Read the chaper titled "CONCLUSION" [4 pages long] from Dupuy's Crisis of faith: b-ok.xyz
Walter Benjamin
Blake White
William Adams
I wonder if there ought to be more critical theory reading threads. I feel like I haven't seen that many theory threads recently.
Christopher Brooks
Thanks a lot. Although I understand what he's saying about the paradox of "fatalism" I'm still a little hazy. The prophets of enlightened doomsaying are akin to the new messiahs? What really struck me was The Blob. It's a metaphor for the mysterious aspect (subjectless process, but still somehow 'the enemy is us') of capital accumulation. It can't withstand the cold, the freeze. From the wiki, "Dave requests authorities send an Air Force heavy-lift cargo aircraft to transport the Blob to the Arctic, where it is later parachuted down to the ice and snow pack. Dave says that while the creature is not dead, at least it has been stopped. To this, Steve Andrews replies, "Yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold"."
That last line is seriously fucking chilling to me.
Cooper Anderson
Luis Nelson
Keep in mind that Dupuy is a liberal and Benjamin – at best – anti-capitalist. The chapter I put forward from Dupuy is – more than anything – an expression of the internal contradiction of the capitalist market. Even though Dupuy evokes a kind of enlightened messianism, the communist counterpart is missing (we are not libs).
Eli Ward
le wrong flag
Asher Green
Totally legit observation: the very mode of posing this problematic is idealistic at best. Communists should 1) understand this as a contemporary mode of expressing the (scientific-ideological-philosophical) conjuncture, representing how 'things are';
2) undivorced from the modes of practices that could actually attempt to solve it…
Dylan Rodriguez
That's all pretty close to normal contemporary German though. People don't need to believe in ghosts to call a situation 'ghost-ish (gespenstisch) when they were alone in the dark and felt some other person or an animal was observing them. Talking of promises that amounted to nothing in the real world is to say that they dissolved into air (sich in Luft aufgelöst). You can just read the sentence right before the melts-into part in the Manifesto, and it's clear what it refers to. (And in the German version, the sentence that got the melts-into translation explicitly refers to the feudal class order as evaporating. It's just that Ständische doesn't seem to have a corresponding word in English, unless you think feudal-class-society-ordery'' is a word. I'm sure Fred and the other guy translating were more concerned with how the words flow when read aloud in English than with absolute autists not getting simple metaphors.) And the German word that got translated as contradiction (Widerspruch) has a broader meaning that also can mean disagreement.
This also looks like an anti-Marxist text, so I don't get what you mean by our camp if you include Benjamin in that. Can you provide the German original?
Luis Parker
Sorry. Again, with un-fucked (I hope) formatting:
>People don't need to believe in ghosts to call a situation ghost-ish (gespenstisch) when they were alone in the dark and felt some other person or an animal was observing them. Talking of promises that amounted to nothing in the real world is to say that they dissolved into air (sich in Luft aufgelöst). You can just read the sentence right before the melts-into part in the Manifesto, and it's clear what it refers to. (And in the German version, the sentence that got the melts-into translation explicitly refers to the feudal class order as evaporating. It's just that Ständische doesn't seem to have a corresponding word in English, unless you think feudal-class-society-ordery is a word.
David Gomez
I'd actually need to think about that. Wouldn't it be implicit in calling an even ghostly that, to a certain extent, the "reality" of ghosts is being affirmed? The weird, the eerie, the not-apparently material? Where Benjamin and, later dwn the road, Derrida take off on Marx's language is his focus on almost transcendental elements of capitalism, alienation, and fetish. These early Freudian-Marxists (though Benjamin eventually found Jung more appealing) is comparing Fetish in Marx and Fetish in Freud, both of which are building off of its tribal connotations.
That makes sense. My point was simply that oblique metaphor is part-and-parcel for marxist theory.
Benjamin is absolutely a Marxist, he's just a very strange marxist. This is the guy who coins "Left Melancholy" after all.
Here ya go, Germananon.
uni-erfurt.de