Adrian Johnston
speaker
618 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2020
last heard Jan 2020
Adrian Johnston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The Isle of Minerva is already implicitly part of Hegel's perspective here.
For Hegel, it just so happens that after –
a certain number of permutations of these different figures or shapes of consciousness have historically unfolded, we can see how they can be put in relation to each other, where one of them is, in a sense, the successor of another, because it resolves the problems that were particular to that other shape.
But it's only because history happens to have gotten...
to this point where there have been certain figures or shapes that have come on the scene that have dealt with problems that other shapes created for themselves.
That allows Hegel to tell this story with the benefit of hindsight, but just because there's a certain retroactive necessity in the sense of for there to have been progress, it had to have been the case that certain problems were resolved in certain ways.
That doesn't
commit one to saying that it was already from the get-go necessary, fated, guaranteed that when particular human perspectives ran into self-generated problems, that something would come along that would resolve those difficulties.
It just so happens that after the fact, we know that that happened, but it wasn't guaranteed beforehand.
Yes.
Yes.
Well, you know, here, um, implicitly in the background of what Zizek is doing here is, um, you know, our set of developments, which trace back to, um, Western Marxism in the first half of, of the 20th century.
Um, and, you know, here in particular,
I think that the best point of reference that really gets at this in the most direct and I think sophisticated fashion would be Walter Benjamin's famous essay, Theses on the Philosophy of History, from the end of the 1930s.
And in that text, Benjamin, among other things, talks about
what he calls a weak messianic power.
And what he is doing is that he is recasting Marxism in a way that takes into account the particularly discouraging experiences of the stretch of history from Marx's death in 1883 up through the rise of fascism in Europe and the outbreak of the Second World War.
And
Benjamin, and along with Benjamin, certain other Marxists, Western Marxists of this period are also making moves along these lines.
They come to acknowledge that, well, for any intellectually honest observer of the first half of the 20th century in particular, it just seems impossible.
Showing 401–420 of 618 · page 21 of 31
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