Activity: Academic Talks or Presentations › Invited talk › Research
Description
Democracy (even radical democracy) should not be thought of as simply liberating ‘the political’ as such, but rather as something that gives rise to a specific historical spirit of the political. In the terms of Luhmann, the political becomes part of the autopoietic and ‘necessitarian’ development of the systemic whole. The liberal-capitalist-democratic imagination and its attempts to realise a world order, for example, shows how the dominant paradigm is speculatively engaging with its inherent Othering and trying to take its own dissonances and counter-forces into account. Thus the ‘contingent’ antagonisms of terrorism, civilization clashes and so on, are presented as the ongoing birth pangs in the inevitable development of a global system. It is precisely this necessity that is reflected in George Bush’s view that freedom and democracy are ‘God’s gift to humanity’ (the dispensing of which falls, of course, to America – God’s ultimate witness).
Period
27 Jun 2010
Event title
‘The Philosophical Idea of Communism’ (with Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou),