"People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept...The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions. Christianity and Judaism, for example, both conceive love as a political act that constructs the multitude...There is really nothing necessarily metaphysical about the Christian and Judaic love of God: both God's love of humanity and humanity's love of God are expressed and incarnated in the commmon material political project of the multitude. We need to recover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death. This does not mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, and your child. It only means that your love does not end there, that love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are nothing."
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 351-52.
Showing posts with label Φ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Φ. Show all posts
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
Sunday, 23 November 2008
escapism
The Principle of Hope contains three volumes, divided into five parts, and fifty-five chapters. The three volumes roughly correspond to Hegel's division of his system into interrogations of subjective, objective, and absolute spirit. The first volume queries "Little Daydreams" (Part One), "Anticipatory Consciousness" (Part Two") and "Wishful Images in the Mirror" (Part Three). The latter studies analyze the utopian dimensions of fashion, advertising, display, fairy tales, travel, film, theater, jokes, and other cultural phenomena. The second volume (Part IV) depicts "Outlines of a Better World," focusing on social and political utopias, including technological, architectural, and geographical utopias, as well as quests for world peace and a life of leisure. Volume three (Part Five) discusses "Wishful Images of the Fulfilled Moment," including morality, music, images of death, religion, morning-land of nature, and the highest good.
Just as Hegel's philosophy articulated the odyssey of spirit through history and culture, so too does Bloch's philosophy chart the vicissitudes of hope. For Bloch, hope permeates everyday consciousness and its articulation in cultural forms, ranging from the fairy tale to the great philosophical and political utopias. For Bloch, individuals are unfinished, they are animated by "dreams of a better life," and by utopian longings for fulfillment. The "something better" for which people yearn is precisely the subject-matter of Bloch's massive The Principle of Hope, which provides a systematic examination of the ways that daydreams, fairy tales and myths, popular culture, literature, theater, and all forms of art, political and social utopias, philosophy, and religion -- often dismissed tout court as ideology by some Marxist ideological critique -- contain emancipatory moments which project visions of a better life that put in question the organization and structure of life under capitalism (or state socialism).
Bloch urges us to grasp the three dimensions of human temporality: he offers us a dialectical analysis of the past which illuminates the present and can direct us to a better future. The past -- what has been -- contains both the sufferings, tragedies and failures of humanity -- what to avoid and to redeem -- and its unrealized hopes and potentials -- which could have been and can yet be. For Bloch, history is a repository of possibilities that are living options for future action, therefore what could have been can still be. The present moment is thus constituted in part by latency and tendency: the unrealized potentialities that are latent in the present, and the signs and foreshadowings that indicate the tendency of the direction and movement of the present into the future. This three-dimensional temporality must be grasped and activated by an anticipatory consciousness that at once perceives the unrealized emancipatory potential in the past, the latencies and tendencies of the present, and the realizable hopes of the future. Above all, Bloch develops a philosophy of hope and the future, a dreaming forward, a projection of a vision of a future kingdom of freedom. It is his conviction that only when we project our future in the light of what is, what has been, and what could be can we engage in the creative practice that will produce a world in which we are at home and realize humanities deepest dreams.
In his magnus opus, Bloch carries though both a thorough examination of the ways that hope and visions of a better world exist in everything from daydreams to the great religions, and cultural studies which trace throughout history anticipatory visions of what would later be systematized, packaged, and distributed as socialism by Karl Marx and his followers. Consequently, Bloch provides a critical hermeneutic of the ways that cultural history and socio-economic developments point to socialism as the realization of humanities deepest dreams and hopes, and that encourages us to look for the progressive and emancipatory content of cultural artifacts (rather than the merely ideological and mystificatory).
illuminations
Just as Hegel's philosophy articulated the odyssey of spirit through history and culture, so too does Bloch's philosophy chart the vicissitudes of hope. For Bloch, hope permeates everyday consciousness and its articulation in cultural forms, ranging from the fairy tale to the great philosophical and political utopias. For Bloch, individuals are unfinished, they are animated by "dreams of a better life," and by utopian longings for fulfillment. The "something better" for which people yearn is precisely the subject-matter of Bloch's massive The Principle of Hope, which provides a systematic examination of the ways that daydreams, fairy tales and myths, popular culture, literature, theater, and all forms of art, political and social utopias, philosophy, and religion -- often dismissed tout court as ideology by some Marxist ideological critique -- contain emancipatory moments which project visions of a better life that put in question the organization and structure of life under capitalism (or state socialism).
Bloch urges us to grasp the three dimensions of human temporality: he offers us a dialectical analysis of the past which illuminates the present and can direct us to a better future. The past -- what has been -- contains both the sufferings, tragedies and failures of humanity -- what to avoid and to redeem -- and its unrealized hopes and potentials -- which could have been and can yet be. For Bloch, history is a repository of possibilities that are living options for future action, therefore what could have been can still be. The present moment is thus constituted in part by latency and tendency: the unrealized potentialities that are latent in the present, and the signs and foreshadowings that indicate the tendency of the direction and movement of the present into the future. This three-dimensional temporality must be grasped and activated by an anticipatory consciousness that at once perceives the unrealized emancipatory potential in the past, the latencies and tendencies of the present, and the realizable hopes of the future. Above all, Bloch develops a philosophy of hope and the future, a dreaming forward, a projection of a vision of a future kingdom of freedom. It is his conviction that only when we project our future in the light of what is, what has been, and what could be can we engage in the creative practice that will produce a world in which we are at home and realize humanities deepest dreams.
In his magnus opus, Bloch carries though both a thorough examination of the ways that hope and visions of a better world exist in everything from daydreams to the great religions, and cultural studies which trace throughout history anticipatory visions of what would later be systematized, packaged, and distributed as socialism by Karl Marx and his followers. Consequently, Bloch provides a critical hermeneutic of the ways that cultural history and socio-economic developments point to socialism as the realization of humanities deepest dreams and hopes, and that encourages us to look for the progressive and emancipatory content of cultural artifacts (rather than the merely ideological and mystificatory).
illuminations
Tuesday, 11 November 2008
Friday, 11 July 2008
A Deleuze note
The thing has become independent of its “model” from the start, but is also independent of other possible personae who are themselves artists-things, personae of painting breathing this air of painting. And it is no less independent of the viewer or hearer, who experience it after, if they have the strength for it. What about the creator? It is independent of the creator through the self-positing of the created, which is preserved in itself. What is preserved - the thing or the work of art - is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects.’ (‘What is Philosophy?’ p. 164)
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
Plato_Symposium excerpt/myth of the Androgynous
...for the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were
not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was
man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding
to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now
lost, and the word "Androgynous" is only preserved as a term of reproach.
In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides
forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with
two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely
alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond.
He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased,
and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his
four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and
over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast.
Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because
the sun, moon, and earth are three;-and the man was originally the
child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the
moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and
moved round and round: like their parents. Terrible was their might
and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they
made an attack upon the gods;
...At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He
said: "Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve
their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in
two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in
numbers.
...And when one of them meets with his other
half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or
a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love
and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other's sight,
as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their
whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire
of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards
the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse,
but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and
cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment
..human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.
not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was
man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding
to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now
lost, and the word "Androgynous" is only preserved as a term of reproach.
In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides
forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with
two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely
alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond.
He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased,
and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his
four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and
over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast.
Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because
the sun, moon, and earth are three;-and the man was originally the
child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the
moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and
moved round and round: like their parents. Terrible was their might
and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they
made an attack upon the gods;
...At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He
said: "Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve
their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in
two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in
numbers.
...And when one of them meets with his other
half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or
a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love
and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other's sight,
as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their
whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire
of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards
the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse,
but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and
cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment
..human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.
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