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Arquivo para February, 2018

The antropotechnicaland the ascetic non-spiritual

15 Feb

To define his antropotechnical, Sloterdijk will establish the relation of the relations within theaoVazio present religions like the most pure antropotécnicos procedures:
“If we reduce these” religions “to their essential characteristics, there are three basic complexes of which each has a clear relation to the anthropothermic dimension. First, on the dogmatic side: an illusionist exercise club, rigidly organized, whose members in the course of time are being impregnated with the conceptions of the milieu. Then from the psycho-technical side: a training roadmap for exploring all the chances in the survival struggle. We observe, finally, the top of the movement; we can see everything, but no “founder of religion”: in front of us is an unscrupulous, radically ironic, flexible on all sides, business-trainer “(Sloterdijk, 2009, 168).
Seeing also Scientology and the Olympic Movement as religions, he uses the concept of habitus, but criticizes the development made by both Pierre Bourdieu and Marx, solving the problem of how the social base or “infrastructure” would be reflected in “Superstructure” or how the general conception of society is able to penetrate the individual in a lasting way, this is his habitus done as an antropotécnico procedure.
In order to actualize and historicise his concept he resorts to the concept of habitus in Aquinas and hexis in Aristotle, which “… describes a seemingly mechanical process under aspects of the inertia of overcoming to explain the incarnation of the spiritual. They identified man as that animal who can do what he owes, if one cared in time with his abilities “(ibid., p. 289).
According to the author in presenting his own theory of cultural development, humanity itself, despite the fact that we find different customs and traditions in each moment of its history, did not follow the conservative identity script, so this question is false, although it is a reference for many contemporary authors.
The conclusion about this unspraced asceticism is training, letting itself operate: letting yourself be informed, letting yourself be entertained, letting yourself be served, letting yourself be cured, letting yourself be transported, and if this is, for the author, the being-there, its counterposition is not general negativity, but it should be the general epoché, letting itself be empty, there can be the being-there-not-being that could complement itself as onto-antropotechnical, light of the social habitus, re-reading the current anthropothermic conditions and capable of criticizing them, would be a total deflated being, a non-being-there that is also being.

SLOTERDIJK, P. Du musst Dein Leben ändern. Über Antropotechnik. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2009.

 

The crisis and the ashes

14 Feb

The economic, political and social crisis is worldwide, but the Brazilian has more of an ash asCinzasWednesday than carnival, but it is possible to survive in the crisis.

A suggestive and profound book is the book in partnership with Edgar Morin and Patrick Viveret: How to live in times of crisis? (Bertrand Brasil, 2013), who suggest in the book “I risk the hypothesis that perhaps we have reached a moment of rupture” (page 22), but what rupture?

Ortega y Gasset recalls, “we do not know what happens, and this is exactly what happens”, says this about the difficulty of relating facts, the digital revolution, the resurgence of nations (Armenian, Kurds, Croatians among many others), the great Asian tigers jumps, finally a great range of new relations, and now new tensions and wars in Africa.

The pragmatists, who do not know the complexity, want to be practical, ignore the theory or repeat only a single author, the illusion of a “universal” theory, what we need Morin and Viveret: “the present, the real is not what it seems stable … one must be open to the uncertain, to the unexpected. “(p.25).

But the authors ask: “What then, the good news? An awareness of the breadth, of the complexity, of a new beginning. We are in a period of planetary crisis and we do not know what will come of it; what counts on the possibility of transcending this crisis will be good news “(p.27).

Viveret writes in the chapter “What will we do in our lives,” stating that we should go out of the way to preserve the best “, but paradoxically” maintaining the lucidity that there is the worst “(p.44), does not seem to give a definitive solution, but we can find the best of “traditional societies and civilizations”, and we must know these civilizations.

Emphasize the author that “it is necessary to reappropriate democratically and semantically the words ‘value’ and ‘richness’ whose root reich (in German) refers to the creative power” (pages 60 and 61).

He also recalls Karl Polanyi, in his book “The Great Transformation”, “analyzes the market economies that are legitimate for market societies that are dangerous, that is, the moment when commodification invades the whole social universe . “(P.61). The author gives us as a remedy to leave the infernal pair “excitement / depression,” to move toward another pair: “intensity / serenity” (p.76).

They end the book by saying that it is “necessary to grow in humanity.”

 

The bas-fonds and the Carnival

13 Feb

Walking through the central streets of my hometown, Bauru of São Paulo (Brazil), I passaoCarnavalMedieval by a girl already with a bean and a lady’s body, with a sandal with moorings and silver pieces of leather, wearing shorts that barely closes at the thick waist, a dark T-shirt with the Eiffel tower and the word Paris printed in his t-shirt in Golden color, I remembered the book by Dominique Kalifa: Bas-Fonds: History of an Imaginary (edUsp, 2017).
The book I mistakenly bought at the end of the year thought to be the origin of the Happy Holidays, the traditional end-of-year greetings, but when I opened the book I understood the “cities in crisis”, the dirty, the greasy and the deformed one, the Kingdom of the Destitute, Sodom, Rome and Babylon, finally some of the chapters of the book of Dominique Kalifa.
In fact the center of the cities became peripheral, at least in the medium cities, and the centers went to the malls in some condominium closed to the condominiums, where there are clubs, bars, shops and even chapels, privatizing the jogging.
The author says, “the bas-fonds … understand each other instantly” (Dominique, 2017, p.11), perhaps in French but in Portuguese english it took me a long time to connect the periphery (which nowadays frequent central commerce) and Carnival fantasies (at least the Brazilian, made by people from the periphery)..
I find in the beginning of the book the connection with the carnival: “the bas-fonds extend through a mobile, vague terrain in which reality, the worst of realities, is in collusion with the imaginary, a terrain in which the social ‘Is constantly redefined by the’ moral ‘, in which the flesh-and-blood beings mingle with characters of fiction “(ibid, p. 11).
He clarifies that from the “positive” figure of the Greek philosopher Diogenes “the poor of God, the” poor of Christ “,” the poor with Peter “of the Middle Ages, XIII “in France and England, the terms of vagond and vagrant” (page 69), which the author calls “the invention of the poor poor.”.
Dominique goes on to cite a number of authors: “The comparison of the threatening proletarians with the Indians of America is a recurrent motive, which explains in part the immense success [of the Fenimore Cooper novels]” (page 109) , also quotes: Balzac, Sainte-Beuve, Dumas, George Sand, Maxime du Camp, Eugène Sue, Bérange and others mentioned in previous pages, fall in love with “Walter Scott of the wilds” (of book of the Henri Couvain).
Just to tell you how universal it is, I also remember “Bola de Sebo” tale by Guy de Maupasanti, and the film Rale (Donzoko, 1957) whose translation into French exactly by The Bas-fonds, little known film of this great  diretor.

The origin of the carnival however is more controversial, the Carnival of Venice or perhaps the party of the crazy, described in 1445 like “party of the crazy ones” made in the faculty of Theology of Paris (modern engraving picture above).
The transformation of the joy of the imaginary of the poor has become almost everywhere, a private party in which the parade of the imagination of the bas-fonds is watched.
Kalifa, Dominique.Os bas-fonds: história de um imaginario (The bas-fonds: History of an imaginary), trad. Márcia Aguiar, São Paulo: Edusp, 2017.

 

The liquid Policy

12 Feb

Unable to make a correct reading of the current process of globalization, politics across the AveryConfuseglobe develops in a false right-left dichotomy, since it is only de facto right (defense of the market, return to the concept of wealth of the nations, defense of manual labor without the machines, etc.) in a comic style of Trump, and it is only de facto left (defense of the sacred intervention of the state in any economic and all human areas, such as art, religion and schooling), as the childishness of the dictator of North Korea: Kim-Jong Un.

Brazil is no different, the picture that moved in the axis of Lulopetismo (ex-presidente Lula is chief of PT partity) and militarism the Bolsonaro fashion is nothing more than a repetition of the history, in fact, the corruption and the blows were nothing else but the repetition of the history, from the proclamation of the republic , getulism, tenentism and military coup are antecedents of a ruling class that has taken over the Brazilian State since the Proclamation of the Republic in an institutional form of statism, and, perhaps before the monarchist period, but without forgetting the Pombaline reforms.
In Brazil the Pombaline reforms (Iluminist reforms in colonial Brazil) are important because they are the presence of the deepest and perhaps most radical Illuminist State in Latin America, but historians and politicians forget about it, in fact a clear demonstration is the positivist motto “Order and Progress” (and Love, positivismo lemma) printed on the flag and government motto Michel Temer.
Bauman’s liquid modernity, in his later writings, practically abandoned it, it is convenient to Brazilian political religiosity that remains in dualism, without the possibility of finding an answer in the third way, we hope it appears, and not the Hulk.
Without realizing that the process of a new globalization is already necessary, without it there will be no end to corruption, income redistribution, religious tolerance, racial and mainly political, to respond to the modernist mausoleum, which is no longer liquid because life continues to pulsate on the planet.
The net policy does not have the strength to push this change, it is trapped in a false dualistic dichotomy, it has no humanitarian foundation, it appeals to the welfare state because the state is its belief, not the concrete man, the one who suffers from this net policy.
Perhaps from where we least expect an answer, the Portuguese contraption (Portuguese government collision), meanwhile we are packing a false joy in the middle of the carnival, but Wednesday is coming finish in Brazil. 
 

The exclusion and the lepers today

09 Feb

It is not uncommon even in places of relative calm and social well-being that aosLeprososthe man feels uncomfortable and displaced from everything that lives and feels around him: families are no longer just a place of comfort, in Brazil the rates of domestic violence frighten , even laser space like football fields and other sports are encountering fights, corruptions and various types of violence, not to mention the society at large that lives at alarming rates.
We think that isolation is the solution, when not alone in groups and often in large groups, we also form our bubbles of “security”, are no longer spaces of comfort because it is almost unattainable, but safety.
The widening of the concept of individualism to that of microspheres and spheres of Sloterdijk, the spice that we find coming out of the self and going to the self is not enough, in him we feel the absence of something essential, if we can not reach the spiritual sphere, which I call the noosphere (sphere of the spirit), we must understand the processes of exclusion of the “bubbles”.
First because they are unreal these days, we live a wide-ranging exhibition, Byung-Chul Han talks disc and in the recent book of Domenico de Mais (post Monday here) also speaks of social “disorientation”, and therefore is not of liquidity, but of fleeting spheres and a new relation with exclusion: the peripheries existences and their “bubbles”.
There will be no solution if there is no leap beyond itself, it is a beyond that which was badly defined in philosophy as one for itself, although there also occurs the danger of fideism and subjectivism, it is in him that we find it open spheres of our dreams, of our poetry and of a worldview without exclusion, the problem that Heidegger called Weltanschauung.
Oscillating between a religious pique and a pseudo-religious low-level materialism, the necessary world view becomes a vision without exclusion, that world in all persons may be part of it.
At a time when leprosy (the leprosy) was the worst kind of exclusion, and was even considered “One,” Jesus’ words can well summarize the exclusion of that time in Mark when a leper asks him on his knees: “If you want , you can cleanse me! “Jesus reached out and touched him and said,” I want to. Be purified! “(Mark 1: 40-41).
Leprosy today is many, look around us and how many people excluded in the various bubbles that look around and say haughty “are not our people” because these “are impure.”

 

Exclusion and immune shock

08 Feb

Petr Sloterdijk’s idea that history is “a collision of immune systems,” could very well beaImunologia translated to be understood as the “clash of exclusions,” and the idea that the people who do this are just religious is false and ideological .
In an interview and dialogue on the Frontiers of Thought, the philosopher said: “Marx was wrong when he intended that every criticism should begin with the critique of” religion. ” True criticism must begin with false concepts. The idea that God wanted to destroy humanity in the Flood is a heavy expression of how people may feel guilty, but it is a false concept. The idea that widows should be burned with their husbands is also a false concept. To pose the question paradoxically as it is: [religion] has nothing to do with religion. “, see Gauchazh brazilian site.
The idea that religion, in the philosophical and theological sense, has nothing to do with religion, reconnection to God and our fellow man is easily demonstrated by reading theologians who are most concerned with an “immune” religion (of Others, who are the others?) and less with the inclusion of people who are invisible to the contemporary world.
The philosopher who wrote the “Critique of Cynical Reason” in 1986, said in the interview, which sheds light on the world political scene: “In our days, the cynicism syndrome as an aggressive revolt against the idea of ​​justice, progress and goodwill is again changing the party field. I see very few “conservative” elements in the new right-wing movements around the world, if by conservatism we understand the just sentiment for the values ​​of the past. I perceive instead a lot of anger against civilization as such and a deep hatred against the “elites” – symptoms that we know very well of the totalitarian temptations of the 20th century. There has been a significant debate among French intellectuals in recent months about the new “demoralization.” ”
In addition to immunological exclusion, we provide social scale with a “demoralization”, the religion that includes lepers, widows, women and the poor, has nothing to do with immunological

 

Individualization and relationship losses

07 Feb

All processes of modern individualization were forms of isolation of the subject,aOrfeu-atenas initially of objects (the famous Kantian rupture between objectivism and subjectivism), after the individuals among themselves, but Sloterdijk we go further, states “anatomical.”
The form of his criticism is one of the pillars of the pathetic nation-state, the formulation of Rousseau who was “the inventor of man without a friend, who could only think of the other complement in the form of an immediate maternal nature or an immediate national totality. “(Sloterdijk, 2016, 248).
The solitude of modern man gives a more solid explanation: “If the individual can not complete and stabilize himself through successful applications of the techniques of solitude – for example, in artistic exercises and written soliloquies – he is destined to be absorbed by the totalitarian collectives “(p. 349) for this, writes in Spheres I on the bubbles.
It gives an anatomical explanation for this: “The modern solitary subject is not the result of his own choice, but a fractional product of the rude separation of birth and placenta.” (350), just as he had already spoken of the heart in the relationship with the Other, now traverses the original aspect, the attachment of the child to the mother through the placenta, this helps to understand his concept of “anatomical individualism.”
He resorted to the novel of Orpheus and Eurydice to explain the rupture, in Greek mythology Orpheus was the son of the muse Calliope with the Apollo or Éagro, king of Thrace, knows Eurydice and falls in love and marries with her, but the beauty of Eurydice attracts a beekeeper Aristeu, but Orpheus pursues her and in pursuit she stumbles on a serpent that bit her heel and kills her.
Orpheus’s symbology that serves the modern man is the pursuit of the relationship, but without abandoning his “anatomical individualism” he can not reach communion, the umbilical connection that prevents him from “truthful relations”, organic, although he praises “pure relationship “As did Orpheus who praises her in his songs (photo).
Maybe Sloterdijk does not know, but the brazilian popular dictator: “looking at his own belly button” that has exactly an individualistic sense, in this case is looking at the relationship lost.


SLOTERDIJK, P. Esferas I: bolhas (Spheres I: bubbles). Translate to portuguese: José Oscar A. Marques São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2016

 

Being in spheres and self-being

06 Feb
Undoubtedly the greatest evil of ours, together with economic and socialasBolhas exclusion, is the exclusion by specific human characteristics: diseases, physical type and even intellectual.
We have already emphasized in our posts the importance of the triad of spheres of Petr Sloterdijk: Spheres, in which he describes various aspects of an isolated society in “bubbles” (name of the first book Spheres I, already translated into Portuguese) (Estação Liberdade, 2016)
It is a place, the sphere, where it can be protected, it is not a place of comfort but of security, which in the treatment given by Sloterdijk is the tradition of thought, which appears as a place of protection of a humanity that, for protect, get stuck with stones, weapons, songs and ideas, and would not be expected differently to the cyber world.
In Sloterdijk’s concept, which is different from that treated as “identity” because the spheres have identity that are fleeting, does it address the human problem where we are when we are in the world? That is why it is a consequence of Heidegger’s thought of “being-in-the-world.”
Today’s society has dissolved its protective relations of intimacy into formal gray relations, the question becomes transfigured: where are we when we are in the unusually large, the lack of shelter of absolute exteriority, so it is a bigger problem than Domenico de Masi approach, it is not only the loss of sociological projects, but a human rupture.
It is not only the malaise of modernity, of a purely psychological nature, such as that treated by Freud, Sloterdijk’s sense of the “bubble” is what one thinks by “spirit” or “soul” is only the “air” of life in a shared space
This is clearly already thinking of the inner space, beginning of his book, when Sloterdijk demonstrates the pendency of his microspherology with respect to contemporary psychology, what philosophy calls itself (Hegel uses this category to differentiate the in-itself) from if and to allow one to think of the surrealism of human spatiality, namely, to be content and continent, so when one speaks of the production of content one should speak of the continente in digital world.
The religious belief in the mystical fusion and the physiological enchantment of the cases described by Sloterdijk, who speaks of the heart and soul of figures like Catherine of Siena and Raimundo de Cápua, who speaks of the exchange of one’s own heart with that of Christ, revealed the relational character of human bodies and that even finds in Plato’s Banquet and that were annulled by “anatomical individualism”, according to the author, when the dissection of corpses begins in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Despite a language ranging from poetic to biting (in certain sense), Sloterdijk’s critique of our time to be fundamental, which could be roughly said to be “in-spheres.”
 

What is the evil of our time?

05 Feb

Modernity is in crisis, and it is not due to technology and new media, since theDesorientaçao process has long been detected by thinkers, sociologists and social scientists; and point is not the central cause even if it influences the crisis.
One of the authors who points out this crisis is Domenico de Masi, a 79-year-old writer, professor at the La Sapienza University in Rome, he talks about a disorientation, his latest book “Alphabet of the Disoriented Society” (Brazilian edition: Objetiva) reached Brazilian bookstores in 2017 , he became famous for his book “Creative Leisure.”
In his previous book, “The Future Has Arrived,” he says that society’s current sociological model is missing as a reference, it is interesting to note that this reversal of the ideologies of the previous century reveals exactly this , the binary model of understanding that we either go to utopian socialism or to capitalism in the period of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations.”
From his previous book I take an analysis that I consider important, where it says that the lack of reference made society unable to distinguish between what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is true and what is false, what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is left, and even what is alive and what is dead, we may understand the wave of “zombies” and the post-truth there.
To point out what the author thinks of the future, he points out a series of “sociological acupunctures”, some significant aspects of our society, and explores twenty-six, which in my view is too much and can somehow confuse.
He himself makes a synthesis by pointing out the factors that were “solid” (concept that I attribute to him in terms of the Baumanian liquid), industrial society (1750-1950), namely: rationality, speed, efficiency, standardization, consumerism and chauvinism.
It shows how problems such as concentration of income could be solved from a view of wealth produced, according to the author’s data the world grows 3 to 4% year, and already produces, 65 trillion dollars a year, and using a UN report about human development, would be enough to 100 billion dollars a year to end hunger in the world.
It points to enigmatic visions of society, like loss of privacy (according to him, it will be impossible to forget, get lost, get bored and isolate), and we will be able to avoid genetic diseases (very unrealistic at least until now), and do technology for many of our ills: affective robots (using Artificial Intelligence), 3D printers that would replace industrial machines.

Although it appeals to subjectivity, in the old dichotomy between subject and object, it does not yet see the question of Being that can only be solved with the presence of another Being, according to the analysis of the existential-ontological thinking currents, to replace it artificially does not seem to me solution.
But it’s worth the most of Seneca who likes to use: “No wind is in favor of the sailor who does not know where to go.”

 

 

Princess Leia: Back to the Future

03 Feb

I know, it’s two distinct films, but Brigham Young University (BYU) seems to return to theaPrincesaLeia path of broadcasting and projecting 3D holographic images into the air.
“Our team’s mission is to make the 3D holograms of science fiction a reality,” said Daniel Smalley, a professor of computational engineering and computer science, a holography expert who recently published an article in Nature magazine.
The technique he developed is based on the phenomenon of photophoresis, in which particles suspended in the medium of a gaseous liquid (there are experiments with droplets of water that forces it to be sucked into the air), it can be the particles that are in the air, which need to be moved by thermal gradients and can be done by laser beams, explains Smalley, “these screens are capable of producing images in a ‘fine beam’ that are visible from any direction and are not subject to cutouts,” ie seen from any position of the viewer.
The technical name of this effect is more precisely: “photophoretic-trap volumetric display”, and is superior to old techniques that could not capture light through the air to create a virtual object with the same notion of depth as the actual object.
But the most spectacular is the possibility of RGB projection (Red-Green-Blue, the three primary colors that composed were the visible spectrum by the human being) as the point of light is able to move quickly and thus the point of light produces the color, the projection of the green, red and blue laser radios produce the visual effect of the color.
The color image in three-dimensional volumetric (3D), will have the resolution of 10-micrometer (10 ^ -6 of the meter or 10 ^ -4 of the centimeter), this means to produce 10 thousand voxels (Pixels volumétricos) by centimeter or one million by meter cubic.
In a short time the communication has changed, in 10 years we have spoken through the Web in visual interaction, thanks to VoIP (voice over Internet), now the volumetric interaction in holograms, or also, to watch images of objects and people around us that are thousands of miles of distances, or simply in filming from other times, we are back in the future.