Edmond Constantinescu

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Deciphering the Martian Rosetta Stone

Deciphering the Martian Rosetta Stone

  One day, ALH84001 will be remembered as the Rosetta Stone of the hieroglyph of life.

When the Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799, our information about the ancient world was limited to the Bible and Greek historiography. The triple script of King Ptolemy gave Champollion the opportunity to transliterate the hieroglyph, providing the key to decode older writings.

We have moved beyond the Bible…

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Rooting for the Apes

Rooting for the Apes

In the movie Planet of the Apes (1968), the chimp-archeologist Cornelius in quoting from the sacred scrolls of the apes:

Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him;…

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The misrepresentation of Martin Luther King

The misrepresentation of Martin Luther King

Every Martin Luther King day, every street that carries his memory into the city slums, every movie that holywoodises his cause, is a celebration of victory. The victory over Martin Luther King.

Let me explain.

King did not fight for racial emancipation. He fought for the emancipation of humanity from identification with race. The black community was to him what the proletariat was to Marx: the…

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Juda's Sacrament

Juda’s Sacrament

The allegation that Christianity worships money has a deeper meaning than the truism that the church is after money. Actually, it is the institution of money that needs the church.

According to Walter Benjamin, Christianity has reached the point where it has turned itself into cultic Capitalism. Contending against Weber’s thesis that Capitalism draws from protestant ethics, he held that, on the…

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Marx' opium statement revisited

Karl Marx is back. The specter is haunting again. The Capital appears to be vindicated by the crisis of global capitalism.

I will leave economics with the economists. My interest is only in one single aspect of the global market: the cancerously thriving market of postmodern religion. Like every other cancer, it progresses toward the destruction of its own host. The ultimate victim of commodified religion will be religion itself. In order to decode the symptomatology of this process, I will conjure – to use one of Marx’ favorite cliches – the ghost of the young Marx…

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The global religious market was made possible by two inventions of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662): the mathematics of probabilities and the redefinition of theology as a strategic game. The latter is known as Pascal’s Wager. Slave trade insurance was the first global-scale application of probabilities in economics. The reintroduction of slavery in Christianity was not a resurrection of pre-feudal economics. It was rather…

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Ludwig Wittgenstein defined the meaningless and the inevitability of God-talk in one and the same statement: “The sense of the world must lie outside the world” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.41). The sense of life, the world as a whole – in one word – God, is unsayable. “In the world everything is as it tis, and everything happens as it does happen, in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value” (ibid). On the flip side, every statement of meaning and value, even the most trivial, is ultimately theological. This is even more true with statements and concepts concerning the exercise of power…

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According to Darwin’s own confession, Ichneumonidae was the theological dilemma that would eventually push him toward agnosticism. He was bewildered by a natural order built on cruelty and pain. Ironically, Darwin’s blind spot was the evolution of the concept of God…

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Two things happened in England in 1772. Judge William Murray concluded in Somerset v Stewart that a slave could not to be removed from England against his will. Secondly, John Newton composed Amazing Grace, his poetic confession. Newton had been a slave trader himself, before becoming an Anglican clergy, and, late in his life, an abolitionist. The two events are tips of the iceberg. They bridge below the waterline across the coalescing body of eighteenth-century biopower…

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A specter is haunting Europe again. This time it doesn’t show up as a topless woman with a gun in one hand and a red flag in the other. Well, the topless woman might still be there, but the specter puts the face of an WW II veteran, with cossack mustache and wearing a Waffen SS cap. Ukraine has become an unsolvable dilemma for liberal democracy. Whether Europe lets Putin have his way, or incorporates an uncontrollable revisionist movement, the outcome will be the same: challenging the moral consensus on which the present is built…

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In the movie Planet of the Apes (1968), the chimp-archeologist Cornelius in quoting from the sacred scrolls of the apes:…

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Alexis de Tocqueville noticed that America is “one of the countries where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and are best applied”. He finds explanation in the peculiarities of democracy. Philosophy is for aristocrats. America is egalitarian. Yet egalitarianism encourages also intellectual self-reliance. So it is that doubting authority comes rather naturally to Americans…

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Friedrich Nietzsche defined modernity in one short sentence: God is dead. Widely misunderstood as a profession of atheism, what the German philosopher meant was a mere statement of fact that “ belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable”. What makes belief unbelievable?…

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The 95 thesis from Marx to Luther

The 95 thesis from Marx to Luther

“From Marx to Luther” is a calculated anachronism. Reading the 95 thesis as a post-note to The Capital is made arguable by three presuppositions of Luther’s theses. These are: Nominalist ontology, repentance and penance, and grace vs. money. Essentially, they correspond to the three tenets of Marx’s economic philosophy: his anti-metaphysical ontology, the dialectics of labour and capital, and the…

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The Declaration of Independence is a revolutionary manifesto framed in Platonic language…

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