Mark Bahnisch

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Mark Bahnisch

• Heidegger, Strauss and Schmitt
• Apocalypticism, Neoconservatism or Politics
  Understanding the 21st century eclipse of
  globalisation with 20th century philosophers
• Seminar paper, School of AMC, 15 March 2006

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Walter Benjamin

• The story is told of an automaton constructed in
  such a way that it could play a winning game of
  chess, answering each move of an opponent with a
  countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with
  a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard
  placed on a large table. A system of mirrors
  created the illusion that this table was
  transparent from all sides. Actually, a little
  hunchback who was an expert chess player sat
  inside and guided the puppets hand by means of
  strings. One can imagine a philosophical
  counterpart to this device. The puppet called
  historical materialism is to win all the time.
  It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists
  the services of theology, which today, as we
  know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.

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Context

• Research programme
• Political theory/sociology
• Historical macrosociology
• Interest in the relationship between hope, social
  change and political possibility
• The longue duree (Braudel, Wallerstein)
• The political as a sociology of secularised
  theological concepts (Schmitt)
• Ideas and action (The philosophers)

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Methodology

• Weber ideal types
• Against causal reductivism
• Value free analytics
• The work of destruction/deconstruction
• clearing a (political path)
• Poststructuralist phenomenology

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The problem I

• Memorably, Marx (1977 begins The Eighteenth
  Brumaire of Louis Napoleon with some sardonic
  observations about history and its repetitions
•  
• Men make their own history, but they do not make
  it as they please they do not make it under
  self-selected circumstances, but under
  circumstances existing already, given and
  transmitted from the past. The tradition of all
  dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
  brains of the living. And just as they seem to be
  occupied with revolutionizing themselves and
  things, creating something that did not exist
  before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary
  crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of
  the past to their service, borrowing from them
  names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to
  present this new scene in world history in
  time-honored disguise and borrowed language
•  

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The problem II

• What is the status of globalisation? What are
  we talking about?
• Where did globalisation go? Are we living in
  apocalyptic times? What happened to liberalism
  (as a system of rule)?
• Under the sign of Marx and Mill
• Has history ended?

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Meaning and/in history

• Post-traditionalism and identity
• Narratives of historical meaning
• Dante
• Shift post-Reformation to a different
  (teleological) theology
• What about postmodernity?
• Utopia, apocalypse or something else?

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Against globalisation

• Distinguishing cultural and economic
  interconnectivity from political discourse
• Periodisation
• Inadequate as a social-scientific concept
• A utopic political discourse problems of
  legitimacy

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The eclipse of globalisation

• It was always already contaminated from within
• Power and the state
• When did liberalism disappear?
• What is left of liberalism? (or right of
  liberalism?)

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Wars of Empire

• Contradictions at the beginning of the 21st
  century
• Perry Anderson (2005) philosophers of perpetual
  peace justify perpetual war
• From liberal humanitarism to what?

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The philosophers

• Strauss
• Exoteric writing and the arcanii imperii

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The philosopher king?

• Thymos
• The end of history
• OR
• The last man?
• Apocalyptic politics

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The philosophers

• Heidegger
• Dasein and being towards death
• and theology
• the Latinisation of the world

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Carl Schmitt

• This thought and work repeatedly presaged the
  fearsome world that was announcing itself from as
  early as the 1920s. As though the fear of seeing
  that which comes to pass take place, in effect
  had honed the gaze of this besieged watchman.
  Following our hypothesis, the scene would be
  thus lucidity and fear not only drove this
  terrified and insomniac watcher to anticipate the
  storms and seismic movements that would work
  havoc with the historical field, the political
  space, the borders of concepts and countries, the
  axiomatics of European law etc. Such a watcher
  would therefore have been more attuned than so
  many others to the fragility and
  deconstructible precariousness of structures,
  borders and axioms that he wished to protect,
  restore and conserve at all costs.
• Derrida (1997 107)

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Carl Schmitt

• Friends and enemies
• Left and right Schmittians
• With Schmitt but not Schmittian

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For a phenomenological political analytic

• Agonism not antagonism
• Phenomenology, sociology and the political
• Understanding the 21st century otherwise

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In place of a conclusion Benjamin

• Paul Klees Angelus Novus

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In provisional place of a conclusion

• My wing is ready for flight,
• I would like to turn back.
• If I stayed timeless time,
• I would have little luck.
• Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
• ich kehrte gern zurück,
• denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
• ich hätte wenig Glück.
• Gerherd Scholem,
• Gruss vom Angelus

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In provisional place of a conclusion

• A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an
  angel looking as though he is about to move away
  from something he is fixedly contemplating. His
  eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings
  are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of
  history. His face is turned toward the past.
  Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one
  single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage
  and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel
  would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make
  whole what has been smashed. But a storm is
  blowing in from Paradise it has got caught in
  his wings with such a violence that the angel can
  no longer close them. The storm irresistibly
  propels him into the future to which his back is
  turned, while the pile of debris before him grows
  skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

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Discussion