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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.
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.
YouTube Philosophy: Peter Singer on Hegel and Marx (I-V)
I haven’t watched all of these yet, but they look useful for anyone wishing to jump further into Hegel and Marx without going straight into the deep-end head-first.
(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
Zizek on Philosophy
A series of three articles written by Zizek on philosophy, examining the relationship between Spinoza-Kant-Hegel, Deleuze-Derrida-Lacan and, lastly, Badiou. I thought this was especially well-put, as its an insight that many come to experience at a University, but never really consider as a problem outside of the way “Philosophy” departments are run:
This theory of the four “conditions” of philosophy allows us to approach in a new way the old problem of the “role” of philosophy. Often, other disciplines take over (at least part of) the “normal” role of philosophy… in US today - in the conditions of the predominance of cognitivism and brain studies in philosophy departments -, most of “Continental Philosophy” takes place in Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, English, French and German departments… What if, then, there is no “normal role”? What if it is exceptions themselves which retroactively create the illusion of the “norm” they allegedly violate? What if not only, in philosophy, exception is the rule, but also philosophy - the need for the authentic philosophical thought - arises precisely in those moments when (other) parts-constituents of the social edifice cannot play their “proper role”? What if the “proper” space for philosophy ARE these very gaps and interstices opened up by the “pathological” displacements in the social edifice? Along these lines, the first great merit of Badiou is that, for the first time, he systematically deployed the four modes of this reference of philosophy (to science, art, politics, and love).
(Via Naught Thought.)