Critique
CRISIS AND CRITIQUE: SPECIAL ISSUE, VOL.I ISSUE II, 2014
CRISIS & CRITIQUE: http://materializmidialektik.org/crisis-and-critique-n-2/
CRISIS & CRITIQUE SPECIAL ISSUE VOLUME I / ISSUE II, 2014
Edited by Acheronta Movebo
EDITORS Agon Hamza Frank Ruda
CRISIS & CRITIQUE Editorial Board is:
Henrik Jøker Bjerre, Aaron Schuster, Adrian Johnston, Joan Copjec, Robert Pfaller, Frank Ruda, Gabriel Tupinambá, Sead Zimeri, Fabio Vighi, Benjamin Noys, Roland Boer
ACHERONTA MOVEBO Editorial Board is:
Sina Badiei, Srdjan Cvjetićanin, Oguz Erdin, Chrysantho Figueiredo, Agon Hamza, Martin López, Fernando Marcelino, Duane Rousselle, Ehren Stuff, Gabriel Tupinambá, Daniel Tutt, Bree Wooten, Yuan Yao
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial note (p.4)
Toward a New Thinking of the Absolute (p.6)
Politics, Subjectivity and Cosmological Antinomy: Kant, Badiou and Žižek (p.14)
Discontent, Suffering and Symptom: Reading Lacanian Diagnostics through Amerindian Perspectivism (p.33)
Psychoanalysisas labor: an impossible profession and the Marxist conception of labor (p.49)
The 21st Century Dawns with a Chance (p.61)
Entlassen. Remarks on Hegel, Sacrifice and Liberation (p.71)
Real Abstraction and the Autonomization of Value (p.84)
Serialism as Simulacrum (p.95)
What is missing / what is coming (p.101)
The Analysis and the Presentation of Marc Lachièze-Rey’s ‘Travelling in the Time: The Modern Physics and the Temporality’ (p.109)
Crisis
Editorial Note
The texts comprise a special edition of Crisis and Critique, created by the editors of a different journal project, entitled Acheronta Movebo which is still in its infancy. This latter project, which began about 7 months ago, is comprised of a few students and researchers whose aim was to construct a Freudian journal which was not strictly psychoanalytic, but makes use of the Freudian categories in politics and philosophy as well. As we began to receive submissions from various authors, we decided that Acheronta had not sufficiently distinguished itself from other journals with similar commitments, most notably this one, to warrant its own existence. Although the topics covered in this issue are perhaps of a more variegated nature, we believe that they essentially fit into the structure and platform of Crisis and Critique better than our own project.
In this sense, our decision to move our first issue under the banner of a different journal is very practical – we simply think that one good journal devoted to Marxist critique is good enough, and that there is no need to further divide an already fragile field. By consolidating with Crisis and Critique, we are also motivating a question regarding our future plans – how should Acheronta Movebo move forward? The present letter from the editor is an inquiry into this situation – we hope that by outlin ing the facts of our project, what we aimed to do, and why we thought our end product did not fit the idea, we can engage ourselves and others to re think our mode of work.
The texts offered here were to be divided into two “camps” – Rings (which are modeled after Zizek’s productive engagement with the borromean knotting of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and ideology) and Conditions (which are further divided into Badiou’s “main” truth procedures – politics, art, science and love). Our thesis (and if you affirm this, we consider you one of us) is that this split between the two thinkers orients the entirety of philosophy today. Their differing perspectives on the same issues is well documented, but it is not enough to simply “choose” one or the other – it is not a matter of dividing their readers into the same two camps as the thinkers themselves. Rather, we conceive of their disagree ment as an example of what the Left should be capable of today – internal dissension (about the role of the State, about the nature of the New, and about the unconscious) which supports, rather than detracts from, our solidarity.
We have also come to realize that the primary marker of distinction for our project should be the novelty maintained in the way we work with our authors, which unfortunately was not upheld this time around. A platform that supports the “contradictions among the people” requires that we engage the authors by confronting their texts with certain naïve questions about their positions. Namely, we want to ask our authors those questions which would make their point clear for ourselves – and ﾭself. The current texts are the product of intelligent thinkers, and for that reason, they ought to be met with the incomprehension of an engaged student.
Our first attempt was that of a standard Call for Papers – but we soon found that there were certain obstacles inherent to the openness of this request – first and foremost, the lack of submissions, but also the vagueness of the criteria we used to judge whether a text was properly “Zizekian” or “Badiouian”.
In that vein, here is an excerpt from the original editorial note which was planned:
“The goal of this journal is to establish, by means of a self-referring movement, a field of study which can be properly named as Badiouian and Zizekian. This effort requires us to go beyond the work of the thinkers themselves, to expand it in as many dimensions as possible. It is not our job to dissect and disseminate their work, but rather to begin new projects that inherit the problems they’ve posed to us. The first problem ﾭtending a thinker’s work actually betray it most fully? It is a sure sign that one is among the left when the charge of “revisionism” is raised, but as the masters have shown us, it is only in rendering this charge undecidable that we make progress. What we need is to acquire the capacity to betray with honesty, to make use of what we grasp as the real contradictions of previous thought. In that sense, the division of the journal into two sections – Rings and Conditions – is a perfect fit for the task. If Badiou ’s thesis that truth is always the outcome of certain procedures (and that philosophy must maintain itself upon those procedures) is true, then we can only go as far as our grasp of these procedures (e.g. love, politics, art and science). If Zizek’s thesis that one must close the internal gap of cynicism before one can subvert the existing ideology is true, then we must train ourselves to take the Freudian unconscious seriously. In short, we must confront the contradictions posed by Badiou and Zizek’s respective edifices by establishing our own practice of them. This means to question, as they do, the ontological and ethical premises of the various situations which constitute our time – not simply to satisfy a vain understanding, but so that we may intervene in these situations with boldness.“
We essentially failed in our first attempt to actualize the above points, for reasons that were mostly based on our own inexperience, but also on the inherent problems of the field we are involved in. Our failure confirms for us that this project (Acheronta Movebo) cannot do without the close proximity between the editorial team and the authors of the journal. We rarely contacted the authors to make major changes to their texts or to ask for clarifications – a task which is quite difficult when faced with authors of such erudition – and we didn’t ask ourselves what sort of new criteria would be required to authorize any such changes in the first place. We think that our project should be more devoted to establishing the Zizekian and Badiouian field of study rather than being a format for celebrating already established figures.
Additionally, we found that good contributions to the “Conditions” section were especially sparse. Though there is a relatively large community of thinkers who engage with Badiou’s work, we could not find many who would write with enough proximity on the truth procedures. Thus, we are today lacking a platform to engage with what is new, and – following Badiou – this contributes to an overall degradation of philosophy. Certain questions, then, have to be confronted. What would be the proper text on love, for example? How would our texts on science be distinguished from those of other formats, and what would compel a scientist to publish with us given other options?
The reasons for “transplanting” our first texts to C&C became clear when we realized that it is genetically identical with AM (in the sense of having similar authors, political and philosophical positions), but without the extraneous structure we are imposing on ourselves. We hope that this decision stands as one of those few examples of the Left “unionizing” rather than dividing in the face of common obstacles, and we affirm our commitment to a new presentation of AM’s idea, one that has learned from the concrete experience of its first attempt.
First Published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/new-issue-of-crisis-critique
Crisis
**END**
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