Jacobin: "Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia"

Can you clarify what exactly you dislike about this article so much?

It was philosophical autism that, like post-modernism, did almost nothing good.

Yeah exactly. I liked this article a lot of the Left's problems stem from having abandoned enlightenment era values; race/gender tribalism, misanthropic everyone is stupid attitude, lack of a coherent vision, feels>reals.

Postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism.

Good riddance.

Enlightenment philosophy was the foundation of liberal thought. Locke, Hobbes, Burke, and all the other early capitalist thinkers were Enlightenment philosophers. Going back there is as stupid as going back to the Classical Greeks.

Criticising post-modernism and deciding that going back to enlightment basics is a rational step to combat this philosophical plague. Ofc you shouldnt go full Enlightment, but there rests the basis on which we have to combat post-modernism.

Both classical greeks and enlightment philosophers have been abandoned in favour of incoherent post modernist babbeling. Going back to the basics to reground the discourse is necessary.

It was sublated into Hegel who not only salvaged the best of the Enlightenment's idealism (the Enlightenment proudly wore its badge of idealism) by conceiving of absolute idealism, but Hegel also marked the end of the Enlightenment in this way, and classical Enlightenment thinking has been entirely obsoleted ever since.

Enlightenment as in maybe the specific disciplinary form Zizek for example advocates I can live with, even support, but a general return to Enlightenment thinking is worthless.

It doesn't help that we have idiots like:

who think everything that happened between the end of the Enlightenment and the late '70s was
when, if anything, post-Enlightenment/pre-PoMo era philosophy was inarguably the most reals > feels we've ever had.

For someone who is a supposed philosopher you have shockingly bad reading comprehension. I said abandoning enlightenment era values namely a universalizing vision and reliance on reason has served the left badly and led to those things. In no way does my post imply that
race/gender tribalism, misanthropic everyone is stupid attitude, lack of a coherent vision, feels reals

The Enlightenment was pretty bad for basically everyone who wasn't a member of the bourgeoisie.

I would rather live in a capitalist parliamentary democracy then a monarchy.

It was good for everyone, capitalism is not inseperable from enlightment thought.

that's not how you link retard

Nothing wrong with being a front for the dsa

Serfs had better lives than proles during real capitalism (i.e. capitalism during the 19th and early 20th centuries.) You have been brainwashed by capitalist historical revisionism. Obviously capitalist was a good thing from a historical perspective (as it leads us one step closer to communism) however the change itself made things a lot worse for the average laborer.

Daily reminder faucolt said there was no such thing as post modernism. It's literally just a buzzword

Neither the Platonists nor the early liberals are "the basics." That's not how philosophy works. It is not like technological development that keeps advancing.

Read Hegel.

Its more like a puzzle, you need the relevant pieces if you want the whole picture.

I don't like to fancy myself a philosopher because I'm just an autodidact who's read a lot.

This appeared to imply that because the value of universalism (which we find out was not very universal post-Enlightenment by investigating its prerogatives, but I digress) was solidified under the Enlightenment and abandoned in PoMo for localist narratives, that a return to Enlightenment thinking is necessary to salvage universalism. The even bigger problem here would be that the pillar of the Enlightenment was idealism, which is something we desperately don't want to return to if we're abandoning the crypto-idealism of post-modernism. Only a couple of good Enlightenment-era thinkers were dualists and but a few were materialists, and only materialists of the "mechanical" type (Stewart, Diderot).

Don't think this is much of a case against the Enlightenment. As much as I'm against Enlightenment thinking, one can very well detach philosophical principles from an era.

Liberal thought is also the foundation of socialist thought. Do not forget the roots of socialism, for it is the heir of philosophical liberalism.

In general one could say that we all should read more Marx?

That's my two cents, yeah.

I'm currently investigating Lacan because Zizek says his thinking has massive potential for the left but I'm only through a single introduction with two more to go. I thought he was another esotericist because all I'd heard of him before was Chomsky's salty opinions on his linguistic theories, but reading him myself and PDF related shows that he was actually very coherent and a materialist in everything but name (p. 119-124 argues for late Lacan essentially being a materialist, fully compatible with the Marxist view of things).

You should ignore Zizek, but still study Lacan. Zizek is dumb opportunist who cites Chang and Halliday, Badiou is Maoist Grandpa and good.

No, Enlightenment philosophy is not the foundation. That would imply that socialism uses its principles as its underpinnings, which is not the case. It is more like a different school of thought with some similar aspects to socialism.

Literally whom'st?

Marxist humanists are beyond okay. I found out the hard way by actually exposing myself to amazing MarxHums like Dunayevskaya and Kliman.

This confuses me tho fam. Badiou considers Lacan an anti-philosopher and Johnston's book (PDF I posted) goes into detail about the debate between him and Zizek on the subject of Lacan, where Badiou unequivocally suggests we discard Lacan.

I meant this Chang and Halliday:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao:_The_Unknown_Story

Actually Zizek is good when writing about Lacan and Hegel but his politics are really bad. He basically will say anything provocative to get paid, which is why Verso published editions of Lenin, Mao, and Che with his terrible introductions that cite anti-communist propaganda.

I never said that, I said that socialism is the heir of philosophical liberalism, which it is.

Socialism is about accomplishing the promises that liberalism failed to give.

Any idea where I might get an ebook of the Jorjani's book (Prometheus and Atlas) mentioned in the article? none of the usual places give me any results.

I'm really interested to see how spooked this individual is, consider this excerpt I found on some blog:

I mean, can't we read this as an eminently Zizekian/post-Althusserian insight (albeit an obvious one)? It almost reads as the criticism Zizek has apropos Lenin's empiriocriticism:

And yet we know Jorjani is no materialist, he's going for something completely different here (feels > reals, basically), so again, I'm really puzzled and thinking, hey, maybe I could get a good laugh here.

There is another reason: as a good Althusserian, I consider of the utmost importance that we become experts in Jorjani's philosophy (and the philosphy of the aut-right, by extension) in order to defeat it as good old Althusser would say.

Reminder: both Badiou and Zizek is a return to enlightenment without abandoning some of the radical critique produced by the new left.

"Abandoning" either is anti-intellectual.

This isn't new.

This is basically Schelling's criticism of Fichte and Kant. Why is this being classified as PoMo?

I think these "Dark Enlightenment" figures trying to rehabilitate a criticism of enlightenment found some of that in Schelling.

That second greentext quote was Zizek's, no Jorjani, sorry if I wasn't being clear.

This article makes me angry because it abuses and misinterprets the Shuja Haider article that ended up on Jacobin, probably in my top 5 for stuff Jacobin's put out.

Haider got shit from libs who tried to interpret what he wrote as saying that liberal arts or social justice movements "caused" or "were the same as" alt-right idpol, which he categorically denied. This article takes the lib misinterpretation/willfully un-generous reading to be the actual argument to try to put forth its own.

Ironically, this article heavily leans on a sly use of death of the author to argue against PoMo. Not very Enlightenment of you, guys!

Jason Jorjani will complete the system of German idealism.

...

Pussy destroyer

...

I always wondered if this pic was set-up, if it's satirizing neo-reactionaries, or what. No nigga can be that serious.

Why are you surprised?

I agree with Jacobin that postmodernism is extremely compatible with far-right thought.

I think the freedoms promised by the enlightenment are worth defending, but I'm not a liberal because liberalism offers said freedom in practice to a small minority; if speech hostile to elites gets you blackballed or fired, if major platforms are privately owned with barriers to entry beyond the reach of the overwhelming majority of people, then freedom of speech only exists for the bourgeoisie. (And so it is with other enlightenment rights.)

Even if I disagreed with this article, however, it'd be far from the dumbest thing Jacobin had ever written. These guys joined the "save al-Qaeda from the baby killer Assad in Aleppo" drumbeat, for fuck's sake.

I don't see how what you quoted endorses the lib misinterpretation of Shuda's article at all. Its just saying reactionaries have appropriated liberal idpols rhetoric and vocabulary not that they are equivalent or that one caused the the other.

Incidentally, here's what that Archon nitwit has to say about it: everyjoe.com/2017/03/13/politics/will-alt-right-make-left-embrace-enlightenment/

You might remember that name from a Pastebin list circulated around GG "proving that cultural Marxism is REAL" which consists of the then-first page of Google Scholar results for "cultural Marxism".

Haider may not believe that social justice movements caused or have significant similarities with alt-right idpol, but it's still true.

I agree, but people would lose there fucking minds if Jacobin published something saying this can you imagine the responses.

You're right, but I want idpolers to lose their fucking minds at Jacobin. :^)

I understand why Jacobin might not want it, but I think that kind of open break is needed for the left; we'd gain much more people that way than we'd lose.

Eh, that was very good for Jacobin standards.

I disagree with it (I'm on >>1468095's side here), but it's coherent and raising important points that have so far eluded mainstream leftist zeitgeist.

is that kantbot?