Tag: capitalism
-
The Religion of Reason (with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein)
Hard to disagree with too much of what Pinker and Goldstein say about Reason. Yay Reason, right?! They also make a very persuasive case for (neo)liberal capitalism. Pinker’s bit about empathy was a nice reprieve, but Goldstein shut him up fast by recounting Reason’s historical march toward the Good. In the end, I prefer Schelling’s, Hegel’s,…
-
The Psychedelic Eucharist: Is there an Alchemical Solution to the Ecological Crisis?
Some notes toward a talk I’m giving at Burning Man next week. I’ll be at camp Cosmicopia (located at 3:45 and Ephesus). The talk is on Wednesday at 4pm. http://playaevents.burningman.com/playa_event/13197/ …………………… The word “psychedelic” was coined in the 1950s by the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in a letter exchanged with the famed author and philosopher…
-
Ontologies of Work (capitalism) and Play (panpsychism)
Now that the Pluralism Wars have died down, each camp having dug itself in for the winter, maybe its time to change the subject. Let’s talk about David Graeber’s recent article in The Baffler “What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun?” He makes the radical (or not so radical?) move of taking play seriously, not only…
-
Money, Ecology, and Burning Man: Inquiries into the Thermodynamics of Capitalism
I’m headed back to Black Rock City for the 3rd time in 4 years later this week. I’ll be camping with Cosmicopia at 7:15 J if you want to stop by. I’ll be giving a brief talk on the need to ecologize economics on Tuesday at 11am. The title of the talk is actually a…
-
Alf Hornborg on Ecology, Economy, and Technology
A few excerpts from professor of human ecology Alf Hornborg‘s book The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment (2001). “We seem to have difficulties understanding exactly in which sense human ideas and social relations intervene in the material realities of the biosphere. Rather than continuing to appraoch ‘knowledge’ from the Cartesian…
-
Thinking on a Walk in the Woods: The Ideality of Matter and the Materiality of Ideas
Something of a response to Levi Bryant/LarvalSubjects on “hylephobia.” See also this post on the Astrality of Materiality.
-
“Deleuze, Guattari, and the ‘Politics of Sorcery’” by Joshua Delpech-Ramey
Find the article in SubStance HERE. “Deleuze and Guattari’s mode of immanent critique is linked to the possibility of founding identities and collectivities which, because inherently relational and constantly in a state of becoming, can not be the subject of straightforward representation, whether in ontological or political discourse. I will argue that sorcery is an important reference…
-
A Time to Mourn, A Time to Weep- The Many Faces of Progress
Great piece by Trevor Malkinson on the state of the planet: A Time to Mourn, A Time to Weep- The Many Faces of Progress. Malkinson quotes the process theologian John Cobb Jr. from this recent interview: If I tried to be very philosophical, and look at things very broadly, I think that the divine experiment on…
-
Latour’s final Gifford Lecture – “Inside the Planetary Boundaries of Gaia’s Estate”
Whereas the Atlas of the scientific revolution could hold the globe in his hand, scientists of the Gaian counter-revolution, I am sorry to say, look more like ticks on the mane of a roaring beast. -Latour Who are the people of Gaia?: …if the agent of geostory had to be the revolutionary humanity of the Marxist utopia…[that…
-
Latour’s 4th Gifford – “The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe”
My summary: By 2016, the world’s geologists will officially decide whether or not Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. From Latour’s non-modern perspective, neither “nature” nor “society” can enter this new epoch unscathed. The theater of Modern history has been destroyed and must be re-constructed from scratch. Gone is the passive stage,…
-
No one is in control…
…because power has left the nation-state; politics has been overcome by financial flows. -Zygmunt Bauman
-
Isabelle Stengers on Cosmopolitics
-
Immanent Law, Transcendent Love, and Political Theology
I’m going to attempt to clarify my own position in relation to that of Levi Bryant’s on the issue of the potential role of religion in revolutionary politics. Bryant has toned down the diatribe, offering two substantive posts over at Larval Subjects, as well as several comments to me here at Footnotes. I’ll try to lay…
-
[Rough Draft] “The Re-Emergence of Schelling” – The nature of human freedom
For a PDF of the entire essay, click The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency. The Nature of Human Freedom The Naturphilosoph comes to understand “Nature as subject.”232 This does not imply that nature necessarily conforms to the transcendental structure of the human mind (a form of anthropomorphism), but rather that human consciousness…
-
[Rough Draft] “The Re-Emergence of Schelling” – Literature review
Again, sorry for the lack of italics. I don’t know how to paste from Pages while keeping the formatting. For a PDF of the document (with italics in tact!), click: The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency. Literature review This section assesses the reasons for the contemporary resurgence of scholarly interest in Schelling.…
-
“From Kant to Schelling to Process Metaphysics: On the Way to Ecological Civilization” by Arran Gare
I stumbled upon this great essay on Schelling and process metaphysics recently published in the journal Cosmos and History by Prof. Arran Gare. He really makes it clear how compatible Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is with Whitehead’s cosmological scheme. “From Kant to Schelling to Process Metaphysics: On the Way to Ecological Civilization” Here is a sample: Schelling’s work…
-
Anarchy of the Heart
I am still struggling to understand what motivates the black bloc vandalism of the anarchists. I gather that they believe the big banks of the world have lost the ability to communicate with anything but monetary ammunition. It’s true, the bank’s way of transacting with the world is inherently violent, since their modus operandi is…
-
Cyberpolitics on YouTube: thoughts on the role of the University in the Universe
-
Žižek on the worldlessness of global capitalism
He nails it (from a recent column in the London Review of Books about the UK riots): “Alain Badiou has argued that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as ‘worldless’: in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless violence. Perhaps this is one of the main dangers of…
Footnotes2Plato 