturb the parameters of the life on earth. The limitation of our freedom that becomes palpable with global warming is the paradoxical outcome of the very exponential growth of our freedom and power, i.e., of our growing ability to transform nature around us up to destabilizing the very basic geological parameters of the life on earth. “Nature” thereby literally becomes a socio-historical category, but not in the exalted young Lukacs sense (the content of what is for us (counts for us as) “nature” is always overdetermined by a historically-specified social totality which structures the transcendental horizon of our understanding of nature). It becomes a socio-historical category in the much more radical and literal (ontic) sense of something that is nit just a stable background of human activity, but is affected by it in its very basic components. What is thereby undermined is the basic distinction between nature and human history: nature blindly follows its course, it just has to be explained, while human history has to be understood. Even if its global course is out of control and functions as a Fate which goes against the wishes of most of the people, this “Fate” is the result of the complex interaction of many individual and collective projects and acts based upon certain understanding of what our world is – in history, we confront the result of our own endeavors.

Chakrabarty seems to miss here the full scope of the properly dialectical relationship between the basic geological parameters of the life on earth and the socio-economic dynamic of human development. Of course, the natural parameters of our environment are “independent of capitalism or socialism” – they are a threat to all of us, independently of economic development, political system, etc. However, the fact that their stability was threatened by the dynamic of global capitalism nonetheless has a stronger implication than the one allowed by Chakrabarty: in a way, we have to admit that the Whole is contained by its Part, i.e., that the fate of the Whole (life on earth) hinges on what goes on in what is formally one of its parts (socio-economic mode of production of one of the species on earth). This is why we have to accept the paradox that, in the relation between the universal antagonism (the threatened parameters of the conditions for life on earth) and the particular antagonism (the deadlock of capitalism), the key struggle is the particular one: one can solve the universal problem (of the survival of the human species) only by first resolving the particular deadlock of the capitalist mode of production. In other words, the common-sense reasoning which tells us that, independently of our class position or of our political orientation, we all will have to tackle the ecological crisis if we are to survive, is deeply misleading: the key of the ecological crisis does not reside in ecology as such.

Perhaps, the key to this limitation is Chakrabarty’s simplified notion of the Hegelian dialectics. That is to say, is the idea of a “negative universal history” really anti-Hegelian? Is, on the contrary, the idea that a multiplicity (of humans) totalized (brought together) through a negative external limit (a threat) not Hegelian par excellence? Even more, is not for Hegel every universality ultimately a “negative” one, in the precise sense that it has to appear as such, in its opposition (“negative relationship”) to its own particular-determinate content – recall Hegel’s theory of war. Hegel may appear to celebrate the prosaic character of life in a well-organized modern state where the heroic disturbances are overcome in the tranquillity of private rights and the security of the satisfaction of needs: private property is guaranteed, sexuality is restricted to marriage, future is safe… In this organic order, universality and particular interests appear reconciled: the “infinite right” of subjective singularity is given its due, individuals no longer experience the objective state order as a foreign power intruding onto their rights, they recognize in it the substance and frame of their very freedom. Gerard Lebrun asks here the fateful question: “Can the sentiment of the Universal be dissociated from this appeasement?” The answer is clear: yes, and this is why war is necessary – in war, universality reasserts its right against and over the concrete-organic appeasement in the prosaic social life. Is thus the necessity of war not the ultimate proof that, for Hegel, every social reconciliation is doomed to fail, that no organic social order can effectively contain the force of abstract-universal negativity? This is why social life is condemned to the “spurious infinity” of the eternal oscillation between stable civic life and wartime perturbations.

In other words, Chakrabarty’s dismissal of the Hegelian universality would only hold if we were to reduce what Hegel calls “concrete universality” to the organic-corporate model of a universal order within which every particular moment plays its determinate role, contributing to the wealth of the All. If, however, we bear in mind that the Hegelian “concrete universality” designates a universal which enters into a dialectical tension with its own particular content, i.e., that every universality can only assert (posit) itself “as such” in a negative way, then the idea of nature as not only the self-evident stable background of human activity, but as the unity of the invisible background of and apocalyptic threat to the human species, appears profoundly Hegelian.

From lacan.com

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Immanuel Kant

Check out this FIVE MINUTE guide to Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, illustrated with comics.

(Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgement”: Drastically Abridged Awesome Version – lacunae.)

Douglas Wolk

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[Originally published in Le Monde, 13 February 2010. Translated by Alberto Toscano]

Alain Badiou

The Courage of the Present

For almost thirty years, the present, in our country, has been a disoriented time. I mean a time that does not offer its youth, especially the youth of the popular classes, any principle to orient existence. What is the precise character of this disorientation? One of its foremost operations consists in always making illegible the previous sequence, that sequence which was well and truly oriented. This operation is characteristic of all reactive, counter-revolutionary periods, like the one we’ve been living through ever since the end of the seventies. We can for example note that the key feature of the Thermidorean reaction, after the plot of 9 Thermidor and the execution without trial of the Jacobin leaders, was to make illegible the previous Robespierrean sequence: its reduction to the pathology of some blood-thirsty criminals impeded any political understanding. This view of things lasted for decades, and it aimed lastingly to disorient the people, which was considered to be, as it always is, potentially revolutionary.

To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil. Let us therefore pose, with regard to a previous and visibly closed sequence of the politics of emancipation, that it must remain legible for us, independently of the final judgment about it.

In the debate concerning the rationality of the French Revolution during the Third Republic, Clemenceau produced a famous formula: ‘The French Revolution forms a bloc’. This formula is noteworthy because it declares the integral legibility of the process, whatever the tragic vicissitudes of its unfolding may have been. Today, it is clear that it is with reference to communism that the ambient discourse transforms the previous sequence into an opaque pathology. I take it upon myself therefore to say that the communist sequence, including all of its nuances, in power as well as in opposition, which lay claim to the same idea, also forms a bloc.

So what can the principle and the name of a genuine orientation be today? I propose that we call it, faithfully to the history of the politics of emancipation, the communist hypothesis. Let us note in passing that our critics want to scrap the word ‘communism’ under the pretext that an experience with state communism, which lasted seventy years, failed tragically. What a joke! When it’s a question of overthrowing the domination of the rich and the inheritance of power, which have lasted millennia, their objections rest on seventy years of stumbling steps, violence and impasses! Truth be told, the communist idea has only traversed an infinitesimal portion of the time of its verification, of its effectuation. What is this hypothesis? It can be summed up in three axioms.

First, the idea of equality. The prevalent pessimistic idea, which once again dominates our time, is that human nature is destined to inequality; that it’s of course a shame that this is so, but that once we’ve shed a few tears about this, it is crucial to grasp this and accept it. To this view, the communist idea responds not exactly with the proposal of equality as a programme – let us realize the deep-seated equality immanent to human nature – but by declaring that the egalitarian principle allows us to distinguish, in every collective action, that which is in keeping with the communist hypothesis, and therefore possesses a real value, from that which contradicts it, and thus throws us back to an animal vision of humanity.

Then we have the conviction that the existence of a separate coercive state is not necessary. This is the thesis, shared by anarchists and communists, of the withering-away of the state. There have existed societies without the state, and it is rational to postulate that there may be others in the future. But above all, it is possible to organize popular political action without subordinating it to the idea of power, representation within the state, elections, etc. The liberating constraint of organized action can be exercised outside the state. There are many examples of this, including recent ones: the unexpected power of the movement of December 1995 delayed by several years anti-popular measures on pensions. The militant action of undocumented workers did not stop a host of despicable laws, but it has made it possible for these workers to be recognized as a part of our collective and political life.

A final axiom: the organization of work does not imply its division, the specialization of tasks, and in particular the oppressive differentiation between intellectual and manual labour. It is necessary and possible to aim for the essential polymorphousness of human labour. This is the material basis of the disappearance of classes and social hierarchies. These three principles do not constitute a programme; they are maxims of orientation, which anyone can use as a yardstick to evaluate what he or she says and does, personally or collectively, in its relation to the communist hypothesis.

The communist hypothesis has known two great stages, and I propose that we’re entering into a third phase of its existence. The communist hypothesis established itself on a vast scale between the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune (1871). The dominant themes then were those of the workers’ movement and insurrection. Then there was a long interval, lasting almost forty years (from 1871 to 1905), which corresponds to the apex of European imperialism and the systematic plunder of numerous regions of the planet. The sequence that goes from 1905 to 1976 (Cultural Revolution in China) is the second sequence of the effectuation of the communist hypothesis. Its dominant theme is the theme of the party, accompanied by its main (and unquestionable) slogan: discipline is the only weapon of those who have nothing. From 1976 to today, there is a second period of reactive stabilization, a period in which we still live, during which we have witnessed the collapse of the single-party socialist dictatorships created in the second sequence.

I am convinced that a third historical sequence of the communist hypothesis will inevitably open up, different from the two previous ones, but paradoxically closer to the first than the second. This sequence will share with the sequence that prevailed in the nineteenth century that fact that what is at stake in it is the very existence of the communist hypothesis, which today is almost universally denied. It is possible to define what, along with others, I am attempting as preliminary efforts aimed at the reestablishment of the communist hypothesis and the deployment of its third epoch.

What we need, in these early days of the third sequence of existence of the communist hypothesis, is a provisional morality for a disoriented time. It’s a matter of minimally maintaining a consistent subjective figure, without being able to rely on the communist hypothesis, which has yet to be re-established on a grand scale. It is necessary to find a real point to hold, whatever the cost, an ‘impossible’ point that cannot be inscribed in the law of the situation. We must hold a real point of this type and organize its consequences.

The living proof that our societies are obviously in-human is today the foreign undocumented worker: he is the sign, immanent to our situation, that there is only one world. To treat the foreign proletarian as though he came from another world, that is indeed the specific task of the ‘home office’ (ministère de l’identité nationale), which has its own police force (the ‘border police’). To affirm, against this apparatus of the state, that any undocumented worker belongs to the same world as us, and to draw the practical, egalitarian and militant consequences of this – that is an example of a type of provisional morality, a local orientation in keeping with the communist hypothesis, amid the global disorientation which only its reestablishment will be able to counter.

The principal virtue that we need is courage. This is not always the case: in other circumstances, other virtues may have priority. For instance, during the revolutionary war in China, Mao promoted patience as the cardinal virtue. But today, it is undeniably courage. Courage is the virtue that manifests itself, without regard for the laws of the world, by the endurance of the impossible. It’s a question of holding the impossible point without needing to account for the whole of the situation: courage, to the extent that it’s a matter of treating the point as such, is a local virtue. It partakes of a morality of the place, and its horizon is the slow reestablishment of the communist hypothesis.

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“His body on the cross was therefore fully and entirely subject to the laws of nature.  In the picture the face is terribly smashed with blows, swollen, covered with terrible, swollen, and bloodstained bruises, the eyes open and squinting; the large, open whites of the eyes have a sort of dead and glassy glint. . . .

Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, though it may seem strange, as some huge engine of the latest design, which has senselessly seized, cut to pieces, and swallowed up–impassively and unfeelingly–a great and priceless Being, a Being worth the whole of nature and all its laws, worth the entire earth, which was perhaps created solely for the coming of that Being!  The picture seems to give expression to the idea of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subordinated, and this idea is suggested to you unconsciously.  The people surrounding the dead man, none of whom is shown in the picture, must have been overwhelmed by a feeling of terrible anguish and dismay on that evening which had shattered all their hopes and almost all their beliefs at one fell blow.  They must have parted in a state of the most dreadful terror, though each of them carried away within him a mighty thought which could never be wrested from him.  And if, on the eve of the crucifixion, the Master could have seen what He would look like when taken from the cross, would he have mounted the cross and died as he did?”

Feodor Dostoevsky: Spoken by Ippolit in The Idiot (Penguin 1955, tran. by David Magarshak, 446-7)

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Buck-Morss’ book seems to gaining an ever wider readership: good. See my post on it from last year here (CH). Here’s a more recent post from an interesting blogger:

I very belatedly (it was published in 2000) got round to reading Susan-Buck Morss’s essay ‘Hegel and Haiti’ (available through the usual sources). This is also well worth a read. And I see no strong reason why her thesis can’t be true, that Hegel’s ‘Master-Slave Dialectic’ was inspired in part by the revolution in Saint-Domingue occuring whilst Hegel was writing the Phenomenology. Pretty strong evidence is adduced by Buck-Morss via details of the political journal Minerva, which Hegel read, and which was covering the uprising for a European audience. With this interpretation Buck-Morss seeks to ‘rescue’ this famous theme in Hegel from being solely philosophical (though in criticism I’d say it’s undeniable that Hegel did have Aristotle, Hobbes and Fichte also in mind when writing it; philosophy and politics were inextricable for him) and in so doing radicalises our picture of Hegel, who is now seen to treat an empirical event which for all their humanitarianism few other Aufklaerer touched. For Buck-Morss the dialectic of Master and Slave needs to be rescued from the appearance of concerning only feudal social relations and seen as a critique of the enslavement of Africans which had created the very ‘wealth of nations’ which the Aufklaerer now enjoyed. It should be said that such a particular inspiration, if true, would not detract from the wider resonance, a relevance to any relation of dependence and independence which Hegel clearly intended, and this is no doubt the enduring appeal of the passage. Again one could criticise Buck-Morss for downplaying precedents for the critique of slavery amongst les Lumières themselves – her reading of Rousseau’s silence on the Code Noir is unsympathetic, as she herself acknowledges. In Rousseau’s defence the point of asserting freedom as a universal right was that the reader would see the injustice of particular unfreedoms; these didn’t need to be named. It was arguably the very generality of Rousseau’s claims which made them incendiary – they could be applied to any form of inequality, whether in Old Europe or the New World. These fine points aside, I think Buck-Morss’s thesis holds much water.

Tagged with: Hegel, Haiti, Susan Buck-Morss

via The Philosopher’s Haiti « Box 3, Spool 5.

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Fast Tube by Casper">Society of the Spectacle

‘In a society that has really been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood’ – Guy Debord

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To become mature is to recover that sense of seriousness which one had as a child at play -Nietzsche

Freud was right when he said getting work and love right are essential for a good life, but he should have added a third: play. What is play? I think it’s something like a pure means, without any ends.  When we play we do something that has no real utility, no end, no extrinsic reward. It’s done for its own sake. As such, it is the exercise of our freedom.

When a child plays with something everyday -like a box, a cup, a coaster – she turns it away from its fixed meaning as a tool, a bit of equipment, and recreates it as a thing subject to the play of her imagination. Its potential to be a thousand things is there; the child makes it in imagination a multitude of them in an hour.

When we play, as adults, we release ourselves from the means-end  logic of the day. Play here reveals its affinity with art. Both, I think, have a utopian aspect: negating the sad realm of necessity, linking the infant we were to the joyful adult we are. Or might be.  I’d go so far as to say that making this possibility real for everyone should be the  ultimate aim  of politics. Stendhal called beauty the promise of happiness; play is the thing itself.

Play is the unneurotic unhurried childlike absorption in the present, a sign of maturity. To to be childlike is to be in the opposite state to childishness. It’s childishness that our mass entertainment industry stimulates in us, an endless distraction, without real focus on anything, the finger of the depressive hedonist flipping from channel to channel. Childish: the promise of satisfaction, forever witheld, just out of reach of the tetchy kidult. The full absorption in what one is doing is utterly different to this.

So we need play, we need it as we need freedom and love. Are they even possible without it?

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“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge–unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.”

–Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” (Spring, 1940) trans. Harry Zohn.

via walterbenjamin.html.

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“Nothing is worth more than this day. You cannot relive yesterday. Tomorrow is still beyond your reach.” -Goethe

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Valences of the Dialectic

Two sections from the breathtaking climax of Jameson’s Valences Of The Dialectic – a work that is by turns frustrating, dense and opaque, elusive and mist-like, exhausting, tragic, moving, galvanising, inspiring – a genuinely monumental achievement:

We have indeed secreted a human age out of ourselves as spiders secrete their webs: an immense, all-encompassing ceiling of secularity which shuts down visibility on all sides even as it absorbs all the formerly natural elements in its habitat, transmuting them into its own man-made substance. Yet within the horizon of immanence, we wander as alien as tribal people, or as visitors from outer space, admiring its unimaginably complex and fragile filigree and recoiling from its bottomless potholes, lounging against a rainwall of exotic and artificial plants or else agonizing among poisonous colors and lethal stems we were not taught to avoid. The world of the human age is an aesthetic pretext for grinding terror or pathological ecstasy, and in its cosmos, all of it drawn form the very fibres of our own being and at one with us in every post-natural cell more alien to us than nature itself we continue murmuring Kant’s old questions – what can I know? What should I do? How may I hope? – under a starry heaven, no more responsive than a mirror or a space ship, not understanding that they require the adjunct of an ugly and bureaucratic qualification: what cn I know in this system? What should I do in this new world completely invented by me? What can I hope for in alone in an altogether human age? And failing to replace them by the only meaningful one, namely how can I recognize this forbiddingly foreign totality as my own doing, how may I appropriate it and make it my own handiwork and acknowledge its laws as my own projection and praxis?

And the theory-poetry of the very last paragraph which, to say the least, has a bearing on capitalist realism:

… We may argue that Utopia is no longer in time just as with the end of voyages of discovery and the exploration of the globe it disappeared from geographical space as such. Utopia as the absolute negation of the fully realized Absolute which our own system has attained cannot now be imagined as lying ahead of us in historical time as an evolutionary or even revolutionary possibility. Indeed, it cannot be imagined at all; and one needs the languages and figurations of physics – the conception of closed worlds and a multiplicity of unconnected yet simultaneous universes – in order to convey what might be the ontology of this now so seemingly empty and abstract idea. Yet it is not to be grapsed in this logic of religious transcendence either, as some other world after or before this one, or beyond it. It would be best, perhaps, to think of an alternate world – better to say the alternate world, our alternate world – as one contiguous with ours but without any connection or access to it. Then, from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible.

From: k-punk.

There’s an interesting discussion on the same site of Mark Fisher’s (a.k.a. k-punk) recent book Capitalist Realism. Worth reading, as is the book itself.

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