"To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places...To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away and never, never, to forget." ~ Arundhati Roy
Friday 30 June 2023
"This is the sort of medicine, and this is the sort of law, which you sanction in your State. They will minister to better natures, giving health both of soul and of body; but those who are diseased in their bodies they will leave to die, and the corrupt and incurable souls they will put an end to themselves."
"Then we shall be right in getting rid of the lamentations of famous men, and making them over to women (and not even to women who are good for anything), or to men of a baser sort, that those who are being educated by us to be the defenders of their country may scorn to do the like".
Plato
"Plato makes a wide variety of thought-provoking yet equally upsetting arguments through the literary manifestation of his mentor, Socrates, but while constructing his ideal society inThe Republic, in my opinion, he touches on an issue that persists in modern society today (in a really messed up way).
While explaining his vision of the perfect city to his student, Glaucon, and a variety of interested Athenians, Socrates states, “This is the sort of medicine, and this is the sort of law, which you sanction in your State. They will minister to better natures, giving health both of soul and of body; but those who are diseased in their bodies they will leave to die, and the corrupt and incurable souls they will put an end to themselves” (Book III: 409e-410a).
Through Socrates, Plato explains that people in this ideal society will only suffer from one curable sickness. Those who are chronically ill will not receive medical treatment and will thus be allowed to die, while those who suffer from mental illness (“corrupt and incurable souls”) will similarly be denied treatment and, in Socrates’ opinion, will kill themselves or simply die off.
Plato believes that those who suffer from chronic diseases should be allowed to die off, as he states that those who suffer from chronic illness are not able to provide for the city as much as their healthy counterparts. Similarly, based on the ancient Hellenistic understanding of mental illness, Plato believes that those who suffer from a mental illness are being affected by some sort of supernatural spirit or a somehow corrupted soul. Therefore, these people are equally hindered in their ability to provide for the ideal city.
For Plato’s ideal society to be perfect, everyone must be running at 100% efficiency. Everyone has one job (which the state assigns them), must believe the lies that the state tells them, and they cannot be too strong nor too artsy and intellectual.
(I don’t think Plato noticed that his fascism was showing during this speech! How embarrassing!)
This society is an untenable absolutist nightmare. It is offensive, smothers individuality and free will, and calls for the death of entire groups of people”.
Among the data's revelations are that in many parts of the Deep South, people have less than a 5% chance of going from the bottom income level to the top. Meanwhile, in many places in the Mountain West region, such as Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado, people have more than a 16% chance of accomplishing the feat.
According to Chetty, there are five key factors that go into this geographical disparity: segregation, income inequality, local school quality, social capital, and family structure.
Numerous policy initiatives have been proposed to flatten the gap in upward mobility. Experts have suggested building public housing in low-poverty areas instead of high-poverty areas, which would spur poorer families to move to better neighborhoods and increase their chances of success. Another possibility is expanding school choice by providing vouchers for poor families to attend better-funded schools in rich neighborhoods.
Mark Abadi
Sunday 25 June 2023
A shadowless man is a monster, a devil, a thing of evil. A man without a shadow is soulless. A shadow without a man is a pitiable shred.
Claudio Baraldi, Giancarlo Corsiand Elena Esposito
'On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production.'
Marx
Friday 23 June 2023
The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pactfied. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
"I had immense difficulty with the transition to public school. I felt that I was sent to school as punishment for transgressions. Major problems included the fact that I did not know what the rules were in my new context and could not understand (until after many weeks) the structure of practices such as homework and the format of daily schedules. It did not help that in Ohio there was standardized testing in fourth grade, when I entered; I came in after the beginning of the year and was required to immediately make up hours of missed testing alone in a room with a testing monitor. I made myself literally ill worrying over an additional standardized test, which I took later in the year with the rest of my class. I could not eat or sleep after hearing comments that my teacher made about the importance of the testing. I remember that I repeatedly got up during the test to sharpen my pencil and was afraid to leave the room to go to the bathroom.
In general, I recall my hands trembling and experiencing breathlessness throughout the school day. I believe these physical symptoms lasted for at least several months — I remember wondering if I would always tremble while at school and trying to figure out how to compensate so that no one would notice. Escaping notice became an obsession; I stood out in so many ways and wanted desperately to erase the differences between myself and the other students.
When I was asked questions about myself, I had a difficult time telling the truth and fabricated stories to meet expectations. But this simply made it harder to talk to my peers, as I was dealing with multiple overlapping fears that I would be “found out.” I never wanted to undermine anyone’s positive views of me, so I preferred my friendships to be sporadic and static, making flash connections and then moving on, rather than continually interacting with anyone in particular and — inevitably, so I thought — disappointing them. These relationship trends have lasted into adulthood.
It is hard, as an adult, to thoughtfully evaluate these experiences because I was very confused at the time. Often, I did everything that I could to avoid my intense discomfort, even dangerous things like hiding outside the building before school and purposely missing the bus after school because I was too anxious to find someone to sit beside. Because of these behaviors and my many absences, I was flagged for interventions and received some counseling.
My situation highlights the ways that institutions both create and then pathologize disability — in this case, social anxiety. Schools, as neoliberal institutions, reward outspoken and highly social children and young adults, and expectations of continual, intense interpersonal interactions and performances create binds. The early mornings, long days, and large class sizes contribute to this. These features are especially hard on those from minority and marginalized backgrounds and non-traditional students.
When students fail to be responsive to the demands of these settings or develop negative responses to them, they become subject to medical taxonomies of various kinds and are carefully observed. This is one way that disability is constructed: through the demands of institutions and the censure of individual responses by those same institutions. Of course, even referring to my experiences and situation as “social anxiety” is already deeply informed by this particular historical moment, including a variety of material conditions, labor practices, and ways of talking about psychology and medicine".
"Marginalized groups are routinely scapegoated, gaslighted, and infantilized, while the privileged are exonerated, forgiven, and praised for no good reason.
To eliminate these asymmetries of power and respect, I propose that we use blame and praise—which I define as communicative acts—to identify oppressors and take a stand against them, as well as to recognize and stand in solidarity with resisters. Blame and praise shouldn’t, say, respond to a person’s quality of will, or seek an apology from a morally competent person, but should instead shed light on people’s investments in systems of oppression and resistance and oppose or support them in those roles.
This is an important task given that we live in a society full of gaslighting and colonialist propaganda that make it difficult for many people to understand oppression, much less take action against it. James Baldwin once famously said, “I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian church that is white and a Christian church that is black.” We don’t always know what makes someone tick, but we can see how they choose to occupy space. I say that people are blameworthy for their contributions to systems of oppression irrespective of the attitudes that they “hold in their hearts.”
"...disabled students usually must—as you put it in your book, Shelley—“medicalize their circumstances and enter a bureaucratic morass in order to get the social goods that they require, that is, must make more effort (and usually considerably more effort) to get the services and resources that they require than nondisabled people make to get comparable services and resources.”
"As an episodically disabled woman and a migrant worker with limited earning potential, I am multiply oppressed under capitalism, and this isn’t due to my choices, or “bad luck,” or a glitch in the market system, but is rather an example of capitalism working as intended...people like me are supposed to be exploited, marginalized, and exhausted.
Within capitalism, the alternative to wage labour is welfare, and welfare is designed to be punitive and marginalizing".
"To end oppression, then, we need a coalitional, anti-capitalist movement. In other words, we need, not just justice, but transformational justice, a re-visioning of the social order. This revision of the social order will require what Garland-Thomson describes as “inclusive world building” in contrast to “eugenic world building,” i.e., the design plan made for the “ideal citizen.” Eugenic world-building constructs a society for the privileged and tries to “eliminate” everyone else through techniques of genocide, assimilation, medicalization, and so on.
Michelle Ciurria
Unsurprisingly, capitalism is now driving us toward the ultimate eugenic state: the annihilation of the human species. Capitalism is producing more greenhouse gas than the planet can sustain, leading to global ecological collapse and mass extinction events. Capitalism emerged out of eugenics-based practices like genocide, slavery, and rape, and, if left unchecked, will progress to the logical conclusion of mass extinction and the end of life on Earth. Extinction isn’t a by-product of capitalism but, once again, a design feature. If we don’t question the logic of capitalism, we will continue down the path to the end of the world.
The end of the world is, of course, not a new frontier for Indigenous peoples, who have been forced to live through the end of their worlds due to genocide at the hands of the settler-colonial state and who continue to live under a genocidal regime today. Accordingly, Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard says that “in order for Indigenous peoples to live, capitalism must die,” as capitalism is a form of genocide. This understanding is quickly becoming a reality for all of us, as we face the extinction of the human species under capitalism. The decolonial collective “Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures” (GTDF) describes capitalism as a central feature of “modernity coloniality,” the modern way of life which “cannot exist without expropriation, extraction, exploitation, dispossession, destitution, genocides and ecocides”.
Michelle Ciurria
Tuesday 20 June 2023
Symbolic power, therefore, is fundamentally the imposition of categories of thought and perception upon dominated social agents who, once they begin observing and evaluating the world in terms of those categories—and without necessarily being aware of the change in their perspective—then perceive the existing social order as just. This, in turn, perpetuates a social structure favored by and serving the interests of those agents who are already dominant.[5] Symbolic power is in some senses much more powerful than physical violence in that it is embedded in the very modes of action and structures of cognition of individuals, and imposes the specter of legitimacy of the social order.
Wikipedia
"This ideology of voluntarism obscures the fundamental destruction of rights. It's not an accident that poverty grows deeper as our charitable responses to it multiply. The growth of kindness and the decline of justice are intimately intertwined."
“Reason is not just the movements and actions of rational structures, but the movements of the structures and mechanisms of power. Reason is what sets aside madness. Reason is what gives itself the right and means to set aside madness.
Michel Foucault, 1978
“Of the Foolish…”
The Crito is simultaneously an account of political right and an ethical work. Because of this it also speaks to something that would become a hallmark of Plato’s later philosophical focuses. Perhaps the most important concept, and the most elusive, in Plato’s henological metaphysics is, in fact, the ethical concept of the good life.
What readers are provided in the Crito is an examination of the co-origination shared between moral law and the material ethical practices taken in life that tend toward eudaimonia. This Socratic dialogue produces many distinct philosophical threads, ranging from the function of agreement and philosophical foundations to parental debt to the relationship between the foundation of sovereignty and the hold it maintains on life.
Beyond this, however, one finds a certain crucial signature of a theory of Sovereignty. Before the good life, eu zên, is even defined the entire groundwork of the discussion is to be agreed upon. “See whether the start of our inquiry is adequately stated, and try to answer what I ask you…” Socrates commands Crito (Crito 48e-49a). This “start”, or archê, is established in such a manner that it can only be produced by several distinct motions (which each have various implications). Primarily, the radical exclusion of the Many (hoi polloi) and, more importantly, the “foolish” (Crtio 47a). The constitution of a community that produces a covenant is predicated on an exclusion.
This exclusion does not, however, merely place this elusive figure on the outside, it remains at the core of the community’s function. “The ban is a form of relation” (Agamben 1998, 29). It is an “exclusive inclusion” (Agamben 1998, 85). It is truly an exclusive inclusion, because without this maneuver the founding of a supposedly rational discourse on the fate of Socrates is deemed impossible. This interaction on law and punishment remains unestablished before a community can be circumscribed and established. While this may seem initially like a small gesture, meant to highlight the differences in the argumentation between the boisterous crowds of Athens and the quiet and assured Socrates, it does something far more important – something that will serve as a signatory[1] touchstone for many subsequent theories of sovereignty, whether they be grounded in personation or consent of the governed predicated upon a certain kind of contract.
Reason and its Exclusions, Law and its Exceptions
Jacques-Louis David, “The Death of Socrates” (1787)
In a strange way, Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates carries a particular literal, if not literary, accuracy in its depictions of the events of Phaedo. Not in who is present in the foreground, but who is departing. In the backgrounding frame, Xanthippe with a lifted hand is ushered away by a figure (one of “Crito’s people”) as they ascend a staircase, away from the unpleasant events of an execution (Phaedo 60a). However, Phaedo notes that this was not the nature of their final moments with their beloved friend. They philosophized (Phaedo, 59a). As noted earlier, this is precisely what happened when Socrates was initially sentenced to death (Apology 39e).
Such a discourse seemingly could not be pursued with those so deeply in mourning or crying out. The production of a rational community is one of the fundamental philosophical elements of Crito, and the series of refutations that produce this community are not merely inductive, but are foundationally exclusionary. Crito, when he first entered Socrates’ cell, was not in a state conducive to the formation of such a community. Socrates does two things when Crito finally completes his extensive, but disjointed, argumentation.
First, surprisingly, he completely abandons the line of thought centered solely around the consequences of his death for Crito. He notes that they do not in fact come from concerns of Crito himself, but they are the concerns of the majority. Crito is speaking for himself as an individual, but entirely captured by the concerns of others. But Crito is not entirely lost. Socrates tells him, “I am eager to examine together with you, Crito” (Crito, 46e). However, the dialogue cannot move forward with Crito so long as the concerns of the majority remain conceptually present in the cell (Kim 2011, 70-73).
Alan Kim, in his essay “Crito and Critique”, posits that Crito and Socrates produce a sort of Kantian “rational community” throughout the early stages of the dialogue. This claim is taken seriously here. Kim argues, very effectively, that this dialogue operates through a “Persuade or Obey” doctrine (Kim 2011, 94). If this doctrine is to be understood as that which Socrates preliminarily agrees to through the constitution of a rational community with Crito, then that rational community must be examined with political-theoretical care.
This process begins with an affective opposition between Socrates and Crito. Pleading for agreement, no matter how righteously, is the diametric opposite of the way Socrates has pestered the citizenry of Athens to take care of their soul and tend to what is most important, obviously:
We must therefore examine whether we should act in this way or not, as not only now but at all times I am the kind of man who listens to nothing within me but the argument that on reflection seems best to me. […] I value and respect the same principles as before and if we have no better arguments […] be sure that I shall not agree with you, not even if the power of the majority were to frighten us…
CRITO 46B-C
Socrates then moves to acquire foundational agreements with Crito, as is customary in these “early” dialogues. Socrates has already accounted for his own rational autonomy, and has established this autonomy “as the ultimate condition of moral action” (Kim 2011, 94). Socrates’ own constitution has been established. Now, the same conditions must be established for Crito as his dialogical partner. First, that one should value certain opinions over others. Crito agrees. Then, that “one should value good opinions” (47a). Crito is slowly pulled away from his fright of the majority.
It is here, however, where a fascinating exclusionary circumscription takes place. This exclusion needs be commented on in a historical manner as it may point to a theory of sovereignty alongside the interrelation between moral and juridical law. The majority are to find themselves excluded from the discussion. Certainly this should not surprise a reader of Plato, as one quickly becomes accustomed to the anti-majoritarianism embedded in the elenctic process of the Socratic dialectic.
However, it is not simply for a reason of argumentation alone, but the nature of the individual positing the argumentation. Socrates asks, “[T]he good opinions are those of wise men, the bad ones those of foolish men?” (47a). Crito replies “of course” (47a).
In the production of this community of reason, there must not only be the essential exclusion of appeals to the “bogeys” or arguments of the many and the foolish, but the many and the foolish as such. It is in this exclusion, this setting aside of the foolish, that a properly constituent gesture is found. It is not just in the affirmation of Socrates’ and Crito’s rational being that is necessary, refutation of what is not – of who is not. The “foolish”, aphronōn, is a complicated translation choice to make. Liddell and Scott translate aphrōn as “senseless” or “crazed” (Liddell and Scott, 1889). This is a slightly confusing transliteration (in the text) and translation, given that phroneō is to pay mind to or often translated as practical reason as such and in relation to the human praxis of circumspection (phronesis).
Fascinatingly, phroneō often connotes a certain level of harmoniousness or like-mindedness in community. In Romans, Paul invokes the term to describe a cohesion of among followers of Christ. “May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Jesus Christ” (Romans 15:5, NSRV).[2] However, let us first briefly focus on its utilization in classically ancient Greek philosophical texts.
When Aristotle, in Politics, outlines the differences between “natural slaves,” “lower animals” and “freemen” in “political life”, this diagnostic of practical wisdom becomes the operative distinguishing factor. “[H]e who participates in rational principle enough to apprehend, but not to have, such a principle, is a slave by nature” (Politics 1254b19-24). While practical reason is directly invoked, Malcolm Heath argues that, given what we know about Aristotle’s view on the impossibility for natural slaves to achieve eudaimonia (and what eudaimonia necessarily entails as it pertains to wisdom), that Aristotle is explicitly describing practical reason:
When Aristotle says that the natural slave ‘shares in reason to the extent of understanding it, but does not have it himself’, therefore, he is thinking specifically of practical reason.
HEATH 2008, 247
It is worth quickly noting its appearances in Xenophon’s Memorabilia. In Book I it is used to oppose “senseless and motionless images” (eidōla aphrona) evoked by poets against the “sense and activity” of living, intelligent beings (Xenophon 1994, 1.4.4). In book II, it is explicitly tied to non-human animality when describing the risks of immoderation and the fate of those who cannot properly use their pleasure. “[I]s it not shameful, in your opinion, for a human being to suffer the same things as the most senseless of beasts?” (Xenophon 1994, 2.1.5).[3] This theoretical nomos established in the sovereign territory of the discussion between Socrates and Crito in the galley, even prior to the laws’ personification, has already indicated that Plato’s conception of sovereignty, like many that proceed him, is reliant on a founding violent exclusion – and specifically that of the “fool”.
While fool may be a complicated translation, the problem—and ever-present threat of discordance in the conducting of thought itself—is found in texts that speak to sovereign power and its limits directly. Of course, a certain level of careful study is needed when discussing these issues with any historical focus. However, our discussion remains separate from the monumentally important analysis of medical etymology and its relation to law. That will be dealt with in a subsequent piece on Hobbes, political theology, and aberrance.
Chapter XVI of Hobbes’s Leviathan contains an extensive deliberation on who/what can or has the capacity to author actions or to personate (which is the process by which the sovereign manifests). Hobbes lays out his theory of authorization in a manner comparable to the process of playwriting:
Of persons artificial, some have their words and actions owned by those whom they represent. And then the person is the actor, and he that owneth his words and actions is the AUTHOR, in which case the actor acteth by authority.
HOBBES 1994, 101
Inanimate objects can be personated, be it by an “overseer” or a “rector” who has such authority. However, “things inanimate cannot be authors, nor therefore give authority to actors” (Hobbes 1994, 102-103). Hobbes extends this foundational political incapacity in the forging of a covenant to three other figures. “Likewise, children, fools and madmen that have no use of reason may be personated by guardians or curators can be no authors” (Hobbes 1994, 103). Hobbes takes this further when discussing civil law. He attests that “[o]ver natural fools […] there is no law” (Hobbes 1994, 177).
The figure of the fool is, in the founding of the covenant and establishing of law, to be explicitly beyond the very bounds of its application, but this does not reduce this figure’s function to a secondary matter. To read Hobbes (or Crito’s initial dismissal of the fools) this way would be a mistake. That exclusion is paramount to its establishment in the first place – in its incipience. It is the constitutive gesture that makes the multitude possible. Michel Foucault writes of the constituent liminality of this figure in the century preceding the English Civil War this way:
[H]is exclusion must enclose him; if he cannot and must not have another prison than the threshold itself, he is kept at the point of passage. He is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely.
FOUCAULT 1965, 11
This suspended territory is the abode of the one “without mind.” It cannot simply be stated that “foolish” arguments are to be set aside for Crito and Socrates, but it must be affirmed that they are, in fact, not among the “foolish”. It is in the establishing of this “threshold” or “exclusion” that a faint echo is shared between reason and sovereignty.
Giorgio Agamben indirectly provides a helpful extension of the analysis of the marginality of the “madman” and “fool” by Foucault in the first volume of Homo Sacer, when discussing Hobbesian sovereignty. It is not an exception that, once it is made, leaves madness and the “fool” beyond the gates of the covenant. The figure that is subject to the exception, which is in this border space, is truly liminal. Agamben asks his reader to consider the figure who is subject to the circumscriptive gesture as being in a space between “physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion”. This figure “dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither” (Agamben 1998, 105).
Hobbes, in fact, makes this quite clear when discussing the status of the law for “fools”. As already stated, for Hobbes, there is no law over the “fools”, however, it seems certain punishment can still be applied – as the Sovereign maintains the ability to invoke and apply, but not decree or constitute, natural law. To Hobbes any “law that obliges all subjects without exception” and is not written or codified, “is a law of nature” (Hobbes 1994, 177).
Spinoza, in his Political Treatise, clearly attempts to avoid this same inductive process of predicating his theory of sovereignty on “the teachings of reason” – and seems to explicitly target Hobbes in doing so. “[O]ne should not look for the causes and natural foundations of the state in the teachings of reason, but deduce them from the nature and condition of men in general” (Spinoza 2000, 36). And yet, the figure of the “fool” permits in his treatise a crucial break in the movement of nature and law.
For Spinoza, “a fool or a madman cannot be induced by any rewards or threats or carry out orders,” they are among “those things which cannot be a part of the commonwealth’s right and from which human nature for the most part recoils” (Spinoza 2000, 52). The broad foundation of Spinoza’s philosophy of the right of the commonwealth and its offices, has one constituent exception: the “fool” and the “madmen”. With this difference between Spinoza and Hobbes in mind, it is interesting to find that Spinoza starts from a position “natural foundations” and then discovers the necessary constituent exception, whereas Hobbes starts from the constituent circumscription then moves to “natural law” to maintain the liminality of those in the state of exception.
Returning to Plato, one sees a fascinating resonance between this small, but no doubt violent, gesture and the history of theories of sovereignty. It may be reduced to an argumentative idiosyncrasy within Socratic methodology, but this would be a mistake. Plato’s conception of what one could call, speculatively: sovereignty, in this dialogue remains bound to Socrates’ personal ethics. Socrates abides by and territorially inhabits a particular kind of nomos defined by his rational autonomy and just living.
What is lost in contemporary discourses on constituent power is this ceaselessly updated exception, which nonetheless always portrays itself as necessary in its foundational position. In the quest to get to the heart of law, the practices of the self and the processes of subjectivation dissipate beneath the almost asphyxiating exegeses on code. What is important is the blood that has dried on the parchment (as Foucault reminds us in “Society Must Be Defended”). Even attempts to articulate the constituent gesture’s consequences, like Judith Butler’s masterful essay “We the People”, still fundamentally fail to capture the precariously mobile and liminal status of the exceptional figure.
It is not merely that they are on the outside of the constituent activity. It is that their exception makes the constituency possible. Through their exception, the fool, the madman, the one without sense, inhabits the city, or rational community – and maintains it. Perhaps what is needed is a new approach to these philosophical figures that we still, despite everything, consider peripheral (with no account of how that periphery moves and maintains the center). Reason needs madness. It needs it by right.
It is not only that “practical reason” produces, like in the Crito, a sovereignty whose foundation is the exclusion of the “foolish.” More importantly, it is that this exclusion is the practiced ethic of the wise, reasonable subject. Exclusion, therefore, as a clinical practice, is not just an echo of the circumscriptive groundwork of reason and its moralisms, but always in a direct and active relationship with it.
I would like to thank those who gave me notes (and even a title)… As always, the conspirators know who they are…
References:
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.) Stanford: Stanford University Press.
__. 2009. The Signature of All Things: On Method. (L. D’Isanto and K. Attell, Trans.) New York: Zone Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1965. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. (R. Howard, Trans.) New York: Pantheon Books.
Heath, Malcolm 2008. “Aristotle on Natural Slavery.” Phronesis. 3(53): 243-270.
Kim, Alan. 2011. “Crito and Critique.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 1(41): 67-113.
Spinoza, Baruch. 2000. Political Treatise. (S. Shirley, Trans.) Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Watkin, William. 2014. “The Signature of All Things: Agamben’s Philosophical Archeology.” Modern Language Notes, 1(129): 130-161.
Xenophon. 1994. Memorabilia. (A. Bonnette, Trans.) Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
[1] A “signature”, to the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, is a device that takes a philosophical paradigm (such as the exclusionary exception) and distributes it “through time and across discourses” (Watkin 2014, 140). If the paradigm can be understood through individual examples, the signature is what makes those examples legible in the history of philosophy. This paper, in part, contends that Crito carries this signature of the sovereign exception that is foundational to so many theories of sovereignty, political power, and right in the history of western philosophy. Literary scholar William Watkin even contends that the “signature” may be Agamben’s most important philosophical contribution. For a more complete analysis of the “signature” in histories of sovereignty, law, and authorship/authorization, see: Agamben 2009, 33-81; Watkin 2014, 139-141.
[2] “… ho de theos tēs hupomonēs kai tēs paraklēseōs dōē humin to auto phronein en allēlois kata Khriston Iēsoun…”
[3] For a treatment of this exact passage, but on the notion of kakodaimonia, see: Rosen’s Madness in Society, 1969, 90-93.
Why does metaphysics still exist as a discipline if Kant showed that metaphysics exceeds the limits of reason?
For one thing, because Kant didn’t show that metaphysics exceeds the limits of reason to everyone’s satisfaction.
In particular, he didn’t persuade Saul Kripke. In 1972 Kripke published work that would eventually appear as Naming and Necessity (1980), and called the Kantian view into question in a way that was impossible for anyone to ignore. It was probably the biggest philosophical event in the last half of the twentieth century. Philosophy was one way before Kripke and another way after him.
In the Kantian view, the world is a “manifold” of sensations that we put into an intelligible order by applying concepts and names to it. A concept is a set of properties in virtue of which something counts as a certain kind of object, and a name is a label that stands for a uniquely identifying description of some particular thing. (This is the way Frege and Russell understood it.) Take the name “Abraham Lincoln.” It stands for “the sixteenth president of the United States” – that’s what the name “Abraham Lincoln” means. And that meaning determines its referent, as there is only one thing in the world to which that description applies.
In this way of looking at things it seems that the world we know is the world as we make it intelligible to ourselves, and the closest we can get to a fundamental understanding of reality consists of knowledge of the workings of our structures of intelligibility. What reality is like “in itself,” the traditional domain of metaphysics, is beyond our grasp.
An implication of this view is that there are no objects with necessary properties. What’s necessary or essential to something’s being the way it is is determined by how we choose to describe it, not some natural feature of the thing as it is in itself, independently of our interest in it. If you choose to describe Lincoln as “the sixteenth president of the United States,” an essential feature of Lincoln is that he was an American citizen and an inessential or “accidental” feature is that he was the husband of Mary Todd Lincoln. But if you re-describe him as “the father of Tad Lincoln,” he’s essentially the husband of Mary and only accidentally the sixteenth president of the United States.
All this, to repeat, depends on the claim that meaning determines reference, and this is what Kripke denied in Naming and Necessity. We don’t refer to objects by organizing them into groups of properties, he argued, we simply designate them, such that a name names the same thing in all possible worlds including those in which the referent of the name lacks the properties we attribute to it. There’s no undifferentiated “manifold” that we can shape as we please within the scope of our cognitive faculties. There’s some real thing “out there” that we encounter, name, and talk about.
(To get a quick sense of the weaknesses in the Frege-Russell theory that motivate Kripke’s argument, consider an imaginary but possible case. Schneider was the author of the incompleteness theorem, but he died before he told anyone other than Gödel, who then published it as his own work. Does that mean that when you were referring to Gödel as the author of the incompleteness theorem, you were really referring to Schneider? Not at all. You were referring to Gödel, but had some false beliefs about him.)
The larger implication of Kripke’s work is that we are not separated from reality by our representations of it. That means that the picture of philosophy that derives from Kant – that we study and clarify concepts, meanings, and representations, all things that we have “made,” but not the world as it is in itself – is an unnecessarily restrictive way of understanding the discipline. When we encounter a bit of reality and call it, for example, gold, gold is what we’re talking about regardless of the various beliefs about it we may entertain. The medieval alchemist who thought of gold as compounded of mercury and sulfur, and the modern chemist who thinks of it as an element with the atomic number 79, are both talking about the same thing. Both are directly in touch with the same real world.
"Space and time are not just forms of our own intuition but are this field of possibility which is achieved by a society or an ecology of organisms stretching back billions of years in this cosmic process that we are part of.''
Matthew Segall
Part IIconsists of the following chapters: “To Open a Site: A Political Phenomenology of Dwelling” (69-92), “Devastation” (93-111), “An Ecology of Property” (113-129). In chapter four, Marder explains Heidegger’s application of the concept of failure in the context of the Greekpolis, which is linguistically tied to the wordpolos(=swirl) (70); the latter is characterized by a perennial openness both in the sense that its members are renewed continuously but, also, in the sense that the questioning that takes place in thepoliscan never be concluded. Heidegger objects to the common translation ofpolisas state or city-state because it suppresses its ecological stance (72). Notably, he toys with the Nietzschean notions ofhypsipolisandapolis, often through his grappling with Sophocles’Antigone(73-74) which indicates that Heidegger recognizesoikologia, which in Heideggerian terms would be translated as house-being or house-gathering, as a concept often realized by those who substitute the site of thepoliswith the site of history – another deeply Platonic idea (cf.Republic, 592b on the Heavenly city), but, also interestingly agreeing with several stories of ancient founders who were never afforded civic identity. I am here thinking of Heracles, but, in defense of Marder’s point that to appreciate Heidegger’s preoccupation with thepolis is inherently antisemitic, I would like to add the example of Moses, who led his people to the promised land, but was not allowed to cross the river and enjoy Canaan. Heidegger employs a geometrical appreciation of the dwelling; as Marder explains (75) dwelling, or being a Dasein, is conceived as the meeting point of a vertical dimension that refers to geographical situation and the political and a horizontal dimension that refers to the ethos of thepolis. In fact, it is in the context of thepolisthat Dasein is revealed to be aMitsein, being-with (76). Having the Platonic example at the back of my mind, I was not clear at this point how Heidegger deals with those exceptional (philosophizing?) individuals who manage to exchange the actual dwelling for the site of history; how does the notion ofMitseinapply in these cases? And, importantly, if the openness of the dwelling relies on it becoming hostile to the individual (as in the case of Antigone), should we consciously seek to rise above theMitsein? Possibly questions of a novice in Heidegger’s thought, but in advocating the study of Heidegger, Marder could have spent a bit more time trying to guide the less advanced reader. Marder then argues that ecology has been replaced in modern societies by a political and ethical economy, which privileges quantitative valuation (78). Discussing Heidegger’s contribution to the concept ofnomos, Marder notes: “The work of ‘mere fabrication’ of the law by human reason corresponds to the degradation ofēthosto the ethical with the help of morality …” (79). The intense economization of existence has allowed for the reign of nihilism, defined as the “danger of self-destruction” (82). InHHI48, cited by Marder on 91, Heidegger explains: “What I mean by ‘economization’ is the encumbrance of the things and the world they co-create with the time, spatiality, and language (nomos) that are alien to them.” Heidegger charges the Romans with mistranslating thepolitikón, as the product which arose “out of the existence of the Greek polis,” with the LatinImperium(83) (as well as with attaching to the Greek wordgē= earth the notion of territory by translatinggaia/gēasterra, 84). Admittedly, I am grateful to Marder for including the etymological arguments of Heidegger’s thought to his analysis, I found them delightful. Heidegger urges us not to confuse the need for housing with the desire for dwelling (87). By now, however, I really thought that Marder would press the question of people withoutterraand flung into history (regardless of whether this was a choice) … maybe the reader should be more patient for a treat later in the book?
In chapter five, Marder examines the question “what do we do when we devastate the world?,” noting that Heidegger anticipated “an abandonment of being” (93). He then introduces the distinction between destruction and devastation (94): “Staying with the logic and the vernacular of the preceding chapter, I am tempted to say: destruction destroys housing, while devastation devastates dwelling, striking not at the actual but at the possible, at the possibility of actuality.” For the next few pages, Marder details Heidegger’s desperate attempt to find hope in the face of ecological destruction, eventually glimpsing it in what Heidegger mentioned in HCT 18 (19): when the system fails possibility or the possibility of possibility, then possibility enters concealment. Thus, when devastation has completed its terrible effect both within and outside us, the concealment of the beginning harbored within Dasein offers the possibility of a new beginning (97). At this point, Heidegger appears almost poetic, perhaps even fatalistic. The worse effect of devastation in us is the “incapacitation of logos, of articulation” (99). Devastation, according to Heidegger, “transmits a scorching desert silence” which “cuts into Dasein and severs it from its world.” Again, to me, Heidegger’s thought at this point is pregnant with theological concepts, especially the eastern hesychast tradition (as an adaptation of pagan philosophical silence) and was a bit disappointed that Marder is not interested in the topic, though this observation is an aside rather than a criticism for the work which here becomes much more legible in terms of style. Going back to the problem of articulating devastation, Heidegger suggests discussing it as “evil,” though he suspiciously claims that “the devastation of the earth and the annihilation of the human essence … are somehow evil” (101). Heidegger appreciates evil as the opposite of logos, rather than in moral terms, but again here Marder avoids saying more about Heidegger’s antisemitism and how this plays against the fascist devastation of logos. Heidegger finds the positive aspects of devastation in the trace of its energy (103); devastation “procures its energy from a contentless and abstract possibility and, in effect, reconfigures energy as this possibility” (104). Although such an appreciation of devastation seems to almost brash off the Nazi regime and their followers as the mere means of devastation, Marder reminds us that Heidegger’s thought is here preoccupied with more mundane forms of devastation, primarily in the forms of economic rules (105). Finally, we come to the question, “what is to be done” about the onslaught of unconditional calculation? The answer being a. “fight the obvious temptation to get over it” (CPC 140/216 cited in Marder, 108) and b. endure it (GA: 94: 292, also on 108). Marder reminds us that here that being proactive is not necessarily a philosophical category, especially given Heidegger’s belief that in doing something we contribute to the expansion of devastation (109). Although Heidegger argues that devastation destroys the in-between space in which the polis exists, there is an in-between possibility in devastation too, the space between abandonment (of being) and releasement which may still save us (111).
In chapter six, Marder discusses the notion of property in the context of Marx’s political economy (113). Since Plato and Heidegger believe that the philosopher’s task is above all to “un-forget being in the midst of a profound ontological amnesia” (114), very much in line with the ancient conception of oikonomia, the modern institution of economy perplexes the mission of the philosopher: “the un-forgetting of being must engage in a painstaking analysis of economism and its corollary modes of appropriation that endanger planetary existence.” Marder here proposes to examine “how the ecologico-phenomenological attitude subtends an economic-political approach to ‘property’” by putting Heidegger in dialogue with Vladimir Bibikhin, a Russian philosopher who translated much of Heidegger’s work into his native language (114-115). Taking start from the post-Soviet privatization, construed by Bibikhin as the “capture of the world” (117), Marder explains how Heidegger allows Bibikhin to articulate the challenges of his society as a symptom of our overall tendency to “world-devastation and the obviation of logos inherent in the economic or economistic attitude.” Finally, Marder considers fascism and technocratic liberalism as alternatives to the ecology of property (119-122). Toying with the double meaning of the Latin capio as grab and grasp(=understand), Marder explains liberalism as preoccupied with grasping without being-grasped to which fascism responds with the reverse option of being-grasped without grasping (119) – notions which both Heidegger and Bibikhin employ in their struggle to restore the ecology of property (120). Here, we have a pseudo(?)-choice between the indifferent grasp of beings or the ecstatic surrender to them. For Heidegger, Marder concludes, “ontological history proceeds by way of ending, its ‘process’ twisting into the ends, a pair of them-fascism and technocratic liberalism-now looming large before us as the only destiny” (121). In his effort to free up some space between calculative rationality and thoughtlessness, Heidegger comes up with the notion of “inceptual thinking,” which diverts “the task of thought from the capture of the world,” to “dwelling with and in the world, all the while articulating and being articulated by this difference between ‘with’ and ‘in’”
