k-punk
Spectres of Mark
re: Dogger's comments....
Yes, on the face of it, conservative and neo-conservative/Blairite thinkers seem to be full of positive rhetoric about 'freedom' etc., but the one of the key defining characteristics of this axis is its showy disavowal of anything deemed to be utopian. The appeal is always to what, in a theatrical gesture of faux-regret, they call the 'real world' (its assumption being that the nature of reality is basically fixed, we know what people are really like, come on) . Needless to say, what is characterised as the wisdom of maturity actually amounts to a cynical ratification of the current world order (which is both naturalized and presented as 'the best possible world', the end of history to which everything tends and everyone aspires).
Badiou has described the 'nihilsm' of this contemporary ethics very well. 'Parliamentary politics as practised today does not in any way consist of setting objectives inspired by principles and of inventing the means to attain them. It consists of turning the spectacle of the economy into the object of an apathetic (though obviously unstable) public consensus.' This politics articulates itself in terms of a defence of 'human rights' but these ''human rights' are rights to non-evil', so that 'Evil is that from which Good is derived, not the other way round.'
Thus, there can be large-scale commitment of resources only to the 'ridding of Evil', not to the construction of any Good. Interesting that the disavowed utopian impulse is never ACTUALLY translated into a pure pragmatism. The neo-con agenda isn't actually 'realistic'; its vision of extirpating all tyranny from the world is every bit as dewy-eyed as any scheme dreamt up by the Left. It is not as if, for instance, 'the war on terror' has the remotest prospect of succeeding.
Yes, on the face of it, conservative and neo-conservative/Blairite thinkers seem to be full of positive rhetoric about 'freedom' etc., but the one of the key defining characteristics of this axis is its showy disavowal of anything deemed to be utopian. The appeal is always to what, in a theatrical gesture of faux-regret, they call the 'real world' (its assumption being that the nature of reality is basically fixed, we know what people are really like, come on) . Needless to say, what is characterised as the wisdom of maturity actually amounts to a cynical ratification of the current world order (which is both naturalized and presented as 'the best possible world', the end of history to which everything tends and everyone aspires).
Badiou has described the 'nihilsm' of this contemporary ethics very well. 'Parliamentary politics as practised today does not in any way consist of setting objectives inspired by principles and of inventing the means to attain them. It consists of turning the spectacle of the economy into the object of an apathetic (though obviously unstable) public consensus.' This politics articulates itself in terms of a defence of 'human rights' but these ''human rights' are rights to non-evil', so that 'Evil is that from which Good is derived, not the other way round.'
Thus, there can be large-scale commitment of resources only to the 'ridding of Evil', not to the construction of any Good. Interesting that the disavowed utopian impulse is never ACTUALLY translated into a pure pragmatism. The neo-con agenda isn't actually 'realistic'; its vision of extirpating all tyranny from the world is every bit as dewy-eyed as any scheme dreamt up by the Left. It is not as if, for instance, 'the war on terror' has the remotest prospect of succeeding.