swears

preppy-kei
At the time when I could have done the most, I was a complacent liberal who was more or less happy to let the grown-ups run things.

I'm getting quite into liberalism at the moment. Reading some José Ortega y Gasset and Isaiah Berlin. Next time an angry leftist calls me a liberal, I'll just nod my head and say "Yep, that's me!"

I'm rather tired of all this baby Baader-Meinhof bullshit, all these Net 2.0 Wolfie Smiths.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
I should also mention that I feel that the 'provacative' school of writing which you describe is also getting a bit overdone; or, if not overdone as such, then too easy to produce a poor example of. But I can understand the position it comes from, bascially the Nietzchean that people sometimes need to be scared or alarmed into thought. Why attempts to do this often fail is something I need to reflect on more.

well said.

i didn't half enjoy that Paul Bowman piece from poetix!
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Next time an angry leftist calls me a liberal, I'll just nod my head and say "Yep, that's me!"

Additionally, remind them that it's the favourite term of abuse of Bill O'Reilly, Anne Coulter et cetera, ad nauseam.
 

swears

preppy-kei
Additionally, remind them that it's the favourite term of abuse of Bill O'Reilly, Anne Coulter et cetera, ad nauseam.

Yeah, but at least those people really believe in something. :rolleyes:

Besides, Didn't Zizek once say that the American Christian right with all their iron will and moral rectitude could be courted as allies rather than considered as opponents?
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Bowman essentially does a Bourdieuian number on Badiou (how does Badiou function in terms of questions of taste and distinction, whose cultural status and identity is shored up by that function, etc.).

Probably the best line of counter-attack would be Rancierian: most of what I've been saying about the will to understand, the ability to participate in the practico-theoretic construction of a truth etc. presupposes a generic intellectual and political (and artistic, and amorous) capacity that Ranciere/Badiou thinks everybody just has, and Bourdieu thinks is the by-product of an uneven social process of cultivation. The idea here would not be to argue, against the evidence of one's own eyes, that the cultivation of people's capacities is not uneven, but to uphold Ranciere's point that such cultivation presupposes a capacity that does not depend upon it. Anyway, I'll work out the details later on.
 

vimothy

yurp
The people who murdered Dr George Tiller were possessed by a violent belief, by a certainty, a "truth" no less, and heroically unprepared to let the liberal world continue to spin on its axis as if everything was okay. Are they so distinct from Badiou's imagined revolutionaries? And if they are, is it merely that pro-life, bad, communism, good?
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Yes, yes, I get it: being too certain about anything is teh bad, we should be tolerant of conflicting viewpoints, after all we're only human etc. etc.

Generally good rules for ordinary human sociality, which is why they're part of everybody's kindergarten-level moral training.

In what circumstances might someone (who wasn't simply psychologically damaged and looking for excuses to hurt other people) legitimately suspend or revoke those rules? Do they apply in all situations? This is a trick question.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, but at least those people really believe in something. :rolleyes:

Besides, Didn't Zizek once say that the American Christian right with all their iron will and moral rectitude could be courted as allies rather than considered as opponents?

Allies against whom, I wonder? Presumably lilly-livered bourgeois liberals like you and me, who'd prefer not to have to live under either Soviet-style state communism or a sort of cheerfully fascistic, Jesus-flavoured version of Shari'a law.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
It's not about some special cadre of human beings who place themselves above the moral codes that govern ordinary mortals. It's about the conditions under which ordinary mortals might commit themselves, with courage and anxiety, to an uncertain cause.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Well, if this small knot of bloggers isn't who Daniel means when he says "Badiouvians", then I honestly don't know who the fuck he thinks he means. There's a certain amount of old, warmed-over cuntishness in his furious attempts to portray us as heretic-burning elitists consumed by our own intellectual vanity. But "power-block"? Come on.

You're really losing it Dominic... For the record, what I mean by the Badiouvian power-block is the network which organized the Communist Conference at Birkbeck, who collectively control journals, academic appointments, and who were all over the media as a result of that exploit. Every network of people associated with each other operates as a power-block. People do favors for their friends, and there is an excess of power generated by every association - a material process that is more significant then things that they say ("Truth" "The Revolution" "The Working Class") they are committed to. Things which are often said to camouflage and/or justify their real ambitions. Including from themselves.

.
 
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vimothy

yurp
So we are a network in search of a ghetto, a resistance in search of an occupation. Not a lonely destiny; we are ordinary middle class people who want to do something extraordinary. And we are not scared of violence. Or rather, we are scared, but committed. Or rather, we might be committed, if this wasn’t hypothetical. Or rather, we are not certain yet if this is hypothetical. But we want to retain the possibility of the possibility of collective revolt. So we shall continue our search.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Something that I think is being elided too freely in this discussion is the difference between being broadly or even powerfully convinced that Badiou has certain things right, and thinking of oneself (or wishing to think of oneself) as a "militant of a truth" in the sense he establishes. There has been no Badiou-event; Badiou's philosophy is not a truth procedure. Whatever else it is to be a "Badiouvian" (and I am unconvinced that the organisers of the Birkbeck conference were anything of the sort), it is not incorporation into the body of a truth.
 

vimothy

yurp
Something that I think is being elided too freely in this discussion...

But might Badiou enable such a thing -- I mean, how did we get from the academy to the ghetto in the course of this conversation?
 
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