No Capitalism — And No Way Out of it — Without Science 

To account for the rift between actual life and the life of capital it is not enough to evoke the fact that, in capitalism, the metabolic process between humans and nature is subordinated to the valorization of capital. What made this rift explode was the intimate link between capitalism and modern science: capitalist technology which triggered radical changes in rational environs cannot be imagined without science, which is why some ecologists already proposed to change the term for the new epoch we are entering from Anthropocene to capitalocene. Apparatuses based on science enable humans not only to get to know the real which is outside the scope of their experiential reality (like quantum waves); they also enable them to construct new “unnatural” (inhuman) objects which cannot but appear to our experience as freaks of nature (gadgets, genetically modified organisms, cyborgs, etc.). The power of human culture is not only to build an autonomous symbolic universe beyond what we experience as nature, but to produce new “unnatural” natural objects which materialize human knowledge. We not only “symbolize nature,” we as it were denaturalize it from within.

Today, this denaturalization of nature is openly palpable, part of our daily lives, which is why radical emancipatory politics should aim neither at complete mastery over nature, nor at the humanity’s humble acceptance of the predominance of Mother-Earth. Rather, nature should be exposed in all its catastrophic contingency and indeterminacy, and human agency should assume the whole unpredictability of the consequences of its activity. In spite of the infinite adaptability of capitalism which, in the case of an acute ecological catastrophe or crisis, can easily turn ecology into a new field of capitalist investment and competition, the very nature of the risk involved fundamentally precludes a market solution—why?

Capitalism only works in precise social conditions: it implies trust in the objectivized/“reified” mechanism of the market’s “invisible hand” which, as a kind of Cunning of Reason, guarantees that the competition of individual egotisms works for the common good. However, we are in the midst of a radical change. Until now, historical Substance played its role as the medium and foundation of all subjective interventions: whatever social and political subjects did, it was mediated and ultimately dominated, overdetermined, by the historical Substance. What looms on the horizon today is the unheard-of possibility that a subjective intervention will intervene directly into the historical Substance, catastrophically disturbing its run by way of triggering an ecological catastrophe, a fateful biogenetic mutation, a nuclear or similar military-social catastrophe, etc. No longer can we rely on the safeguarding role of the limited scope of our acts: it no longer holds that, whatever we do, history will go on. For the first time in human history, the act of a single sociopolitical agent effectively can alter and even interrupt the global historical process, so that, ironically, it is only today that we can say that the historical process should effectively be conceived “not only as Substance, but also as Subject.”

Slavoj Žižek, in "Surplus Enjoyment. A guide for the non-perplexed", pág. 71-72, 1ª ed., Bloomsbury, 2022

 

 

A situação pós-comunista

Uma observação conclusiva sobre a "situação espiritual do tempo" deve evidenciar a perspectiva estratégica característica das exposições seguintes - antigamente, teríamos falado do seu engajamento. Elas colocam-se num debate que movimenta a esfera pública intelectual do Ocidente desde os anos 1990. Para dizer resumidamente, o que está em questão aqui é a interpretação moral e psicopolítica da situação pós-comunista.

A entrada em cena dessa situação apanhou de maneira completamente desprevenida a grande maioria dos contemporâneos de 1990 no seu pensamento político. Por quase toda a parte, os intérpretes políticos do tempo do pós-guerra satisfizeram-se em comentar a situação do mundo, criada pela vitória dos aliados sobre a ditadura nacional-socialista, com os conceitos tradicionais da sua disciplina. Em ampla frente, as pessoas declararam-se partidárias da democracia e da economia de mercado, deixando aos antigos camaradas a parca satisfação de tirar do armário, de tempos a tempos, as suas condecorações antifascistas. Durante essa longa belle époque (assombrada por ameaças nucleares) predominou a opinião de que, com a "eliminação" dos excessos totalitários da Europa, teria sido preenchido o programa do diagnóstico do tempo - de resto, precisaríamos de considerar como é que a civilização liberal, sob o efeito concomitante de correctivos social-democratas, se ateve com os seus meios às requisições históricas por um mundo melhor. Quase ninguém possuía os meios teóricos e os impulsos morais que tornassem possível pensar para além das relações da era bipolar. A implosão do hemisfério ligado ao socialismo real não promoveu apenas o encolhimento e a redução das suas próprias ideologias e aparatos à insignificância. Pelo contrário, também colocou mais ainda o capitalismo "plenamente vitorioso" diante do impasse de precisar de assumir praticamente sozinho a responsabilidade pelo mundo. Não se pode afirmar que os pensadores ocidentais tenham sido provocados por essa situação a encontrar respostas extraordinariamente criativas.

Peter Sloterdijk, in "Ira e Tempo", pág. 52-53, Estação Liberdade, 2012, São Paulo

[sidenote: existe edição em português europeu, com a chancela da Relógio d'Água, mas a escolha da palavra 'cólera' em vez de 'ira' parece-me tão incompreensível que me impede de usufruir dessa tradução. o livro parte da primeira palavra da Ilíada: ira e não cólera, e que é repetidamente revisitada ao longo do livro associada a vários conceitos...]

 

 

We have the “technocratic” vision of Europe as another efficient actor in global capitalism, we have the liberal vision of Europe as the pre-eminent space of human rights and freedoms, and we have the conservative vision of Europe as a union of strong national identities. How to orient ourselves in this mess? It is all too easy to distinguish between the different aspects of Europe, the good and the bad, adopting a stance wherein we reject the Europe which gave birth to modern colonialism, racism, and slavery, but we support the Europe of human rights and multicultural openness. Such a solution recalls an American politician from the era of prohibition who, when asked where he stands on drinking wine, replies: “If you mean by wine the drink which makes an evening with friends so wonderful, I am all for it, but if you mean by wine the horror which induces family violence and makes people jobless and degenerate, I am totally opposed to it!” Yes, Europe is a complex notion full of inner tensions, but we have to make a clear and simple decision: can “Europe” still serve as what Jacques Lacan called a Master-Signifier, as one of the names that symbolizes what the struggle for emancipation stands for?

My thesis is that it is precisely now, when Europe is in decline and the attacks on its legacy are at their strongest, that one should decide for Europe. The predominant target of these attacks is not Europe’s racist or conservative legacies, but the emancipatory potential that is unique to Europe: secular modernity, Enlightenment, human rights and freedoms, social solidarity and justice, feminism. . . The reason we should stick with the name “Europe” is not only because good features prevail over bad; the main reason is that the European legacy itself provides the best critical instruments with which to analyze what went wrong in Europe. Are those who oppose “Eurocentrism” aware that the very terms they use in their critique are part of European legacy?

 

Obviously, the most visible threat to this emancipatory potential comes from within, from the new Right populism which aims at destroying the European emancipatory legacy. The Right’s Europe is a Europe of nation-states bent on preserving their particular identity. When Steve Bannon visited France a couple of years ago, he made a speech which finished with the words: “God bless America and Vive la France!, Vive la France, viva Italia, long live Germany. . . but not Europe. We should be attentive to how this vision of Europe implies a totally different mapping of our political space.

In his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, the great conservative T. S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is the one between sectarianism and non-belief, when the only way to keep religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse. This is our only choice today: only by means of a “sectarian split” from the standard liberal-democratic version of the European legacy, only by cutting ourselves off from the decaying corpse of the old Europe, can we keep the European legacy alive. To act on a global scale that is not focused on Europe—for instance in helping India and others with vaccines, mobilizing internationally against global warming, and organizing global health care—is the only way to be a true European today.

Slavoj Žižek, "A European Manifesto", in Heaven in Disorder, pág. 173-75, OR Books, Dez. 2021

 

 

Lecture Two: “A Social and Psychic Revolution of Almost Inconceivable Magnitude”: Countercultural Bohemia as Prefiguration

 

Bentham famously proclaimed that mankind is at the mercy of two sovereign masters: pleasure and pain. Human beings will pursue pleasure and avoid pain. It seems obvious! But Freud discovers that this apparent truism just doesn’t hold up, actually. Much of the time, we will pursue things which seem, on the face of it, painful. There is, in a way, a second-order level of enjoyment, which is the enjoyment of things which, on the first-order level, seem to be painful. And yet, part of the problem that Freud had with his patients was this attachment to a second-order level of enjoyment. Because if it’s simply a matter of people being in pain, and that pain was straightforwardly undesirable, then you could fairly easily wean them off the pain, but if there’s some second kind of satisfaction to be derived from things which were superficially painful, then it’s much more problematic, and other attachments are formed. This is what stood in his way and one of the key things that he finds.  

 

So, then there is this problem of “repetition compulsion”, which is central to Beyond the Pleasure Principle of 1921. It’s commonly known that Beyond the Pleasure Principle, like Civilisation and its Discontents, was substantially informed by the experience of World War One. Because one of the things that Freud was puzzled by was shellshock, from the First World War. Shellshock, which is a phenomenon whereby people would repeat the trauma of a shell going off near them. So, if a book fell from a shelf, they would immediately be thrown back into the situation of a shell having exploded close to them.

 

We kind of take this for granted now. Freud asked the naive question:Why? Why do people do this? Because if an organism was simply motivated by staving off panic and moving towards pleasure, then what compels it to repeat these extremely unpleasurable things? Part of the answer for Freud is some kind of mastery over the trauma. The repetition enables the organism to claim the trauma for itself, in a way. And he discusses this with the so-called “fort–da” game… He plays this game [with his grandson], to do with the absence of his mother, who is spending more and more time apart from him, he plays this game which involved, I think, some sort of small object that you throw away and it’s here, it’s gone, it’s there, it’s gone, it’s here, it’s gone… And so, instead of simply avoiding the pain of the absence of his mother, he turned it into a game of which he could have some sort of mastery, and which tells him some sort of narrative in the process. 

 

This compulsion to repeat, then, becomes crucial. But beneath that there is then this more metaphysical problem that emerges for Freud from the very basic drives of human beings. And this is where he starts to posit the so-called “death drive”, which is highly complicated… We’ll broach it though.

 

Partly, it’s complicated because Freud himself is not fully sure what he thinks it is. You can see it in almost diametrically opposed ways, in some respects. The first way to see it, then, would be simply as a destructive or aggressive drive, which is simultaneously also the drive towards self destruction. And Freud starts to posit this as an independent drive from erotic drives, the drives for pleasure. But, hold on a minute … You see, what he also starts to think is, well, is this really opposed to the pleasure principle or another form of the pleasure principle? Because what the death drive ultimately seems to be aiming towards, at least in one of its versions, is acquiescence, peace, ultimate calm — the release from desire itself. This is the so-called “nirvana principle”… We can see it as if the organism is like an elastic band that is being pulled. It’s in a state of tension. And there is this innate impulse towards the release of that tension, just in the tension itself. If I keep pulling the elastic band, something doesn’t pull it back — it pulls itself.

 

This is one way that Freud starts to think of the death drive. The death drive has to be pivoted in its aim, and this is how Marcuse essentially discusses it — the erotic drives are there to impede the goal of the death drive towards acquiescence. The organism finds its own way to death — that’s the line that he takes. 

 

There’s another way of thinking about the death drive. A lot of Lacanians take this view of the death drive. People like Žižek. The deathdrive doesn’t aim at death; it doesn’t aim towards a final state of acquiescence. It aims at, rather… I don’t want to say an indifference to death.

 

One of Žižek’s examples is The Red Shoes. (. . . )

It’s where a ballerina puts on a pair of enchanted dancing shoes and they basically dance her to death. She’s initially in a state of ecstasy but, eventually, she can’t keep dancing at that sort of frenzied pitch, and so she dies.

 

The point is not that she was taken over by something which aimed at killing her. It’s that she happened to die because the drive made her indifferent to death; indifferent to organic death. This is a drive that was stronger than the desire to avoid death.

 

So, there are these two almost diametrically opposed senses of the death drive here, but what they have in common is this antipathy towards the idea of a utilitarian-style disposition of our desires. So, there’s all this to contend with. And this leads Freud, then, into his most pessimistic theses, which are expressed most powerfully in Civilisation and its Discontents, which haunts this chapter of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation.

 

Mark Fisher, in "Post Capitalist Desire. The Final Lectures, edited by Matt Colquhoun

 

 

𝑼𝒎𝒂 𝒏𝒐𝒗𝒂 𝒆 𝒓𝒂𝒅𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍 𝒍𝒆𝒊𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒂

 

      Claro que no mais fundo de nós desejaríamos que esta versão idílica da colonização e a não menos utópica da descolonização fraterna correspondessem à realidade. Que, sobretudo, não fossem uma demão (a última?) na imagem açucarada e sinistramente opressiva que os portugueses construíam de si mesmos e da sua História ao longo dos séculos. Acontece apenas que a mentira sobre nós mesmos nos corrompe a substância e nos rouba a verdadeira vida. Não temos depois do 25 de abril desculpa alguma para nos mentirmos por conta de uma imagem idólatra, beata, de nós mesmos e menos a temos para continuar a alimentá-la à custa de mitos imperiais historicamente defuntos. E tanto menos a temos quanto a simples e crua verdade do nosso destino de nação — compreendendo nele a colonização — não exige de nós ocultações urgentes nem penitência eternas. Como também não as exige a descolonização e as suas mais que surpreendentes (embora previsíveis) consequências. O que tudo está pedindo é, com urgentíssima necessidade, uma nova e radical leitura, precisamente a que se tornou imperativa para que a Revolução de Abril não seja apenas uma perturbação acidental do nosso viver sonâmbulo, mas a irrupção daquele espaço de liberdade mental e moral que nos permite olhar-nos sem complacência nem pânico, espelho da nossa vera realidade.

 

      Alguma coisa se modificou depois do 25 de Abril, mas, atentando bem, a essência da nossa antiga mitologia cultural continua intacta. A nova liberdade superficial do mero discurso político e ideológico vela-nos o mais importante, a vigência imperturbável do silêncio, da não-fala cultural sobre aquelas realidades-tabus que estruturavam a opacidade do Antigo Regime. Há uma nova arrumação dessas opacidades, uma aparente liberdade ou disponibilidade em relação a elas, mas sem eficácia nem poder de repensamento como o exigiria a dinâmica da ruptura se ela fosse o que poderia ter sido e não foi. Nem a opacidade-Igreja, nem a opacidade-PC, nem a opacidade-Forças Armadas, nem, a bem dizer, a pseudotransparência democrática oficial criada pelo 25 de Abril, foram deslocadas dos seus espaços míticos para a luz de uma consideração frontal não necessariamente iconoclasta, do seu estatuto, da sua função, do seu projecto no seio de uma sociedade que se diz democrática e livre. Terminou sem dúvida o silêncio maiúsculo da nossa antiga cultura, mas para dar lugar a um pluralismo de silêncios de algum modo tão perniciosos como o anterior. Escusado será dizer que o silêncio relativo às últimas peripécias da nossa aventura imperial e do seu fim resume e coroa todos os outros. Nesse campo é o vazio integral, a sufocação íntima por ausência.

 

Eduardo Lourenço, in "Do Colonialismo Como Nosso Impensado", pp. 264-66, 1ª ed., Gradiva Publicações, Lisboa, 2014

     De um modo geral, pode-se dizer que a história contemporânea está cada vez mais dominada pelo aumento de reivindicações de singularidade subjectiva - querelas linguísticas, reivindicações autonomistas, questões nacionalísticas, nacionais que, numa ambiguidade total, exprimem por um lado uma reivindicação de tipo libertação nacional, mas que, por outro lado, se encarnam no que eu denominaria reterritorializações conservadoras da subjectividade. Deve-se admitir que uma certa representação universalista da subjectividade, tal como pode ser encarnada pelo colonialismo capitalístico do Oeste e do Leste, faliu, sem que ainda se possa plenamente medir a amplitude das consequências de um tal fracasso. Actualmente vê-se que a escalada do integrismo nos países árabes e muçulmanos pode ter consequências incalculáveis não apenas sobre as relações internacionais, mas sobre a economia subjectiva de centenas de milhões de indivíduos. E toda a problemática do desamparo, mas também da escalada de reivindicações do Terceiro Mundo, dos países do Sul, que se acha assim marcada por um ponto de interrogação angustiante.

 
Félix Guattari, in "Caosmose. Um novo paradigma estético" (trad. Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão) pág. 13, Editora 34, SP, 2006 [1992]

     We should follow Immanuel Kant here who wrote with regard to the laws of the state: “Obey, but think, maintain the freedom of thought!” Today we need more than ever what Kant called the “public use of reason.” It is clear that epidemics will return, combined with other ecological threats, from droughts to locusts, so hard decisions are to be made now. This is the point that those who claim this is just another epidemic with a relatively small number of dead don’t get: yes, it is just an epidemic, but now we see that warnings about such epidemics in the past were fully justified, and that there is no end to them. We can of course adopt a resigned “wise” attitude of “worse things happened, think about the medieval plagues...” But the very need for this comparison tells a lot. The panic we are experiencing bears witness to the fact that there is some kind of ethical progress occurring, even if it is sometimes hypocritical: we are no longer ready to accept plagues as our fate.
      This is where my notion of “Communism” comes in, not as an obscure dream but simply as a name for what is already going on (or at least perceived by many as a necessity), measures which are already being considered and even partially enforced. It’s not a vision of a bright future but more one of ”disaster Communism” as an antidote to disaster capitalism. Not only should the state assume a much more active role, organizing the production of urgently needed things like masks, test kits and respirators, sequestering hotels and other resorts, guaranteeing the minimum of survival of all new unemployed, and so on, doing all of this by abandoning market mechanisms. Just think about the millions, like those in the tourist industry, whose jobs will, for some time at least, be lost and meaningless. Their fate cannot be left to mere market mechanisms or oneoff stimuluses. And let’s not forget that refugees are still trying to enter Europe. It’s hard to grasp their level of despair if a territory under lockdown in an epidemics is still an attractive destination for them?
      Two further things are clear. The institutional health system will have to rely on the help of local communities for taking care of the weak and old. And, at the opposite end of the scale, some kind of effective international cooperation will have to be organized to produce and share resources. If states simply isolate, wars will explode. These sorts of developments are what I’m referring to when I talk about “communism,” and I see no alternative to it except new barbarism. How far will it develop? I can’t say, I just know that the need for it is urgently felt all around, and, as we have seen, it is being enacted by politicians like Boris Johnson, certainly no Communist.
      The lines that separate us from barbarism are drawn more and more clearly. One of the signs of civilization today is the growing perception that continuing the various wars that circle the globe as totally crazy and meaningless. So too the understanding that intolerance of other races and cultures, or of sexual minorities, pales into insignificance compared with the scale of the crisis we face. This is also why, although wartime measures are needed, I find problematic the use of the term “war” for our struggle against the virus: the virus is not an enemy with plans and strategies to destroy us, it is just a stupid self-replicating mechanism.
      This is what those who deplore our obsession with survival miss. Alenka Zupančič recently reread Maurice Blanchot’s text from the Cold War era about the scare of nuclear self-destruction of humanity. Blanchot shows how our desperate wish to survive does not imply the stance of “forget about changes, let’s just keep safe the existing state of things, let’s save our bare lives.” In fact the opposite is true: it is through our effort to save humanity from self-destruction that we are creating a new humanity. It is only through this mortal threat that we can envision a unified humanity.

 
Slavoj Žižek, in "Pandemic, Covid shakes the world", pág.102-05, NY, OR Books, 2020

67. Olhem para o vosso quarto, à noite, quando já dificilmente se distinguem as cores – e agora acendam a luz e pintem o que viram antes, na semiobscuridade. – Como comparam as cores tal como estão na pintura com as do quarto semiobscurecido?
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in "Anotações Sobre as Cores"

O Texto da filosofia e a experiência literária

( . . . )

A palavra texto tem vindo a ser a metáfora (espacial e têxtil) e o conceito que designa um artefacto verbal (e transverbal), um objecto transaccional ou comunicacional; um espaço, uma rede, ou uma tessitura onde o sentido se pluraliza; a partitura de uma polifonia; um acontecimento ou o «lugar» e os «tempos» de um encontro de horizontes.

Manuel Gusmão, in "Uma Razão Dialógica"

fotografia retirada do blog da extinta Angelus Novus