Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Tag: politics

  • Philosophy and the City

    A few good posts on the polis recently. One by Adam Robbert. Another by Bill Thorn. … Re-thinking politics is something most Athenian citizens never had to do. They had common categories to guide them in the agora, as well as comedy and tragedy to form and re-form their feelings for them at the theater.…

  • 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…

  • Another Critchley interview…

    I’m almost done with Faith of the Faithless. Critchley is really clearing up a lot of my own thinking, confirming some intuitions I’ve had and really fleshing out what had remained below the level of articulation for me. I’ll post some more in depth reflections soon, especially on the issue of whether an anarchic community…

  • Experiments in Political Theology and Dialogical Blogging

    The first clause in the title of this post is the subtitle of Simon Critchley‘s newest book, The Faith of the Faithless (2012). Critchley is a deep ethical thinker who had until a week ago managed to fly under my radar. This isn’t all that surprising, since the admittedly still diffuse research methodology of my…

  • Simon Critchley’s “Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology”

    Just ordered his newest book Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (2012) after watching Critchley and Cornel West’s recent discussion. There are many reviews of the book around, but here is one I enjoyed from the Los Angeles Review of Books by David Winters. He writes: Critchley…[claims] that politics consists of reconfigurations of religion. In…

  • Poetics of Resistance: Radical Politics in the Waning Years of Capitalism

    Levi Bryant has had a lot to say in the past several months about the relationship between politics and ontology. HERE is his latest. Essentially, he argues that academia is too caught up in symbolic and cultural forms of resistance to capitalism, when in reality what changes history are not shifts in consciousness but transformations…

  • Philosophy, society, politics and the decline of America

    Jason/Immanence Transcendence brought my attention to this critique of Graham Harman‘s Object-Oriented Ontology. The critique, written by Alexander Galloway, complains that OOO’s lack of a political dimension makes it a nonstarter as a groundwork for philosophizing in public. In today’s global context, where neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism have collided (and colluded) to bring Starbucks to Baghdad,…

  • Images from Occupy SF march on Oct. 15th

    I’ve heard estimates from 5,000 to 15,000 people. I’d guess it was somewhere in between. We marched through the financial district and then gathered at City Hall.

  • Corporations are egregores (reflections on #Occupy protests)

    Yesterday, I had to decide whether I’d go downtown to protest, or go to class. I ended up going to class. Why? I was confused, and honestly a bit deflated, by ontological questions. Where is Chase? Where is Goldman Sachs? Where is Bank of America? These entites are not located in downtown SF, nor even on…

  • 10 years later…

    An audio/visual collage, from the days of Wilson when sheep roamed the White House lawn to the days of Bush, when politics had already been fully transformed into pageantry.