Graham Harman has responded to my earlier piece on Academic Nihilism. Unsurprisingly, for those who have followed his career advice strand of commentary on his blog, he doesn’t suffer from academic nihilism. In the piece he sees a certain self flagellating, masocistic tendency representative of ‘killjoy puritanical’ moralism amongst leftists around the continental philosophy scene. [...]
Archive for June, 2010
Graham Harman on Academic Nihilism
Posted in political theory, tagged academic, nihilism, university on June 30, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Environmentalism and the left
Posted in political theory, tagged capitalism, climate change, environmentalism, the left on June 29, 2010 | 11 Comments »
Here’s an experiment. At the pub, on your Facebook wall, or wherever, criticise environmentalism and see what reaction you get from your friends on the left. My prediction is that what will result will probably be one of the most heated arguments you ever have. Environmentalism has become a near sacred belief on the left; [...]
Academic Nihilism
Posted in political theory, tagged academic, nihilism, politics, university on June 27, 2010 | 7 Comments »
Like Mark Fisher’s excellent epithet ‘capitalist realism’ describing the cultural response to the doctrine of ‘there is no alternative’, I believe there is another closely related phenomenon that deserves to enter every intellectuals’ vocabularly: academic nihilism. Academic nihilism is, I believe, something experienced by all truly critical thinkers who spend enough time behind the walls [...]
Categories
-
Recent Posts
- Marx, Money, Utopia: What should communism do with money?
- Quantity-quality transformations and Lenin’s idea of lower communism
- Why communists need moon bases, or in other words, a vision for post-capitalism
- On the stalled project of Marxian economics
- Sexism and Narrative: why Cash shouldn’t have proposed to Carter on stage
-
Top Posts
-
Recent Comments
Archives
Megalomania and Enlightenment
Posted in Film comment on June 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Slavoj Žižek once insightfully noted that the only time your ever see productive labour on screen is in the villains’ lairs of the James Bond films. This sounds about right. Take any number of films or tv programmes based around work—even of a white collar kind—and you won’t find many backs to the grindstone. In [...]
Read Full Post »