Телеграм канал «Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)»

Н. Пахсарьян - Мишель Фуко и литература

К 100-летию со дня рождения французского философа

На этой неделе исполняется 100 лет со дня рождения Мишеля Фуко (1926–1984), без работ которого невозможно представить современную мировую культуру. В преддверии этой даты «Горький» публикует статью Натальи Пахсарьян о том, как в работах французского философа отразились его литературные пристрастия и какое влияние на литературоведческую мысль оказал он сам.

https://gorky.media/context/mishel-fuko-i-literatura

Wolfgang Streeck - System Fractures

No need to get ahead of ourselves: it will still be a few years before the AfD takes power. In the five German state elections held this year, while they were the only party to increase their vote across the board, the AfD failed to secure an absolute majority anywhere. Across all five elections, the party averaged 27.3 percent. Its highest result – 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt was more than two and a half times its lowest, 16.3 percent in Berlin. Its biggest gains were in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern states with relatively small electorates (1.7 million and 1.3 million respectively, in a nation with 60.5 million eligible voters), and in which Chancellor Merz’s CDU performed particularly badly. It is hard to believe that so many CDU voters in these two eastern regions could have turned into neo-Nazis over the past five years.

In any case, there were other trends at work in these elections, beyond the rise of the AfD. Regional factors played a role specifically, the relative position of incumbent state premiers (weak in Saxony-Anhalt and Berlin, strong in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania). The Greens stagnated, suffering losses in three of the five states; the CDU made gains albeit modest ones in the two western states (in Baden-Württemberg, with its 7.7 million eligible voters, they came within a hair’s breadth of winning, and in Rhineland-Palatinate, with 2.9 million eligible voters, they actually won); while Die Linke increased its vote in three of the five elections: in the two western states and, above all, in Berlin (2.5 million eligible voters), where it finished nearly ten percentage points ahead of the AfD.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/system-fractures

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee - Lacan’s Lenin

In his discussion of this, Lacan associates knowledge with the jouissance involved in acquiring and exercising it. Such a brief juxtaposition does not constitute an endorsement of Leninism. But it does pose a question which I find more intriguing than an attempt at uncovering Lacan’s politics: What is it to inherit an idea whose implications the author has not exhausted?

https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783559/lacan-s-lenin

Minxin Pei - China’s Crony Capitalism. The Dynamics of Regime Decay (2016)
 
When Deng Xiaoping launched China on the path to economic reform in the late 1970s, he vowed to build “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” More than three decades later, China’s efforts to modernize have yielded something very different from the working people’s paradise Deng envisioned: an incipient kleptocracy, characterized by endemic corruption, soaring income inequality, and growing social tensions. China’s Crony Capitalism traces the origins of China’s present-day troubles to the series of incomplete reforms from the post-Tiananmen era that decentralized the control of public property without clarifying its ownership.

Beginning in the 1990s, changes in the control and ownership rights of state-owned assets allowed well-connected government officials and businessmen to amass huge fortunes through the systematic looting of state-owned property in particular land, natural resources, and assets in state-run enterprises. Mustering compelling evidence from over two hundred corruption cases involving government and law enforcement officials, private businessmen, and organized crime members, Minxin Pei shows how collusion among elites has spawned an illicit market for power inside the party-state, in which bribes and official appointments are surreptitiously but routinely traded. This system of crony capitalism has created a legacy of criminality and entrenched privilege that will make any movement toward democracy difficult and disorderly. Rejecting conventional platitudes about the resilience of Chinese Communist Party rule, Pei gathers unambiguous evidence that beneath China’s facade of ever-expanding prosperity and power lies a Leninist state in an advanced stage of decay.

Why I Can’t Stop Thinking About “The End of History”

Francis Fukuyama's “The End of History and the Last Man” is one of the most insightful books for understanding the strangeness and instability of this political moment.

Fukuyama wrote his landmark book more than 30 years ago, and it’s typically remembered as a triumphalist argument, heralding the permanent victory of liberal democracy at the end of the Cold War. But that’s not quite right. Fukuyama also talked about the serious weaknesses he saw in liberal democracy how it may not fully satisfy the human soul and his warnings feel very prescient now.

So I wanted to have Fukuyama on the show to talk through the ideas in his book and how he sees them today, at a time when liberal democracy seems increasingly imperiled around the world. Fukuyama is a political scientist at Stanford University and the author of a number of other great books of political theory, as well as a new memoir, “In the Realm of the Last Man.”

00:00 Intro
02:16 What Is “The End of History”?
06:28 Politics of Recognition
14:12 Megalothymia and Trump
16:03 Nietzsche’s Last Man
18:11 Why Liberalism Feels Flat
22:44 Looking Back on 9/11
26:03 Why Fukuyama Broke Away From the Neoconservatives
39:16 Moderation vs. Bold Reform
44:24 Strong Leader Tradeoffs
46:41 Denmark
53:12 Social Media and Populism
55:42 China
01:00:11 Tech Horizons and Democracy
01:02:46 Agentic A.I. and Arms Race
01:07:50 Elections and Liberal Renewal
01:09:48 State Capacity and Abundance
01:11:50 Moral Energy for Liberalism
01:14:39 Book Recommendations

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KIn-1EuXx78&ra=m

Isabel Jacobs, Jacob Saliba - Finitude and Freedom

When the political philosopher Stanley Rosen recalled his encounter with Kojève in Paris in the 1960s, he noticed that Kojève often evoked one figure that stood above the rest of his circle: the theologian and Jesuit priest Gaston Fessard, “one of Kojève’s closest friends, perhaps his closest friend in Paris.” Rosen, moreover, added that among everyone he met, including Paul Ricœur and Emmanuel Levinas, Fessard remained “in my view, the greatest” with the exception of Kojève himself. Though little-known in English-speaking scholarship, Fessard was a giant on the French scene. He was known for his public debates with left-wing intellectuals, his resistance to Vichy in the 1940s, and pioneering contributions to the New Theology movement that led to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Throughout, Fessard maintained a close dialogue with Kojève, his friend, teacher, and philosophical sparring partner. This volume is the first systematic collection of the published and unpublished materials that document their exchanges and debates, including letters, essays, book reviews, and lectures. Standing at the intersection of secular political thought and theological discourse, Kojève and Fessard radically reshaped concepts of authority, right, sovereignty, and the end of history. This volume reveals how each thinker developed an original reading of Hegel, and how those readings and the debate that they spurred continue to shape political theology today.

https://communispress.com/finitude-and-freedom/