- QUESTION: does religion have any truth in it?
- UP TO 2009: i guess so...? dunno
- UP TO 2012: NONONONONO. NO. RELIGION IS SHIT.
- UP TO 2013: it's culturally significant, but only science can give us truths.
- UP TO 2015: fixating some discourse as an absolute truth is a rather dangerous thing, be it religious or scientific. in a society based on domination and privilege, we should always be suspicious of dominant given certainties and who's producing and reinforcing them.
- CURRENT ANSWER: it is impossible not to speak in the name of truth: adopting an absolute reference is a pre-condition for enunciation — be it god, reason or communism —, but we have to beware of the inescapable frailty of these absolutes, whose specific figure always exists in a historical entanglement.
- Q: is a stateless, self-management-based fully democratic utopia possible and how?
- UP TO 2014: yes, it's only a question of overthrowing the bourgeoisie through the good and ol' leninist revolution & then the dictatorship of the proletariat & all that stuff.
- UP TO 2019: well, even though the networks of power that govern our class society are far more intrinsic then the question leads to & the political institutions that form what we ordinarily call "the state" are just a fraction of the apparatuses for the reproduction of the order..., yes. it may not be through a single united revolutionary uprising (although this may be a way), but it is & has to be affirmed possible. but the important thing is not to live in function of the utopia & fight for the changing of the present.
- C.A.: all of those "apparatuses" (institutions) that reproduce the order cannot be adequately comprehended but as moments of the totality of the process of accumulation in its national and imperial levels, and that is also what gives the specific unity of the state, as its content is the reproduciton of that process. "living the present" is itself a utopia, since the present, in the current conditions of absolute insecurity, can only be experienced truly as identical with the imminence of the future, be it hopeful or fearful. that, on the other hand, could also be the immanence of utopia to the present, which is the unavoidable subjetive position of the critic.
- Q: what is better: to have one huge lover or many memorable lovers throughout one's life?
- BEFORE 2012: i tend to say many memorable ones, but it may vary from person to person.
- 2012: one huge lover, & i've found mine!
- END OF 2012: one huge lover, & i've lost mine!
- UP TO 2014: i tend to say many memorable ones, but it may vary from person to person.
- UP TO 2021: accept the finite nature of everything. let your lovers & your loves go, life feeds itself with movement.
- C.A.: one huge lover, & i've found mine. the idea of the integral communion of souls cannot be done away with from a supposedly mature, cryptocynic celebration of abstract change and overcoming of mourning without the danger of sanctioning the socially determined isolation of modernity and the relentlessly destructive movement that is its base. that said, love - that communion - is not only the passionate Augenblick that abolishes finitude but also the patient, painstaking construction of everyday life. and that means that the unity of love is unity of unity and diversity; and diversity comes with all of the contingent implications of number...
- Q: is complete gender equality possible? does biology have influence? if so, to what extent?
- UP TO 2013: even tho there are differences between the male & female bodies, gender is a construction.
- UP TO 2017: utterly possible. what we call gender or sexuality is a construct (which exists materially as any other construct) & there's no such thing as a pre-discursive nature under the rule of which our bodies or minds is ultimately determined.
- C.A.: if by "gender equality" i understand the lifting of the imposition of societal roles based on a normative relation between anatomy, identity and desire, then it is totally possible. but if by this i understand a lifting of the conflictive nature of sexuality and the relation to sex and a purely consensual (in the contractual sense) sexual relationship, then no.
- Q: what is better: to be shallow and live carelessly throughout life or to be wise & suffer with questioning?
- THE PAST: dumb people don't see the problems & because of that are too happy. i suffer because of my unquestionable cleverness.
- C.A.: not understanding well the world doesn't make life easier. it only has you suffer without knowing why.
- Q: does thought & feeling follow from the material world or does existence have some kind of extraphysical composite?
- UP TO 2013: 1st option, fuck yea materialism.
- UP TO 2019: thought does not follow from the material world as there is nothing but the material world. ideas, in the form of discursive practices, have a material existence. to pose this question is already to assume a duality of thought/matter that is related to an enlightenment problematic not pertinent to dialectical materialism. the materialist position is that in which the point is not to affirm there is no beyond, but that to look at everything from a position beyond is to look at nothing.
- C.A.: certanly, looking the abstraction of everything from an abstract beyond is the relationship of nothingness with itself; but that very relationship between two negations entails a unity - the equality of the nothingness of the world and the nothingess of the I - which not only is, but is something different, determined, in which, unlike empty nothingness, there is again something immediate and something which trancends it, but which now is also immanent to the immediate. thought is surely not a purely self-related substance or a form of the absolute that is complete in itself; but without life's trancendence from the pure contingency of mechanic causation - which the reduction of thought to discursive practices tries to eliminate - not even the critique of thought - its transcendence from itself - would be possible.
- Q: should we limit liberty & freedom? if so how to define precisely these limits?
- UP TO 2015: we should limit the freedom to take the freedom of other people from them, that is to say, the best liberty that can exist is that in which the relations of power are balanced.
- UP TO 2019: the human game is not a game of competing atoms that encounter by chance, but takes the form of a structured totality composed of parts with a relative autonomy that don't make sense but in the play. so the question of freedom doesn't make sense abstractly, it always takes the form of a struggle for freedom from something concrete and, thus, is a matter to be resolved in concrete situations.
- C.A.: the reduction of the individual to a part of the whole of society, which is the true content of contemporary hollow individuality, is redoubled in theory by that affirmation of a complete immanence of the world to itself, an affirmation that the alienated social totality, as a whole alien to its constituent parts, impinges on the individual from the top down. liberation from it, then, cannot assume the form of that very external negation which constitutes domination, as an infinite progress into the future. but it is true that, for this very reason, the idea of freedom necessitates a positivity which couldn't be determined upfront by thought without opposing itself to praxis again, and could only be referred to the concrete negation of concrete situations.
jan 15 2014 ∞
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feb 13 2024 +