The Political Vocation of Philosophy

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Donatella Di Cesare. The Political Vocation of Philosophy

CONTENTS

Guide

Pages

The Political Vocation of Philosophy

1 The saturated immanence of the world

Notes

2 Heraclitus, wakefulness and the original communism

Notes

3 The narcosis of light: on the night of capital

Notes

4 The pólis: a calling

5 Wonder – a troubled passion

Notes

6 Between heavens and abysses

Notes

7 Socrates’ atopia

Notes

8 A political death

Notes

9 Plato – when philosophy headed into exile within the city

Notes

10 Migrants of thought

Notes

11 ‘What is philosophy?’

Notes

12 Radical questions

Notes

13 The out-of-place of metaphysics

Notes

14 Dissent and critique

Notes

15 The twentieth century: breaks and traumas

Notes

16 After Heidegger

Notes

17 Against negotiators and normative philosophers

Notes

18 Ancilla democratiae: a dejected return

Notes

19 The poetry of clarity

Notes

20 Potent prophecies of the leap: Marx and Kierkegaard

Notes

21 The ecstasy of existence

Notes

22 For an exophilia

Notes

23 The philosophy of awakening

Notes

24 Fallen angels and rag-pickers

Notes

25 Anarchist postscript

Notes

Bibliography

Index. A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Z

POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

Отрывок из книги

Donatella Di Cesare

Translated by David Broder

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It is no mystery that the discourse on the ‘end of the world’ is taken so seriously.6 Such discourse takes its cue above all from the empirical sciences: climatology, geophysics, oceanography, biochemistry, ecology. Humanity’s fall into catastrophe seems imminent. The near future – unforeseeable because it is completely other – is instead consigned to the scenarios portrayed in filmic drama or messianic visions. The Promethean cry risks being suffocated in an apocalyptic death-rattle. What is, at least, clear is that the late-capitalist world is the world of planet-wide ecological collapse. The fusion between techno-economy and biosphere is plain for all to see.7

‘Anthropocene’ is the name for that geological epoch in which humans look on near-impotently at the devastating and deadly effects of this asymmetrical fusion, in which nature has been eroded to the point of disappearance. Yet, the violence of this intrusion would not have been possible without the implacable, incandescent sovereignty of capital. But, in the contemporary imaginary, it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Here lies the enormous discrepancy between scientific understanding and political impotence. At this point, capitalism has occupied the entire horizon of the thinkable. And it has done so by absorbing every hotbed of resistance within the imagination, by erasing every exteriority prior or posterior to its own history. It is as if before capitalism there was only the gloom of the archaic; after it, only the darkness of the apocalypse.

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