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"In his short book The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou argues that today all that remains of the ideological machinery of freedom, human rights and Western values is a simple, negative statement: communism failed. The labors of the capitalist philosophers, he says, amount to little more than the assertion that there is no choice but to consent to the capitalist, parliamentary present. But what "exactly do we mean by 'failure' when we refer to a historical sequence that experimented with one or another form of the communist hypothesis?" he asks."
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On this occasion, though, Žižek's response was serious. In speaking of a communist "we," he explained, he was not evoking an already existing political subject, let alone an inherently revolutionary sociological class. Rather, the use of "we" could best be understood as a speech act or a performative utterance – that is, as one of those utterances identified by the philosopher of language JL Austin that do not describe an existing reality but instead produce a new one. Just as statements like "I do" or "You're fired!" are themselves actions, transforming rather than describing a situation, Žižek said he hoped the act of evoking a communist "we" would contribute to bringing a collective subject into existence.
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Badiou's point is not that the participants in these uprisings are subjectively communists – indeed, after decades of successful annihilation of the left across the Middle East, this would hardly be expected. Rather the point is that a successful popular uprising points toward the horizon designated by Marx as the withering of the state, opening up a realm of non-state political action in which that elusive figure "the people" comes into being.
"Communism", Badiou writes, "here means: a common creation of a collective destiny." Such a common, he argues, is generic, representing humanity as a whole, and capable of overcoming statist contradictions between substantive identities. When female doctors from the provinces sleep peacefully in the middle of a circle of young men, when a row of Christians keeps watch over Muslims at prayer, when a group of engineers entreats young suburbanites to hold firm, these situations and inventions, he suggests, constitute the communism of movement.
"There was no mention of more sex or bungee jumps. A palliative nurse who has counselled the dying in their last days has revealed the most common regrets we have at the end of our lives. And among the top, from men in particular, is 'I wish I hadn't worked so hard'."
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1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
"This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it."
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2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
"This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship.
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"And here it seems to me that there’s a bizarre and surprising way in which Dennett comes very close to Zizek and Badiou in his discussions of freedom. It seems to me that the work of Zizek and Badiou is primarily motivational. Where, for years, we got Continental social and political theory after theory demonstrating all of the ways in which we are secretly determined by forces behind our backs such as the secret machinations of language (Lacan will go so far as to say we’re “cuckold” by language in Seminar 5, that language uses us rather than we using language), or power or “social forces” or economics or any of the other sundry forces that invade our lives, where theory has paralyzed us with self-doubt, leading us to wonder “are these truly emancipatory aims and practices or are we just reproducing ideology?”, Zizek and Badiou have everywhere sought to cultivate the belief that we are free, that we can act, that we can decide. For them– and they’re right –the belief that we can choose and act is every bit as important as actually acting and choosing. And if this is the case, then this is because without that prior belief we never will choose or act (Zizek is quite explicit on this point throughout all of his writings)."
"There's a glum desperation in the air that's hard to escape: volatility, futility, and a McFuture ghoulishly wagging its skeletal finger at a lost generation."
"Today we've become so aware of the downsides of innovations, and so disappointed with the promises of past utopias, that we now find it hard to believe even in protopia -- that tomorrow will be better than today. We find it very difficult to imagine any kind of future we would want to live in. Name a single science fiction future that is both plausible and desirable?
No one wants to move to the future today. We are avoiding it. We don't have much desire for life one hundred years from now. Many dread it. That makes it hard to take the future seriously. So we don't take a generational perspective. We're stuck in the short now. We also adopt the Singularity perspective: that imagining the future in 100 years is technically impossible. So there is no protopia we are reaching for. "
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