The Absolute Salon meets Theory Underground EU Tour
Notes on constructing in lack, contradiction as positive, politics of timenergy, and the Philosophy of Right
Theory Underground is leading an “American Idiots EU Tour” from April 27th through May 25th. To find out more, or to get involved, check: EU Tour 2024.
We also celebrated the launch with a pre-tour conversation:
This past weekend I had the chance to welcome David McKerracher and Bryce Nance of
to Europe for the start of their American Idiots EU Tour. The tour has stops in Paris, Brussels, Linz, Vienna, Krakow, Glasgow, London and Oxford. I co-hosted in Paris, and will be co-hosting this week in Brussels, as well as present in London and participating in Oxford.For Paris and Brussels, these events represent a little experiment with physical spaces I have been participating within and trying to cultivate for some time behind the scenes, so to speak. In Paris, I have been working with psychoanalyst Sinziana Ravini in her “Absolute Salon”, which is a space to explore “The Absolute” through literature. We have hosted Salons inspired by texts like Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar.
These Salons bring together a unique group of European intellectuals to actively work through and rethink our relationship to “The Absolute” given the context of an age that seems to have abandoned serious thought about its most direct connotations and associations (God, Ultimate Reality/Value, Fundamental Being, etc.).
The way I have engaged the Salon, so far, has been to try to think through the philosophical and political implications of this act itself. The risk or threat in this performativity, it seems to me, is to spin around in circles without an aim. The event can easily become a particularist libertine circle jerk without reference or connection to anything truly universal and concrete.
This is why I have had for some time the idea that it would be very cool and also productive to connect this event to movements emerging in the underground theory scene. In this connection we can start to explore the ways in which circling literature on the topic of The Absolute can filter in and engage an active philosophical milieu that is striving to raise the level of our collective political and philosophical discourse. What better place to start or launch the Theory Underground American Idiots EU Tour?
Well, as it turns out, there wasn’t one!
The aim of the event was to put David McKerracher’s Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy, into conversation with the work I have been doing at Philosophy Portal regarding the logic of contradiction, inspired by Hegel’s Science of Logic.1 Both texts have a direct impact and relation to our understanding of The Absolute:
McKerracher’s Timenergy because he conceives of the concept of timenergy — reliable, reusable, and routinely available large blocks of energy-infused time throughout the week — as central for the future of any emancipatory politics; and the
Logic of contradiction, because with the Science of Logic we get the first argument that The Absolute only comes to a positive result by working with and through contradiction
This event was undoubtedly an experiment. We still need to work out the higher order methodology to bring spaces like this into concrete engagement with political and philosophical ideas. However, it was a good first experiment, and the atmosphere certainly opened the conditions of possibility for the type of discussion and thinking that could have unpredictable ripple effects throughout our collective conceptual ecology. Below, I will simply share some of the core points that I wanted to make in relation to using the philosophy of contradiction to work towards deriving positive results on the level of concrete politics:
We must move from social constructivism as an obfuscation of limit and lack, to real constructivism with social effects and consequences, which requires working the form of the lack of a given social connection or relation. In other words, we cannot construct without thinking the form of the lack given to our present moment and in concrete relationality to our actual bonds and links. My engagement with both Sinziana Ravini and the The Absolute Salon, as well as David McKerracher and the Theory Underground EU Tour, are both a result of careful, patient, and long-term engagement with the form of the lack that both of these processes and projects present to our present moment. What engaging with the form of the lack helps us to achieve is a constructive intervention which can open a new process of becoming (without understanding the form of the lack one risks falling into a superficial becoming, a becoming which does not really engage to the real of the moment).
Timenergy (or Energytime, a concept for future exploration) attempts to identify and actively work with the central contradiction for emancipatory politics: that the majority of citizens are losing and/or lacking timenergy. One of the problems with contemporary emancipatory politics is that we have lost a grip or a hold on the real of our central contradiction (it used to be class, today it has more shifted to sex, gender and race). While McKerracher distances himself from both contemporary Leftist discourse on sex, gender and race, as well as conventional Marxist class politics — opting instead to centre the idea that we are today a post-class fractured mass — he also actively picks up and tries to reinvent the central contradiction of class politics with the notion of timenergy. This notion of timenergy at once attempts to transcend particularist concerns with sex, gender and race, while also seeking for some new concept of emancipation that does not rely on the idea that the working class is in-itself a revolutionary agent of history (but closer to a vulnerable precariat class or unintegratable rabble).
Against the idea that the neoliberal state is the End of History (Fukuyama), we may be entering the serious return of global geopolitical tensions on the level of the social and political ideal. Moreover, we should perhaps think of this return as the end of global neoliberalism as an “intermission” of the Cold War. In short: it is possible that the Cold War never really ended, but was rather temporarily disrupted and interrupted by an abstract universality (neoliberalism) that papered over the cracks on the level of the Absolute becoming of World Spirit. One of the most significant events that revealed the fragility of this political order was 9/11, but more and more, contemporary geopolitical tensions (e.g. Russia/Ukraine; Israel/Palestine) seem to be pointing towards serious military escalations and conflicts which are not going to be going away, but will become a new feature of our collective struggle. This is why philosophers like Peter Sloterdijk suggest that we are entering an era of multipolarity or “foams”, and philosophers like Alexander Dugin support the emergence of a “plurality of civilisational spaces”.
Here it could be that thinking timenergy as the central and positive contradiction of politics may help us to think through what is indeconstructible about our historical situation and condition. Following Hegel’s Philosophy of Right we could suggest that if we do not find a way to mediate the will and the world (where Hegel places morality), we will be unable to mediate global ethics from the local (family, community) to the global (state and interrelation between states). The result of being unable to mediate these dimensions, we might expect, would produce global symptoms that we see as geopolitical tensions on the level of war as an expression of our Absolute Freedom. We should remember that Hegel does not suggest that states/interrelation of states leads to a unified global geopolitical order but rather the domain of World Spirit and Absolute Freedom, where the terror of spirit’s freedom expresses itself in its capacity to annihilate itself.
This is one of the reasons why, starting May 18th, Philosophy Portal will be hosting its fifth course focused on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. To learn more, or to get involved, check the link: Philosophy of Right.
Theory Underground is leading an “American Idiots EU Tour” from April 27th through May 25th. To find out more, or to get involved, check: EU Tour 2024.
Philosophy Portal will be soon releasing our third anthology, inspired by Hegel’s Science of Logic, and titled Logic for the Global Brain.