“If another mass attachment takes the place of the religious one, as socialism seems currently to be doing, the same intolerance towards outsiders will ensue as in the War of Religion, and if differences of scientific opinion ever managed to to attain a similar importance for masses, the result would be the same for this motivation as well”. Freud in Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the ‘I’.
Continue reading “The Concept of the Political: ab-original insights”
Marxism has conventionally found itself on the side of ‘materialism’; there has been a hyper-separation (as against the overdetermination) of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ in much of Marxian praxis. How does one make sense of this hyper-separation, of the conventional bar, which is also the ‘bar of convention’, between Marxism and the spiritual? Can one carefully work one’s way towards an ‘and’ between Marxian questions and spiritual quests, even if it is an uneasy ‘and’?
What is a ‘virus’? There appears to be global consensus on the virus as an invader of human ‘territory’. But, what if, the virus was a product, an excreta of the cell, of say, a cell in stress, a cell in extreme distress? What if, the virus was not always already present; lurking around the corner; waiting to “infect”, “invade” the cell? Waiting to leap into the human world, from an animal environ; waiting to migrate? What if, what we call the “virus” was not there in an a priori sense? What if, the virus is not the precursor of life? But the ruin of life? The remainder of life? What if, the virus emerges in an a posteriori sense? Out of cellular processes? What if, “it” – a strand of RNA or DNA – a fragment of genetic material – precariously poised at the cusp of life and death – is not the seed of future life; but the tombstone of the cell and cellular processes?
