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Philosophy and Crisis
Slavoj Zizek in an interview with Michael Hauser:
So I think that, I’m very traditional basically, that German idealism, the metaphysics of German idealism, still offers the best conceptual tools to deal with the crisis we are approaching. Because, as Hegel knew, philosophy and crisis are always connected. All philosophy, it’s clear, Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, even Plato. Plato—you cannot imagine Plato without the political crisis of Greece. No wonder that Plato’s representative book is The Republic which typically, although you have all of Plato’s ontology there, the metaphor of the cave and so on, but nonetheless all this emerges to answer which kind of political order do we need.
I like this because not only does it conform to some of my own ideas about the intersection between history and philosophy, but Zizek also manages to tie together issues relating to the overlap between politics and ontology in a brief but clever way. Another good example: the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake.
Simon Critchley on Heidegger
Simon Critchley has a new blog at The Guardian where he reads and comments on Heidegger’s Being and Time. I haven’t had a chance to read this yet but it looks interesting.
Understanding “Critique” in Marx’s “Capital”
Criticism is something I’m very interested in. It was essentially what my undergrad thesis was on. That’s why I’m linking to this terrific talk, given to the Marx & Philosophy Society, by N. Pepperell of Rough Theory. Here’s an excerpt:
Capital’s reflection on critical standpoint, I suggest, takes the form of a sustained analysis of all the conditions that we have not chosen, of materials – in the form of practices, institutions, beliefs, affects, forms of perception and embodiment, habits of thought, technologies, forms of interaction, and other subjective and objective moments that feed into the reproduction of capital – that have been thrown up from the detritus of history and are currently suspended into a determinate form that reproduces the capital relation. Marx’s analysis examines these materials as they currently are – looking at the properties these materials exhibit while suspended within this distinctive relation. It also, however, examines what other properties these materials might exhibit, if they were to be suspended within new relations. It is through this contrast – examining what we currently create with the historical materials that lie ready to hand, and contrasting this to what we potentially could create with these materials – that Marx establishes his standpoint of critique.