It is conspiracy which must be twinned with corruption, with its series of insiders, only further down, of the depths, not the heights... a regress of insides which are always merely shells of the assymptotic reduction down to the screaming impossible point of zero. Peel it away, concsiousness, capitalism, being...
I would basically posit the real as corruption, that's precisely what immanence is- the insider, "the man"-- what is the real of post-Fordism?- that we are all "the man".
Eliminativism as the .....how it is. The hermeneutics of suspicion conducted by Ligotti and Beckett, hopelessly heading worstward ho, leaving even the abgrund beneath the ground a scorched earth shell, a simulation that only looked like the end. Heading all the way down while knowing that there's no rock bottom to hit. Intensive negativity.... the leering, looming, lure of the dark apparently //// libido in Libidinal Economy Lyotard, Land, early Hamilton-Grant... abjuring all sentimentality, all comfort, all illusion
Real = that which exists indepedently of us. The real is
Accessible only as fantasy...
Depacification Program
Peter Hallward - elegant and lucid. Yet my problem ... Badiou...: this is political philsophy, not a philosophy that is political. It's a description of how .... 'will' operates... in other words, it's a description, and a very convincing one, but it misses the political dimension, which would be ..... precisely how to bring this 'will' into operation.... The suspicion is that Peter, like Badiou, is in danger of providing what is in effect a post-evental phenomenology: a thorough description of ....
There are other problems.... depression... population is depressed... suffering from hedonic depression I've talked about before (and which Oliver James has pointed to).... Depressed people precisely cannot exercise their will... seems easy...
crystallised a problem that I have with Badiou's ... completely right to assert that events are a complete break from ////. Yet // break is not of the order of an act of will... Rather, the capacity to exercise what is called 'will' is precisely an effect of the event... Moreover, unless we're positing something that is literally miraculous - a suspension or interruption of material causality... It's only at the level of phenomenological appearance that an event can 'come from nowhere'. That phenomenological appearance is certainly //.. consensual reality... is not a break out of phenomenology but rather a different kind of phenomenological terrain... The evental 'truth'... But, contrary in every way to Badiou's Pauline miracualism, there are precise socioneurological conditions that can allow events to occur... The only political question, I would argue, is exactly the one that Badiou forbids: how can these conditions be brought about?
important to stress.... 'will' is not... folk psychology generates what Alex Williams calls 'folk politics'... further problem with the emphasis on Rousseau and Jacobins is that it suggests that we doesn't matter that we are no longer in the world of the quill pen and the guillotine but the ... cyberspace and neuroscience. After the .... conference, it was impossible to conclude anything other than Badiou's communism is profoundly unMarxist, perhaps even anti-Marxist. As Steven Shaviro has rightly argued, the refusal to think in terms of political economy - even Rousseau did that! - is fatal. Badiou's dismissal of any ... 'economy' entirely accepts the neoliberal .... For Marxists, surely, there is no 'economy'; ... Karatani... transcendental....
Forget Badiou
media.. advertising... neurology... control.... baffling...
Badiou's importance lies in his insistence on militant ascesis (the subject of another post), and organisational discipline... excoriating ... fidelity is only a virtue in times of .... interlock with the end of history, ... managerialism... call to start again from zero...
Mike Banks is a far better theorist of anti-capitalist practice than Badiou... mediocre audiovisual programming is a weapon... instead of retreating into the study to read Celan, that terrain has to be fought over. (Often I suspect that for Badiou, 'capitalism' means 'US': how else to account for a book - a very great book - on the 20th century which barely deigns to mention any American...? Part of the greatness of Deleuze and Guattari was to have /// Gallic disdain for America, the identification with another America,... Zizek.. excoriating destructions of identity and territoriality.) Hardt and Negri are at least engaged with...
counter-branding.... definitively established for me that the signifier 'communism' is of no further political use... compete with capitalism, a measure of crude instrumentalism is necessary... Concepts are important, not words... needn't involve populist... instead a pulping. (D/G).. ... what business would use the name of ... corrupt "No, we're not them..." I'm more than ever convinced that new words - which is not necessarily to say neologisms - are needed. ....Not only 'communism', but also 'radical', 'revolutionary', 'emancipatory'....
Let's leave it to the philosophers to discuss set theory and being. The role of political theorists is to return to the question, more urgent than ever, ... organisation.... otherwise, it's all just talk, academic in the worst way...