Simon Critchley's Blog, page 2

Occupy and the Arab spring will continue to revitalise political protest | Simon Critchley

Disaffected by a politics that only serves power, the people are reclaiming democracy. Where next to occupy – the Olympics?

The Arab spring, notably in Egypt and Syria, seems to be running out of steam. The vivacious drive of the Occupy movement has faltered and it is not clear what new life will appear. Can popular protest regain its energy and inspiration, or is that it?

Rather than retreating into the comfort of despair or cynicism, perhaps this is a moment in which we can try and gain a broader view of matters.

Power is the ability to get things done. Politics is the means to get those things done. Democracy is the name for regimes that believe that power and politics coincide and that power lies with the people. The problem, as Zygmunt Bauman has reminded us, is that power and politics have become divorced. What we call democracy has become a sham. Power has evaporated into the supra-national spaces of finance, trade and information platforms, but also the spaces of drug trafficking, human trafficking and immigration – the many boats that cross the Mediterranean and other seas.

But the space of politics has remained the same as it has for centuries, localised in the nation state with its prosaic variations of representative, liberal democracy. Politics still feels local – we might feel British or Greek or whatever – but it isn't. Normal state politics simply serves the interests of supra-national power. Sovereignty has been outsourced.

The premise of western representative democracy is the following: citizens exercise political power through voting; representatives are elected; governments are formed and these governments have power to get things done, a power identical to the will of the people.

The belief that many of us had (or perhaps still have) is that if we work for a certain party, then we can win an election, form a government, and have the power to change things. But every day this is proven to be wrong.

Take Greece, where last November the former prime minister George Papandreou had the idea of holding a referendum to ratify a eurozone bailout deal negotiated at an EU summit in Nice. It was a democratic gesture of a rather old-fashioned kind. Of course, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy were appalled because they knew that such a popular referendum showed a deep misunderstanding of the nature of contemporary political reality. Contemporary power is not the people and is not located in local or national governments. It lies elsewhere, with the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the interests of various financial institutions that the European states serve. How could Papandreou be so naive?

Now we have unelected governments of technocrats in Greece and Italy, and elected technocrats elsewhere. At this point in history, representative liberal democracy is no more than a kind of ideological birdsong. Politics does not have power. It serves power. And power is supra-political and out of the reach of common citizens.

The casualty of this separation of politics and power is the state. The state has become eviscerated, discredited, its credit rating has been slashed. Greece is only a slightly more extreme example of the situation here in the US, where I live, and elsewhere, in Britain, say. The state is in a state.

So what do we do? The answer is surprisingly simple. We have to take politics back from the political class through confrontation with the power of finance capital and the international status quo – the people who, little more than a year ago, were insisting the Egyptian government was stable. What was so admirable about the various social movements that we all too glibly called "the Arab spring" was their courageous intention to reclaim autonomy and political self-determination.

The protestors in Tahrir Square refused to live in dictatorships propped up to serve the interests of western capital and corrupt local elites. They wanted to reclaim ownership of the means of production, for example through the nationalisation of major state industries. The various movements in north Africa and the Middle East still aim at one thing: autonomy. They demand collective ownership of the places where one lives, works, thinks and plays. This is the most classical and basic goal of politics.

The Occupy movement is fascinating from the standpoint of the separation of politics and power. To be with the Occupy protestors when the chant went up, "this is what democracy looks like", was really powerful, as was the way in which they conducted general assemblies peacefully, horizontally and non-coercively.

The movement tried to remake direct democracy, with a mixture of the old – concepts such as assembly, consensus and autonomy – and the new, with Twitter feeds and mobile demonstrations organised through messenger services. It has yielded a period of massive political creativity.

It is important to remember that the separation between politics and power did not happen by chance or through the quasi-automatic movement of capitalism. It happened with the connivance of generations of politicians, such as Tony Blair, who embraced free-market capitalism as the engine of growth and personal gain. It has led to a situation where the state, and the entire political class, are discredited.

Occupy is the becoming-conscious of a deep disaffection with normal politics, particularly among the young. And perhaps it is the phenomenon of politicised, radicalised youth that – after two decades of postmodern irony and posturing hipster knowingness – is so striking and exciting.

True politics requires at least two elements: first, a demand, what I call an infinite demand that flows from the perception of an injustice; second, a location where that demand is articulated. There is no politics without location.

If the nation state or the supra-national sphere is not a location for politics, then the task is to create a location. This is the logic of occupation. The Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park taught us that much. Otherwise, we are doomed to the abstraction of demonstration and protest. The other thing it taught us is the unpredictable character of location.

It is unclear how the different elements of the Occupy movement will develop. But they certainly will – this genie of popular protest cannot be put back in its bottle. But what it requires is a location or, better, a network of interconnected sites.

So what is the next location? Where to occupy next? It is not for old men like me to offer advice, but a massive occupation of Olympic sites in London in order to stop the dreadful, sad jingoism of the whole tiresome spectacle would be nice.

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New thinking is needed about September 11 | Brad Evans and Simon Critchley

The political response to 9/11 has been pitiful. A new series invites leading thinkers to challenge conventional narratives

The 10 year distance from the attacks of 11 September 2001 gives us an opportunity to reflect on the significance of that day's violence. Common sense asserts that our world is changed for ever because of 9/11. But if true, shouldn't we have spent more time considering the stakes of the event? The attacks were abhorrent and criminal, but our response so far represents a profound failure of the political imagination.

The many human faces to the tragedy provided a passing glimpse into a genuine ethical response mobilised by grief. But all too quickly the mourning ended as matters turned to the usual militarism. The invasion of Afghanistan, the illegal bombardment of Iraq, the establishment of torture camps and, most recently, the execution of Osama bin Laden.

Perhaps this shouldn't surprise. Despite paying lip-service to global security, peace and justice, the west's history is marked by violence against those who refuse to capitulate to it. After 9/11, Giorgio Agamben wrote that security was fast becoming the main criterion of political legitimacy. Elections would be won on claims to protect domestic populations from rogue elements. This means taking the fight to enemies who, it seems, hate our existence. But when this happens, the state can itself become a terrorist entity.

Our political response has been pitiful. The left accuses the right of suffocating politics by taking advantage of so-called "exceptional" conditions. The right accuses the left of blindness to the ideological dangers of Islamo-fascism. The left condemns the unmediated abuse of power, but supports or remains silent on Nato-led violence. The right draws connections between Islam and one of the most shameful episodes in modern history to justify violence.

Without trying to critically understand why people support the wilful oppression and slaughter of "others" – especially within the shallow remit of international "norms" – our justification to control through violence is rarely questioned.

Modern politics is infected by a utilitarian mindset that bets the future against the present. "Our present actions are justified because they will make the world a better place" is a hypothesis that cannot be disproved. But these supposedly reasoned deliberations have underwritten the collateral slaughter of millions. Nor can they answer these questions: when is too much killing enough, and how many deaths must there be before a well-intentioned action loses its moral credibility?

We require new ethical ways of thinking about living in a radically interconnected world.

The University of Leeds is attempting to contribute to just such a debate by inviting some of the world's foremost thinkers to reflect critically on 10 Years of Terror. You can see some of these responses on Comment is free, starting today with Noam Chomsky. We are not trying to establish the definitive truth about 9/11 and subsequent events, but instead want to challenge conventional narratives that tend to receive widespread media attention, in the process offering new critical thinking on an ongoing problem.

• The full lectures will be available on 11 September at the Histories of Violence project at the University of Leeds: historiesofviolence.com. An edited compilation will be screened at the Guggenheim museum in New York on 9, 12 and 13 September

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Ideas for modern living: the future

Those who don't learn from the past are condemned to repeat it, we learn again and again

What will be the defining issues of the coming decade? Consider the following three trends. First, ever-growing environmental devastation. Second, continuing growth of the already cavernous social inequalities between the rich and the poor that lead the rich to fear the poor and live in seclusion from them. Third, the further erosion of any remaining faith in liberal democracy and the precipitous slide away from "democratic capitalism".

If one has an interest in confronting and even reversing these three trends, then what is to be done? The first step is a systematic avoidance of the question of the future. That is, we have to resist the idea and ideology of the future, which is always the ultimate trump card of capitalist narratives of progress.

But in the name of what? How about in the name of the radical potentiality of the past and the way the past impacts on what we find possible in the present.

Revolution, as Walter Benjamin writes, "is a tiger's leap into the past". I suggest we make such a leap.

All we have to oppose these three trends is a radical understanding of history, a clear-sightedness about the structural injustices of the present and their causes, and a willingness to take action. We need to confront the drift, disappointment and slackening of this age with the urgency of commitment if we are to avoid disaster.

Simon Critchley is author of The Book of Dead Philosophers (Granta, £15.99) and How to Start Worrying and Stop Living (Polity, £12.99). Visit theschooloflife.com

Simon Critchley
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Heidegger's Being and Time: Temporality | Simon Critchley

Time should be grasped in and of itself as the unity of the three dimensions of future, past and present

To try and compress 437 dense pages of Being and Time into eight brief blogs was obviously a difficult exercise from the start. But, I must admit, this was also part of the attraction. Despite the limits of this virtual medium, I hope that something of the book has been conveyed in a way that might encourage people to read more and further. Being and Time is extraordinarily rich, difficult ...

Being and Time, part 7: Conscience | Simon Critchley

For Heidegger, the call of conscience is one that silences the chatter of the world and brings me back to myself

After the existential drama of Heidegger's notion of being-towards-death, why do we need a discussion of conscience? As so often in Being and Time, Heidegger insists that although his description of being-towards-death is formally or ontologically correct, it needs more compelling content at what Heidegger calls the "ontic" level, that is, at the level of experience. Finitude gets a...

Being and Time part 6: Death | Simon Critchley

Far from being morbid, Heidegger's conception of living in the knowledge of death is a liberating one

As I said some 6 weeks ago, in my first blog on Heidegger, the basic idea in Being and Time is very simple: being is time and time is finite. For human beings, time comes to an end with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death. This is what Heidegger...

Being and Time, part 5: Anxiety | Simon Critchley

Anxiety is the philosophical mood par excellence, the experience of detachment from which I can begin to think freely for myself

As I showed in the last blog, moods are essential ways of disclosing human existence for Heidegger. Yet, there is one mood in particular that reveals the self in stark profile for the first time. This is the function of anxiety (Angst), which Heidegger calls a basic or fundamental mood (Grundstimmung). Safranski rightly calls anxiety "a shadowy queen amongst moods".

A...

Being and Time, part 4: Thrown into this world | Simon Critchley

How do we find ourselves in the world, and how can find our freedom here?

As I already tried to show, Heidegger seeks to reawaken perplexity about the question of being, the basic issue of metaphysics. In Being and Time, he pursues this question through an analysis of the human being or what he calls Dasein. The being of Dasein is existence, understood as average everyday existence or our life in the world, discussed in the last entry. But how might we give some more content to this rather...

Being and Time, part 3: Being-in-the-world | Simon Critchley

How Heidegger turned Descartes upside down, so that we are, and only therefore think

I talked in my first blog entry about Heidegger's attempt to destroy our standard, traditional philosophical vocabulary and replace it with something new. What Heidegger seeks to destroy in particular is a certain picture of the relation between human beings and the world that is widespread in modern philosophy and whose source is Descartes (indeed Descartes is the philosopher who stands most accused in Being...

Being and Time, part 2: On 'mineness' | Simon Critchley

For Heidegger, what defines the human being is the capacity to be puzzled by the deepest of questions: why is there something rather than nothing?

As Heidegger makes clear from the untitled, opening page with which Being and Time begins, what is at stake in the book is the question of being. This is the question that Aristotle raised in an untitled manuscript written 2500 years ago, but which became known at a later date as the Metaphysics. For Aristotle, there is a science that investigates w...