#intelligentsia

[ahumourlessworld]

My Friends by Sergey Pen

“After Maximov had left, Viktor launched into a tirade against the Russian intelligentsia. All too many of them talked too much, did too little, had no strength of will and were oversensitive to the point that their sensitivity was an excruciating burden to others.” - Vasily Grossman, ‘Stalingrad’ (1952) [p. 189]

[bocadosdefilosofia]

«Nietzsche y Heidegger especialmente son desde hace tiempo —también fuera de Alemania— objeto de una profunda veneración y se han convertido en ídolos de las nuevas corrientes hipersubjetivistas, antihumanistas, nihilistas y postmodernistas, una tendencia que el derrumbamiento de las ilusiones marxistas sobre la dictadura del proletariado no ha hecho más que acentuar. Muchos de los intelectuales que en su juventud habían militado en el campo marxista, han perdido la fe en sus antiguas ideas o se han convertido en decididos adversarios de la misma ideología a la que antes habían estado fervorosamente adscritos. Y de la misma manera que en los años dorados del marxismo y del diálogo cristiano-marxista la "intelligentsia" europea —sobre todo en los países latinos— se empapaba de Marx y de Hegel, lee ahora a sus antípodas Nietzsche y Heidegger. Así, una gran parte de los sistemas de ideas, modas filosóficas y teorías surgidas en Francia en las últimas décadas —Estructuralismo, "nuevos filósofos", Deconstructivismo y Postmodernismo en general— se han amamantado en las ubres nietzschianas y heideggerianas, desde Lacan y Foucault a Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze o Jaques Derrida. Eso explica que el debate en torno a la filosofía alemana sea en Francia más intenso y popular que en la propia Alemania.»

Heleno Saña: Antropomanía, en defensa de lo humano. Editorial Almuzara, pág. 32. Madrid, 2006.

TGO

@bocadosdefilosofia

@dias-de-la-ira-1

[intelligentsiamazagangi]

[theidealistphilosophy]

Words are loaded pistols.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Sayings.

[grandhotelabyss]

If you’re not listening to Grand Podcast Abyss, above is the first of what I hope are many briefer clips advertising its virtues. Here I address the audience directly with my most minimal hope for the future. Heavy is the head that wears the podcast crown: if you don’t go in for fully nihilistic irony, the form can lend itself to didacticism, not unlike pedagogy. You want to send the listeners away with something that will keep them from jumping off the nearest bridge. (In my fiction, I have no such compunction. Fiction is absolute reality, which includes, though is not reducible to, the absolutism of despair.) Privately, I fear whatever hopes and ambitions we might like to gather under the name of “liberalism” are totally finished in America’s liberal institutions today, that what calls itself “liberalism” now is simply imperial sociopathy and technocratic totalitarianism, and, especially in the guise of “progressivism” so-called, may always to some extent have been. I like this clip because I am wary of sounding as if I am defending some extant liberal institution—sometimes I do sound this way and I always regret it—when all such institutions, I think, have fallen, and not to foreign influence, whatever the merits of Rachel Maddow’s fulminations about Russia or Steve Bannon’s about China, but to the inner contradiction of an ideology pledged at once to freedom and to calculation. What we are faithful to, in the end, is a literary utopia, the republic of art. Which need not be a reproach, as if we were moon-eyed dreamers about to fall into a well, but evidence of the sheerest pragmatism. The water is rising; we seek higher ground.

[indizombie]

It is indeed surprising that the so called intelligentsia or cream of knowledge that claims to reside within the hallowed doors of institutions such as IIM cannot see the innate flaw in the segregation of the 'non-deserving' from the 'deserving'. The sad truth of the matter is that the 'deserving' will always be from one narrow caste group, and the 'non deserving' from another caste group that has traditionally and historically been ascribed this label, irrespective and in spite of anything other than the 'fatal accident' of their birth. Unless people from marginalised communities are pro-actively brought into and genuinely supported in these spaces, the spaces will automatically be 'reserved' ONLY for the so called upper caste elite.

Sylvia Karpagam and Sridhar Gowda, ‘Merit of ‘Vision’ groups and ‘Knowledge’ commissions in Karnataka’, Round Table India

[j-august]

Xinran, China Witness (2008: 290).

[earthboundrocketman]

Respect the drip, Karen.