This is Lukas Bergstrom's personal weblog. You might want to visit my professional site. You can also find me on Twitter, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
He sighs and closes his eyes and seems to deflate before my eyes. "I will tell you my problem openly and for this my publisher will hate me. All the talk and the writing about politics, this is not where my heart is. No. I have been sidetracked. I really mean this."
He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. "I will tell you the truth now," he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. "Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah." He flicks furiously through the pages. "Chapter 3, where I try to read Marx anew, is maybe OK. I like this part where I analyse Kafka's last story and here where I use the community of outcasts in the TV series Heroes as a model for the communist collective. But, this section, the Architectural Parallax, this is pure bluff. Also the part where I analyse Avatar, the movie, that is also pure bluff. When I wrote it, I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality."
Why, then, given that he does not like most of his books and does not have any enthusiasm for the lecture circuit, does he not call a stop to the Žižek show? "I am doing that right now!" he shouts. "I am writing a mega-book about Hegel with regard to Plato, Kant and maybe Heidegger. Already, this Hegel book is 700 pages. It is a true work of love. This is my true life's work. Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel. For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel," he says, sighing again. "But people just want the shitty politics."
There are two types of 'shared deliberation' in contemporary society, one that's focused on resolving conflicts between individuals over competing goods, and another (which he's championing) that's focused on building the common goods that we need qua being a member of groups.Check the link for a bit more. I'm searching desperately for a video or transcript.
Because we're so good at the former, and so bad at the latter, we have virtually no resources in our politics for asking what we owe each other, and so we mostly talk about what we're owed ourselves.
So I thought they lived in a very short Now, their sense of Now was from about the beginning of last week to the end of next week. And if you said what are you working on now they would tell you what they had been working on that morning, not what they’d been working on for the last couple of years or so - it was exciting but it was very narrow and that kind of narrowness in time-thinking slightly worried me, because it doesn’t translate into terribly productive social behaviour. It doesn’t encourage you to set in place projects and agreements and arrangements between people that will flower over very long periods.
Robert H. Bork, The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law (New York: The Free Press, 1990), p. 6
Futurism was an international art movement founded in Italy in 1909. It was (and is) a refreshing contrast to the weepy sentimentalism of Romanticism. The Futurists loved speed, noise, machines, pollution, and cities; they embraced the exciting new world that was then upon them rather than hypocritically enjoying the modern world’s comforts while loudly denouncing the forces that made them possible. Fearing and attacking technology has become almost second nature to many people today; the Futurist manifestos show us an alternative philosophy.Links to a bunch of breathless manifestos, including Russolo's Art of Noises.
Too bad they were all Fascists.
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