Peter (to Adam):
[I am] Highly ambivalent towards Jorjani, to say the least. First put off – claiming Heidegger’s original insight that science is in essence technological as his own. Secondly, while claiming to reject the notion of the ‘paranormal’ as byproduct of mainstream scientific paradigms, he very weakly argues that there is evidence of parapsychological phenomena “even” in plant and animal life. What about human subjective and bodily knowing.
Thirdly, whilst he rejects, wrongly in my view the possibility of direct access to ‘objective’ reality, a neo-Kantian stance, he seems to favour a Promethean/Atlantean objectification and appropriation of the “spectral” realm. The notion of a new and thorough going ‘Subjective Science’ that I spell out, with its own quite distinctive methods and techniques of Intersubjective research and validation, does not seem to occur. Rather than deconstructing the current notion of ‘paranormal’ or ‘parapsychological’ phenomena and understanding them as the most basic and pervasive dimensions of lived human experience and the lived body as I describe it in ‘The Qualia Revolution’ , ‘The Illness is the Cure’ and many earlier works, he talks in standard parapsychological terms of such things as ‘telepathy’ or ‘remote viewing’ as if they were special abilities and not already intrinsic to very fabric of subjective human experiencing.
There, where awareness goes in us, we already are. The remote is only ‘remote’ to he who cannot experience nearness or closeness in distance and thinks only in classical spatial terms of these. The ‘para-‘, as the inherent ‘alongsideness’ of phenomena within consciousness fields is not explored as such or per se. My overall take, Adam, is that academics like Jorjani have long been engaged in a project of appropriating, coopting, colonising and corrupting Heidegger, who firmly rejected socio-anthropological dumbing downs of his thinking, and critiqued the growing specialisation of the sciences, no matter how many ‘alongside’ disciplines it embraces or adds to itself. His aim in the Rektoratsrede fell only barely short of the total destruction of the academy as we know it, and he was particularly excoriation as regards academic ‘philosophy’.
As an example of the cooptive nature of the academic project I happened on the same evening as I watched Jorjani to come across an academic paper based on Heidegger’s late but absolutely seminal essay whose title is translated as ‘Science and Reflection’. The author of the paper passes seamlessly from an unquestioning translation of the German word ‘Besinnung’ into ‘reflection’ (others use the fashionable new age meme ‘mindfulness’ ) to a whole new academic jargon of ‘Critical Interdisciplinarity’.
Heidegger would have thrown up!!!! We touched on the issue of resurgent nationalism recently, though this wave seems to have been halted by the Covid coup d’etat. But what of ‘linguistic nationalism’ for want of a better term? It is not that Heidegger’s German is opaque to Anglo-Saxon interpretation, but only if it is explored taken seriously in its roots, its richness and the very different way it speaks and works to subverts Latinate hegemonism.
A final gut reaction to Jorjani and his ilk. In a word, and in the strongest sense and meaning possible, ‘they do not know what they are talking about’ – if by knowing we mean deeply felt, bodily knowing and sensing. In this sense, their work is ‘Sinnlos’, senseless, and intellectually linguistically desensitised and desensualised in all senses of the German and English words ‘Sinn’ and ‘sense’. As in ‘Besinnung’. Yeah right, translate it as ‘reflection’ without any further ado, as if English were the sole world currency of thinking.
The para-dox is that English CAN offer ways of making Heidegger a lot less “opaque”, but only through greater attention to his use of language and the way German word families served it so well, as in ‘Leben’ (life), ‘Er-leben’ (to experience or ‘live’ something), ‘Leib’ (the lived body as opposed to the ‘Koerper’ or corpse) and ‘Leiben’ (to body forth).
Peter On “Capital as Power”(written by Leftists but popular with the dissident right):
Since my earliest reading was Marx and Das Kapital, I must say have a bit of hard time understanding what is novel about the Capital as Power project, except as a statistical exercise. From what I have read so far there seems also to be a significant lacuna in monetary theory. Even before the term QE was coined it was admitted by corporate commercial and central banks that they create money from nothing in the lending process. 97 or more % of the money supply of nations is created as fictional money entered into borrowers’ deposit account by pressing a few numerical keys. The money loaned did not exist before. The FED too admits it creates its ‘QE’ money to bail out other private banks in the same way.
There are now pressure groups in many European countries seeking to overcome the total misconception that private banks lend money from saver deposits, rather than creating it from nothing, and proposing, as both Lincoln already did, and JF Kennedy was about to act on) that the power of money creation should be returned to the state treasury, thus freeing governments from dependence on either tax revenues or borrowing at interest. Hitler’s first economics mentor and finance minister too, was all in favour of the nationalisation of central banks, and several US States have been very successful in establishing and using their own public banks. QE for Main St. as opposed to Wall St. is still the way to go as I see it, pipe dream though it may be. In the meantime however, as you may know from the Libertarian movement in the States, there are also grassroots organisations that use Common Law to argue in court that banks are committing fraud on a massive scale when they lend, since they were and are … bankrupt.
Poor Joe works several jobs, often for a lifetime, to pay off, with interest a sum of mortgage or loan money that didn’t exist before he signed the loan agreement, which is not contractually countersigned by the bank as Common Law demands. Hard labour is exchanged for nothing, no assets possessed by the lending bank at all – another gross contravention of Common contract law. There is a good reason why loans themselves are accounted as assets by the banks!!! They are money created from nothing and at virtually no cost at all. All this has been made a lot easier by the technological digitisation and virtualisation of this fictive money as Marx called it, though unlike Engels, and not being able to foresee an end to the gold standard and commodity money, he did not anticipate that finance capital would increase its power over industrial capital to the extent that the pricing of commodities is increased considerably by manufacturers’ debt to the banksters. On one level, American history has been a constant and often violent war against the private banking system, in the war of independence was also a war against the Bank of England who were happy to ‘finance’ King George to deal with those pesky colonials who were freely issuing their own currencies.
Finally there is the hoary old myth that ‘money printing’ is inherently inflationary. Not if it goes into labour and tangible assets like the Autobahns, unless you confront Perfidious Albion which sent shiploads of counterfeit colonial currency notes over to the States to deliberately create an inflationary scenario. Japan was moving into issuing state money just before WWW. In fact Britain itself experimented with it during WW1, until a posse of bankers stormed into the Treasury to demand that it put an end to this outrageous defiance of their monopoly on money creation!!!
Adam:
The way I see it, Marxists have a hard time seeing the importance of everything you just laid out. I recently heard Doug Lain, the publisher of zero books, trying to talk to a Trump supporter, pointing out how right wingers always focus on the federal reserve, but true marxists see it as only a small part of the system. Rightwingers seem to oppose modern banking, while the left tends to oppose capitalism in general. “capital as Power” I think fits well with Ellen Brown’s public banking and the dissident’s rights focus on a class alliance with geopolitical elites that can nationalize the fed and take the power away from financial elites. We can’t do it without the geopolitical elite’s help but the left is too scared of fascism to go down that route and are too hemmed in by marxism’s conception of finance capital as “fictitious” capital, instead of seeing capital as power and a power that should be in good hands, preferably a government that is beholden to its people not banksters. Trump made some inroads towards getting the FED back from its capture, but the Left doesn’t see that as important or thinks it is another sign of nationalism which freaks them out.
