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Showing posts from May, 2019

The Capital method

With a moderate fever, I opened my email and was struck by a Quora question (Is Cuba proof that socialism works?). I don't like this questions in general, they seem to come with a pitfall. But I guess my fever made me go on and read one of the answer. It was from a man who apparently have lived in Cuba. He writes that Cuba is all about corruption and controlling their citizens. Then he goes on to present what he called "The KGB method". I went on to give my answer citing his description of the method: It is a proof that over all anything is better than leave-it-to-the-market systems. Of course, to challenge capital has been always like drying a block of ice. It doesn’t work in the long run, and a previous answer to this question provided an insight to the reason why: The Capital method is this: 1. “Create through propaganda a GREAT ENEMY that is about to attack your country and subjugate the people and make them suffer, unless they line up behind you to fight this e

Levinas' ultratranscendental

After finishing Deictic Absolutes , I'm revisiting Autrement qu'ĂȘtre (and Derrida, and Silvia Benso) in my course on Levinas, Heidegger and Derrida. Today we discussed the orientation towards the other - kerygmatic - in the significance of empirical verdicts. What is said is reduced to the saying - because the metaphysics of the subjectivity is not a form of ontologism. That is, when one says anything like S is P, one is predicating and preaching, preaching requires responsibility to the Other who hears one's report. Sensibility is ultimately testimony: my senses are geared towards producing reports to the Other. Now, this is why the senses themselves have no language - no private language - but rather they are led to speak the Other's language so that I can genuinely inform from my senses to the Other that, say, S is P. So, that sensible intuition requires concepts is a consequence of sensibility being geared towards the Other. My senses are put at the service of sayin

Post-truth

Guida Chambel, Nuno Oliveira and the Ana Lama Gallery folks in Lisbon are planning a long cycle revolving around anarcheology, fake news, artificial norms and post-truth. They want to look at the kidnapping of the iconoclastic practices both by the enthusiasts of capital and by the social conservatives - now that they are clearly placed together at least in practice. Attention to the non-univocity of representation - for example, in terms of the infinite saying that compose what is written according to disconstruction or in terms of the displacement of the force of matters of fact through the concern with versions according to anarcheology - is among the iconoclastic efforts to promote heresy against the dominant project in the last decades. These efforts have been recently not only embraced by the ultimate keepers of the status quo and by the unconditional supporters of capital as the sovereign engine in planetary life but also applied by those groups to (jointly) reach positions of p