The book proceeds from the question on the possibility of intervening in irreversible processes. After the basic conceptual discussion of this issue in the field of Freudian psychoanalysis and the study of the problem of the end in literature (Kafka, Beckett, Kristof) and popular culture (South Park), it moves to an analysis of the contemporary reality of crisis. The crisis, which is itself defined as an irreversible process, is discussed from a discursive perspective (especially through the mutation of the fiscal crisis into the refugee one), on the one hand, and in connection to current mass phenomena defining the post-crisis politics of Europe, on the other.
COBISS.SI-ID: 282716160
The extended prologue of the newly rewritten work places at the fore the crisis of 2008 and the critique of neoliberalism viewed from the perspective of the contemporary social bond, which reinforces the Law and simultaneously transgresses and resists it. The latest mutation of capitalism has skilfully used the commodification of all spheres of contemporary everyday life. Passions and affects turn out to be especially profitable. With the help of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the author contextualises the debate between Deleuze and Foucault with regard to desire/pleasure and the flourishing contemporary “culture of danger”, which constantly differentiates between simulation, semblant, and the excessive surplus that Badiou termed the “passion of the real”. Yet the contemporary dominant belief that everything is illusion and simulation blinds itself to the true dimension of the real. Only if we put forward Lacan’s conception of enjoyment as being commanded by the superego and as that particular excess that we can never get rid off, can we understand the paradigmatic status of pornography, sports, media, etc., in late post-Fordist capitalism, where searching for as passionate expression of one’s own personality and singularity is pursued. This search is nothing but a superego injunction and exemplifies Badiou’s thesis that the “passion of the real is without morality.”
COBISS.SI-ID: 40530221
In the article, the author continues the discussion on the transformation of the notion of crisis from its cyclic nature to the point of considering it an irreversible phenomenon. He does so relying upon Jameson’s reading of Arrighi’s theory of crisis within systemic cycles of accumulation. In this context, the article shows again that financial and debt crisis, which began in 2008, mark the limit of cyclic repetition of the crisis insofar as, due to different causes, a new productive cycle of accumulation cannot appear any more. At this point, the author introduces a new concept called post-productive capitalism with which he tries to grasp precisely the difference between today’s crisis and its appearances in past historical periods. At this basis, the article further shows the difference between ancient, modern and postmodern appearances of crisis ascribing them their own corresponding temporalities (contingency, cyclic nature, a-cyclic nature). In the concluding part the article concept these theses also with Benjaminian-Agambenian theory of the state of exception and shows which type of the state of exception fits today’s postmodern form of crisis.
COBISS.SI-ID: 40861229
The study accompanies the Slovene edition of the polemics between philosophers and thinkers G. Lukács, E. Bloch, W. Benjamin, B. Brecht in T. W. Adorno, which range from the 1920s to the 1960s. It focuses on philosophical conceptualisations of political and economical realities in the times of economical and political crises, the October revolution, the rise of Nazism and the world war. The paper claims that aesthetics, which is at the centre of these debates, enables with its apparent distance from reality a thorough reflection on the link between different dimensions of the crisis.
COBISS.SI-ID: 36577837
The work discusses the notion of the crisis from the perspective of structural analysis and critique of political economy. It focuses notably on the structural instabilities of the capitalist social bond and addresses the formal-logical overlapping of the economic relations and the logic of the signifier. The work combines the historical discussion (the genesis of the capitalist mode of production) with the analysis of structural relations (the public debt as the foundation of the capitalist social bond and the central structural agency in the instability of capitalist social mechanisms). The book also provides critical analysis of ideological mechanisms, which mask the reproduction of social inequality and produce the apologetic frame for legitimizing the abolition of established democratic standards, while simultaneously imposing the interests of financial capital on all levels of social reality. The work discusses debt crisis and the crisis of 2008 as such.
COBISS.SI-ID: 40447277