The state of emergency in which we live

This morning I taught Benjamin’s On the Concept of History to some baffled students, and I was struck by the contemporary relevance of Section VIII:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

The basic attitude Benjamin is critiquing seems remarkably similar to that of contemporary “progressives,” who always seem to believe that if we simply wait out the current “emergency” of conservative governance, they will ultimately undermine themselves — or else simply die off, leaving the more liberal younger cohort to take over and set things right.

Two Free Books On The Neoliberal University and Protest

Everybody loves a free book, so I present to you today two free books that might be of general interest to readers here, along the theme of the general battles around education and its funding occurring in the UK and globally.

The first is Fight Back! A Reader on the Winter of Protest, available as free PDF download and very reasonable (£1.48) Kindle version to save you the bother of conversion of formats. At 350 pages, it is a collection of accounts, journalistic reports, theoretical reflections, interviews and practical guides on the winter of education protests that occurred here in the United Kingdom against sweeping changes in higher education funding. These changes seek to move from a tax payer provided service for the public good to hyper-indivdualised marketised system with an ontology based upon advantage to private individuals. This programme includes a potential tripling the level of tuition fees with an introduction of variable market rates, vast cuts to central funding, particularly of the humanities, and the under-reported (and perhaps vital for US students looking to study in the UK) slashing of the numbers of student visas. This is, of course, an element of the wider austerity program, and students were keen to emphasise from the beginning their solidarity with those fighting the Coalition government’s wider austerity agenda and austerity agendas globally. It is a book that is consciously by the movement and for the movement, hoping to inform and provoke debate. With the second phase of university occupations occurring on the run up to the mass trade union day of protest (40 universities were occupied in the last round), it is an opportune time to give it a look and if you are from outside the UK get up to speed.

In a similar vein is the PDF version of the book Toward a Global Autonomous University produced by the trans-national collective Edu-Factory. Very much influenced by autonomous Marxist trends, the new thinking on what the politics of the common and thinkers like Hardt and Negri (Negri here provides a co-written conclusion), it is a provocative look at the current place of the university in capitalist society and the possibility of alternative formations. This book and their website, which includes reports from their very recent conference attended by education activists from across the world (including many UK occupations), are certainly worth a read.

Awkwardness continues to spread

Tom Cutterham has written a review for the Oxonian Review, and a particularly positive one at that.

As always, there is no shame in buying a copy (Amazon: US, UK; Book Depository).

Sunday Link Post: Jeremy Ridenour

The occasional AUFS link posts serves to highlight important books, posts, and other virtual goings-ons that we think our readers would find interesting. Today there is just one person to be highlighted, Jeremy Ridenour of JRidenour. Everyone really should be reading Jeremy’s blog if they are not already. He consistently posts high-quality reflections on important books in the tradition. Recently he finished the entirety of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, then worked through important books in Liberation Theology, and is currently reading (along with a new addition to the blog) Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. I also really liked his recent post proclaiming Death to Apologetics which highlights the death of the orthodoxy theological blogosophere.

Appeal for Travel Funds

Update: In less than 24 hours you’ve already provided what I need. Thank you so much to everyone. It’s been a hard few months already, financially it does look very grim for the mid-future and finishing a PhD never does seem to foster great joy, but I feel very loved on today. Thank you again for your support.

In the past I’ve referred to myself as a secular mendicant because I often find myself frequently begging for money to support my academic work. Because I am in my writing up year and because the budget has been cut I don’t have the full funding to attend the Syracuse conference, where I am on a panel discussing issues related to Laruelle’s Future Christ. The department has generously offered me a little money, £150, which is about half of what I need for a plane ticket. I would be able to cover the other half if it wasn’t for a crisis related to my partner being forced out of her job and likely to leave the country soon (essentially, due to a mixture of beaurcratic error on the part of her employer and the new immigration rules of the ConDem government, her visa renewal was denied and we have been told by three lawyers that our appeal is likely to fail as well). This means that I’m going to be very cash-strapped in the last three months of my PhD here in the UK.

So, if you can spare £5 or $10 please consider donating. I can’t offer much more than my gratitude and to post an audio recording of the panel here at AUFS. I will also enter everyone who donates into a drawing for a free copy of Future Christ signed by Laruelle as well. Thank you for any help you can give.

Donate Now.

Review of Awkwardness in The New Inquiry

Malcolm Harris of The New Inquiry has written a generous and yet critical review of Awkwardness, a book that remains very much available for purchase (Amazon: US, UK; Book Depository).

It’s Buddhist, so it must be true!

I conducted a short Introduction to Buddhism presentation tonight, as the culmination in a four-week world religions survey course. Of the religions covered, it is really the only one I had a personal investment, as I’ve “dabbled” in it; and have lingering sympathies, if not actual practice. Obviously, it is impossible to cover all that you’d like in a ninety minute introduction. One can barely get through the life of Gautama and a too-quick gloss of the dubiously simplistic three-pronged typology of the “Three Vehicles,” let alone explore the complexities of the human condition. Oh, but I tried, and in the process, I think, did a hatchet job to the two-truth doctrine. So much so that I feel like I should make up for it here, in the only other public venue I have for these kinds of things, and tap out a lay-level presentation on the topic. Take from it what you will. Given the venue, however, I welcome comments on its relative coherence, and am also curious whether others otherwise unconcerned with Buddhism find any resonances with their philosophico-political projects.

Book event?

Dearest colleagues, it has been a while since we did a book event. Is now or soon a propitious time? Does anyone have any suggestions for an appropriate book to center our interpretive and evaluative efforts on? We tend to focus on contemporary works that deserve greater attention, but some have previously suggested that discussing a “classic” work might be a good route as well. Personally, I am totally open at this point.

The So-Called Dualism between Nature and Culture

I’ve expressed my disappointment with the majority of theological engagements with ecology and that disappointment has come up again as I’ve been preparing my lectures for Environmental Ethics and Religious Thought. It seems that a lot of theologians focus in on the “split between nature and culture” as the underlying idea driving the ecological crisis. It isn’t just the high-church orthodox ones either. Lynn White’s famous essay that locats the “psychic foundation” for the ecological crisis in the turn from paganism to monotheism is really about what more contemporary thinkers refer to as the split between nature and culture. For White sees in Christianity the enthroning of humanity over and above nature. You then have Northcott responding to this claim with the counter that it was “the wrong kind of Christianity” that created this split. So, rather than dealing head on with the charge (which could be spurious anyway), Northcott moves around it, all the while leaving the underlying thesis regarding nature and culture in place.

This so-called dualism really doesn’t bother me though. I don’t think that positing distinctions in reality lead to the ecological crisis. Nor do I think that a nature/culture split leads automatically to viewing the earth as just a collection of things to be used. I know you get this in Heidegger, the change from a river into the power that a river can provide, but that is part of the river. Even from a phenomenological perspective we don’t find any foundation for the rampant nostalgia present in the theologians’ insincere lamentations for a bygone era. I’m not the biggest fan of Latour’s work, but his theory of nature/culture hybrids does reveal something. Essentially, neither nature-as-that-which-is-but-is-not-human and culture-as-that-which-is-human-and-part-of-nature have priority. There is something univocal at work underlying nature and culture (with these definitions, since they are slippery terms). We can call that Nature’s character as One. But positing a dualism helps us to think the real immanence of Nature-as-One, for it is a formal and abstract separation, rather than a real one.

I think if theologians could get to grips with the truth of immanence they would be less terrified by death, by nature, by genes, and the like. It may help them get past their psychopathic ethics; the kind where you say things like “there is no death outside the church” or you’re living in fear that you don’t know what life is. For the truth of immanence is not naturalism, scientists don’t even believe in naturalism now days, but gnosis. Rather than thinking it is all occluded, all a paradoxical mystery supported by the hand of the Creator who humiliates his creatures, you just know.

On the Chicago mayoral election

I have often joked that I support Rahm Emanuel because he’s so evil. It’s funny, but it’s not actually a joke. First of all, I do support him. I went out of my way to make sure my Chicago residency was (re)established specifically so that I could vote in the mayoral election and then to visit an early-voting location on a Sunday to vote for him. When he was kicked off the ballot by the appeals court, I anxiously hovered over my computer seeking fresh news on the situation — the only other news issues I do that for are presidential elections and major public transit-related legislation. (And like all right-thinking people, I have of course avidly followed the @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed.)

Why am I so supportive of a conservative Democrat who took a couple years off of politics to cash out in investment banking and famously dismissed liberal activists as “fucking retarded”?