There is a common belief that genuine awareness and acceptance of the existence of anthropogenic climate change (as opposed to either ignorance or denial) automatically leads one to develop political and moral positions which advocate for collective human action toward minimizing suffering for all and adapting human societies toward a fossil-free future. This is a mistake. Against the idea that scientific awareness of the facts of climate change is enough to motivate a common ethical project of humanity toward a unifying (...) good, I argue that climate change awareness can just as well equally motivate heightened divisions of humanity into anti-egalitarian, xenophobic, class-differentiated zones of competitive survival. I call this climate barbarism, and seek to explain its conceptual grounds. (shrink)

Adorno’s use of the term “barbarism” has probably been most often referred to in the context of his much- cited dictum that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno 1983: 34). While, nowadays, the term is usually and fortunately presented within the broader context of his works, his intended meaning was frequently misunderstood particularly after Adorno had articulated it for the first time. For clarity, the aforementioned dictum was not a verdict intended to silence poets or artists. It (...) was rearticulated a few times by Adorno — specifically in response to Celan’s poetry — who calls for arts and culture to respond from within and in the face of an inescapable aporetic condition. Namely, to write poetry after Auschwitz means to write from within a differend—a radical chasm between the signifier and the signified that one neither ought nor could overcome via writing or aesthetic means in general. Yet, poetry (and also art and thinking, per se) as a form of active engagement with sociopolitical realities, has to respond to the ungraspable (i.e., the Holocaust); it cannot simply avoid doing so. It permanently has to speak whilst knowing that it will never reach the addressee; that it must fail in speaking. -/- . (shrink)

The goal of this article is to compare and contrast the traditional Western versus the postmodern colonization of the mind. How is the current technological age barbaric? I investigate Aimé Césaire’s writings, refer to Lea Ypi’s definition of colonialism, and discuss society’s use of psychopolitics to find the answer.

In Kant’s “Doctrine of Right” there is a philosophical and interpretive puzzle surrounding the translation of a key concept: Gewalt. Should we translate it as “force,” “power,” or “violence”? This raises both general questions in Kant’s legal-political philosophy as well as puzzles regarding Kant’s definitions of “barbarism,” “anarchy,” “despotism,” and “republic” as the four possible political conditions. First, I argue that we have good textual reasons for translating Gewalt as “violence”—a translation which has the advantage that it answers these (...) questions and puzzles convincingly. Translating Gewalt as “violence” has two further, somewhat surprising advantages. It allows us to explain how human beings can be caught in situations with no morally good ways out, and it gives us an ideal Kantian refutation of the death penalty. I then explore Kant’s account of the establishment of public authorities by means of an analogy between the birth and development of a natural person (a human being) and an artificial one (a state). This analogy helps to clarify the difference between the necessary coercive element involved in ideally establishing a state and the likely violence involved in actually establishing one. The third and final section uses the ideas of barbarism, anarchy, despotism, and republic to identify four different types of political forces operating at any given time in actual historical societies. Once we use Kant’s theory to improve our understanding of the various challenges our historical societies present, we also realize the importance and usefulness of philosophical precision when we translate Gewalt as “violence” and correctly define barbarism, anarchy, despotism, and republic. (shrink)

“We are experiencing an ecological and social crisis, driven by exponential capital accumulation, whose end result will be the extinction of human civilisation” (p. 18). While it is easy to shrug off such a dramatic claim, in Alienation, Spectacle, & Revolution: A Critical Marxist Essay, Neil Faulkner takes this relatively strong claim and endeavors to demonstrate its truth. Thus begins his project of updating our understanding of alienation—not an easy task, but one that Faulkner does well. In a time of (...) a simultaneous dearth and deluge of information, Faulkner attempts to pull apart the dialectical and economic structures of the third industrial revolution and follows the breadcrumbs until he comes to a different “end of history.” Faulkner, who died in February 2022, was an archeologist and a political activist. He was a member of the Socialist Workers Party in the U.K. for many years and later a founding member of Anti-Capitalist Resistance. He wrote on topics ranging from the Arab-Anglo conflict to the history of the Olympics. While his corpus spanned several subjects, his books and articles all have a bitingly Marxist take that brought Faulkner much acclaim. (shrink)

how's going human civilizat5ion: preparing to leave earth behind?

(Early) Modern social contract theories reject the idea that legal and political institutions are grounded in an alleged natural ordering or hierarchy of human beings, and instead argue that only government by a public (and not private) authority can fulfil the idea of justice as freedom and equality for all. To be authoritative and not just powerful, governing institutions must be shared as ours in this irreducible sense. I first outline how Kant’s ideal account of rightful freedom brilliantly transforms this (...) tradition as found in the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, before proposing a way to see Kant’s two-layered non-ideal theory—his accounts of human nature (“moral anthropology”) and historical societies (“the principle of politics”)—as complementing his ideal theory of rightful freedom. This enables us to envision a conception not only of rightful external freedom but of rightful human freedom in particular societies—with their histories—on planet Earth. With these arguments at hand, we can also better appreciate the importance of realizing that the four possible political conditions for Kant—anarchy, barbarism, despotism, and republic—are ideas of reason, which means that they are never perfectly realized. Hence, historical societies we are not either in the state of nature or in civil society. In addition, in historical societies founded on principles of freedom, there are pockets of injustice or pockets that are devoid of justice that can only be captured by means of one of the three political ideas that are not constitutive of the republican legal-political framework. Kant’s four ideas therefore give us more tools with which to capture the nature of different political forces and challenges facing us in our historical societies. (shrink)

Abstract: Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil -/- This paper starts by sketching Kant’s four ideal legal and political conditions—'anarchy,’ ‘despotism,’ ‘republic,’ and ‘barbarism’—before showing their usefulness for analyzing different political forces that may operate in any given society. Contrary to the common tendency in political philosophy to view our societies as either in the so-called ‘state of nature’ (‘anarchy’) or in ‘civil society’ (‘republic’), I propose that we might find ourselves in societies where aspects or ‘pockets’ (...) of our lives are subject to any one of these (anarchic, despotic, republican, and barbaric) political forces. I then combine Kant’s ideas on barbaric evil with Arendt’s ideas on totalitarian evil, which gives us a four-fold conception of political evil. This fourfold distinction is then used to identify some types and patterns of destructive political forces as they occur in actual, historical societies, such as racist, sexist, or heterosexist violence and oppression. (shrink)

Hatred of America expressed in the September 11th attack is more than matched by the hatred by Americans for Islamists expressed in the war on Afghanistan, the War against Terror and the threatened wars against the “Axis of Evil”. It is argued here that there is a pattern of self-reinforcing hatred operating in the world set in motion by the actions of the United States, particularly by George Bush Snr. and embraced and used by George Bush Jr. to reinforce and (...) further develop this pattern. To oppose this it is necessary to understand how hatred is generated, how this system operates and how Bush is exploiting it, and then to provide an alternative. It is argued this requires a new story of civilization as the quest for justice understood as true recognition to oppose to the myths based on hatred promulgated by Bush. In terms of this story, the extreme economic, social, political and military policies of Bush and the myths used to justify them should be recognized for what they are, the challenge of barbarism to civilization. (shrink)

Voltaire has presented in his Letters on the English different themes, from religious ethics, literacy, politics, to dramas and science. The letters present us a comparison between England and France. In this parallel we shall present how Voltaire was concerned in evaluate a high standard of taste and refinements. This paper will review some of the last letters of those, which testify about this criterion of taste as a modern point of view. We shall present in Voltaire the eminence of (...) modernity in taste, refinements and on liberty of enjoying the ecstasies of a cosmopolitan life fulfilled with entertainments and luxury. We shall present how Voltaire fought against barbarism in benefit of civilization and some how against religiosity in benefit of an ethic hedonism. (shrink)

This paper develops the implications of Spinoza’s invocation in chapter 6 of the traditional analogy between the oikos and the polis. Careful attention to this analogy reveals a number of interesting features of Spinoza’s political theory. Spinoza challenges the perception that absolute monarchy offers greater respite from the intolerable anxiety of the state of nature than does democracy. He acknowledges that people associate monarchical rule with peace and stability, but asserts that it can too easily deform its subjects. Unchallenged monarchy (...) may be credited with a certain order, “but if slavery, barbarism, and desolation are to be called peace, there can be nothing more wretched for mankind than peace.” This is all familiar to friends of Spinoza, but what kind of democracy is the alternative to those monarchies that tend toward despotism? It is a form of association that, he suggests, resembles a bitterly quarrelsome but nevertheless virtuous family. Thus, he admits that democratic, or popular, rule is typically turbulent and disorderly, but urges his reader to view contentions and disputes as a kind of salutary discord that preserves rather than threatens virtue. (shrink)

This essay argues that the Ancient Greek's tales of cannibalism were not really about cannibalism at all, but about more typically Greek issues (such as the transfer of political power, the guest-host relationship, the initiation of youths into adulthood, and so on). Cannibalism is rather the image used to designate the negative extremes of human behavior as conceived by the Hellenic world: social breakdown, barbarism, reversion to animality, and ultimately, the inability to live under the institution of the polis.

This paper explores the ontology of the beautiful from the standpoint of competing logics, i.e., ways of speaking the Logos. The first is a theo-logic centered on the analogy of being, which uniquely regards reality as Logos—a structured hierarchy of the real, a ‘Who’ rather than a ‘What’—which provides an ontology of beauty as desirable being, and ultimately, the desirable Being. The correct response to reality is thus holiness, the sacral separateness of God imparted to, and thus borrowed by and (...) reflected through, creatures. The competing logic is what Baudrillard calls the simulacral, in which the real is suspended by its own model; the image exposes the poverty of the real and causes it to disappear altogether, revealing a transaesthetics of banality and indifference, a totalizing counterfeit of the real that is beyond real difference, beyond Logos—and therefore beyond structured hierarchy, beyond beauty and ugliness. The simulated real is thus the world of the spectacle, the world as product of consumer gaze. A way to repudiate the simulation, the murderous image, to uncover the real always and already grounding the image is to return to Logos: to emplace the image in a hierarchically relational context within Logos. The upshot is that, when so emplaced, the gaze of the image tells a different story: the world is not one of consumerist spectacle but of mutual self-gifting. Amidst the barbarism of the dislocated consumer ego, we can conscientiously commune with neighbor and turn away from what Augustine termed "fellowship with the demons.". (shrink)

This essay explores the works of German artist Gustav Metzger as a potential response to Theodor W. Adorno’s dictum “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch” (“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”). It argues that culture, as understood in the Adornian sense, is inextricably barbaric as a result of simply being after Auschwitz. Culture must acknowledge the finitude in its own ability to live up to an ethical demand in response to justice, whose arrival is infinitely deferred. In (...) spite of this, culture, and art in particular, must not refrain from the very act of writing. Metzger’s works are discussed as aesthetic responses to the “new categorical imperative” of Adorno, who addresses art’s failure in light of Auschwitz by pointing to aporias that constitute the inescapable condition of “barbarism.” This essay suggests that Metzger’s aesthetic articulations are nonbarbaric ruptures, in that they challenge our living on irresponsibly within the condition of barbarism via a constant confrontation with complicity. (shrink)

Artistic productions, as well as other material products, are reflections of human societies. They are often the support of specific mental and symbolic conceptions and contribute to shaping an immaterial vision of Man and his environment. The Bangou chiefdom located in West Cameroon was no exception to this rule and during the pre-colonial period, it produced notable artworks. However, today it is extremely rare to find testimonies of this past. With the help of primary and secondary sources, we have tried (...) to understand the reasons for this disappearance. Our research shows that it was the Germans who were the first to have damaged the artworks in Bangou at the very beginning of the 20th century. Then, after a beginning of reconstruction, the French government in 1957 burned down the chiefdom which was a major place of conservation of these works. The same phenomenon of destruction will be repeated by the Cameroonian army forces between 1960 and 1961. During this barbarism, the legitimate chief, who guaranteed artistic production, was forced into exile. After presenting the remains of the artistic creation still visible in the area, our article concludes by proposing possibilities for revalorizing this Bangou artistic expression necessary for its development. (shrink)

Drawing on Adorno and Horkheimer's oft-quoted 1944 essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Bernard Stiegler’s The Age of Disruption affirms that the Frankfurt School duo scrupulously envisaged a “new kind of barbarism,” or an inversion of modernity’s Enlightenment project illustrated by our contemporary political semblance. Surveying the critical social fissures that index contemporary Western civil society—from 9/11 to the 2002 Nanterre massacre and the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting—Stiegler diagnoses that our epoch is plagued by the “absence of (...) epoch,” whereby computational capitalism and algorithmic governmentality have extirpated the “transcendental imagination” underlying vital primordial narcissism. In short, these are symptoms a world increasingly “going mad,” in a thousand ways, possible because we are the bearers of “a negative protention of a becoming without future,” yet “we prefer not to say so: we do not want to know about it.”. (shrink)