Posts Tagged ‘ Politics ’

Owning Up: Academic Responsibility in a Polarised Political Landscape

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1 December 2011
Myth

A Sigh of Relief There was a sigh of relief when, after a far­cical legal pro­cess, befit­ting an Ally McBeal-​type scen­ario of the bizarre and sur­real, Wilders (the anti-​Islam/​Muslim politi­cian) was acquit­ted from incite­ment to hatred and crim­inal insult. The acquit­tal had been pushed for right from the moment the Court of Appeal had ordered his pro­sec­u­tion, both by coun­sel for the defend­ant and the pro­sec­u­tion. Most politi­cians and many fel­low schol­ars (legal and oth­er­wise) held the belief that the court was not the forum in, and the law not the instru­ment with, which the under­ly­ing prob­lem­atic ought to be addressed or debated. The per­ceived prob­lems about integ­ra­tion and immig­ra­tion and the per­ceived threat of the other, the stranger, is polit­ical not ...
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The Eclipse of Politics (4 of 4): Theory in Bits and Pieces

André Masson – Resistance (1944)

The eclipse of stra­tegic reason should logic­ally be paired with the return in full force of spec­u­lat­ive philo­sophy, rein­ves­ted with a pro­trud­ing mis­sion — or one of sur­veil­lance— to police “any instance of abuse of power on the part of polit­ical ration­al­ity.” Con­trary to its her­al­ded decline, this resur­rec­tion con­ferred on the resus­cit­ated philo­sophy a “very prom­ising life expect­ancy.” (Dits & écrits, 954) This stra­tegic abdic­a­tion implied in fact the renounce­ment of a the­ory, no longer a sci­ence or an art (in the sense of empir­ical know-​how), but simply an expres­sion of ant­ag­on­istic forces in motion. It is then not sur­pris­ing to find in Deleuze a return to philo­sophy: “I think of philo­sophy as a sys­tem.” (Deux regimes, 339) In response to polit­ical dis­il­lu­sion, philo­sophy was ...
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The Eclipse of Politics (3 of 4): Strategy Degree Zero

André Masson - Untitled

The Deleuzean oppos­i­tion between the molecu­lar and the molar, between flux and state-​coding, were coeval with the lib­eral turn of dereg­u­la­tions and prom­ised to lead the great cap­it­al­ist decod­ing and the mar­ket deter­rit­ori­al­iz­a­tion to their ulti­mate con­sequences. “But which revolu­tion­ary path should one choose? Is there one? To retreat from the global mar­ket in an uncanny reen­act­ment of the ‘fas­cist eco­nomic solu­tion?’ Or go in the oppos­ite dir­ec­tion, instead, that is to say even fur­ther fol­low­ing the move­ment of the mar­ket, of decod­ing and of deter­rit­ori­al­iz­a­tion? But then again per­haps fluxes are not yet deter­rit­ori­al­ized enough, not decoded enough, from the point of view of a the­ory and a prac­tice of high-​Schizophrenia fluxes. The idea then was not to retreat from ...
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The Eclipse of Politics (2 of 4): A Crisis of Historicity

André Masson - Méditation sur une feuille de chêne (1942)

Since 1977, Deleuze insight­fully grasped the decep­tion and the reac­tion­ary logic inher­ent to, the then nas­cent new philo­sophy: “the habitual threshold of bull­shit is on the rise (…),” says Deleuze. “The hatred of 68, resent­ment of 68 (…). The revolu­tion must be deemed impossible, uni­formly and at all times…” The most talked about themes at the time were tears, tis­sues and good­byes: a farewell to pro­let­ariat, a farewell to the revolu­tion (“we have loved it so much!”), and a farewell to the event as “an open­ing up to the pos­sible.” It was all about the “neg­a­tion of all polit­ics.”1 But, para­dox­ic­ally, Deleuze’s own philo­soph­ical dis­course did con­trib­ute to this absent-​mindedness: “Becom­ing is not to pro­gress or regress fol­low­ing a series (…). Becom­ing does ...
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The Eclipse of Politics (1 of 4): Intro

tour-de-sommeil

Translator’s note: “The Eclipse of Polit­ics” is the fourth chapter of Daniel Bensaid’s Eloge de la poli­tique pro­fane (Albin Michel, 2008) (tr: In Praise of Sec­u­lar Polit­ics). In this chapter, the author situ­ates the most prom­in­ent dis­courses of the event, as developed by Fou­cault, Deleuze and Guat­tari among oth­ers, in the polit­ical con­text of the 1970s. Start­ing with the after­math of May 68 and end­ing with the Ira­nian Revolu­tion of 79; Ben­said revis­its the main ten­ets of the philo­sophies of the event to under­score their inad­equacy to under­stand the revolu­tion as a polit­ical concept. Iron­ic­ally, the philo­sophies of the event would have missed the two main events of the same dec­ade that marked their rise to prom­in­ence. But how did that ...
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Constitutional Politics & Capital

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1
18 July 2011
Colombia

Colombia’s 1991 con­sti­tu­tion is seen by many as the threshold of an intense polit­ical pro­cess that has arrived at a set of revolu­tions in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and now, maybe, Peru. Fur­ther­more, in the midst of a hor­rible con­flict, Mex­ico is look­ing to a Colombian-​style con­sti­tu­tional assembly to over­come the blood­shed its people have suffered. I believe such atti­tudes are mis­guided, and that it is in the interest of ortho­dox neo­co­lo­nial powers to enforce the con­sti­tu­tional fable. In the United States, soci­ety, state and con­sti­tu­tion were born in a sin­gu­lar and indi­vis­ible event and as such, they’re stuck to each other like flesh to the bone; the his­tory of the US is the his­tory of its con­sti­tu­tion. Dis­courses on eman­cip­a­tion or recog­ni­tion, such as ...
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The pillars of ignorance

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14
9 July 2011
Time saving truth from falsehood and envy

Deleuze told us that for some­thing to con­sti­tute an event, it must go all the way down. The death of the News of the World (soon to be resur­rec­ted as the undead Sun on Sunday) is not an event of itself, though it does con­sti­tute the sign of an event. This event, how­ever, is not as one might believe the sub­ter­ranean tremors that have struck the Mur­doch empire, but the tec­tonic shifts that brought the ‘Dirty Dig­ger’ to the UK. It is what Mur­doch expresses that goes all the way down – his is but one of the pil­lars of ignor­ance on which rests the Brit­ish state. If we treat Mur­doch as but one pil­lar, we are bet­ter placed meth­od­o­lo­gic­ally to move ...
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Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost! (Pina Bausch, 1940 – 2009)

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4 May 2011
A still from Ataxia, choreographed by Wayne McGregor

Image: A still from Ataxia, cho­reo­graphed by Wayne McGregor The release of Wim Wender’s film Pina presents us with an occa­sion to con­sider what dance, as an art form and prac­tice, can offer us by way of ima­gin­ing new ways of being in the world. Unlike other art forms, such as lit­er­at­ure or paint­ing, dance as a medium through which to think about ways of being that chal­lenge rep­res­ent­a­tional, nar­ra­tional, and other (sov­er­eign) modes of thought about life remains some­what under-​examined. The film, a stun­ning trib­ute to the Ger­man expres­sion­ist cho­reo­grapher Pina Bausch, con­veys the pathos and sens­ib­il­ity of Bausch’s cho­reo­graphy through a range of invent­ive tech­niques. The 3D tech­no­logy, usu­ally the pre­serve of hor­ror or adven­ture films, aids in mit­ig­at­ing the flat­ness ...
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For a Humanities of Resistance

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1
7 December 2010
'The Garden of Earthly Delights' Hieronymous Bosch

I first real­ised that there is some­thing strange about the term ‘Human­it­ies’ when as the Dir­ector of my University’s Human­it­ies Insti­tute I par­ti­cip­ated at a meet­ing to set up a European Con­sor­tium of Human­it­ies Centres. Except for the host centre in Utrecht and mine no other par­ti­cip­at­ing European Uni­ver­sity had a Human­it­ies Insti­tute. The other aspir­ing found­ing moth­ers and fath­ers came from single dis­cip­lines: Archae­ology, Eng­lish, Dutch, Media, Philo­sophy. And then it struck me: no proper or widely used word trans­lates the term ‘Human­it­ies’ in Greek or Italian, their sup­posed mother tongues. The ‘Human­it­ies’ des­pite their des­per­ate look east­wards and back­wards are a con­sum­mately mod­ern and decidedly Amer­ican inven­tion. No Fac­ulties, courses or centres for the ‘Human­it­ies’ exis­ted in European Uni­ver­sit­ies until recently. The few Brit­ish ...
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The End of Politics and the Defence of Democracy

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1
23 November 2010
Demonstrator

In this month of the ‘Greek pas­sion’ one thing is cer­tain. The coun­try will never be the same again. But while the com­ment­at­ors, aca­dem­ics and ‘experts’ dis­cuss end­lessly the eco­nomic crisis, the deep polit­ical mal­aise has gone unnoticed. The three ‘waves’ of ‘sta­bil­ity’ meas­ures have befallen Greece like an evil tsunami which will turn the cur­rent reces­sion into a depres­sion with no clear end. But they also attack the found­a­tions of demo­cracy. The unfold­ing events offer a pan­or­ama of the symp­toms of ‘the end of politics’. In a first obvi­ous way, the government’s aston­ish­ing volte-​face is worthy of a gym­nastics Olympic medal. PASOK’s mani­festo attacked New Democracy’s neo-​liberal policies and prom­ised social justice, re-​distribution in favour of the poor, strength­en­ing the wel­fare state ...
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Hard Lessons From The Hard Right

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0
16 July 2009
BNP Rally

When the Brit­ish National Party finally man­aged two suc­cesses in the June 2009 European Elec­tions, the main­stream media reac­tion was one of aston­ish­ment fol­lowed by intense curi­os­ity and soul search­ing. This was a UK ver­sion of the 2002 suc­cess of the Front National in France, when Jean-​Marie Le Pen man­aged to get through the first round of the pres­id­en­tial elec­tions. Most com­ment­at­ors at the time attrib­uted Le Pen’s suc­cess to the gen­eral dis­af­fec­tion with polit­ics, while those on the left lamen­ted the fact that the “false” issues stirred up by the hard right (the for­eign threat, Islamic con­tam­in­a­tion, etc.) appealed much more to voters than the “real” issues (neo-​liberal eco­nomic exploit­a­tion, uneven glob­al­iz­a­tion, etc). There was a col­lect­ive sigh of relief when Le ...
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The Politics of the Nomad

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0
30 March 2009

At a time when the end of His­tory and the rise of Empire have been pro­claimed, as bor­ders lose their sig­ni­fic­ance and cul­tural spe­cificity increas­ingly gives way to the grim homo­gen­eity bequeathed by cap­ital, we are bizar­rely told that we should feel at home. The reduc­tion of dif­fer­ences and the cham­pi­on­ing of plen­it­ude and enti­tle­ment accom­pany the dubi­ous rhet­oric of global com­munity. Of course, we don’t feel at home. The ali­en­at­ing effect of cap­ital is not a mere pro­pos­i­tion – it is palp­able. There are two con­sequences that are of interest here. First, we lose our sense of home as both labour and cul­ture are increas­ingly uprooted from their spa­tial moor­ings. Second, we become increas­ingly able to identify oth­ers, across time zones, seas ...
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