I am going to read this book, as it will follow from Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Trouble’ quite nicely. It is a critique of post-humanism, which aside from talk of cyborgs and AI, I am more interested in the sense of the term as being about post-humanist views within knowledge.

Rosi Braidotti is a post-structural feminist and she discusses the mindset of our time, the war on terror, dim views towards post-structuralism/post-modern thought from the stuffy and rigid Anglo-saxon philosophers of analytic philosophy, as well as some activist movements such as feminism itself, who see continental thought as ‘taking the action out of activism’.

I thought it would be a good read to get to grips with the feelings of apathy in our time and the regressive movements we have seen lately. It is also a good book for critiques of capitalism.

Over the past few years, especially since 2012 after the world did not end, we have all seen a massive surge of right wing politics. They range from your garden variety loons who deny the Holocaust or think the Earth is flat, to anti-feminists (not necessarily right wing by the way), but the main influx is the lower class, middle class support for free markets, neo-liberalism and concrete border controls that come with accompanying Islamophobia and antisemitism.

I have some theories and perspectives as to how this came to be, but I thought I would open up a thread for everyone to share their thoughts about how this all led to what I call the rise of the right.

Alfredo Bonanno puts forward a truth in regards to the crisis an anarchist faces when attempting to define anarchism:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-the-anarchist-tension

Judith Butlers’ reading of Luce Irigaray says that woman is ‘cancelled’, she is referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufheben?wprov=sfsi1

Any thoughts?

From what I can gather, Lacan is saying the formation of the ego is a structuring of images, an illusion of completeness after feeling fragmented, until eventually, during the mirror stage (not a literal mirror) we form our ego and subjectivity (which are two different things for Lacan) in relation to the other. 

Anyone else have anything to add to the clarity here?

@”Whisper” brought up a decent point that I have wanted to bring up for a while. I always find political and sociological discussions to have annoying limits intrinsic to them, for example, when discussing rape culture or patriarchy in general, I know of women who have been raped and shamed, I have experienced oppression, but I simply can’t share that information in these discussions.

If you do, it will be dismissed as anecdotal for one, but there is a double standard when the opposite confirms a bias. I don’t want to discuss with the immature types who can’t see the irony of never taking these issues seriously, leading to silence from the oppressed party as the best choice.

@”Whisper” bought up this interesting insight on the moderator Discord today. The subject matter was ‘why don’t people from Facebook join the forum etc’?

I would say that people are frustrated with social media and would rather be creative, they are just not aware of the irritation. It’s like when you watch too much television, you are bored out of your mind, but don’t change anything.

As philosophy is all about the inquiry of what is true and meaningful, virtuous and beautiful, I thought we could start a few threads asking these simple questions, starting with Truth.

What is truth to you? Is there absolute truth? Is truth just something we believe is there, but isn’t, kind of like the arguments for free will? It’s a necessary illusion to get out of bed in the morning, but ‘Truth’ is a necessary preposition that we search for in order to begin inquiry. Is Truth an outdated concept, a hang up from religion?

More Netlogo stuff:

In this Netlogo program, it models extortion. It’s about social norms, whether shops choose to denounce or pay extortion, it measures anxiety, boycotts of extorted shops, the wealth of the society.

Truly fascinating.

I am going to attempt to quickly summarise Michel Foucault’s ‘bio-power’.

Sovereign power had the right to decide life and death. The father of the Roman family had the right to ‘dispose’ of the life of his children and slaves. Wars would break out if the Sovereign’s very existence was in jeopardy, if he was to be overthrown etc. So the sovereign’s right to life was exercise through his right to kill, which was formulated as the ‘power of life and death’ and was a means of deduction.

Bio-power, or the form of power that emerged with the rise of capitalism is a means of production – instead of ‘take life and let live’, a representational element was introduced – ‘foster life or disallow it to the point of death’. In order to guarantee and individuals continued existence, the whole population must be exposed to death, the large scale outcomes of capitalism (longer life, improved health etc) has transformed the nature of power of the social body.

Capital punishment declined, or vanished in some countries, but deaths due to wars rose dramatically – wars are a means of production, they ‘open’ markets. So power is exercised and situated at the level of life, the species, the race.

The limit of power is death. Suicide, once a crime, as it is a way to usurp the power of death which the sovereign alone had the right to exercise, is a common resistance to the political administration of life as its self assigned task.

Foucault sees two poles of from of power over life (Bio-power) – centers on the body as a machine and the other focuses on the species body. The bodies were ‘disciplined and docile’ and the regulations of the population were the way power over life was deployed. Power over death was supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.

So Foucault presents to us a changing social body with power as a force responding to the multiplication of the population and the institutional bodies of discipline and punishment.