Atheism has become part of official American dialogue, Dawkins, Hitchens. Are there ways for the emanicpatory dimension in regligious discourse, if yes, are there limitations to it … if yes, then cultural imperialism, etc.
Bruno Bosteels (young guy, good looking, nice haircut, shirt button down collar
Zizek whatever you do you cannot squeeze Paul into the line of saints, there was a deep resonance between Maoists and preaching sainthood … Maoist saints.
Lin Bao second man after Mao, he said the origin of revisionism is fear of death.
Augustine: I totally agree with you, he is for me the arch-bad guy. Fred Jameson St. Augustine as a social democrat: SA inventetd bullshit about inner struggles precisly so Christianity can function as a state religion.
Pope and Napoleon: Napoleon took the crown and crowned him, we know what you want to do destroy christianity
You can discern an inner tension in christianity: the entire church org. as one desperate attempt to contain the founding gesture of christianity itself. What is this founding gesture: Me and Alain, deeply agree with terror founding violence, but I agree with Rene Girard’s (the enemy) point is that in the death of christ is not simply a repetition of founding violence, but the mechannism to Break withthe logic of Sacrificial Founding Violence.
I bring war not peace, if you do not hate your father/mother you are not with me: You shouldn’t get too attached to worldy beings, as if Christ is some primitive jealous god … zizek’s point is he talked to bishops/priests, the best answer from a priest in Poland, “my god, I can’t answer this now you surprised me” Zizek replied hey you had 2000 years to reply.
Bosteels: The bombing of presidential palace in overthrowing Allende the Chilean sept 11
Fascist revolution are not paternal revolutions, there are son rebelling against fathers.
if we are all materialists, why not simply formulate things directly, can’t we say it better directly … don’t go through christianity
Atheist=Christianity
Death of Christ is death of god there is no big Other, the death of this secularized religion, ie., there is no god but a form of big Other.
Atheist w/o Christiantity you go through a big Other
materialists who still believe in the big Other
We don’t believe, but a big Other believes for us. We can be athiests, while the bourgeois subject is a britsh utitlitarian, he doesn’t believe but the commoditieis beleive for us.
Christianity is a much more radical athiesm.
Bosteels replies: collateral undesired advantages, it’s simply acceptable why not make those arguments in a materialist way, where your interlocutors are not Christians, Millbanks etc.
Bosteels let’s be atheist materialists, why this talk about perverse core of Christiantity. Dominant religious ideology that’s been part of a state apparatus for hundreds of years.
Zizek: The enemy today , with all our sturggle against fundamentalists, the enemy is logic embodied in secular apparatuses, I don’t know any fundamentalist theologists who like Zizek. Even sympathetic theologists are paternalists, … it’s not enough to be against relgion, to be truly an atheist today, its absolutely to include the theological dimension of secular state appartus itself.
Susan BUck
Politics is not Ontology
the ontolgoical is never political
la politice (empirical politics) —-> le politique (essence of the political)
(ontic) empirically given to ontological (essence of existence)
A communist ontology is a contradiction in terms!!
MAN IS BY NATURE A SOCIAL ANIMAL isn’t that an ontological claim
– man’s alienation from nature
in actual political life this ontological man doesn’t exist
– gay straight, black white, citzen, non-citizen, worker
Yes the Young Marx developed a philosophical ontolgoy but nothing follows from this politically
Marx of the 1844 manuscripts talking about ‘social being’ but No specific orientation follows from this.
How do we turn this social fact of this work … into a communist practice? How to conceive of a communist practice? Not in the Heideggarian way of what it is to be a caring being.
Buck-Morss is anti-Heidegger
Today’s philosophically naive social sciences and philosophy retreats to the humanities celebration of affect, contingency, positivism
Due to the epistemoligcal consequences, reject creating an ‘ism’ out of any belief because they turn into cosmological systems. Too closed and hermetic, essntialist.
To argue with Negri of a historical ontology is DUBIOUS, he wants an ontological fix to avoid the dangers of relativism. With due respect to Negri there can be no ontology of history, it is the realm of the unpredictable because of human action.
Brecht described as non-elegant thinking: Buck-Morss
pragmatic approach to doing theory
a tiger does not proclaim its ‘tigretude’ it pounces.
a theoretical pragmatics: things acquire meaning because of their relation to other things and this relation is flexible
SBM emphasizes that the big 3 guys read newspapers: the political centrality of the event, the unpredictability of the EVENT. It is not truth that punches a whole in knowledge, it is social action, the truth it reveals is the possibility of freedom.
A pragmatics of the suddenly possible.
– What’s happening?
What’s new, is there an event going on here. What gives, what is yielding. What’s going on? are certain structures not changing.
What to do?
Tarry over these questions for a while to view them in a commie mode.
What’s happenning? The event is not a miracle that overcomes us with awe and strices us down it lifts us up. the possibility to act in common. it is an empirical question.
non-violent protetst, SBM is big on this non-violent aspect.
Steve Jobs father was a Syrian Muslim [this has nothing to do with SBM talk]
Maybe this is excessive subjectivity: maybe a new way of doing theory,
“I’ve seen it before, I know what it means, or it doesn’t rise to the level of philosophical sophistication etc.”
The big thing
Bosteel’s reply to SBM:
Capital even if we don’t call it capitalism, produces abstraction, abstraction is not simply a spectral deviation, it is the one universal being produced, teh capitalist universal. the nominalist universal is not a philosopher’s mistake, itis part and parcel and funcitoning of the captilaist system,
social nature of human animal — I am active as a human being active as a social being.
Adrian Johnston
1975 Theory of contradiction Badiou based on Mao’s essay on Contradiction: Badiou asserts primacy of disunity over unity.
EMERGENTISM???
life is irreducible to matter
thought irreducible to life
non-deterministic materialism
capitalist biologist: fixed instincts and fluid providers, medicate or kill those who will not make peace with it.
REWORK THE ENGELSIAN DIALECTICS OF NATURE
The part played by labour in transition from ape to man: the closest Engels comes to use dialectics as human beings as labouring creatures.
bio-plasticity (Malabou re-writing the dialectic)
human being as self-transformative subjects-objects
split between manual and intellectual labour produced out of manual labour, intellectual labour erases its own origins in manual labour, thus the birth of idealism.
Levins and Lewontin were good with Engels, and Steve Rose too. organisms are not passively determined by their environments, but act to change their environments in turn.
tensions in engels materialist dialectics of nature
– criticized arid Hegelian formalism projected onto nature, methodical formalization of Hegel.
– AJ is doing an immanent instead of external critique of Engelsian dialectics
Dialectics is science of inter-connections
1. quantity into quality
2. interpenetration of opposites
3. negation of negation
QiQ = emergentism of LevinsLewontins etc. anti-reductivist dialectics of nature.
– weak constraints as regards the concrete localizations of entities
biological objects are internally heterogeneous, at the nexus of a large number of weak forces, and subsystems independent of one another, and the effects on organism appear as random.
Technical legal stipulations – Tax code as a SYMBOLIC SYSTEM
– every year laws are changed, and loopholes are created, unforseen possibilities will arise from structural ineractions with changes, additions subtractions —
loophole like short-circuits zones of anomie
transcendental materialism is deeply indebted to Engels DM.
ohh he doesn’t like Rose.
democratic materialsim vs. materialist dialectic
Lysenko a terrifying nosedive into dogmatism and paranoi purges.
DM appropriation of the natural sciences is something Adrian wants to DO.
Engels DM engagement with the sciences and carrying forward by Soviet scientists, is an image of past not recognized by present as one of its concerns which threatens to disappear.
Johnston RETURN TO ENGELS DM! Might equip left against a globalized capitalism focused on natural sciences economics and ideologically.
Better than cultural ideological critque against capital. The only critiques worth doing are IMMANENT ones.
Ecology genetics health and agriculture.
18th century French Materialism must be revised against the UNIVERSITY DISCOURSE
The sciences are ripe for joining in movements of history! Engelsian projects for theorizing the sciences.
Necessary condition for current renewal of communism, not only more political economy, a revival of dialectics of nature, nurtured by cuttiing edge science. Repeating anew Engels DM philosophy of the natural sciences.
A kind of society of materialist friends of Hegelian dialectics.
Žizek: You know this concept DM has a history far from unproblematic. So when you are saying return to this traditioin of DM. You make it sound like its a glorious return to a tradition.
I agree with AJ is what we should get rid of is this idea of science identified with exploitation of nature, we should free science from this. Relativism, we llike to replace science with “fields of knowledge” isn’t it eurocentrism to privlege our science, do we have any right to etc. different modes of discourse blah blah. Here we agree. But you have to be more evil to Engels … you passed gently over language. Engels at his most stupid. With development of work it got so complex that people had to invent language to talk about it.
Negation of Negation: all DM that I know, even if we include Engels and Lenin their understanding of dialectics stops at interaction A influences B and B influences A. With proper negation of negation you need more complexity than just interaction.
There is one mega revolution theory of relativity, quantum physics. with every great scientific revolution the theory of materialism has to be refined.
It’s something new, how to read it in a materialist way, without watering it down in a old school way.