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The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation—becoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure—as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form.

The Invisible Committee

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“If there is no longer “power,” a single and centralizing power, how do we identify these mechanisms, these structuring apparatuses, that link power and pleasure in what Foucault calls the “perpetual spirals of powers and pleasures” (1978, 45; translation modified)? Or, more precisely, how do we know that these apparatuses are apparatuses of power? How do we know that they have this in common, that they carry, bear, accept the common name of power— or, for that matter, that of pleasure?”

— Jacques Derrida, Beyond The Power Principle

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Edvard Munch, Melancholy, 1894–1896

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Christianity is and is not religion, Derrida tells us. As a religion, it may be like other religions (insofar as they are Christened and Christianized by that very name), but the frame of reference that would enable us to take the measure of Christianity and of its limits must be radically expanded, to media and to politics, to technology and to economics. That is how Derrida alerts us to a remarkable fact: to the extent that its critique has been conducted exclusively as a critique of religion, the critique of Christianity very much remains to come.

Gil Anidjar, “Of Globalatinology”

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What is Christianity’s lingering influence? What space has its historical withdrawal left vacant? Which of its concepts continue to govern this or that sphere of existence? What Christian (read: religious) elements have grafted themselves with other (‘non-theological’, say) mechanisms, apparatuses, or structures?

Gil Anidjar, “Of Globalatinology”

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Either Christianity is a religion and there are no others (because without Christianization and the globalization of Christianity, none of the so-called ‘world religions’ would have been identified as religions, nor would they have had to refer to themselves as such). Or, there are religions in the world – according to one definition or another – but Christianity is not one of them.

Gil Anidjar, “Of Globalatinology”

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“The modern obsession with self-discovery, self-expression, knowledge about self and being authentic, is a kind of prison.”

— Foucault (via Edward McGushin, paraphrased)

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In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (via syntheticphilosophy)

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The Hegelian philosophy is the last grand attempt to restore a lost and defunct Christianity […] by identifying the negation of Christianity with Christianity itself.

Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. (via speciesbarocus)

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What is distinctive about ripley’s postmodern take on the big Other is that it is radically atheistic - he neither believes in God nor in any moral order written into the fabric of the universe. The postmodern big Other is a Symbolic Order stripped of its symbolisation of itself; it no longer poses as God or History and openly announces itself as a social construct - but this ostensible demystification does nothing to impede its functioning. On the contrary, the big Other has never functioned more effectively.

K-Punk

Mark fisher

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“In the belief that without strict limitation to the observation of facts and the calculation of probabilities the cognitive mind would be overreceptive to charlatanism and superstition, that system is preparing arid ground for the greedy acceptance of charlatanism and superstition. Just as prohibition has always ensured the admission of the poisonous product, the blocking of the theoretical imagination has paved the way for political delusion. Even when people have not already succumbed to such delusion, they are deprived by the mechanisms of censorship, both the external ones and those implanted within them, of the means of resisting it.”

– Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic Of Enlightenment

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If the state is able to exert symbolic violence, it is because it incarnates itself simultaneously in objectivity, in the form of specific organizational structures and mechanisms, and in subjectivity, in the form of mental structures and categories of perception and thought. By realizing itself in social structures and in the mental structures adapted to them, the instituted institution makes us forget that it issues out of a long series of acts of institution (in the active sense) and hence has all the appearances of the natural. This is why there is no more potent tool for rupture than the reconstruction of genesis: by bringing back into view the conflicts and confrontations of the early beginnings and therefore all the discarded possibles, it retrieves the possibility that things could have been (and still could be) otherwise.

Pierre Bourdieu 

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It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.

Stefano Harvey and Fred Moten

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The end of this world is the third in a succession of deaths—the Death of God, the Death of Man, and now the Death of this World. This is not a call to physically destroy the world. The Death of God did not call for the assault of priests or the burning of churches, and the Death of Man did not propose genocide or the extinction of our species. Each death denounces a concept as insufficient, critiques those who still believe in it, and demands its removal as an object of thought. In the Death of Man, we learned that the human sciences were impotent in the face of the systemic injustices of this world. Rather, Foucault shows how expert inquiry makes exploitation, sexism, racism, poverty, violence, and war into the constitutive elements of how humanity defends itself. He shows that attempts to save this humanity created a biopower that “makes live and lets die,” which paradoxically administers life through “a power to expose a whole population to death” that tends toward wars of all-out destruction (Foucault, History of Sexuality, 135–37). Elaborating on this condition, subsequent theorists say that we have already been killed but have not yet died, making us an “already dead” that makes us already ready to adopt a revolutionary orientation that sacrifices our current time and space for a new, not-yet-realized future (Cazdyn, Already Dead, 9). Seen from this perspective, runaway climate change, the Sixth Extinction, and many other impending catastrophes are all essential parts of this world. The Death of this World admits the insufficiency of previous attempts to save it and instead poses a revolutionary gamble: only by destroying this world will we release ourselves of its problems. This does not mean moving to the moon, but that we give up on all the reasons given for saving the world. In my own announcement of the death of this world, I propose critiques of connectivity and positivity, a theory of contraries, the exercise of intolerance, and the conspiracy of communism.

Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze (via tiqqun)

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We must remember the lesson provided by Adorno's negative dialectics, and regard analysis as in the fullest sense being against the grain, deconstructive, utopian.

Edward Said

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...the Jew between the Crucifixion and the Second Coming can only have a negative meaning in Christian theology.

Franz Rosenzweig 

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We must learn to read with X-ray eyes. This means reading in such a way as to make a work’s hidden content and puzzles as transparent as the Cabbalists tried to make the Torah. Any other approach to the great philosophical texts seems to me impossible.

Theodor Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason