[D66] PDF: Politics without politics

[A.O.]

PDF: Essay Politics without politics uit: The Writing on the Wall,
Anselm Jappe.


[...]

Contemporary advocates of “politics” distort the original goal of
“action” because they reduce it to mere tinkering with a machine come to
be accepted as such. Today, “action” must face situations that are far
too serious to be confronted with the outdated means of politics. The
new arena is that of a real anthropological transformation, which is
both the result of over two centuries of capitalism and, in the course
of the last few decades, of its increasingly visible programmed
self-destruction.
This regression is leading to barbarisation. Given the increasing
frequency of incidents such as the one involving teenagers who laughed
as they used a camera phone to film a dead female classmate of theirs
who had just been run over by a bus so that they could later upload the
video to YouTube, it is somewhat inadequate to resort to unemployment,
the casualisation of labour or the shortcomings of our schools by way of
explanation. Rather, we are witnessing a generalised, albeit
inconsistent, “anthropological regression” which appears to be the
product of a deep-seated collective mental disorder, of a narcissistic
psychosis bequeathed by commodity fetishism and the relation it imposes
on the way individuals interact with the world. No one can honestly
offer any effective short-term remedies in the face of this crisis of
civilisation. Indeed, precisely because the situation is so serious,
calls in the circumstances to do something, anything, right now, on the
grounds that there is zero time for discussion and that praxis is better
than theory, tend only to aggravate matters. In this age of financial
and molecular capitalism, Fordist-era forms of opposition will simply
not do.

[...]
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: politicswithoutpolitics-jappe.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 96780 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.tuxtown.net/pipermail/d66/attachments/20180902/95b831e4/attachment-0001.pdf>