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Ethics and Capitalism
September 28, 2021Here I want to outline an argument for the claim that ethical action is impossible under capitalism. This is the kind of claim that is liable to get one labelled as a hopeless cynic—unfortunately for me I happen to believe it, so the aim here is really to clarify the...
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Note on Fetishism
September 8, 2021A thought that’s been bugging me from one of the Žižek posts:
‘Being-a-king’ is an effect of the network of social relations between a ‘king’ and his ‘subjects’; but—and here is the fetishistic misrecognition—to the participants of this social bond, the relationship appears necessarily in an inverse form:...
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Žižek on Retroactivity
September 4, 2021This post touches on a paradox of temporality at the centre of Žižek’s thinking. In fact this is an idea which crops up in many places—Hegel’s conception of history and historicity, Thomas Kuhn’s conception of scientific revolution and paradigm shift, and Baudrillard’s conception of the fatal, to name just a...
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Žižek on Marx's Symptoms
August 29, 2021A few extracts from the first chapter of The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek, 2008), entitled ‘How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?’
(In the previous post I mentioned that Žižek had claimed elsewhere that the ideological operation is essentially unconscious—i.e. it can’t work unless we’re not...
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Žižek's Critique of Poststructuralism
August 23, 2021Žižek is someone I’ve come to appreciate more lately, and The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek, 2008) had been on my list for some time before I finally got round to reading it over the last few weeks. There’s a lot going on in this book, but here...
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Marcuse: Eros and Civilisation
August 10, 2021Another research post—basically just loads of excerpts from Herbert Marcuse’s 1956 text Eros and Civilization, plus comments. This was an interesting read, and easily one of the most explicit and lucid example of what I was arguing against in Towards Antivitalism that I’ve encountered. I’ve pulled out so many...
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Structure and Optimism
August 4, 2021When it comes to social theory I tend to lean more towards structure than agency, and often encounter those who consider this to be pessimistic. At a superficial level I can see where they’re coming from—after all, it is structural critique that has given us all those images of a...
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Rex Butler's Baudrillard III: The Collection
July 28, 2021My previous post concluded with the distinction between the observance of a rule with pre-determined content, and the constant renegotiation of the content of a rule, suggesting that in Baudrillard’s eyes only the latter constitutes a process of communication. (And given Baudrillard’s further commitment to the symbolically mediated structure...
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Rex Butler's Baudrillard II: Seduction
July 23, 2021Butler makes a comparison between simulation and Baudrillard’s concept of seduction:
Indeed, what is crucial to realize is about simulation is that it is not finally distinguishable from that second term we will be looking at here, seduction, and in a way is only another version of it (as...
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Rex Butler's Baudrillard I: Simulation
July 22, 2021I’m going to spend a couple of posts pulling out some extracts from Rex Butler’s book on Baudrillard, widely considered to be one of the more subtle readings in the secondary literature (a view even expressed by the man himself—no small accolade).
I’ll start with what Butler takes to be...
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Deleuze contra Hegel (... Hegel contra Deleuze?)
July 4, 2021This is a quick note on Deleuze’s critique of Hegel, or at least on one popular representation of it. I touched on this explicitly (and very briefly) in a previous post on Bad Optics, and it is also one of the underlying concerns in Towards Antivitalism. I am...
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Brandom Notes: Transformations of Geist
June 22, 2021I’ve finally come to the end of A Spirit of Trust (ASOT)—Robert Brandom’s labyrinthine interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—after almost a year and a half chipping away at this massive tome. There’s an enormous amount to digest and to be extracted from it, but in this post I just...
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On Fertile Ruins and Remixability
June 10, 2021Last week I attended Frederico Campagna’s wonderful online talk for Ignota Books, a presentation of his new book Prophetic Culture. I’ve not read it yet, but there were some thought-provoking morsels in the talk which dovetailed with some other things I’ve had on my mind lately. This was a little...
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Baudrillard Notes: Seduction contra Eros
June 2, 2021The purpose of this post is to gather a few quotes from Baudrillard’s Fatal Strategies, all taken from a chapter called The Evil Genie of Passion. Here Baudrillard writes about love or Eros, contrasting it with his own prominent model of seduction (a successor concept to symbolic exchange, which...
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Towards Antivitalism
May 31, 2021Eros is a topic which has been...
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Sloterdijk on Dalí
April 29, 2021Here’s a few excerpts from Peter Sloterdijk’s Foams, the third book of the Sphere’s trilogy. These comments concern Dalí’s 1936 performance-lecture at the New Burlington Galleries in London, at which the artist appeared on stage dressed in a deep-sea diving suit to which no-one had thought to attach an air-supply,...
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Baudrillard and Incompleteness
April 13, 2021This has provoked some thoughts:
Deleuze and Derrida attempt to draw opposite metaphysical consequences from the metalogical incompleteness results: an immanent system that literally includes even pure nonsense, or an always-unfinished tracing of the undecidable limits of systematicity?
— gil, a finite mode (@gdmorejon) April...
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Consensus, Crypto, and Trust
April 13, 20211.
Many of the most pressing political questions of our time hinge on the difference between trustful and trustless (social and economic) consensus, and on their relative status as mechanisms for coordinating human action. This is a struggle played out foremost in the architectures of technical and institutional systems.
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Common Knowledge, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary
February 4, 2021It seems Squarespace have upped their cynical advertising game, perhaps surpassing last year’s A Website Makes it Real campaign with a new Super Bowl commercial that overlays a reworked version of Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 on a horrorshow romanticisation of boundless productivity and eternal work (sorry. ....
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Baudrillard's Real and Brechtian Interruption
February 2, 2021The symbolic is neither a concept, an agency, a category, nor a ‘structure’, but an act of symbolic exchange and a social relation which puts an end to the real, which resolves the real, and, at the same time, puts an end to the opposition between the real and...
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