As for our Achilles-Nemesis, what reason is there to believe, along with apparently the professor, that it is our decision alone, or within anyone’s ability, to define the fight in some essentially different way, and still to fight at all?
The Exception
man-killers
Posted in Art, Books, Featured, Movies, notes, Political Philosophy, The Exception, War Tagged with: Iliad, Islamic State, Parthenon, sacrifice, The Exception
Essential Threat
In light of the ritualized sacrifice of a single man, on the altar of what we cannot help but believe – no possible justification – the many may be revealed to us as allies, as “with us,” perhaps first symbolically, but now also practically. Put simply, Foley’s death marks if it does not itself restore American re-engagement on behalf of those we had all but abandoned in the region.
Posted in Featured, Neo-Imperialism, The Exception, War Tagged with: Daesh, Iraq, Islamic State, Syria
The Egyptian Exception and the Other Islamic State
The alternative resolution or the other Islamic state, the one that avoids the tyrant’s despair – or, put more politically-philosophically, allows for a liberal-Islamic assimilation that would also be integrative or unitary rather than irrecuperably conflictual – would appear to rely on modes of idealization of religion that would evolve simultaneously and bi-conditionally, or, as Fadel or Fadel’s Khaldun puts it, “organically.” Their current impermissibility is a reflection of the same problem.
Twice more into the breach: Hume, Kahn, Schmitt; faith <-> violence (un/reason)
1. Intro by way of a response to Mr. Halasz at the Crooked Timber thread: @239: The Wikipedia entry on Kahn is a good capsule summary. I often wonder why, given that he’s a distinguished professor at Yale (not some…
Posted in Anismism, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, The Exception, War Tagged with: Hume, Paul W Kahn, sacrifice, Schmitt
again as to the irrational underestimation by rationalists of the rationality of irrationalism
“The Temporary Name” points (( 226 The Temporary Name 03.22.14 at 3:26 pm In any case, any form of government seems to attract and empower the very sort of people it is supposed to suppress, and employing the pathological to…
Posted in Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Politics, Religion, The Exception Tagged with: anarchism, Liberalism, Political Theology, rationalism, Schmitt, sovereignty, The Exception
Theologically Anti-Theological (a/theology 2)
“…the odd paradox whereby Bakunin, the greatest anarchist of the nineteenth century, had to become in theory the theologian of the anti-theological and in practice the dictator of an anti-dictatorship.”
Posted in Anismism, Featured, History, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, The Exception Tagged with: anarchism, atheism, atheology, Fascism, Levi Bryant, Liberalism, Political Theology, Schmitt, theology, Voegelin
Nth Comment at Crooked Timber on Schmitt-Brooks and the End of History
The early modern political philosophers… did rather exhaustively examine these questions and the related ones on the nature of power or the origins of authority. They did provide answers. They knew we wouldn’t all like them or fully understand them. Indeed, to a very significant degree the early modern philosophers not only acknowledged, but rather depended on the latter – on general incapacities of understanding. They hoped and trusted that enough of us would accept and implement their proposals under well-considered modifications. If we are in fact still living with those answers, showing no sign of succesfully implementing alternative ones, then Hegel was right, as far as we can say, to claim that in his time humanity had reached the end of history in principle.
Repealing Godwin’s Law
As a matter of history, the administrative state, the FDR state, that the Tea Partiers are glad to shut down temporarily, and that some would like to shut down permanently, is the same state that arose contemporaneously with the fall of the Weimar Republic, in relation to common and overlapping challenges, and that was consolidated in political competition and eventually at war with its immediate successor (which technically still functioned under the Weimar constitution). A serious discussion of an actual or potential crisis of liberal democracy in the leading liberal democratic nation-state, and on the system level – the level of basic responsibilities and assumptions of government – cannot help but take into account prior, concretely related crises, even if particular circumstances initially appear vastly different.
Posted in Featured, History, Internet, Neo-Imperialism, Politics, The Exception Tagged with: Debt Limit, Shutdown, Tea Party, Weimar
After East Ghouta 3: Indicting the Law
To the extent we cannot construct or re-construct the principles for a collective right to life in the age of weapons of destruction of the masses and disruption of global-ecological homeostasis, those principles may be expected to construct or re-construct themselves for us, and through us.
Posted in Featured, History, International Relations, Neo-Imperialism, The Exception, War Tagged with: After East Ghouta, international law, neo-imperialism, Syria, The Exception, UN Charter, United Nations, War
No Center at the Center
The world’s chieftain cannot serve the general interest effectively and reliably unless convinced that serving the general interest also serves “his” self-interest – that the two interests are finally the same or non-severable. When the chieftain falls into a depressive state – of apathy, or aboulia, or neurasthenia; doubting all, negating itself to negate all – the system fails, and the will to stasis is realized, or hypostatized, as crisis.
Posted in Featured, History, International Relations, Neo-Imperialism, The Exception Tagged with: neo-imperialism, Political Philosophy, Political Theology, Rousseau, The Exception, United Nations