Arquivo para a ‘Politics’ Categoria
Refugee Drama and Italian Government
21
Aug
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, because of controversy over accepting refugees,
with his deputy Matteo Salvini, resigned Tuesday in the Italian parliament, and said he would inform President Sergio Mattarela on the same day.
Along with Salvini is the 5-star heiress of blogger and comedian Beppe Grillo, who came to the government as M5S, which in the last elections had 33% of the votes and has 229 deputies, was a government ally, but sometimes controversy with Mattarela’s “league” are united to prevent immigrants from reaching the country, without Conte the right can “turn back”.
In his speech in parliament Conte sharply criticized his deputy for saying he wants to anticipate the elections, which is “irresponsible” and “despises parliament”, and throws Italy into a “dizzying spiral of political and financial instability”.
Salvini is one more who wants to leave the European Union, it seems that every extreme right in the world has only one program, recreating the nations from an economic point of view is a catastrophe, also in England Boris Johnson’s speech about leaving the European Union , is already voted but without possible agreement, show that chaos is not what says these new “nationalists” were of time, is the chaos that they themselves implant, the UK that says so.
Portugal will have elections this year, there the program seems the opposite, the right-wing parties say “we are Europe”, although they do not say clearly what this means, because during the Salazar period there was a speech of “proudly alone”, Salazar was resurrected in other countries maybe.
Spain is a case, I had no good impression of the Catalans until I went there, noting that it is the central government that is the rightmost, and that Catalonia’s nationalism is similar to many small countries in Europe where ethnicities were massacred.
Without taking sides of course, I think the Catalans would wish to continue in the Europa zone, but as independents.
Also Italian, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben described these stateless and dispossessed men of the earth as Homo Sacer, the fringe of qualified political life, man as a political subject, and unlike many interpretations there was the zoo, which was treated as a slave by domains of war, or for living an almost animal life, not for their desire
Dialogue and not-power
16
Aug
A true dialogue: not being able From Nietsche, with its will-to-power category, to
Schopenhauer and others, to Foucault’s biopower and Byung Chul Han’s psychopolitics, power implies resistance and somehow difference, and it does not always admit diversity.
There would be a form of no power, or at least a counterpoint for those who believe that power is necessary, of course here there is no talk of authority, it will always exist, but the type of authority is fundamental, for example, when discussing state violence. and its limits.
In the field of psychology, this is what Arendt calls the ‘space of appearance’, and we explained in the previous post that it is a ‘between’ who speaks and who acts, just as both Arendt and Byung Chul Han explain the complementarity between working life and the contemplative life.
It was Paul Ricoeur, in our view, who made Arendt’s most beautiful synthesis on this point: Paul Ricoeur, “almost all the discussions raised by Arendt’s political thought can be reviewed when presenting the conceptual power-violence pair” (Ricoeur 1989, p. 142), and Arendt herself sums it up by stating: “If we turn to discussions of the phenomenon of power, we quickly realize that there is a consensus among left-to-right political theorists that violence is so -only the most blatant manifestation of power ”(Arendt, 2001, p. 31), so if a counterpoint is desired one must think non-power.
The first form of non-power is attentive and capable listening to an “epoché”, that is, a void so large where there are no categories or dogmas, care is not lack of principles as this would also be a violence, and the second is admit a truth above the dialogue.
Thus the difference remains in the field of the false “epoché” common in many dialogues where the speaker begins to dominate the theme and does not admit counterpoints, while in the distinction makes it possible that what differentiates does not become an obstacle to dialogue, manifesting from the Other.
It has not been possible to overcome forms of violence to this day because power has been and still is needed, but the return to state violence through many governments across the planet brings us to the phenomenon of homo sacer, war criminals, refugees and others without fundamental rights, concept worked by Agamben.
But in philosophy, history, and religion there is a figure that awakens a powerlessness, the figure of Willendorf’s Venus, carved in limestone with shades of reddish paint, in the years between 28,000 and 25,000 BC, obesity and short arms. some scholars reject the idea of the mythological goddess Venus, goddess of beauty, who was the fruit of love between earth and heaven, would say that the religious metaphor is perfect, between the mystery of the Infinite and the feet on the earth’s ground.
Mary, a mythical Christian figure who also causes controversy among scholars, has an unmistakable biblical passage of her dialogical role, is in Lk 1.43: “How can I deserve the mother of my Lord to come to visit me?” The discussion of which Lord she speaks, but it is undoubtedly in her is a dialogue between heaven and earth, between the divine and the human.
Arendt, H. (2001)Poder e violência (Power and violence). Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, pp. 81-94.
Ricoeur, P. (1989) “Pouvoir et violence”. In Hannah Arendt: Ontologie and Politique. Paris, Édition Tierce, pp. 141-159.
Dialogy and nonviolent power
15
Aug
To this day all power has been conquered with some form of force, since the first 
elaboration of the polis it is present, but even Hegel who elaborated the modern idea of state stated: “[…] although the state may arise through violence, it it is not based on it […]. In the state, the spirit of the people is the custom, the law, and the rulers, ”quote by Byung Chul Han in What is power, but the author will take up another concept from Hanna Arendt.
Arendt’s concept of “space of appearance” leads to the power of language, thus makes it “between space,” so this space “illuminates each time, as one between when men are talking and acting with one another” ( Han, 2019) quoting Arendt.
Arendt will also transform this space of appearance. “Power is what it calls {existence and preserves in existence the open realm, the potential space of appearance between the speaker and the speaker.”
What happens in practical terms is that in the potential space of appearance, dialogue must exist in order to admit the distinction, yet, as elaborated by Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle, the preconception is viewed positively, each person comes to dialogue with his worldview, his preconceptions, and a fusion of horizons is a condition for after dialogue one can reach what is common, what unites in distinction.
Impatience and unpreparedness to dialogue often become an exercise in dogmatic proclamation of preconceptions, and it is impossible to reformulate ideas and actions.
True dialogia says the masters Martin Buber, Mikhail Bakhtin, one can include Paulo Freire, Paul Ricoeur, Emanuel Levinas and many others, the figure of the Other is not always present, and without a deep listening and respect to the distinction.
There is no dialogue. Bakhtin, even being a Marxist where conflict is a form of motor, develops the concept through linguistics, her focus of studies, defining her dialogue: “…. as a description of language that makes all statements by definition dialogical; as a term for a specific type of statement, as opposed to other monological statements; and as a vision of the world and of truth (its global concept) ” (Bakhtin, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 1986, p. 506), and the use of this author here is by dialogia.
In Christian thought the fundamental thing is Love of Neighbor, that is, to consider it in all the essence of its dignity as a human person and worthy of divine love, where all its fundamental rights should be respected, including the first of all that is your being. The unity of Being and event is one of the dimensions of Baktin’s dialogia.
In Buber, Tu (Other) is something that goes beyond the person, being the divine present in it, and there can be no verticality.
From biopolitics to psychopolitics
10
Aug
The form of power, while still centered on the state and its modern concept of state
that comes from Hegel and not just the French Revolution, underwent changes in the 19th and 20th centuries, which philosopher Michel Foucault called biopower.
Literally the philosopher elaborates it this way: “The instruments that the government will give to achieve these ends [that are, in some way, immanent to the field of the population, will essentially be the population over which it acts. ” (Foucault, 1978, p. 277-293) that is in his work Microphysics of power, when it addresses the issue of governability.
Many who do not accept Foucault’s philosophy, for lack of reading or understanding, do not realize that what today is called public policy has this idea at its source. However biopower can be thought of more fully, including technologies that act on a local population or particular social demand, but always with the idea of establishing power and control over particular localities or social groups.
Byung Chul Han in three recent works (The Swarm, Psychopolitics, and What is Power) (explains that this form has been superseded by current psychopolitics, where local powers and policies are replaced by elaborate new techniques of power, Foucault also calls them that. With the problems of health, birth, mortality and life estimation (see this theme in welfare reform) the biopolitics aimed to control the “body” as well as the biopower.
Entering the digital age this evolves into psychopolitics, which leads us to a crisis of both freedom and identity, where psychically even one’s own will is struck. Byung Chul Han’s long analysis of What Is Power, returning to Nietzsche and even Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855), the philosopher reveals the subjective aspects that power has been working from the conception of the modern state.
He considers it essential to understand the digital age, even though he has criticism of technological appropriation, and places the latest Big Data technology as a key element in this process, and is therefore very current because it is the technology that reaches the psyche of the social subject, and of the individual ultimately: his interests, desires and worldviews.
I consider it important to return to Kierkegaard, although Chul Han does so on time, the ideas of this existentialist philosopher are deeply related to the concepts of the works of the Korean-German, in particular: the anguish in The Society of Bournout and the pursuit of happiness and pleasure in The agony of Eros.
The social scientist slovenian Renata Salecl’s obsession with choice addresses the issue of Kierkeegard’s updated anguish:
https://www.ted.com/talks/renata_salecl_our_unhealthy_obsession_with_choice/transcript?language=pt-br#t-97506
Power and ignorance
09
Aug
Power can and should be exercised for the common good, for the good of all, but it
is not because there is ignorance of the strength and strength of the ignorant who elect as unqualified persons as representatives.
Just as the mad, the different, and those that Nietzsche and Foucault asked for socializing, the possibility of mad ships landing on shores and borders being opened to refugee peoples, so the wall of ignorance must be broken, because it strengthens the powerful arrogant and merciless.
One cannot speak of a society in general, since it is divided and fragmented for the most part by nostalgia of a “good” time without this being explicit to the whole of society.
They close in groups, in “cheering” without opening themselves to society and its real problems, and where the “ships of the mad” cannot dock, but today it is not only for refugees and stateless people, it is also to the people themselves, often one feels strange in one’s home country. In the social sphere there is also the phenomenon of tiredness, the exhaustion of new ideas, the lack of true evolution, the lack of an ideal or an axis.
What occurs in reaction to what Peter Sloterdijk calls “despiritualized asceticism,” an exercise society, but without real elevation.
This is what happens in religious groups of various kinds, as well as some political and social forces, shut down and expel their “crazy”, “different” members who want to recover the originality of the proposal that attracted them to the group.
What happens in the Bible is to give in to hopelessness: “If that servant thinks, ‘My master is taking too long,’ and begins to beat the servants and the maids, and to eat, to drink, and to get drunk” (Luke 12:45), and when the boss arrives he will charge him for this infidelity. It is not just about resilience, but above all we must not separate those we think are ‘crazy’, ‘exaggerated’, ‘revolutionary’, Foucault warned that this was normal in medieval society and modernity until the 18th century.
It is not just about resilience, but above all we must not separate those we think are ‘crazy’, ‘exaggerated’, ‘revolutionary’, Foucault warned that this was normal in medieval society and modernity until the 18th century.
Bad leaders, and the absence of de facto collective communities, are those who have abandoned their own principles and values and have mistreated and authoritated those who wish to remain true to real values.
This is the argument of ignorance, beyond force, the exclusion of the different, the Other and all those who perceive the deviation to authoritarianism and the various forms of drunkenness.
The land as homeland, the power and the mad
08
Aug
Foucault in History of Madness addresses the work The Nau of the Fools by the Dutch painter 
Hieronymus Bosh (1450-1516), which is in the Louvre collection in Paris, where he arrived on 1918.
The important point is that before the empire of reason, in Foucault’s prophetic view of the refugee boats of our time, these “crazy” people could stop in various places, and even the people who steal the food on the table. , are barely noticed, while today’s vessels suffer numerous embarrassments.
The face of madness was for that normal time, today it is in focus at various borders and the refugees, those that Agamben calls “homo saccer”, and who is a good “microphysics” (Foucault) or “psychopolitics” (Chul Han) of power.
This is not the case only within the framework of the state structure, although Hegel is the great precursor of the defense of ‘normality’, but it is also the rejection of everything that is ‘strange’, ‘different’ or in a more up-to-date language. It belongs to the “Other”, it is also rejected.
Small and large communities, as a form of prejudiced defense, accuse what is not proper of crazy, abnormal or any other form of “expulsion from the other” (Chul Han).
Modern subjectivity, precisely because it seeks normalcy or what is socially considered normal, eliminates the possibility of the different, the “mad” or those who escape a certain standard, this is the argument of “modern” legalists and fundamentalists.
Foucault goes to the extreme in referring to the eighteenth century as the one who built man’s “subjectivity”, since the “Cartesian” subject of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cannot in any way be committed to any form of the “different” of “ “strange”.
Finally something that is not the ideal subject imagined by modernity, so the “crazy” has nowhere else to dock, the ship of the crazy is destined to sink on the high seas, dying for various kinds of deprivation, this is the idealistic model taken to the extreme.
In terms of art is what Byung Chul Han calls “smooth”, “polished”, the absence of deformity, arises an art with no negativity in the broad sense of the word.
Thus ethical values are also aesthetic, it is a whole culture that goes from politics to art, through religiosity, cyberculture and the culture present in everyday life.
In a rather rare interview, German philosopher Fons Elders prepares for the debate between Foucault and Noam Chomsky, made for Dutch television on November 28, 1971.
Psychopolitics and power
07
Aug
In reading Byung Chul Han’s book, I came across the idea that I couldn’t talk about
his arguments without going back and commenting on his psychopolitics of power. In his book Psychopolitics – neoliberalism and the new techniques of power (figure), the Korean-German philosopher demonstrated that the techniques of oppression used now.
It is not those that were politically thought out by Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism, so we talk about him last week, or Big Brother’s super-surveillance (not the unreal reality show), but what he called smartphone surveillance.
It states verbatim: “The confession obtained by force has been replaced by voluntary disclosure,” i.e., “Smartphones have been replaced by torture chambers.”, And it is not that the tortures have disappeared in Guantanamo or Venezuela.
It is possible by rereading (in the case of this blog a reading, as we have not done so) of Nietzsche’s will to power and the microphysics of Power that Chul Han does in his pamphlet “What is power” (HAN, 2019).
It rereads the word by saying that the meaning of things is not a “is-so,” but the meaning is given “as you name things, determining yours where and for what” (Han, 2019, p. 56). ), until the truth is ultimately “is allied with power” (Han, 2019, p. 57) thus being “the victory and the duration of a certain kind of truth” (idem) by quoting Nietzsche himself.
After quoting Foucault he will say “power is ultimately what it represses” (p. 62), and makes a brief historicity of this concept by stating that Hegel was the first to see it like this (I make a note with the state as an idolatry). ), then Freud and Reich, in my point in a stricter sense, that of psychology.
But he will object to an ever-negative view of power, in his right consideration: “power, however, is not based on repression” (Han, 2019, p. 63), and quoting Foucault himself, “power is productive, and produces the real ”(HAN, 2019, p. 64).
As he notes, it is a rarely referenced note by Foucault, for he “distrusts” a “nature” or an “essence” (p. 65), which the author deepens.
What is power
06
Aug
Power is not related, at least in common sense,
to power, but to the idea of domination and coercion, yet Byung Chull Han wrote: “It is a mistaken belief that power acts only by repression or distribution” (Han, 2019, p. 19 ), and quoting Luhmann, adds that even in the communication: “power is the ‘ability’ to ‘increase the likelihood of unlikely decision-making’ (Han, idem), roughly the ability to change people’s minds in confrontation situations.
I remember an electoral clash that one person insisted on offending a certain opponent that I didn’t like either, but at one point the arguments he made were so blunt that it made me wonder if he would convince a single opponent, but in turn attracted even more to his own. the hate.
Chul Han always works with the concept of negativity, which is not an authoritarian one, but that the “yes of those who are subject to power should not be a jubilatory yes” (Han, 2019, p. 21).
Thus the negative arises not as non-compulsory, but as “from a negative perception” (idem), and then cites Max Weber’s definition: “Power means the opportunity, within a social relationship, to impose one’s own will also against resistance, no matter on which such an opportunity is based” (Han, 2019, p. 22), not by chance will define the concept of power. as ‘amorphous’, of course different from domination.
It makes a profound difference between violence and coercion, since violence can take many forms, and taking up Luhmann: who associates power with: “social relationship in which it would be possible for both sides to act otherwise” (Han, 2019, p. 23).
One might imagine that this is too selfless, but Nelson Mandela when he comes to power “if you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with him. Then he will become your partner”, and that’s what he did when he came to power.
Mandela said he knew when he got out of prison that hatred was behind him or he would remain in prison.
HAN, Byung Chul (2019). O que é poder. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
Utilitarianism, philosophy and goods
31
Jul
Utilitarianism essentially sees social logic only for the goods they produce, as well as many
currents of modernity, what is important is objectivity, the actual relationship with objects, and the essence of Being, its relation to the Other, and its culture. .
It thus becomes a dispute for power, money and mobilizing forces for the production of goods, no matter how these goods are distributed among different people, in different positions on the social scale, from different religious or cultural postures.
Professor Julia Markovits of Cornell University’s class, which gives an introduction to the moral aspects of utilitarianism, explains that one of the reasons that a simple disappointment of football fans together could produce a greater devaluation than a person’s pain would mean loss of values associated with the soccer team, while the pain is only of the person.
He explains that according to philosopher Robert Nozick, the “utility monster” can transform an extremely good person, who transforms resources in direct relation to happiness, when more money and food we give to this person, the happier he is, but in the limit this It does not transform all ordinary people into a happy “general collectivity” because of utility.
The answer to utilitarianism is that this will not happen, because the opposite is true, the more resources we have the less impact any additional resources will have on our happiness.
If we think about accumulation this is not what happens, how much impact it has on a mega tech company account, while the same $ 100 can make a difference to a child in a poor region of the planet.
The subject may seem psychological or even sociological, but Robert Nozick was interested in the discussion of the state, so his book is called “Anarchy, State and Utopia” (2011), its original version is from 1974, so long before the fall of the Berlin wall, changes in Russia and the western world.
Nozick’s unique argument is that man chose to leave the “state of nature” and set up a kind of state whose existing morality consists of a future Minimum State, where some “laws” would work automatically, since of course it is no longer possible.
Apart from Martha Nussbaum’s recent book on “The Monarchy of Fear,” little or no literature penetrates the current conjuncture about the return of states as a force of repression and “order” to re-establish possible harmony.
He says of victims of injustice, including those practiced by the state: “What is permissible for victims of injustice to do in order to rectify the injustices committed against them, including the large number of injustices committed by people acting through government? I do not know of a complete or theoretically sophisticated approach to these issues. ”(NORZICK, 2011, p. 195).
He is the only author to criticize John Rawls’s utilitarianism on the issue of distribution and the only author to include in his critique Bernard Williams’s text on the fact that the state’s only action on inequality is the question of disease, curiously. Obama’s health plan that was attacked by Donald Trump. Addressing even Utopia, Nozick states that: “Life is not a race where everyone competes for a prize pre-set by someone…” (NOZICK, 2011, p. 305).
NOZICK, Robert. Anarchy, State and Utopia. Sao Paulo: WMF Martins Fontes, 2011. The following video explains these arguments, the 3rd. Julia Markovitz’s class about utilitarism:
Utilitarianism, economy and moral
30
Jul
The idea that it was consumerism and the production of goods in modernity
that led humanity to a wave of accumulation of goods or capital is not entirely true, the fact that this was done as a way of feeding a capital-based society is rather one part of the matter, the other is what is thought of as life and happiness.
This current as an ethical doctrine that argues that goods promote happiness is not the one that arises from the beginning, liberalism defends usury and capitalization at first, the novels by Honoré de Balzac, which even Marx liked to read, show this anatomy of society liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, utilitarianism later matured with the idea that goods lead to greater happiness, notably with Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873).
In Balzac’s novels the figures of Father Goriot, named in the Human Comedy organized by the Brazilian Paulo Rónai, received in the Portuguese edition the name of Uncle Goriot, is a novel that two ungrateful daughters take everything from their father after leaving him (they were not even on their deathbed) they spend their goods on true liberalism in Paris in 1819, the period of the restoration of the French Bourbon monarchy.
Father Gouriot says on his deathbed: “Ah, my friend, do not marry, have no children! you give them life and they give you death, ”as they see their daughters spend their accumulated possessions. It is not unique to this period, as in King Lear also we note that two daughters also abandon their father because of his throne and only one will follow faithful to their father, and the Shakespeare period to remember is around the year 1605.
Utilitarianism is thus a current born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that influenced the idea that more goods is more happiness, from this the idea that more development must also be a greater social production of goods, not forgetting that this is only an aspect of happiness.
Mill was a member of the British Parliament in 1865, and defended individual rights, including petitioning to extend the vote to women, so this defense is initially the defense of a liberal right.
Even the studies of political economy were done by Mill, who was an economist, having studied Adam Smith, David Ricardo, the physiocrats and mercantilism, and is not, therefore, an exclusivity of Marx, which is in some way aligned with Mill’s thinking, essentially in the aspect of economicism and utilitarianism, they lack the human aspect.
Interestingly, Stuart Mill defends the distribution of wealth, he writes verbatim: “The distribution of wealth, therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society,” which is in volume 2 of its Principles of Political Economy (1983).
Julia Markovits (Cornell University) presents video an introduction to the moral theory of utilitarismo:
