DRIEU

Indicativa la parabola di questo scrittore. Aveva combattuto con coraggio durante la prima guerra mondiale: tre volte ferito e con la Croix de Guerre al petto. Emerse poi come una delle figure letterarie di spicco della Parigi tra le due guerre. Ma non aveva una sensibilità vicina al grande risveglio cattolico che allora andava per la maggiore e per i successivi vent'anni condusse una vita disordinata, dedita alla seduzione delle donne e alla composizione di cupi romanzi in cui le donne e la loro sessualità occupano il centro della scena. Rifiutò le idee nazionaliste che riteneva avessero portato alla Grande Guerra e sostenne un'Europa unita e un nuovo internazionalismo come l'unica via per raggiungere un futuro pacifico. All'inizio sostenne i comunisti, in ragione della sua fede internazionalista, e si unì al Partito, insieme a tanti suoi contemporanei. Quando lasciò il Partito e si dichiarò fascista non fu perché ripudiava ciò che aveva creduto una volta. Il suo suicidio finale, che lo salvò dall'essere processato per tradimento, era già implicito nella noia e nella nostalgia per l’azione che riempiono le pagine delle sue opere. La sua vita, come la sua arte, fu un susseguirsi di devastazioni spirituali, per le quali cercò invano un rimedio politico.

HL 6 NONSENSE IN PARIS: ALTHUSSER, LACAN AND DELEUZE

6 NONSENSE IN PARIS: ALTHUSSER, LACAN AND DELEUZE
Note:6@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,742

the man who was singled out by the revolutionaries of 1968 as their intellectual leader, Louis Althusser.
Note:SESSANTOTTINO X ECCELLENZA

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,743

a new species of Marxist dogma: a theory, or rather meta-theory, which iterated in mesmerizing paragraphs the form of a dogma, while contriving meticulously to conceal its content.
Note:IPNOSI

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,749

he offers a model of a new and fortified language, in which no question can be posed, and no answer offered, except in terms that are barely intelligible

Note | Location: 3,750

UN DISCORSO ININTELLEGGIBILE

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,754

Refutation must be evaded, so that the truth within the dogma can be protected from the malice contained in real things.
Note:ELUSIONE E LOTTA CONTRO I FATTI

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,788

In plain English, the conclusion is this: you can understand Capital only by believing it or, in even plainer Latin, credo ut intelligam, as St Anselm put it, when discussing the supreme mystery of God: I believe in order to understand.
Note:L ATTEGGIAMENTO RELIGIOSO

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,793

For Althusser, however, dogma is ‘revealed’ by being concealed.
Note:IL DOPPIO MOVIMENTO

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,800

The true revelation consists in the credo quia absurdum of the devotee, who sees darkness everywhere and then turns to Marx’s text, in order to convert this darkness into light.
Note:CREDO XCHÈ ASSURDO

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,808

He was particularly opposed to the rewriting of historical materialism and the theory of value in the terms suggested by the ‘Marxist humanism’ of the 1844 manuscripts and also, in the pre-war years, by Lukács and the Frankfurt school.
Note:LA COSA CHE LO FACEVA PIÙ PIuttosto INCAZZARE

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,815

The early Marx’s concerns were ‘ideological’, the later Marx’s were ‘scientific’.
Note:LA VISIONE DI M

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,818

Understanding an ideological argument implies, at the level of ideology itself, simultaneous, conjoint knowledge of the ideological field in which a thought emerges and grows; and the exposure of the internal unity of this thought: its problematic. Knowledge of the ideological field itself presupposes knowledge of the problematics compounded or opposed to it. The interrelation of the particular problematic of the thought of the individual under consideration with the particular problematics of the thoughts belonging to the ideological field allows of a decision as to its author’s specific difference, i.e. whether a new meaning has emerged.10
Note:IL MODO IN CUI ALTHUSSER DICE: "PER COMPRENDERE UN ARGOMENTO OCCORRE VEDERNE IL SIGNIFICATO"

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,825

the ponderous, suspicion-laden circularity of Althusser’s prose, which goes round and round monotonously on its own heels, like a lunatic trapped in an imaginary cage.
Note:LA PROSA DI A

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,826

The endless circle that is built from that tautology has, however, a mesmerizing quality,
Note:Cccccccc

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,843

invocation of ‘economic epicycles’ recalls the attempt to save the Ptolemaic astronomy, by protecting the cherished hypothesis from the evidence that seemed to refute it.
Note:SALVARE MARX NOVELLO TOLOMEO

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,888

Each sentence exhibits the same slightly delirious syntax, embedding a host of unexplained terms in structures that have the shape of thought without the matter. Such, I suspect, was the principal effect of Althusser’s teaching.
Note:LA FRASE DI A

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,921

However Althusser was not, consciously, producing nonsense; rather he was trying to give voice to a religious sentiment, struggling to find the words that would reach through to others and join them to the faith. Religious belief possesses the structure of Pascal’s wager, and this is one way by which we recognize it.
Note:CREDENZA RELIGIOSA...MA DI TIPO PASCALIANO

Yellow highlight | Location: 3,998

we must understand the ‘existential posture’ implicit in the style. The human world is fundamentally opposed to Althusser. Every institution plays its part in the ‘objective’ conspiracy that oppresses him. Church, family, school, trade union, culture, press, judiciary – all belong to the ‘ideological state apparatus’
Note:POSTURA ESISYENZIALE DELL OPPRESSO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,037

Nothing means anything and that is the revolution, namely the machine to annihilate meaning. The machine was put together by Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and a few others, from discarded fragments of Freudian psychology and Saussurian linguistics, and attached to Kojève’s Hegelian wind-bag, with which to pump it up with hot air.
Note:LA RIVOLUZIONE: IL NONSENSE SIGNIFICA QUALCOSA

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,041

In his Cours de linguistique générale
Note:PUBBLIAZ CHIAVE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,042

the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
Note:Cccccccc

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,043

the idea of language as a system of ‘differences’,
Note:L IDEA CHE EBBE PIÙ SUCCESSO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,045

The meaning of ‘hot’ must be understood in terms of the difference between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’.
Note:Ccccccccccc

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,048

language has no ‘positive terms’, but is an endless stream of negations, whose meaning lies in what is not said,
Note:LA CONSEGIENZA...IL NON DETTO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,050

Jacques Derrida went further still, arguing that therefore no sign means in isolation, and meaning waits upon the ‘other’ sign, the sign that completes it by opposing it, but which cannot be finally written down. Meaning is never present but always deferred,
Note:L INTEGRAZIONE DI RIDDA...IL SIGNIFICATO MANCA SEMPRE...CIÒ CHE DA SENSO MANCA SEMPRE E NN APPENA VIENE INTRODOTTO CREA UN ALTRA MANCANZA

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,066

The frame of the nonsense machine was assembled by Jacques Lacan, the cranky psychiatrist whose writings, published in 1966, had an extraordinary impact on the student revolutionaries, with whose cause he publicly aligned himself.
Note:LO STRAMBO PSICHIATRA

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,069

a psychoanalyst who would see ten clients in an hour, sometimes while attended to by his barber,
Note:NN MOLTO PROFESSIONALE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,070

speak, think and feel in the same paranoid language as their doctor.
Note:LA SUA CURA

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,071

People become famed as psychoanalysts not for their therapeutic successes (maybe there are none), but for their ideas. And the fame of an idea arises from its influence, not its truth.
Note:IL CRITERIO IN PSICHIATRIA

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,075

He also scattered his writings and his lectures with mathematical jargon, taken from theories that he did not care to understand, but which he referred to casually as ‘mathemes’, on the analogy with the phonemes and morphemes into which linguists divide the functional parts of language.
Note:X LUI L INCONSCIO È STRUTTURATO COME UN LINGUAGGGIO...PASSIONE X IL LINGUAGGIO MATEMATICO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,080

Lacan suggested, a big Other (capital A for Autre), which is the challenge presented to the self by the not-self.
Note:I PERSONAGGI DEL TEATRINO LACANIANO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,091

‘there is no sexual relation’,
Note:I MANTRA POCO CHIARI DI LACAN

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,094

You become a self-conscious subject by taking possession of your world and incorporating its otherness into your self.
Note:LA COSTRUZION DELL IO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,096

Lacanians give Lacan credit for a thesis expounded far more lucidly and with all due qualifications by Hegel and Kojève
Note:DEIFICAZIONE DEL MAESTRO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,098

Lacan’s ruminations on the Other purport to be part of a ‘return to Freud’,
Note:STRINGI STRINGI

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,101

Lacan established his own seminars in 1953. The influence of these seminars – 34 volumes of which have been transcribed and also translated – is one of the deep mysteries of modern intellectual life. Their garbled regurgitation of theories that Lacan clearly neither explored nor understood, is, for sheer intellectual effrontery, without parallel in recent literature.
Note:SEMINARI

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,104

meaningless is used to exert a personal charisma.
Note:L ORIGINALITÀ DI LACAN

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,107

Today then I must keep to the wager to which I committed myself in choosing the terrain in which the object a is most evanescent in its function of symbolizing the central lack of desire, which I have always indicated in a univocal way by the algorithm (−Φ). I don’t know whether you can see the blackboard, but as usual I have marked out a few reference points. The object a in the field of vision is the gaze. After which, enclosed in a chain bracket, I have written: (in nature ( (as = ( − Φ )
Note:IL SIGNIFICATO DI =

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,116

alchemy promises a deeper truth, and one inseparable from power.
Note:ALCHIMIA E POTERE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,128

Lacan gathers confidence on noticing that barre is an anagram of arbre:
Note:UNA SOLUZIONE COMUNE IN LACAN...L ANAGRAMMA

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,143

Meaning has indeed been reduced to an equation and in the solution of this equation the signified is found to be identical with the square root of minus one:
Note:UN CASO FAMOSO....INTERPRETANDO UN PASSAGGIO OSCURO DI SAUSSURE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,148

the erectile penis (the primary object of meaning) under bourgeois conditions is no more potent than the square root of minus one
Note:ALTRO PASSAGGIO MEMORABILE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,153

Derrida had cast doubt, in his theory of deconstruction, on the possibility of meaning anything. Lacan showed that it is not necessary to mean anything anyway.
Note:IL SIGNFICATO NN NECESSARIO...DA DERRIDA A LACAN

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,163

Lacan’s doctrine that the ‘subject’ does not exist. The ‘I’ is an absence,
Note:IL CUORE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,166

Gilles Deleuze (1925–95)
Note:ASSIAMO A LUI...PIÙ ACCADEMICO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,166

Foucault going so far as to describe the post-war period as ‘le siècle Deleuzien’.
Note:MOLTO LODATO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,174

Deleuze was not, at first, a political, still less a politicized, thinker, and the nonsense machine that he helped to assemble was put to political use primarily by other and less scrupulous spirits.
Note:POLITICIZZATO DA ALTRI...ALL INIZIO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,176

his major treatise, Difference and Repetition, published in 1968, shows the true nature of his thinking, presented as a rumination on the words in the title.
Note:RUMINAZINI OSSESSIVE...SCAVO APPROFONDIMENTO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,178

Heidegger, whose Being and Time was a revelation to philosophers of Sartre’s generation,
Note:IL RIFERIMENTO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,183

Deleuze wished to replace the idea of being, and its associated notions of substance and identity, with that of difference.
Note:IL PROGETTO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,184

time is to be in some way transcended through the ‘eternal recurrence’ of all that happens
Note:ALTRA IDEA RUBATA A NIETZ

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,185

Hence ‘Being and Time’ becomes ‘Difference and Repetition’.
Note:DI FATTO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,187

identity must now give way to difference.
Note:IL PIANO DI D.

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,190

For identity is presupposed by individuation, the act of singling something out as an object of reference.
Note:DA ARISTOTELE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,194

What would it be, to single out difference as more basic than identity, so that ‘being different’ from other things, rather than identical with a specific thing, is understood as the primary way of being?
Note:IL MISTERO DI D.

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,202

Deleuze’s thesis is put forward as deeply subversive: we were imprisoned by sameness and have been released into difference! But does this really subvert the entire previous course of Western metaphysics, and if so, to what effect?
Note:UNA RIVOLUZIONE DIFFICILE DA CAPIRE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,212

an endless stream of abstractions,
Note:LA PROSA DI D

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,213

He does not argue, but encloses his key words in fortified boxes, which he firmly locks against all questioning before throwing the key away:
Note:Cccccccccc

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,225

The seamless web of abstractions continues to the very end of the book, at which point Nietzsche, the most concrete and immediate of modern philosophers, is wrapped in more abstractions and reissued as a philosopher of ‘difference’, in rebellion against identity:
Note:NIETZ IN CATENE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,235

in the Logic of Sense and elsewhere, he is explicitly challenging the distinction between sense and nonsense, showing that the true use of language is expressive, not representational, so that nonsense is as much a part of communication as what is normally called sense.
Note:NONSENSE NN È UN INSULTO VISTO CHE IL LINGUAGGIO È ESPRESSIONE PIÚ CHE RAPPRESENTAZIONE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,242

(Deleuze writes without paragraphs. His pages are like cliff faces from which fragments can be broken away, only to yearn through their jagged edges for the mother stone.)
Note:NO PARAGRAFI

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,253

Sometimes, reading Deleuze, I think that he has something like that in mind – the primordial religious experience, which uses repetition as an icon of eternity.
Note:MISTICISMO? VOGLIA DI VINCERE IL TEMPO?

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,257

Later, writing with Félix Guattari, Deleuze puts aside the abstractions of metaphysics, and becomes both more psychoanalytical and more political
Note:LA SECONDA FASE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,259

Their influential book L’anti-Oedipe is at one level an attack on the Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex – or rather, an attack on the bourgeois family,
Note:IL NEMICO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,262

They describe the human being as a ‘machine désirante’
Note:DESIDERIO...D IDENTITÀ

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,271

you can understand why Deleuze and Guattari think that they have hit on the true explanation of schizophrenia.
Note:LA RICERCA FOLLE D IDENTITÀ

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,274

Schizophrenia, they suggest, is exactly what we should expect when the BwO is hit by capitalism:
Note:LA GIOSTRA DELLE IDENTITÀ ...LA RUTILAMTE PROPOSTA

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,292

Each particle of that comparatively lucid utterance makes sense. But what is the connection between them?
Note:ESTRATTO DAL DELIRIO DI MILLE PIANI

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,297

rhizome’ and ‘territorialisation’.
Note:LE NUOVE PAROLE CHIAVE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,298

A rhizome is a plant stem that grows horizontally underground,
Note:RIZOMA

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,299

In his earlier work Deleuze advanced the view that ‘identity’ had hitherto characterized Western thinking, and that ‘difference’ must now replace it. A similar claim is now made for ‘rhizomatic’ thinking. Instead of the vertical tree – the up/down, cause/effect,
Note:LA NUOVA RIVOLUZIONE AUSPICATA

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,304

a narrative dependent on binary divisions: cause and effect, us and them, one and many, and so on.
Note:CONTRO LA BINARIETÀ OCCIDENTALE....OVVERO LA LOGICA CLASSICA

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,319

those who represent language through generative trees, as Chomsky does, have made a fundamental mistake about the available possibilities).
Note:IL RIZOMA CONDANNA ANCHE CHOMSKY

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,320

Rhizomatic development establishes a territory.
Note:AUTONOMIA

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,335

In the place of definitions we are offered associations, and in the place of theories we are given terms that can be stretched from category to category
Note:IL MODO DI PROCEDERE DI D

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,337

if you wanted a word to describe the intellectual method of Deleuze and Guattari, there is none more apposite than ‘packaging’.
Note:Ccccccccc

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,340

We are to discard the old hierarchies, the binary structures, the ‘trees’ of the bourgeois family and the capitalist machine,
Note:TANTO OSTICO INTELLETTUALMENTE TANTO NAIF POLITICAMENTE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,344

the language of ‘schizanalysis’, which is an assault on the existing structures in the name of desire.
Note:IL GRIMALDELLO DELLA RIVOLUZIONE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,346

the language that we know as rational argument and the pursuit of truth, and which is dismissed by Deleuze and Guatarri as mere ‘representation’, rather than the transformation that their writings herald.
Note:IL LINGUAGGIO DEL NEMICO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,348

‘The love of truth’, declared Jacques Lacan, ‘is the love of this weakness whose veil we have lifted; it is the love of what truth hides, which is called castration.’
Note:SOLO IL DEBOLE AMA LA VERITÀ

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,352

‘the notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth,
Note:COSA CONTA DI PIÙ

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,354

Truth is subservient to power,
Note:Cccccccccccc

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,356

All normal forms of thought, all empirical observation, all pre-existing knowledge is dissolved in their delirious prose,
Note:D & G

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,359

authoritative-sounding language – in which assertoric sentences succeed each other without a break, and with never the slightest nod towards a real or imagined interlocutor
Note:ANCORA SULLO STILE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,362

Abundant footnotes, referring to out-of-the-way works in political theory, anthropology, biology, musicology, particle physics, etc., serve further to intimidate the reader,
Note:IL VEZZO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,370

If you can reproduce that language – and it is, after all, not so hard, since there are no constraints of logic, truth, observation or sincerity – you will be on the way to the A grade
Note:10 E LODE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,400

the idea of the Other rescued from ‘classical German philosophy’ by Kojève.
Note:FRSE L IDEA FULCRO DEL VDELIRIO FRANCESE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,408

By the early 1970s, a kind of impenetrable meta-literature, literature about literature about literature, had evolved, incorporating the features I have mentioned, and about which only one thing was clear – namely, what side it was on. If the politics were obvious, then the obscurity of the language was no defect.
Note:UNA SOLA COSA È CHIARA

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,410

obscurity could be read as proof of a profundity
Note:...ANZI

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,413

In their now famous book Intellectual Impostures, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont attack the phony expertise of Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, Lacan and many more.
Note:LA REAZIONE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,419

My real criticism is that they overlook the political significance of the postmodern meta-literature.
Note:CRTICA A SOKAL

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,421

they fail to point out, and perhaps fail even to see, that being on the left is what it is all about.
Note:Cccccccc

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,438

For the mass of commentators (and they do indeed form a mass) Deleuze is to be received as a prophet.
Note:UN PROFETA DEVE FAR ACCADERE LE COSE

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,446

Having touched base, so to speak, with the real agenda, the prose then rambles on,
Note:LA PROSA COME UNA TROBA X LA CARICA

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,449

Occasionally there is an abrupt and arresting paradox. For example, we are told that ‘the Idea knows nothing of negation’; we learn that ‘while it is in the nature of consciousness to be false, problems by their nature escape consciousness’.63 And because these hints are dropped in the course of endorsing (without explaining) the argument of Das Kapital, the reader can be assumed to accept them as obvious.
Note:XCHÈ SI ACCETTANO CERTE STRONZATE?

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,458

What excites them is the promise that ‘difference’ means revolution,
Note:EPPURE C È CHO LEGE QUESTI LIBRI

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,460

syntax without semantics.
Note:NUOVO STILE ACCADEMICO

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,461

When real thought appears, it is out of context, shorn of its foundations, reduced to a scattering of uprooted technicalities.
Note:Cccccccfcfffff

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,465

Moreover, howsoever you build your career, one thing will be certain, you are ‘on the left’ politically, vindicated by all the righteous causes (whatever they might be) of the day, and therefore immune from serious criticism.
Ccccccc

HL 2 RESENTMENT IN BRITAIN: HOBSBAWM AND THOMPSON da finire - fatto HOB manca THOMP

2 RESENTMENT IN BRITAIN: HOBSBAWM AND THOMPSON
Note:2@@@@@@@@@@@@

Yellow highlight | Location: 590

It is a remarkable feature of the English reading public that it is always ready to treat historians as leaders in the world of ideas.
Note:POTERE ALLA STORIA

Yellow highlight | Location: 606

Hobsbawm has been much criticized, less for his communist sympathies than for his dogged loyalty to the Party throughout the exposure of its crimes, abandoning his membership only when he had no choice,
Note:UOMO DI PARTITO

Yellow highlight | Location: 612

his case also illustrates just how far you can go in collaborating with crime, when the crime is committed on the left. Crimes committed on the right receive no such absolution; and this tells us something important about left-wing movements, which seem to have the capacity assumed by religions, both to authorize crime and to wash the conscience of those who connive at it.
Note:CRIMINE

Yellow highlight | Location: 616

The Cambridge spies – Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt – betrayed many people to their deaths and, by revealing the identities of those East European patriots who were organizing resistance to the Nazis in the hope of a democratic, rather than a communist, future, they ensured that Stalin would be able to ‘liquidate’ the most important opponents of his planned advance into Eastern Europe.
Note:LUNGA VITA A STALIN

Yellow highlight | Location: 649

Born in Alexandria to Jewish parents, orphaned in childhood, and living in Berlin with the relatives who had adopted him, he suffered the trauma of Hitler’s rise to power in his most vulnerable years.
Note:SCUSATO

Yellow highlight | Location: 679

His four-volume history of the emergence of the modern world – The Age of Revolution 1789–1848, The Age of Capital 1848–1875, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914, and The Age of Extremes, 1914–1991 – is a remarkable work of synthesis, seriously misleading only in the fourth volume, where the attempt to whitewash the communist experiment and to lay the blame for all ills at the door of ‘capitalism’ has an aspect that is partly sinister, partly quaint.
Note:GIUDIZIO DI SINTESI SULL OPERA DI H

Yellow highlight | Location: 687

‘no serious discussion of history is possible which doesn’t refer back to Marx or, more exactly, which does not start where he starts. And that means, basically . . . a materialist conception of history.’
Note:LA PREMESSA DI H

Yellow highlight | Location: 690

Marx’s ‘materialist’ theory of history was a response to Hegel,
Note:PRIMA CONTAVANO DI PIÚ MORALE RELIGIONE COSCIENZA

Yellow highlight | Location: 692

It is ‘not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness

Yellow highlight | Location: 692

(The German Ideology).
Note:X MARX...E H

Yellow highlight | Location: 694

the basis of social life is likewise material, involving the production, distribution and exchange of goods.
Note:ECONOMIA COME ESSENZA...STRUTTURA

Yellow highlight | Location: 699

The social superstructure changes in response to the needs and opportunities of production,
Note:LA LEGGE

Yellow highlight | Location: 702

G. A. Cohen, in Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence.
Note:U GRANDE DIFENSORE CONTEMPORANEO DI QS ODEA

Yellow highlight | Location: 707

Consider the rise of the novel as an art form during the second half of the eighteenth century. This addressed the self-image of the emerging society, entrenching ideas of liberty and individual responsibility in the life-plans of the property-owning class.
Note:UN ESEMPIO

Yellow highlight | Location: 727

Marxist history is less an explanation than a shift of emphasis. Where others might study law, religion, art and family life, Marxists concentrate on the ‘material’ realities, which means the production of food,
Note:NO SPIEGAZIONE MA ENFASI

Yellow highlight | Location: 733

More interesting for Marxist historians of Hobsbawm’s generation has been the idea of class.
Note:VOGLIA DI FOMENTARE LA LOTTA DI CLASSE

Yellow highlight | Location: 737

the members of the proletariat form a class because they have shared economic interests, in particular the interest in breaking free from ‘wage slavery’

Note | Location: 738

NELL OTTICA MARXISTA

Yellow highlight | Location: 739

From those competing interests arises the ‘class struggle’,
Note:CONFLITTO MESSO AL CENTRO

Yellow highlight | Location: 743

when the consciousness of shared economic interests is itself also shared,
Note:IL PROMO PASSO VS LARIVOLUZ

Yellow highlight | Location: 746

rewrite the history of the British people as a history of ‘class struggle’.
Note:LA MSSIONE DI H

Note | Location: 756

PROSA DI CLASSE

Yellow highlight | Location: 757

‘parasites’ might equally have been described as merchants and tradesmen, and the ‘reactionary’ professions as the teachers, doctors and agents who, for all their faults, ensured that social capital was passed on and improved throughout the nineteenth century. As in every period, there must have been a few good people among them, including many averse to corruption.
Note:IL LINGUAGGIO DI H LO SMASCHERA

Yellow highlight | Location: 777

Marx famously predicted that wages would fall under capitalism,
Note:FATTI SCOMODI LEVATI DI MEZZO

Yellow highlight | Location: 778

Research has refuted this prediction, and shown that wages and living standards were, with a few hiccups, steadily rising throughout the Industrial Revolution.
Note:Ccccccccccc

Yellow highlight | Location: 780

Rather than accept this, and rewrite his history accordingly, Hobsbawm puts the whole issue in brackets,
Note:LA MOSSA

Yellow highlight | Location: 788

Marxist history means rewriting history with class at the top of the agenda. And it involves demonizing the upper class and romanticizing the lower.
Note:RISCRIVERE SECONDO QS MODELLO

Yellow highlight | Location: 791

debunking those sources of loyalty that tie ordinary people not to their class (as the Marxist doctrine requires) but to their nation and its traditions.
Note:LA MISSIONE DI H

Yellow highlight | Location: 797

To put the point in Marxist terms, the concept of class belongs to science, that of the nation to ideology.
Note:LA NAZIONE NN CONTA

Yellow highlight | Location: 799

Hence, in Nations and Nationalism since 1780 Hobsbawm sets out to show that nations are not the natural things they claim to be but inventions, designed to fabricate a specious loyalty to this or that prevailing political system. In The Invention of Tradition
Note:INVENZIONE DELLA TRADIZIONE

Yellow highlight | Location: 821

When challenged by the rise of Nazism this ‘nation for itself’ proved far more effective than the international solidarity of the proletariat, which showed itself, by contrast, to be a mere dream of the intellectuals.
Note:UN CASO CHECCONFUTA

Yellow highlight | Location: 824

Scottish country dancing and the highland kilt; the Lord Mayor’s procession and the Ceremony of Nine Lessons and Carols; the uniforms and customs of the county regiments – all such things are of course the product of the imagination.
Note:GLI ESEMPI SCELTI DA H

Yellow highlight | Location: 826

imagination also provides us with symbols of a deep and lasting reality; and those particular examples of ‘tradition for itself’ are of little significance when set beside the ‘tradition in itself’
Note:LA CRITICA A H

Yellow highlight | Location: 828

the example that, properly understood, leaves the Marxist theory of history in ruins: the common law of the English-speaking people.
Note:L ESEMPIO CRUCIALE...DI TRADIZIONE MILLENARIA

Yellow highlight | Location: 837

the liturgy of the Catholic communions, diatonic tonality in music, the symphony orchestra and the brass band, the pas de Basque in formation dances, the two–piece suit and tie,11 the offices of Parliament, the crown, the knife and fork, sauce béarnaise, greetings such as Grüß Gott and sabah an-noor, grace before meals, manners, honour in peace and in war.
Note:ALTRE TRADIZIONI AUTENTICHE

Yellow highlight | Location: 845

Hobsbawm does not describe Lenin’s policies in detail, but summarizes them in Marxist Newspeak.
Note:ALTRO PUNTO DEBOLE DI H....LIBRI IV TOMO THE AGE OF EXTREDMES

Yellow highlight | Location: 846

Lenin acted on behalf of ‘the masses’,
Note:LA TESI DI H

Yellow highlight | Location: 848

the ability to recognize what the masses wanted . . . ’ (p. 61),
Note:L ABILITÀ DI LENIN

Yellow highlight | Location: 849

Hobsbawm brushes away the question of who the ‘masses’ were, and whether they really called for the violence

Note | Location: 850

LACUNA

Yellow highlight | Location: 851

‘Who – he said so often enough – could imagine that the victory of socialism “can come about . . . except by the complete destruction of the Russian and European bourgeoisie”?’
Note:LE PAROLE DI L CHE H MINIMIZZA MA DA CUI È EVIDENTE UN PROGETTO

Yellow highlight | Location: 857

Whatever the Bolsheviks did was achieved by ‘the necessarily ruthless and disciplined army of human emancipation’ (p. 72),
Note:CRUDELTÀ GIUSTIFICATA

Yellow highlight | Location: 860

Marxist history does not bother with things like law and judicial process, Hobsbawm sees no need to mention Lenin’s decree of 21 November 1917, which abrogated the courts,
Note:E CHE STRANI MEZZI X EMANCIPARSI

Yellow highlight | Location: 863

Lenin’s founding of the Cheka, precursor of the KGB, and his empowering it to use all the terrorist methods required in order to express the will of the ‘masses’ against that of mere people, is of course not mentioned. Nor is the famine of 1921, the first of three man-made famines in early Soviet history, used by Lenin in order to impose the will of the ‘masses’ on those recalcitrant Ukrainian peasants
Note:L OMESSO

Yellow highlight | Location: 867

Reading these pages of The Age of Extremes I found myself astonished that the book had not been dismissed as a scandal of the same order as David Irving’s whitewash of the Holocaust.
Note:IL DAVID IRVING ROSSO...PRATICAMENTE UN NEGAZIONISTA

Yellow highlight | Location: 869

committed
DA FINIRE CON TOMPSON....ARRIVATI FINO A HABSBAWN

MALEDETTI FRANCESI: IL MERAVIGLIOSO MONDO DELLA FILOSOFIA

IL MERAVIGLIOSO MONDO DELLA FILOSOFIA FRANCESE

Ma guardate come il genio ipnotico di Louis Althusser riesce ad esporre il seguente concetto: "per comprendere un argomento occorre capire il suo significato”. La parola al visionario logoteta:

“… Comprendere un argomento ideologico implica, al livello stesso dell'ideologia, una conoscenza simultanea e congiunta del campo ideologico in cui un pensiero emerge e cresce; nonché l'esposizione dell'unità interna di questo pensiero: ovvero la sua problematica. La conoscenza del campo ideologico stesso presuppone la conoscenza delle problematiche aggravate o opposte ad essa. L'interrelazione della particolare problematica del pensiero dell'individuo in esame con le particolari problematiche dei pensieri appartenenti al campo ideologico consente di prendere una decisione sulla differenza specifica dell'autore, cioè di vagliare se sia emerso un nuovo significato…”

4. Origini della sinistra francese.

cattolici impazienti. cattolici del qui ed ora. cattolici patriottici. figura chiave Peguy. giovanna d'arco la guerriera. maritain prosegue l'opera.

un movimento corrispondente ma ateo: charles murras.antisemitismo. brasillach. drieu. celine... figure tipiche. eroi della prima guerra senza arte nè partew. vite disordinate. fascio/comunisti. disgusto per la vita. gusto per la morte.noia, nostalgia.

 la coscienza sporca dell'intellettuale francese. reazioni al libro nero.

libro nero. denuncia delle leggerezze. denincia del condono etico. identità nazi/com.

la girandola intellettuale. tutti comunisti per reazione.

figura chiave kojeve. lezioni su hegel nei 30. una spia?. di certo uno stalinista.

hegel. dialettica della libertà. necessità di un nemico a cui contrapprsi. autocoscienza. chi sono?libertà come autocoscienza. autocoscienza nell'impegno sociale.

per la de bouvoir il nemico è il maschio e il patriarcato. per bataille la sessualità oggettivata. per lacan la dialettica diventa specchio e oggettivizzazione del soggetto. k. insegna a collegare marx con hegel.

sartre. rielaborazione del concetto di autenticità. debito con heidegger.  mai membro pcf. odio per le istituzioni. sempre a supporto, comunque. di fatto uno stalinista brutale. utopico e miope. voglia di cecità.

il romanzo la nausea. protagonista pieno di disgusto. il non-io prende il posto dell' altro di kojeve. l'altro è il borghese. borghese, famiglia, stato, filisteismo, religione.come rispondere? con l'abnegazione! contro aristotele. è l'esistenza che precede l'essenza, non viceversa. siamo dei creatori di essenze. non c'è una natura umana. primato dell'esistente. la coscienza è intenzionale. teorizzazione dell'impegno. dell'impegno politico in primis.

dall'autenticità all'impegno politico.

sartre e agostino. contro il mondo e i suoi piaceri. ansia di esserci ancora dentro.

il carattere religioso dell'impegno sartriano. aron, il marxismo come sostituto della religione perduta

il marxismo abolisce la realtà in favore dell'idea.

marxismo in salsa kantiana: l'imperativo categorico un giorno s'imporrà. utopia.

la totalizzazione. l'integrità dell'uomo. accusa al capitalismo: ci frantuma in tante parti. lukas. la catena di montaggio. integralismo marxista e religioso. altra fonte: il fascismo. gentile.

l'impegno totale acceca. le crudeltà dell'urss giustificate. lo richiede il contesto.

Riccardo Mariani

56 min · 

Amazon

 · 

Parole insospettabili che la storia ci ha insegnato a temere: autenticità, integrità, autocoscienza, impegno, antifascismo, dialettica, borghese, indignazione, disgusto, utopia, patriarcato, esistenza…

#Amazon

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

The thinkers who have been most influential on the attitudes of the New Left are examined in this study by one of the leading critics of leftist orientations in modern Western civilization. Scruton begins with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and…

AMAZON.IT

La macchina del non senso

Qual è il guaio della Sinistra? I suoi intellettuali.

Prendete il catalogo di saggistica Einaudi (una prestigiosa casa editrice con una chiara storia di militanza): metà è da buttare, e sono generoso. E un caso? No.

Roger Scruton (Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left) cerca di mappare il ciarpame prodotto da certa intellighenzia. E’ ammirevole il coraggio con cui mette le mani nella discarica:

… for example the stunning ‘nonsense machine’ invented by Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, the scorched-earth attack on our ‘colonial’ inheritance by Edward Said, and the recent revival of ‘the communist hypothesis’ by Badiou and Žižek…

L’ autore ha un dubbio:

… there is more to Habermas’s theory of communicative action than his inability to communicate it?…

Non si capisce perché classificare la discarica “di sinistra” e parlare quindi di Intellettuale di Sinistra (IS) accomunando cose eterogene. Scruton ha una risposta:

… Why, therefore, use the word ‘left’ to describe the writers considered? Why use a single term to cover anarchists like Foucault, Marxist dogmatists like Althusser, exuberant nihilists like Žižek and American-style liberals like Dworkin and Rorty? The reason is twofold: first the thinkers I discuss have identified themselves by that very term. Second, they illustrate an enduring outlook on the world, and one that has been a permanent feature of Western civilization at least since the Enlightenment, nourished by the elaborate social and political theories that I shall have occasion to discuss in what follows…

La caduta del Muro ha fatto sperare che questa creatura molesta (IS) ci avesse liberato della sua presenza. Speranza vana, dopo pochi anni è tornato alla grande:

… Within a decade the left establishment was back in the driving seat, with Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn renewing their intemperate denunciations of America, the European left regrouped against ‘neo-liberalism’, as though this had been the trouble all along, Dworkin and Habermas collecting prestigious prizes for their barely readable but impeccably orthodox books, and the veteran communist Eric Hobsbawm rewarded for a lifetime of unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union by his appointment as ‘Companion of Honour’ to the Queen…

Sebbene IS ami la rivoluzione, non manca in lui la vena del burocrate (recentemente riscoperta grazie alla manna della cultura sussidiata):

But for whatever cause, left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture…

La critica al neo-liberismo è ormai un filone che tira più del fantasy:

…As a result, books critical of market economics began to enjoy a new popularity, whether reminding us that real goods are not exchangeable (Michael Sandel: What Money Can’t Buy) or arguing that markets, in current conditions, cause a massive transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest (Joseph Stiglitz: The Price of Inequality, and Thomas Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-first Century)…

Oltre a non funzionare, il neo-liberismo (naturalmente con spesa pubblica al 50%) ci degrada moralmente:

… And from the ever-fertile source of Marxist humanism thinkers extracted new arguments to describe the moral and spiritual degradation of humanity in the condition of free exchange (Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, L’esthétisation du monde: vivre à l’âge du capitalisme artiste; Naomi Klein, No Logo; Philip Roscoe, I Spend, Therefore I Am)…

La storia raccontata dall’ Intellettuale di Sinistra è una storia di Buoni contro Cattivi, forse è per questo che non convince i più avveduti:

… Leftists believe, with the Jacobins of the French Revolution, that the goods of this world are unjustly distributed, and that the fault lies not in human nature but in usurpations practised by a dominant class. They define themselves in opposition to established power, the champions of a new order that will rectify the ancient grievance of the oppressed…

Il potere è sempre malvagio quindi criticando non sbagli mai. Nemmeno le vittime non finiscono mai quindi il facendo del vittimismo non sbagli mai. La loro liberazione è una faticaccia infinita, l’ IS non rischia certo la disoccupazione:

This literature, seen at its most fertile in the writings of Foucault, represents as ‘structures of domination’ what others see merely as the instruments of civil order. Liberation of the victim is a restless cause, since new victims always appear over the horizon as the last ones escape into the void…

L’agenda rinnovata dell’ IS (lo schema è sempre quello marxista) basta inserire nuovi soggetti):

… The liberation of women from male oppression, of animals from human abuse, of homosexuals and transsexuals from ‘homophobia’, even of Muslims from ‘Islamophobia’ – all these have been absorbed into the more recent leftist agendas…

Peccato per quella cattiva convivenza tra eguaglianza e libertà: oggi come ieri è il sassolino nella scarpa dell’IS:

… The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them?…

Fortunatamente, contro le difficoltà teoriche, l’ IS ha forgiato un’arma segreta: il diritto a non spiegarsi. Tanto la storia è con lui, questo fin dai tempi di Marx:

… Marx dismissed the various socialisms current in his day as ‘utopian’, contrasting ‘utopian socialism’ with his own ‘scientific socialism’ that promised ‘full communism’ as its predictable outcome. The ‘historical inevitability’ of this condition relieved Marx of the necessity to describe it…

Ovviamente una storia di “buonicontrocattivi” finisce con l’ “evisserofeliciecontenti”: Marx lui no, non era utopico, lui era sc-sc-scientifico:

There will be no division of labour and each person will live out the full range of his needs and desires, ‘hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, tending cattle in the evening and engaging in literary criticism after dinner’…

Ma finché IS fantastica nella sua cameretta nulla di male, i guai cominciano quando esce e intende realizzare l’impossibile: a quanto pare occorre un bel po’ di violenza per assecondare il normale cammino della storia:

The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible….

Concentrato sull’utopia IS ha avuto l’accortezza di inserire tra i diritti umani quello di non rispondere alle obiezioni mosse:

Marx’s theory of history had been put in question by Maitland, Weber and Sombart; his labour theory of value by Böhm-Bawerk, Mises, and many more; his theories of false consciousness, alienation and class struggle by a whole range of thinkers, from Mallock and Sombart to Popper, Hayek and Aron. Not all those critics could be placed on the right of the political spectrum, nor had they all been hostile to the idea of ‘social justice’. Yet none of them, so far as I could discover when I came to write this book, had been answered…

Perché perdere tempo con risposte e spiegazioni quando abbiamo stabilito che la verità non esiste e che è tutto un gioco di potere?

… The theories of the rule of law, the separation of powers, the right of property, and so on, as these had been expounded by ‘bourgeois’ thinkers like Montesquieu and Hegel, were shown, by the Marxian class analysis, to be not truth-seeking but power-seeking devices…

Se “obiezioni” e “spiegazioni” sono fuori gioco, questo non deve ritenersi per il “mito”, che invece è centrale nella messa a punto della dogmatica di sinistra. Ecco un esempio preclaro:

Since the class-theory is a genuine science, bourgeois political thought is ideology. And since the class-theory exposes bourgeois thought as ideology, it must be science. We have entered the magic circle of a creation myth…

Il diritto a non rispondere alle obiezioni, il diritto a non spiegarsi hanno fatto dell’ IS un vero illuminato d’altri tempi:

This Gnostic revelation was so clear that no argument was necessary, and no argument possible, that would provide it with a justifying proof. All that mattered was to distinguish those who shared the vision from those who dissented… It is this feature that justifies the charge made by Eric Voegelin, Alain Besançon and others, that Marxism is a kind of Gnosticism, a title to ‘government through knowledge’…

Naturalmente a un tipo del genere spetta un posto di tutto rilievo:

…Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.

Un’ altra arma segreta della New Left è la centralità delle “parole” (ovvero: i fatti sono secondari). Nulla di nuovo sotto il sole:

… the communist conviction that you could change reality by changing words…

La nuova rivoluzione sarà una congiura parolaia:

… They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance. As a result Newspeak developed its own special syntax, which – while closely related to the syntax deployed in ordinary descriptions – carefully avoids any encounter with reality or any exposure to the logic of rational argument…

L’ IS sa bene come bisogna lavorare sodo per respingere un nemico quanto mai insidioso:

… to protect ideology from the malicious attacks of real things…

Noi siamo “parlati”, solo l’IS “parla”. Noi non contiamo, contano le forze parolaie che ci manipolano:

… Newspeak prefers to speak of forces, classes and the march of history, and regards the actions of Great Men as acceptable subjects for discussion only because Great Men, like Napoleon, Lenin and Hitler, are really the expression of abstract forces, such as imperialism, revolutionary socialism and fascism…

Quando i fatti s’incaricano di smentire l’ IS, lui come reagisce? Di solito con l’arroganza del risentito, in questi casi adotta Nietzsche come nume tutelare:

… Looked at with the superman superciliousness of Nietzsche, resentment may seem like the bitter dregs of the ‘slave morality’, the impoverished loss of spirit that comes about when people take more pleasure in bringing others down than in raising themselves up…

In casi del genere è necessario annichilire tutto: i fatti non esistono. IS si trasforma in Mefistofele:

… call to mind the words of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, when called upon to explain himself: Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint – I am the spirit who always denies, the one who reduces Something to Nothing, and who thereby undoes the work of creation. This essential negativity can be perceived in many of the writers whom I discuss…

Come non sentire in molti IS la “voce del nulla”?:

And when, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had ‘capitalism’ as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice…

CONCLUSIONI PERSONALE

Scrivere questo post è stata una passeggiata, il tono sarcastico è il più facile da mantenere, non richiede sforzi, tutto fluisce naturalmente. Ma forse proprio lì casca l’asino.

Il libro di Scruton è meticoloso, brillante, chiarificatore, semplice, credibile, verosimile, ha letto tutto cio’ di cui parla (impresa titanica)… ma è anche il tipico libro che ho deciso di non leggere più: manca del principio di carità. Se si puo’ parlare in modo costruttivo di Hitler e delle molte cose ammirevoli proprie della società che ha forgiato, si potrà salvare qualcosa nell’opera di Althusser? E vabbè, ogni tanto bisogna prendere un po’ di ossigeno, le mie viscere pensano in realtà proprio quello che Scruton dice a chiare lettere e ogni tanto è mio diritto farle sfogare. Prometto però in futuro di non indulgere troppo a queste pratiche, e nel frattempo mi dissocio sia dal libro che dal post (nonostante le viscere).