jools posted:
Please, watch a half dozen youtubes to understand the argument that I make.
AmericanNazbro posted:
naw, it was much worse: it was a video of an italian philosopher
hes one of zizek's pals at the elite swiss alps grad school which makes this whole episode especially hilarious. hes good though so im watchign the videos now
but then again im speaking to crowd who wont respond to schmitt whatsoever except to cry nazi (which doesnt even make sense) so lol
why is it important
what is a good third question to ask
gyrofry posted:
who is carl schmitt
why is it important
what is a good third question to ask
carl schmitt wrote a couple important books that critique democracy as well as the conceptualization of dictatorship. the two books are on dictatorship and political theology. his eventual conclusion is that there are two kinds of dictatorship, commisarial dictatorship and sovereign dictatorship. commisarial dictatorship is rule wherein the law is formally in place but not applied. sovereign dictatorship is when the law is formally suspended but applied. its a pretty complex argument but he basically ties the juridical structure of democratic politics that arose from the french revolution to a kernel of this dualistic dictatorial form, and alleges that theology is important to understanding the genealogy of western political thought (if not going so far as agamben does in asserting that christian theology is significant to the constitution of western democratic politics).
EDIT: a lot of people seem to regard schmitt crudely as a nazi and therefore dismiss his entire project which is rather nazi-esque in itself if you ask me! schmitt was committed to producing a democratic juridical structure that permitted revolutionary action without carrying in the baggage of the dictatorial form, and given the history of revolution in the 20th C i think it's fair to say thats a pretty important and relevant project to carry on.
state of exception is pretty short but well argued and explains not only schmitt in a concise way but also builds on his argument to apply it to an important theory of praxis (that i havent quite gotten to) that he claims is divorced a lot of contemporary theory regarding the state. agamben thinks (and i tend to agree) that we don't have a good enough understanding of the state to really propose sufficient responses to the political problems of today, and he also seems to indicate that the legal and philosophical traditions have both fallen into disarray, in large part to the segregation of them from each other thats occured at some point in the past.
this is probably way off but this is what ive gotten out of it so far
Edited by babyfinland ()
babyfinland posted:
agamben thinks (and i tend to agree) that we don't have a good enough understanding of the state to really propose sufficient responses to the political problems of today
hmm.
ok.
well it's certainly hard to disagree that sufficient responses to the political problems of today are not available.
it doesn't seem obvious that this should be attributed to lack of understanding of the state (if is meant by this an understanding of the structures of the state and the socio-politico-economic dynamics of power)
or does he mean 'understanding of the state' in the sense of detailed information about state secrets/national security practices/etc?
gyrofry posted:
i know nothing about agamben. if i am interested in reading it, should i be familiar with any other set of works as background?
not really that i can think of. whenever he references other people he's very good about constructing self-sufficient arguments. he's actually excruciatingly careful about this.
he's dreamy :swoon:
what interests me particularly is the gnostic division between a god foreign to the world and the god which governs, a division subsumed by the christian trinitarian tradition by the formation of a divine kingdom against the foreign world of the gnostic material, the introduction of economic form of christian oikonomia that appears essential to an understanding of the tradition of historical western statist configurations of governance. i believe what babyfinland is getting at (but i could be totally wrong about this, i have very little familiarity with the text being referenced) is that the marxist project of governance fails, perverting its promise of emancipation, by buying into the christian tradition of the divine imperial kingdom, imposing a universal divine order against the foreign material. and at its worst, this kingdom of god manifests itself as a colonial power indistinguishable from u.$. imperial power in its aspiration to this illusory universality opposed to a foreign world
against this, following bataille to a degree, i think you can find the heart of revolutionary marxism in a pre-christian gnostic tradition, a violent rejection of christian oikonomia and the divine tourist completely
It is nevertheless very remarkable that the only kind of materialism that up to now in its development has escaped systemic abstraction, namely dialectical materialism, had as its starting point, at least as much as ontological materialism, absolute idealism in its Hegelian form. (There is no need to go back on this method: materialism, whatever its scope in the positive order, necessarily is above all the obstinate negation of idealism, which amounts to saying, finally, of the very basis of all philosophy.) Now Hegelianism, no less than the classical philosophy of Hegel's period, apparently proceeded from very ancient metaphysical conceptions, conceptions developed by, among others, the Gnostics, in an epoch when metaphysics could still be associated with the most monstrous dualistic and therefore strangely abased cosmogonies.
I admit that I have, in respect to mystical philosophies, only an unambiguous interest, analogous in practice to that of an uninfatuated psychiatrist toward his patients; it seems to me rather pointless to put one's trust in tendencies that, without meeting resistance, lead to the most pitiful dishonesty and bankruptcy. But it is difficult today to remain indifferent even to partly falsified solutions brought, at the beginning of the Christian era, to problems that do not appear noticeably different to our own (which are those of a society whose original principles have become, in a very precise sense, the dead letter of a society that must put itself in question and overturn itself in order to rediscover motives of force and violent agitation). Thus the adoration of an ass-headed god (the ass being the most hideously cosmic animal, and at the same time the most humanly virile) seems to me capable of taking on even today a crucial value: the severed ass's head of the acephalic personification of the sun undoubtedly represents, even if imperfectly, one of materialism's most virulent manifestations.
In practice, it is possible to see as a leitmotiv of Gnosticism the conception of matter as an active principle having its own eternal autonomous existence as darkness (which would not simply be the absence of light, but the monstrous archontes revealed by this absence), and as evil (which would not be the absence of good, but a creative action). This conception was perfectly incompatible with the very principle of the profoundly monistic Hellenistic spirit, whose dominant tendency saw matter and evil as degradations of superior principles. Attributing the creation of the earth, where our repugnant and derisory agitation takes place, to a horrible and perfectly illegitimate principle evidently implies, from the point of view of the Greek intellectual construction, a nauseating, inadmissible pessimism, the exact opposite of what had to be established at all costs and made universally manifest. In fact the opposed existence of an excellent divinity, worthy of the absolute confidence of the human spirit, matters little if the baneful and odious divinity of this dualism is under no circumstances reducible to it, without any possibility of hope. It is true that even within Gnosticism things were not always so clear-cut. The fairly widespread doctrine of emanation (according to which the ignoble creator god, in other words the cursed god - sometimes associated with Jehovah of the Bible - emanated from the Supreme God) responded to a need for a palliative. But if we confine ourselves to the specific meaning of Gnosticism, indicated both by herisiological controversies and by carving on stones, the despotic and bestial obsession with outlawed and evil forces seems irrefutable, as much in its metaphysical speculation as in its mythological nightmare.
It is difficult to believe that on the whole Gnosticism does not manifest above all a sinister love of darkness, a monstrous taste for obscene and lawless archontes, for the head of the solar ass (whose cosmic and desperate braying would be the signal for a shameless revolt against idealism in power).
- base materialism and gnosticism
our profane, braying solar god, the subject that demands of us complete servitude to the revolutionary cause, is the proletariat of marxism
The meaning of Christianity is given in the development of the delirious consequences of the expenditure of classes, in a mental agonistic orgy practiced at the expense of the real struggle.
However, in spite of the importance that it has had in human activity, Christian humiliation is only an episode in the historic struggle of the ignoble against the noble, of the impure against the pure. It is as if society, conscious of its own intolerable splitting, had become for a time dead drunk in order to enjoy it sadistically. But the heaviest drunkenness has not done away with the consequences of human poverty, and, with the exploited classes opposing the superior classes with greater lucidity, no conceivable limit can be assigned to hatred. In historical agitation, only the word Revolution dominates the customary confusion and carries with it the promise that answers the unlimited demands of the masses. As for the masters and the exploiters, whose function is to create the contemptuous forms that exclude human nature - causing this nature to exist at the limits of the earth, in other words in mud - a simple law of reciprocity requires that they be condemned to fear, to the great night when their beautiful phrases will be drowned out by death screams in riots. That is the bloody hope which, each day, is one with the existence of the people, and which sums up the insubordinate content of the class struggle.
Class struggle has only one possible end: the loss of those who have worked to lose "human nature".
But whatever forms of development is foreseen, be it revolutionary or servile, the general convulsions constituted eighteen hundred years ago by the religious ecstasy of the Christians, and today by the worker's movement, must equally be represented as a decisive impulse constraining society to use the exclusion of one class by another to realize a mode of expenditure as tragic and as free as possible, and at the same time constraining it to introduce sacred forms so human that the traditional forms become relatively contemptible. It is the tropic character of such movements that accounts for the total human value of the workers' Revolution, a Revolution capable of exerting a force of attraction as strong as the force that directs simple organism towards the sun.
- the notion of expenditure
the proletarian revolution is an occult black sun, a contraction of the subject of no part into a fury of negativity. to quote bataille yet again, from his popular front on the street:
After February 16.
500,000 workers, defied by little cockroaches, invaded the streets and caused an immense uproar.
Comrades, who has the right to lay down the law?
This ALL-POWERFUL multitude, thus HUMAN OCEAN
Only this ocean of men in revolt can save the world from the nightmare of
impotence and carnage in which it sinks!
our escape from this nightmare-world depends entirely on the emergence of the multitude, the accumulation of this ocean, the widespread submission to our braying, profane sun. the point at which the political actions of this multitude lowers itself to engagement at the level of traditional statist and economic configurations, the point at which the gnostic tradition is subsumed by oikonomia, struggle devolves to the sphere of the christian political tradition, is the point of failure
If we agree to use the term 'class domination', we find ourselves on firmer ground. In a class society such as capitalist society, there exist dominant classes (the big landowners and the bourgeoisie) and dominated classes. What is class domination? It is not restricted to political government over men, which can take different forms: monarchy by divine right, Caesarism, constitutional monarchy, the parliamentary republic, or, later, fascist dictatorship. Class domination encompasses the whole set of economic, political, and ideological forms of domination - that is to say, of class exploitation and oppression. Within this set, the political forms represent a subset of variable size which is, however, always subordinate to the whole set of forms. The state then becomes the apparatus or machine that serves as an instrument for class domination and its perpetuation.
The expression 'dictatorship of the proletariat' or 'class domination of the proletariat' now acquires its full meaning. If we say that every class society presupposes class domination in the sense just stated, then the revolution that is the tendency of capitalist society will modify the relationship of class domination in the sense of an inversion (although matters will be more complicated in actual fact): the domination of the bourgeois class will necessarily give way to that of the working class and its allies. But, here again, proletarian class domination cannot be reduced to the exercise of dictatorial political power by, say, a party representing the new class or a coalition representing the working class and its allies. The class domination of the proletariat can only designate the whole set of economic, political and ideological forms by means of which the proletariat has to impose its politics on the old dominant, exploiting class. It is perfectly possible that this will come about non-violently, if the exploiting classes consent to what amounts, ultimately, to a restructuring of social relations. Moreover, if the former exploiters overstep the new laws or circumvent them, they can be compelled to respect these new laws not by force, but by law. Obviously, if they succeed in precipitating a foreign intervention in order to put themselves ack in the saddle, or in exploiting discontent to tendentious ends in a difficult period, going so far as to provoke acts of armed violence, the revolutionary authorities will clearly be obliged to resist by employing force, as a last resort, after exhausting all other arguments; but, in any event, this by no means settles the question of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', or of the class domination of the proletariat. If it is to exist, this domination must exist in the forms of production (nationalizations combined with a more or less extensive market sector, self-management, workers' control over production, and so on), in political forms (councils, represented in a National Council by their delegates) and in ideological forms (what Lenin called cultural revolution).
-althusser's marx in his limits
this 'domination of the proletariat' exists beyond simple state politics or the economy of oikonomia, beyond the providential machine or state of emergency. for althusser, this 'domination' gives way to 'dictatorship' by the sacrifices demanded by the contingencies of praxis
In many cases, it must be admitted, Lenin himself identified the dictatorship qf the proletariat with violent government by the representatives of the proletariat, or, quite simply, the leaders of the Party and the Party itself, implementing political measures that violated or suspended the established laws.
I do not say this in order to criticize the statesman Lenin for dissolving the Constituent Assembly without due process of law, for outlawing and prosecuting the Social Revolutionaries, or for banning all political parties except the Bolshevik Party, and so on. Lenin sus pended the constitution and governed by decree rather than by voted laws, but he had serious reasons for doing so in a period in which the power of the soviets was under attack from foreign powers that were, inside the borders of the USSR itself, aiding and abetting the forces of the far Right, who had cast all restraint to the winds and were perpetrating unspeakable barbarities. In this case, anyone who fails to opt for the extreme course of suspending the political laws in order to save the revolutionary state, and of taking all the radical measures that the situation calls for, himself falls victim to barbarity and chooses defeat: not only his own, but also that of the revolutionary masses as a whole. For, as far as I know, there was nothing 'legal' about the 'Allied' interventions on Soviet soil and the military operations of the counterrevolutionaries. Lenin simply responded to the illegal horror of the invaders with the only weapons he had: not just by suspending the laws, but also by mobilizing the people to save the state of the soviets.
with the arrival of these unspeakable barbarities, the state of emergency, the state of emergency is established as a defensive maneuver. but it is the subversion of the proletarian revolution that spells failure, when the running dogs saunter along the shining path. the actions of revisionists are responsible for the sublimation of the gnostic structures of revolutionary marxism into modern governmentality, the paradigm in which the kingdom of god governs that which is foreign, soviet imperialism becomes indistinguishable from the u.$. imperial project
the task of avoiding this failure is the evocation of bataille's human ocean, the all-powerful multitude, in the face of which, running dogs are little cockroaches. the submission of fighters to our dark sun, the contraction into negation, people subsumed into fluidity. and here begins my basic opposition to the tactic of subtraction from the state - when the police state mobilizes itself solely as a vehicle directed toward the maintenance of apartheid, a development that is without a doubt occurring, we face a total striation of space. the simple organisms that grow towards bataille's sun can't break through stone walls. the groups which we define as carrying revolutionary potential - for example, the exploited internal semi-colony of the prison labor system - are, in the case of the urban centers of the core states, increasingly becoming defined by their place behind walls of apartheid. the technocapitalist police state takes part in a process dedicated to the prevention of accumulating this human ocean. it isn't that i disagree with the solutions shennong or babyfinland are proposing, it's that i can't, on a basic level, see where they begin to address these problems. this maybe a personal failing of mine, but i don't understand how you can free the palestinian revolutionaries behind the walls of israeli prisons without seizing or dismantling the zionist state. a politics that simply ignores the struggles of the radically excluded is one i don't have any sympathy towards, well intentioned or not. there might be disagreement here, but that is not where i identify emancipation in the slightest
babyfinland posted:
What solution have I proposed?
i'm not saying you're approaching anything definitive by any means, but you do have sympathies toward a non-statist pluralism, that is building subtracted communities in a way that speaks to indigeneity, no?
xipe posted:
how likely is it that teh future will be dominated by State Like Entities organised by cloud/SaaS architecture, and how the fack would we deal with something like that??
well i dont kno exactly what that would entail xipe because im not particularly familiar with this stuff but this seems pretty likely especially considering government contraction of private security firms, so a coupling of multiple components in a singular, extremely dynamic entity seems like a pretty likely development and thats going to need some serious thought!!!
blinkandwheeze posted:
well i dont kno exactly what that would entail xipe because im not particularly familiar with this stuff but this seems pretty likely especially considering government contraction of private security firms, so a coupling of multiple components in a singular, extremely dynamic entity seems like a pretty likely development and thats going to need some serious thought!!!
i aint well versed in it either, but i find it worrying cos i think it offers a model of ever tighter elite control at minimal manpower expense - negating the main advantage taht the people have!
this guy was proposing similar things along humanitarian lines before 'the cloud' became a buzzword; im thinking the 'withering away of the state' will look more like a militarised version of this than, say, what graeber talked about with madagascar, unfortunately
youtube videos with allusions to mystical pyramids are preferable
The UN has the business plan and structure for implementing a one world government
– it just scares me that someone has thought it all out..there is definitely intention there..
You can’t hold an institution responsible. They are just distractions and control/power structures
It’s way more incest-ridden and Dictator/Monarchy-like than that…people are stupid and like routine – it doesn’t take much to lead idiots..lol
Even within OZ politics – like Bob Carr approving the Airport Development before finishing as NSW premier – then where does he end up working on big money? Mac Bank..who got the development etc..it’s all just jerking off your friends and fck the world! It always has been – we’re just better at accepting the rules of the underclass these days – because it seems like so many people are totally playing by the rules! Hahahahahha
It’s always just a farce to hide the money trails…lol
That’s probably one of the main/real reasons 3 buildings fell over on their own..
So much evidence of sooooo much misspent taxpayer money by the DOD…all magically disappears..lol
It’s pretty hard to “mis-allocate” or “lose” a trillion dollars….lol – but that’s cool – we lost all these records in a crazy terror-fire – you’d be unpatriotic to think any differently! Haha
Like – to me; there’s obviously a long term agenda in US “politics” that’s being carried out regardless of the farce of who’s in office every 4 years…
I truly that hope there isn’t some ruling elite – but it’s seems pretty evident that there is.
P.S. The drug problem is funding the world economy and floating the Wall St bubble.
So basically – the elite are getting and staying rich by selling drugs to our kids…lol
sorry – I’m not the most coherent or chronological person with these thoughts
haha – there’s just too much sh!t in the world that links together; like this evil Lego tower of Babel…hahaha
Ironicwarcriminal posted:
like, where do i point him from here
gbs
Ironicwarcriminal posted:
like, where do i point him from here
The UN has the business plan and structure for implementing a one world government
– it just scares me that someone has thought it all out..there is definitely intention there..
You can’t hold an institution responsible. They are just distractions and control/power structures
It’s way more incest-ridden and Dictator/Monarchy-like than that…people are stupid and like routine – it doesn’t take much to lead idiots..lol
Even within OZ politics – like Bob Carr approving the Airport Development before finishing as NSW premier – then where does he end up working on big money? Mac Bank..who got the development etc..it’s all just jerking off your friends and fck the world! It always has been – we’re just better at accepting the rules of the underclass these days – because it seems like so many people are totally playing by the rules! Hahahahahha
It’s always just a farce to hide the money trails…lol
That’s probably one of the main/real reasons 3 buildings fell over on their own..
So much evidence of sooooo much misspent taxpayer money by the DOD…all magically disappears..lol
It’s pretty hard to “mis-allocate” or “lose” a trillion dollars….lol – but that’s cool – we lost all these records in a crazy terror-fire – you’d be unpatriotic to think any differently! Haha
Like – to me; there’s obviously a long term agenda in US “politics” that’s being carried out regardless of the farce of who’s in office every 4 years…
I truly that hope there isn’t some ruling elite – but it’s seems pretty evident that there is.
P.S. The drug problem is funding the world economy and floating the Wall St bubble.
So basically – the elite are getting and staying rich by selling drugs to our kids…lol
sorry – I’m not the most coherent or chronological person with these thoughts
haha – there’s just too much sh!t in the world that links together; like this evil Lego tower of Babel…hahaha
babyfinland posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:
like, where do i point him from here
The UN has the business plan and structure for implementing a one world government
– it just scares me that someone has thought it all out..there is definitely intention there..
You can’t hold an institution responsible. They are just distractions and control/power structures
It’s way more incest-ridden and Dictator/Monarchy-like than that…people are stupid and like routine – it doesn’t take much to lead idiots..lol
Even within OZ politics – like Bob Carr approving the Airport Development before finishing as NSW premier – then where does he end up working on big money? Mac Bank..who got the development etc..it’s all just jerking off your friends and fck the world! It always has been – we’re just better at accepting the rules of the underclass these days – because it seems like so many people are totally playing by the rules! Hahahahahha
It’s always just a farce to hide the money trails…lol
That’s probably one of the main/real reasons 3 buildings fell over on their own..
So much evidence of sooooo much misspent taxpayer money by the DOD…all magically disappears..lol
It’s pretty hard to “mis-allocate” or “lose” a trillion dollars….lol – but that’s cool – we lost all these records in a crazy terror-fire – you’d be unpatriotic to think any differently! Haha
Like – to me; there’s obviously a long term agenda in US “politics” that’s being carried out regardless of the farce of who’s in office every 4 years…
I truly that hope there isn’t some ruling elite – but it’s seems pretty evident that there is.
P.S. The drug problem is funding the world economy and floating the Wall St bubble.
So basically – the elite are getting and staying rich by selling drugs to our kids…lol
sorry – I’m not the most coherent or chronological person with these thoughts
haha – there’s just too much sh!t in the world that links together; like this evil Lego tower of Babel…hahaha
Hahaha
It’s hard because like: none of us a university educated but even in high school I’d pay attention to retail party politics with a basic understanding of a difference between ideologies and history as such. When I started in LF I could overlay shit over the top of it and relate it to that.
He just didn’t care about it until like a year and a half ago and gets all his information from videos, like he very rarely reads and I can’t make him do it. So he’s clued on to the fact that we, humanity, are being fucked by a power structure but has no context for it at all and it’s frustrating when he’ll switch from global finance and banking screwing us (correct) to NWO UN-agenda shit.
9/11 truth shit I’m willing to forgive
(note this isnt much of an effortpost cos i dont really know what im talking about)
cloud computing/saas means that instead of downloading software onto your computer you access it remotely as an app (eg when you log into facebook for example); this is more ~convenient for the user while giving the system owner the users data.
The reason why i think itll be relevant for the future is cos the tech and trends towards its expansion are already here; like if a government (or set of government – such systems are scalable) wants to reduce budgets by shedding their bureaucrats while maintaining a presence in whatever field, this'd be a way to do it.
Also the tendancy towards monopoly/cartel for these system owners is why i say state like entities.
'we shape our buildings then our buildings shape us' applies here when all of the systems we depend on for everything are run like this, allowing smaller cliques of managers to better control lots of people thru Big Data.
Basically i reckon this is what the panopticon could realistically look like; apart from this i'd actually be pretty chill with the 3rdworldisation of my country.
For 'what to do' i dunno; going off grid/under the radar is always good.
Either way we'll clearly have to up our game.
I dunno if any of what im saying is clearer lol but hth
MMT video from dm's thread. news hook is the bilderburg group so that's aprop, and MMT's critical and de-reified approach to money is imo a great bridge from inchoate paranoia to the trusty old leftist paranoia we all know and love
Ironicwarcriminal posted:
like, where do i point him from here
thirdplace posted:IWC:
MMT video from dm's thread. news hook is the bilderburg group so that's aprop, and MMT's critical and de-reified approach to money is imo a great bridge from inchoate paranoia to the trusty old leftist paranoia we all know and love
Sweet, thanks. I'll check this out
Today, at a distance of nearly seventy years, it is clear for anyone who is not in absolutely bad faith that there are no longer historical tasks that can be taken on by, or even simply assigned to, men. It was in some ways already evident starting with the end of the First World War that the European nation-states were no longer capable of taking on historical tasks and that peoples themselves were bound to disappear. We completely misunderstand the nature of the great totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century if we see them only as a carrying out of the nineteenth-century nation-states' last great tasks: nationalism and imperialism. The stakes are now different and much higher, for it is a question of taking on as a task the very factical existence of peoples, that is, in the last analysis, their bare life. Seen in this light, the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century truly constitute the other face of the Hegelo-Kojevian idea of the end of history: man has now reached his historical telos and, for a humanity that has become animal again, there is nothing left but the depoliticization of human societies by means of the unconditioned unfolding of the oikonomia, or the taking on of biological life itself as the supreme political (or rather impolitical) task.
It is likely that the times in which we live have not emerged from this aporia. Do we not see around and among us men and peoples who no longer have any essence or identity-who are delivered over, so to speak, to their inessentiality and their inactivity {inoperositaI-and who grope everywhere, and at the cost of gross falsifications, for an inheritance and a task, an inheritance as task? Even the pure and simple relinquishment of all historical tasks (reduced to simple functions of internal or international policing) in the name of the triumph of the economy, often today takes on an emphasis in which natural life itself and its well-being seem to appear as humanity's last historical task-if indeed it makes sense here to speak of a "task."
The traditional historical potentialities-poetry, religion, philosophy-which from both the Hegelo-Kojevian and Heidegger-ian perspectives kept the historico-political destiny of peoples awake, have long since been transformed into cultural spectacles and private experiences, and have lost all historical efficacy. Faced with this eclipse, the only task that still seems to retain some seriousness is the assumption of the burden-and the "total man- agement"-of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man. Genome, global economy, and humanitarian ideology are the three united faces of this process in which posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own physiology as its last, impolitical mandate.
It is not easy to say whether the humanity that has taken upon itself the mandate of the total management of its own animality is still human, in the sense of that humanitas which the anthropological machine produced by de-ciding every time between man and animal; nor is it clear whether the well-being of a life that can no longer be recognized as either human or animal can be felt as fulfilling. To be sure, such a humanity, from Heidegger's perspective, no longer has the form of keeping itself open to the undisconcealed of the animal, but seeks rather to open and secure the not-open in every domain, and thus closes itself to its own openness, forgets its humanitas, and makes being its specific disinhibitor. The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man.
2. Ontology, or first philosophy, is not an innocuous academic discipline, but in every sense the fundamental operation in which anthropogenesis, the becoming human of the living being, is realized. From the beginning, metaphysics is taken up in this strategy: it concerns precisely that meta that completes and preserves the overcoming of animal physis in the direction of human history. This overcoming is not an event that has been completed once and for all, but an occurrence that is always under way, that every time and in each individual decides between the human and the animal, between nature and history, between life and death.
3. Being, world, and the open are not, however, something other with respect to animal environment and life: they are nothing but the interruption and capture of the living being's relationship with its disinhibitor. The open is nothing but a grasping of the animal not-open. Man suspends his animality and, in this way, opens a "free and empty" zone in which life is captured and abandoned {ab-bandonata} in a zone of exception.
4. Precisely because the world has been opened for man only by means of the suspension and capture of animal life, being is always already traversed by the nothing; the Lichtung is always already Nichtung.
5. In our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin Western politics is also biopolitics.
6. If the anthropological machine was the motor for man's becoming historical, then the end of philosophy and the completion of the epochal destinations of being mean that today the machine is idling.
At this point, two scenarios are possible from Heidegger's perspective: (a) posthistorical man no longer preserves his own animality as undisclosable, but rather seeks to take it on and govern it by means of technology; (b) man, the shepherd of being, appropriates his own concealedness, his own animality, which neither remains hidden nor is made an object of mastery, but is thought as such, as pure abandonment.
the nostalgia for animal closedness in a proletarian form is not a real solution. the point is not the politicize (anthropomorphize) some ontological mode and then pretend to have recuperated it from history by retreating (falsely) into an assumed proletarian, animal closedness, but to depoliticize the openess that defines man. this has been the real goal since the (communist) walter benjamin indicated it in the 1930s. a messianic deactivation of the law and state, not substitution of political ontologies
Edited by babyfinland ()
Thus, just as production founded on capital creates universal industriousness on one side -- i.e. surplus labour, value-creating labour -- so does it create on the other side a system of general exploitation of the natural and human qualities, a system of general utility, utilizing science itself just as much as all the physical and mental qualities, while there appears nothing higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, outside this circle of social production and exchange. Thus capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself by the members of society. Hence the great civilizing influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production. In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces.
But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Furthermore. The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch08.html
http://gawker.com/5941326/ask-the-dnc-is-romney-ready-for-the-kill-list
Asshole
