Philosophy as capitalism and the socialist radically metaphysical response to it
Journal Title: Labyrinth: An International Journal for Philosophy, Value Theory and Sociocultural Hermeneutics - Year 2017, Vol 19, Issue 2
Abstract
The author starts from the thesis that there is no such thing as a "natural" or "apolitical" economy. The economy is always already political, as it is the economy’s material core of power, control, and its main mechanisms, i.e. exploitation and oppression. It is no less so in the era of neoliberalism, a time in which we witness the divorce between capitalism and democracy. In order to lay the foundations of a different economy, one that is not based on wage labor and the exploitation of human life and nature based on their auto-alienation, but rather on action in accordance with their resources, we need – according the author – to rethink the concept of the state in a non-philosophical and post-capitalist fashion, structurally different from the modern bourgeois state. If the structure originating in the bourgeois state, as conceived by modern humanism, is preserved, it will mean that the determination in the last instance is still the same. In order to arrive at a determination in the last instance of a non-exploitative, non-wage-labor-based social order where the determination is affected by the real, we must first arrive at the generic core of the notion of the modern state. As soon as we determine the generic term of "the state," we can radicalize it by letting it be determined by the effects of the real. The generic notion, isolated from the chôra of the transcendental material that is offered by modern philosophies originating in the Enlightenment, should be used as the minimal transcendental description for the determining effect (or "symptom") of the real.
Authors and Affiliations
Katerina Kolozova
Jan Assmann: Totale Religion. Ursprünge und Formen puritanischer Verschärfung
A book review of Jan Assman's book on Total Religion.
Le sens-sans-signe: Pour une éthique de la création
The following article is the result of a collaboration between a painter and a woman philosopher. They worked previously on an experimental documentary film about objects and art objects, which was realized at Palais de...
Victims, Power and Intellectuals: Laruelle and Sartre
In two recent works, Intellectuals and Power and General Theory of Victims, François Laruelle offers a critique of the public intellectual, including Jean-Paul Sartre, claiming such intellectuals have a disregard for vic...
Political Correctness oder Tugendterror?
Political Correctness or Virtue Terror? Discussing the different meanings of the concept of political correctness, the author argues that it is a part of a profound change in culture within Western democracies that has...
Jan Patočka's Reversal of Dostoevsky and Charter 77
Jan Patočka became politically active for the first time as a spokesperson of the dissident movement Charter 77. In this capacity he wrote several essays, the first of which, entitled "On the Matters of The Plastic Peopl...