Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, 3: Civil Disobedience (2012)

“Some of the most prominent theories of civil disobedience, e.g. those of Rawls and Habermas, highlight its primarily or even exclusively symbolic character. This, however, seems to reduce civil disobedience to a purely moral appeal. On a theoretical as well as on a practical level we are today faced with the question whether civil disobedience requires a moment of real confrontation for it to be politically effective. It seems that civil disobedience does in fact have an irreducible symbolic dimension, but that it cannot be reduced to this dimension, because without moments of real confrontation it would also lose its symbolic power and turn into a mere appeal to the conscience of the powers that be. The articles in this special section highlight various of the challenges and possibilities the theory and practice of civil disobedience is confronted with today, from the question whether Paraguayan campesinos have a right of necessity also to uncivil actions via the political potential of the apparently criminal behaviour of marginalized migrants and the effects of ‘hermeneutic invisibility’ on the public nature of civil disobedience to the effects rise of ‘art activism’ on the relation between the social and the artistic and the situatedness of the bodies of protesters in relation to changing police tactics.

In ‘The Misadventures of Critical Thinking’ Jacques Rancière explores the anti-emancipatory effect of an artistic and theoretical critique that specializes in unmasking how all attempts at critique are always already anticipated and incorporated by ‘the system’, suggesting that we should instead focus on what he calls ‘scenes of dissensus’. As Joost de Bloois argues in his comment on Rancière’s text, however, this analysis might not only underestimate the complexity of this unmasking critique, it also seems to run into some of the same problems it diagnoses.

In our interview with Wendy Brown we discuss the emancipatory potential as well as the theoretical and political limits of the notions of democracy and communism, the paranoid practice of walling with which states seem to compensate their waning sovereignty, the Occupy movement and the danger of Oedipalization, the varieties of secularism, and the responsibility of teaching.”

Published in Amsterdam, 2012
101 pages
via Jappe Groenendijk

Authors

PDF

Philippe Pignarre, Isabelle Stengers: Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (2005–) [FR, EN]

“If denunciation were effective, capitalism would have disappeared a long time ago. But denunciation is never enough. Capitalism is a system that reinvents itself permanently, through the creation of infernal alternatives, alternatives which take us all hostage: ‘if we don’t cut the deficit, we’ll never regain our competitiveness’.

In other traditions than that of the moderns, this sort of paralysis would be described as sorcery. Capitalist Sorcery takes this idea seriously – literally – and explores the consequences of our vulnerability to a system which daily recruits the minions that it needs to cast its spells.

Proposing a pragmatic reading of Marx, a reading which seeks to ward off the thoughtlessness encouraged by the theme of progress and the resignation that arises from accepting that capitalism is the ‘only game in town’, the authors look at how we can protect ourselves from the logic which – from financial collapse through GM foods to oil spills and climate catastrophe – runs scared of the cry ‘another world is possible’.”

La sorcellerie capitaliste: Pratiques de désenvoûtement
Afterword by Anne Vièle
Publisher La Découverte, Paris, 2005
ISBN 2707143979
228 pages

English edition
Translated and edited by Andrew Goffey
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
ISBN 0230237622, 9780230237629
224 pages

Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)

La sorcellerie capitaliste (French, 2005)
Capitalist Sorcery (English, 2011)

Gerald Raunig: A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement (2008–) [Spanish, English]

“In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O’Brien’s fiction to Vittorio de Sica’s Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives.”

First published in German as Tausend Maschinen. Eine kleine Philosophie der Maschine als sozialer Bewegung, Turia + Kant, Vienna, 2008.

English edition
Translated by Aileen Derieg
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2010
Intervention series, 5
ISBN 1584350857, 9781584350859
128 pages

Reviews

Publisher (EN)

Mil máquinas. breve filosofía de las máquinas como movimiento social (Spanish, trans. Marcelo Expósito, 2008, added 2014-3-16)
A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement (English, trans. Aileen Derieg, 2010, 19 MB, updated on 2017-6-26)