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616 [lbo-talk] Conversation with Derrida -- rank: 1000

"You needn't know theology to argue whether god exists or not." It is a bit daft to be pushed onto the ground of whether god exists or not at all, which is obviously a hiding to nothing. I thought the strongest critique of religion was Feuerbach's, precisely because it does not disprove god, so much as explain the meaning of the concept god, and its earthly origins. I think that is what Eagleton means when he says that Dawkins Nay Nay to the priests' Yeh Yeh is peculiarly obtuse. You d ...

Document Size:	5885
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 5 10:53:33 PST 2009

617 [lbo-talk] Conversation with Derrida -- rank: 1000

Robert Wood: you would have to do some work to establish that this cynical opportunism was the result of his philosophy. Georg Lukacs already did that work, in his book Destruction of Reason, first published I think in 1948. He has no difficulty explaining that the irrationalist philosophy developed alongside and in correspondence with the German reaction. There is an interesting account of how it was that Lukacs came to be lecturing on German philosophy at that time. He was living in Moscow, an ...

Document Size:	6354
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 5 02:06:23 PST 2009

618 [lbo-talk] Conversation with Derrida -- rank: 1000

Chris writes: 'One could speculate that Heidegger's work contains these notions in some kind of "coded form" (a quasi-Straussian reading of Heidegger I suppose) and so "the authentic subject' really means "the healthy German" and "the They" means "Jews" or something, but one wonders why he wouldn't have bothered to say "the healthy German" and "Jews" in the first place, considering he was living in Nazi Germany where you got props ...

Document Size:	5717
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 5 01:58:49 PST 2009

619 [lbo-talk] Conversation with Derrida -- rank: 1000

I said >Heidegger and Derrida who refused the possibility, by a > destruction of ontology, and an endless deferral of specification. > They did not historicise the subject, but abolish it altogether. Doug and Dennis ask 'Where? How?' Heidegger bemoaned the fact that such concepts as 'the ego cogito of Descartes, the subject, the "I", reason, spirit, person' 'have served as the primary guides' but 'remain uninterrogated' (Being and Time, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990, p44). 'B ...

Document Size:	7705
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 5 01:13:16 PST 2009

620 [lbo-talk] conversation with derrida -- rank: 1000

Chuck on Derrida The basic message, I think, is that our concepts of subject, > rationialism, nation, and other cherished projects are always an > ongoing > system. So then, the method of deconstructing them is essentially to > historicize them and then open them to further development. Doug adding: "Yeah. Why does that drive people into an apoplectic rage?" No, it was Hegel, Marx, Korsch, Lukacs who historicised social categories. Heidegger and Derrida who refused the poss ...

Document Size:	5273
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Nov 4 16:08:04 PST 2009

621 [lbo-talk] does anyone read pos-structuralism still? -- rank: 1000

>'1. ..Heidegger, ..praised the Russians ...' No, he thought of them as dominated by an indifferent mass: 'Russia and America ... are metaphysically the same', because of 'the domination in those countries of a cross section of the indifferent mass'. (Introduction to Metaphysics, p.45-6) >2. Why did the Nazis reject Heidegger's articulation of their philosophy? Heidegger sympathised with Ernst Rohm's brownshirts in the inner party struggle, and his faction lost out. Like many Rohm supporte ...

Document Size:	10224
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Nov 4 13:30:49 PST 2009

622 [lbo-talk] do people still read structuralism -- rank: 1000

Chris: 'you are not a trained philosopher ...it's trained philosophers as a class, that is, the class of people who know what they are talking about, of which you are not a member.' Well, I have a BA in Literature and Philosophy. Does that not count? Can't I wear lederhosen and chop wood in Herr Heidegger's cabin the black forest?

Document Size:	4936
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Nov 4 07:26:28 PST 2009

623 [lbo-talk] another dupe of French theory -- rank: 1000

Dennis reports: "...the most important French thinker of the past twenty years" J.G. Ballard on the cover of Jean Baudrillard's tedious Fragments: Cool Memories III 1991-95 ...but then that could be read two ways.

Document Size:	4767
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Nov 4 00:09:07 PST 2009

624 [lbo-talk] do people sill read post-structuralism -- rank: 1000

Chris Doss: 'Just about every European philosopher post-1930 has been influenced by Heidegger in one way or another, because anybody trained in the history of philosophy can read him and see that he was fucking brilliant. Not being influenced by Heidegger is like being in the Solar System and not being affected by the gravitational pull of the sun.' We get it Chris, you have a hard-on for the Nazi in the lederhosen, chopping logs in the cabin in the woods. To me, it was like learning to speak Ch ...

Document Size:	7236
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Nov 4 00:32:17 PST 2009

625 [lbo-talk] How radical was Derrida? (was 'does anyone read poststructuralism anymore?') -- rank: 1000

The intellectual milieu Derrida moved in at the Ecole Normale Superieur and as a contributor to the journal Tel Quel, was heavily influenced by an increasingly radical outlook, that moved from official Communism to posturing Maoism. Politically, though, Derrida's instincts were more much conservative. As a Jew in French Algeria, Derrida had been a childhood victim of Vichy discrimination, but he was more alarmed by the nationalist independence movement, the FLN, and did his national service teac ...

Document Size:	9345
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Nov 3 00:16:01 PST 2009

626 [lbo-talk] More "who" -- rank: 1000

"I believe they 'abolished' explicit white supremacism due to overwhelming struggles by colonized societies, which fuelled related struggles among 'minorities' in the US, Australia and elsewhere. This opened up democratic possibilities, attenuated the violence and exploitativeness of racial orders, etc." You would be hard pushed to argue that the Australian aborigines brought enough force to bear to abolish white supremacy, or indeed that black minorities in the UK forced the ruling cl ...

Document Size:	6082
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Nov 2 10:09:55 PST 2009

627 [lbo-talk] more "who" -- rank: 1000

The problem with Richard Seymour's approach is that he is always trying to explain away those changes that are taking place. What use is it to go on about how fundamentally things will never change, if you are not going to look at the things that are changing? You need to ask why it was that capitalist elites retreated from the explicit politics of 'white supremacism', and why they introduced the policies of affirmative action. I can remember arguing that capitalism in South Africa could never d ...

Document Size:	5993
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Nov 2 02:13:34 PST 2009

628 [lbo-talk] State capitalism, or the real thing -- rank: 1000

Apologies, for previous, that was meant for another list

Document Size:	4621
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri May 29 16:10:18 PDT 2009

629 [lbo-talk] State capitalism, or the real thing -- rank: 1000

MacIntosh writes that the Bolsheviks went wrong "in instituting a project of the accumulation of capital (i.e. forced industrialization)" But industrialisation, forced or otherwise, is not identical to the accumulation of capital - not unless you abandon Marx's method of historical specification. The question is, was the direction of resources towards industrialisation commissioned by the outlay of capital. The answer, after Stalin's suppression of the N.E.P. is no, it was not. It was ...

Document Size:	7339
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri May 29 13:50:29 PDT 2009

630 [lbo-talk] Punish a Pinochet: Cui Bono? -- rank: 1000

I wrote a web-piece ten years ago saying that the detention of Pinochet in Britain was not the best way to get justice, but more of a humanitarian intervention style act of imperialism. (Still, it doesn't say much for my foresight that in it I condemned the US state department for manufacturing terrorism charges against one "Muhammed bin Laden" (sic)): Chile: still a laboratory for Western policy experiments 06 December 1998 The detention of former Chilean dictator Pinochet has raised ...

Document Size:	5493
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri May 29 08:07:50 PDT 2009