Pill Pod 84 - The Idea of Communism II (Exclusive)
Added 2022-06-24 23:07:52 +0000 UTCThis week we read the article by Susan Buck-Morss "The Second Time as Farce... Historical Pragmatics and the Untimely Present" from, again, The Idea of Communism I https://amzn.to/3xZJjMw
Comments
On the concern of pillaging or misrepresenting topics such as Islam or Buddhism due to unfamiliarity...seems like a good opportunity to have someone on the show from that background, and to explore where the lines of intersection occur with the more familiar western background. I think you kinda did that on an earlier episode "The Violence of Light," and I really enjoyed that aspect. I always find striking similarities between western and eastern philosophy and practices, where a concept from one branch I'd never heard of instantly makes me think of one from another. I'd be surprised if someone hasn't or isn't covering these intersections.
ageOfBumFires
2022-07-14 21:51:23 +0000 UTCGo Eric! The most nuanced. I think ‘Messianism’ in the Benjaminian context is a temporal paradox, which awaits the messiah who never arrives, the ‘Jetzt time ( sp?)’, now moment, being always the opening of possibilities in a system of ideas that closes and excludes. For ex., psychoanalysis awaits its Freud who has yet to arrive….Perhaps more to the point of what Pils suggests about a Xtian evangelism that can interrogate its positions in the interest of a universalism in keeping with its own sacrifice and liberation—- bc on the horizon is always the (im) possibility of the messianic. So also why it is the IDEA… of communism. it never arrives….
Zachary Manenti
2022-07-07 19:12:16 +0000 UTCI think this might be the first time I properly disagreed with you Pills, in that you seem to be equating the fundamentalist American strain of Christianity with mainstream Islam that Buck-Mors was referring to in her paper when it comes to finding some sort of radical inspiration, which I felt was unfair and a false equivalence. I also thought that, as a Deleuzian, you'd appreciate her assertion that we "share as a consequence precisely the untimeliness of the present - the truly new, that none of our knowledge traditions has anticipated" and that it would be bad to "seize the contemporary and stuff it back into the Procrustean bed of tradition, destroying precisely its global newness", because I took this embrace of newness to mean looking for new weapons in the Deleuzian sense. And this lack of anticipation of the current neoliberal present by, say, the Marxist tradition, is something that's spot on IMO. I think the left as a whole has a problem with its general attitude towards religion which it stubbornly refuses to engage with, namely that this immediately hostile attitude towards religion as a whole makes it difficult to engage with the majority of people who to some degree or other are religious/spiritual. This attitude is a hangup not only from the atheist history of most leftist revolutionary traditions, but also liberal humanism, where the "tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living". I think Buck-Mors is right when she says that western leftists make the "facile assertion that 'we' have now progressed beyond religion, when the vast majority of the world's population is excluded in that statement." I completely agree with Victor talking about the uselessness and academic circle jerking of positing thinking with more nuance as some sort of practical political action. How many people outside of a few nerds around the world have even read, say, this paper, let alone understood all of it? That "more radical" bit made me chuckle when I came across it, too.
anacidcommie
2022-06-30 14:30:15 +0000 UTCFelt like you guys were really vibing in this conversation. I LOLed at several points (now “academic circle jerk” is in my vocabulary). IMHO, I’m fine with y’all not doing episodes on non-euro traditions. If there is a universal truth, then I should think any spiritual or philosophical tradition worth its salt will get us there. Of course there’s a lot to be learned by looking at traditions that are foreign to us, but I feel like the most important thing is to grok the kernel of life. And then a foreigner might be like, “Oh, he’s not speaking my language, but I can tell from his actions that he gets it.”
Virginia Scarlett
2022-06-26 02:48:53 +0000 UTCIt's next!
Plastic Pills
2022-06-26 00:46:54 +0000 UTCYou’re not wrong pills. The thing that made me bristle was toward the end there is a sentence on the last page where she talks about how we need to open up a terrain within which Afghan women can openly demonstrate against Islamist laws, without it being subsumed by the west (I’m paraphrasing but it’s close). Knowing a bit about the history of revolutionary organising by muslim and afghan women, it did not sit well with me. It seemed guilty of the same kind of nonsense that enacts a wholesale erasure of the history of the struggles and resistance of afghan women (which resistance has a rich history) but which white feminists and others feel the need to erase in order to occupy the positions they desire to occupy in relation to othered women. It’s interesting that Erik talked about ‘minor literature’ because this article displays the same kinds of weird orientalism that I cannot forgive d&g for reproducing in that fucking Kafka book. Can you please do ‘Communism, the word’ and make me endlessly happy.
Sarah Oates
2022-06-26 00:35:39 +0000 UTC
