“Optimism of the intellect, because we have to start by recognizing that all people are capable of thought, that they are able to not only form conceptions of the world but also to experiment with new possibilities. … But pessimism of the will, because we know that the will has to take a material organizational…
Category: Thinkers
Chris Horner: “Hannah Arendt And The Lost Treasure Of The American Revolution”
“The public space of freedom was not preserved by either of the two revolutions mainly discussed in On Revolution, and we should include their failure alongside that of the Bolsheviks when we read Arendt’s appreciation of the fact that Rosa Luxemburg ‘was far more afraid of a deformed revolution than an unsuccessful one’”.
Yavor Tarinski interviewed on “Direct democracy and the passion for political participation”
‘If we want create a radically democratic and ecological society, we will have to abandon all bureaucratic and exploitative means. It is not enough to consume ethically or vote for the lesser evil. We have to build democratic and resilient communities capable of confederating with each other so as to tackle large-scale issues. As Castoriadis…
Hannah Ohlén Järvinen & Johan Örestig: “Revolution as accelerated modernity: Hannah Arendt and Anselm Jappe on radical social transformation”
“Though their approaches are very different, Hannah Arendt and Anselm Jappe take similar positions on the ambiguities of modernity and revolution. They not only analyse the contradictions of ‘modernity’, but show that the modern situation undermines the conditions for its existence, pointing towards its own revolutionary transformation.”
Gabriel Rockhill: “The Failure of the French Intelligentsia? Intellectuals and Uprisings in the Case of the Yellow Vests”
“Although France has the reputation of having a leftwing intelligentsia, some of the most visible theorists on the Left—including the self-proclaimed torchbearers of the ‘spirit of ’68’—have positioned themselves firmly against the movement or admonished it from the sidelines.”
Kant’s ethics of autonomous obedience
I find it puzzling that, while there is a huge bibliography on Kant’s notion of freedom/autonomy, there is next to nothing on his notion of obedience/subordination even though the two notions are inextricably connected in both his ethics and his politics in a “profound paradox” (Paul Guyer: Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness, 2000, p.…
Jacques Fradin: “Gilets Jaunes: Fractures and lines of escape”
“And if the insurrection is to continue, it must fracture, divide and separate, create new autonomies both in the fissures of society and the Movement.“
Antonio Negri: “French Insurrection”
“how can a multitude, characterised within insurrectionist movements, be diverted from moving rightward and transformed into a class, into a force with the power to transform social relations? My first reflection is this: if it is not transformed into an organisation, a multitude of this kind is neutralised by the political system, it becomes impotent.”
Andrew Ryder: “‘The Function of Autonomy’: Félix Guattari and New Revolutionary Prospects”
“Together, they tried to produce a new creative project that would draw from psychoanalytic ideas, but overcome its reference to social normalisation – through the integration of a Marxist social analysis and political commitment to revolution from below.”
Jamil Khader: “Liberal Politics and the Challenge of White Supremacy: Anti-anti-Eurocentrism and the Question of Identity Politics”
‘Liberal and leftist commentators thus need to draw the ultimate radical conclusion from this anti-anti-Eurocentric position: The struggle for racial justice must be grounded in a dialectical materialist understanding of “the gap” between the particular and the universal which, according to the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, not only destabilizes identity from within, but also serves…