three paragraphs to E
True my metapolitics has always caused difficulties in this long term exchange, I agree that it marks perhaps the primary difference in our cultural, social and philosophical unsdertandings, at least if we ignore the related but more ontological issues of difference/equivalence. It’s not just the underlying belief that to understand, act and live within capitalism we must maintain our connection with Marxism, but also the lesson from Deleuze and 68 is that everything is political or in the softer version ‘maybe’. But still your right the core difference remains the marxism.
What the ‘different uses’ suggests to me is the opposite, that in the de-authored world of texts that I live in where Heidegger as a person is a facist madman but where the texts may be raided and used in the toolbox sense that Deleuze proposes and which I’m advocating with the idea of ‘use’, the texts may be useful. That ‘different uses’ is always political is I think independent of either the strong sense or the weak sense, though clearly I advocate the strong sense of the understanding where the political is not to be considered as being solely the domain of the human and where the restricted subset of the political which is generally advocated as a reflection of the world we live in is rejected.
The point of disagreement over the last paragraph is not in relation to the construction of a global socialist order, whatever we think this might be. But rather the difference is that you’ve had 30 years to have that discussion, to move things forward to allow and use the experimentation and compromise that Lyotard describes and argues for. To present and even construct philosophy as a place where this discussion can take place to arrive a suitable postmodern compromise… But it hasn’t happened. Instead there has been a continuing retreat so that what was once reactionary has become acceptable, has become the new norm, new fascisms sit on the horizon unquestioned, just waiting for their moment… So no - I think its time that we did something different; extend the space which is political into something broader and more all-encompassing, including not just the entirity of the everyday but beyond this into the longer term dreams of autonomy.
