Critchley, Simon. notes from a talk he gave.
Disappointment: the condition of the world in which we live is pretty grim, a state of war, what might justice be in a violently unjust world? It is this question that provokes the need for an ETHICS.
The main task of this book is responding to that need by offering a theory of ethical experience and subjectivity that will lead to an infinitely demanding ethics of commitment and politics of resistance (3)
active nihilsm, passive nihilism: American Buddhism, contemplative withdrawal where one faces the meaningless chaos of the world with eyes wide shut
Motivational Deficit
where citizens experience the governmental norms that rule contemporary society as externally binding buty not internally compelling, there is a motivational deficit at the heart of secular liberal democracy
Each of these forms of nihilsim express a deep truth: identification of a motivational deficit at the heart of liberal democracy, we are basically indifferent and then fall into active or passive nihilism.
What is required, in my view, is a conception of ethics that begins by accepting the motivational deficit in the institutions of liberal democracy, but without embracing either passive or active nihilism … What is lacking at the present time of massive political disappointment is a motivating, empowering conception of ethics that can face and face down the drift of the present, an ethics that is able to respond to and resist the political situation in which we find ourselves. This brings me to my initial question: if we are going to stand a chance of constructing an ethics that empowers subjects to political action, a motivating ethics, we require some sort of answer to what I see as the basic question of morality. It is to this that I would now like to turn (8).
Ethics of commitment and political resistance
A subject is the name for the way in which a self binds itself to some conception of the good and shapes its subjectivity in relation to that good (10).
Ethics is anarchic meta-politics, it is the continual questioning from below of any attempt to impose order from above. On this view, politics is the creation of interstitial distance within the state, the invention of new political subjectivities. Politics, I argue, cannot be confined to the activity of government that maintains order, pacification and security while constantly aiming at consensus. On the contrary, politics is the manifestation of dissensus, the cultivation of an anarchic multiplicity that calls into question the authority and legitimacy of the state. It is in relation to such a multiplicity that we may begin to restore some dignity to the dreadfully devalued discourse of democracy (13).
Divided Self
Guilt is the affect that produces a certain splitting or division in the subject … This experience of self-division is … the sting of bad conscience … the phenomenon of guilty conscience reveals — negatively — the fundamentally moral articulation of the self. Namely, that ethical subjectivity is not just an aspect or dimension of subjective life, it is rather the fundamental feature of what we think of as a self, the repository of our deepest commitments and values (23).
Humour
super-ego is the cause of suffering
instead, we should find oneself ridiculous, learn to laugh at ourselves, “a super-ego which does not lacerate the ego, but speaks to it words of unsentimental consolation. this is a positive super-ego that liberates and elevates by allowing the ego to find itself ridiculous 83.
‘Super-ego II’ is the child that has become the parent: wiser, wittier and slightly wizened. It is the super-ego that saves the human being from tragic hubris, from the Promethean fantasy of believing oneself omnipotent, autarkic and authentic, and it does this through humour
It is indeed true, as Nietzsche would claim, that withoiut the experience of sublimation, conscinece cruelly vivisects thh subject, it pulls us apart. This is why we require the less heroic but possibly more tragic form of sublimation that I have tried to describe in this chapter (87).
Market Meltdown 101: Richard Wolff on Economic History from Amherst Wire on Vimeo.