YOU CAN'T VOTE TO GO BACK HOME
There is no there: it is not possible to return to the state of law.
Revisiting the "Catalyst"-Postmodern Tyranny: States of Deception from 9/11 to Covid-19
William Hawes
Dissident Voice
The parallels between government reactions to 9/11 and the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic are uncanny. Prior to 9/11, a sizable chunk of US citizens would not have put up with domestic mass surveillance. Similarly, prior to the health crisis of 2020, populations would have been very skeptical of mandatory lockdowns, absurd masking rules, and coercive vaccine mandates and propaganda; as well as blocking off access to travel, public spaces, and businesses with vaccine passports. Most interpret this as government exploiting a crisis, rather than governments' prior knowledge and pre-planning of the events. However, from the start, the ready-made, manufactured hysteria and propaganda suggests a collusion of military-intelligence, industrial, financial, and medical forces of industry and government.
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The inevitable conclusion of Agamben’s critique of the state of exception is that the task at hand is not to bring the state of exception back within its spatially and temporally defined boundaries in order to then reaffirm the primacy of a norm and of rights that are themselves ultimately grounded in it. From the real state of exception in which we live, it is not possible to return to the state of law.
This position is very different from the liberal-democratic one as it does not call for the restoring of democratic “checks and balances” but rather for the very halting of the whole machine of the modern state. The way out from our contemporary predicament consists, for Agamben, in nothing less than the messianic overcoming of Western politics as we know it. In his interventions on the pandemic Agamben almost seems to deplore the inglorious end of the bourgeois democracies that he has built a career criticizing, but his current call for “new forms of resistance” must be soberly read (despite and against his current apocalyptic tones) in the context of his philosophical critique of the state of exception. What this resistance will consist in cannot be defined or described a priori, but if there is one thing that the 2020 pandemic has taught us, it is that this new political strategy cannot be reduced to an all-too-common and essentially anarcho-libertarian focus on individual freedoms (to which also Agamben’s project ultimately amounts) but will have to be a positive collective project towards the common good.
CARLO SALZANI is Guest Scholar at the Messerli Research Institute of the University of Vienna, Austria. His recent publications include the volumes Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (2020), co-edited with Felice Cimatti, and Saramago’s Philosophical Heritage (2018), co-edited with Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte
https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/solo-un-dio-potra-salvare-la-politica/
Geminello Preterossi , Political Theology and Law , recently published by Laterza. The thesis: we live among surrogates of theology, in politics, in law and in economics but we need a re-foundation of politics on strong foundations, such as theology. A hundred years ago, a giant, half jurist and half thinker, Carl Schmitt, spoke about political theology : politics, he said, uses secularized theological concepts, that is, concepts that have fallen from heaven to earth, from God to history. Before him, three centuries ago, Giambattista Vico reasoned about "civil theology" and explained the hand of God who intervenes in history and corrects its outcomes, through Providence.
Starting from Schmitt, Preterossi ( nomen omen) applies theology to Gramscian hegemony and modern politics up to populism, but also to the economic sphere, arguing that today's neoliberal domination is based on an economic theology. I've supported it for a long time too. Financial capital is the theological stage of the global economy, wealth becomes abstract and invisible, imperative and taxing, it separates itself from the reality of things and is linked to the control of time, through credit. In the absence of eternity, he who has time is Lord. “Money” separates from gold and the gold reserve, it has no parameters outside of itself, it becomes an autonomous, abstract metaphysical entity, like electronic money and financial flows. Once the other sovereignties have fallen, the economy is absolute, universal sovereign, measure of all things and transfers faith in credit, the last afterlife or promised land. The banks are its cathedrals, the stock exchanges its sanhedrins, the rating agencies its Holy Office. Interest no longer indicates a relationship between beings, interest, but between time and money. Salvation lies in the yield differential. The believer is reduced to a creditor; the sinner to debtor. His faith wears on him. The accounting structure prevails over the real life of people. The fictitious becomes real and vice versa. The sovereign debt that weighs on our shoulders from birth is equivalent to original sin... The accounting structure prevails over the real life of people. The fictitious becomes real and vice versa. The sovereign debt that weighs on our shoulders from birth is equivalent to original sin... The accounting structure prevails over the real life of people. The fictitious becomes real and vice versa. The sovereign debt that weighs on our shoulders from birth is equivalent to original sin...
Economic theology has taken the place of political theology and messianic ideologies that promised heaven on earth, a better world, the passage from need to freedom. The theological message of earthly salvation is entrusted to the techno-economic device, technique plus market. But every theology is also teleology, it is aimed at an end; What is the purpose of techno-capitalism? Its unlimited expansion, its power. The end coincides with the expansion of the means: technology or economics are in fact two instruments. Nihilistic theology, so to speak. The means replace the ends, the technique replaces the human.
==https://enoughisenough14.org/2021/01/15/marginal-notes-on-the-epidemic-as-politics/
What does the scenario that world politics sets before us look like in the twilight of the Agamben’s interventions? Spectacular domination by mass media, iatrocracy of doctor-priests, sovereign policing controlling the streets: this is the image of a world in which the means — conceived as respective exclusive monopolies: monopoly of language, monopoly of health, monopoly of violence — now assert themselves as ends unto themselves. In fact, the spectacle is nothing but a stage of capitalism in which our linguistic nature, which has now attained its extreme alienation, advances menacingly towards us, radically inverted. The same is true of our conception of health care and policing, where our specifically human capacities for healing and violence, long since alienated, now loom over us as dangers. Thus, our muteness encounters language through the words of the media, our illness meets health through the health meted out by doctors, and our powerlessness encounters violence through the violence of uniformed men. Our singularity everywhere encounters its own natural capacities in forms that are alienated, separated, and hypostatized: in the media, medical institutions, and the police.
This is the world of economic-theology, wherein — according to the model described by Nicolas Malebranche in his Traité de la nature et de la grâce — from out of a state of exception (the miracle) a general law confers on executive power (the angels) special powers of government, including legislative power (divine sovereignty), and fragments it into a hierarchy of ministries, a bureaucracy of officials and offices. Providence, the governance of the world, thus becomes a self-sufficient sphere with respect to mediately or immediately sovereign organs, establishing itself as the relative locus of sovereignty [16]. A curious characteristic of our institutions is that, today more than ever, secularized theological concepts secretly operate in them. A strange clue in this regard is offered to us more or less consciously by the notion of the patron saint, or protector, which belongs to some Christian denominations. As is well known, the patron saints of law enforcement, health care workers (pharmacists, nurses, doctors) and those who work in communications are the Angels Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel, respectively.
Ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
The Journal of Lingering Sanity. A reader-supported publication. Surrealist truth not Ubu Roi Phynance duo-party line. !ABAS “The time has come," the Journal said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings."
Corporations need to be taken down a notch or two. Let's just agree for starters that they're not persons. That they can't own single family homes. That they can't contribute money to political campaigns. That they're taxed where they operate. That they can't own or operate a prison. Maybe we should try that and see where it takes us.