Abstract
Crisis, perennial crisis, is the cipher of our times. We should, however, be aware of its interpretational extremes. Living in a perennial crisis does not mean that the end of the world is nigh, but neither can crisis language simply be ignored. If anything, a better understanding of crisis’ main structural characteristics, its temporal and spatial dimension, are required. For as much as crisis will result in being the operativity of a paradox, the addition of the qualifier of ‘perennial’ will result in the exhaustion, the ‘logoration’, of the paradox of the crisis. The spatial moment of the crisis will erode, and its decisional characteristic will be procrastinated.
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- 1.
An almost automatic inclination made me write the word ‘Oriental’ instead of ‘Asiatic,’ but that would have left me in somewhat of a figurative theoretic ‘pickle’ (cf. Said 1979).
- 2.
A kind of Orwellian, from 1984, stratagem of ‘five-minute (self-) hatred’.
- 3.
Žižek does not offer his reader with any reference or source regarding this expression. And although we hope it is not, he has probably just taken it from Terry Pratchett’s novel Interesting Times (Pratchett 1995). This most wonderful novel is, however, not the most reliable source being a comic fantasy. It opens with the following telling sentence as epigraph: “There is a curse. They say: May you live in Interesting Times ” (Pratchett 1995). Although there is, obviously, nothing wrong with referring to fantasy novels as such, to take it as a base for ‘facts’ would be similar as taking Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ ’s Childhood Pal (Moore 2002)—another most wonderful novel—as source for theological reasoning (it would be fun though).
- 4.
See, for example, my ‘Only the country of the blind will have a king. On Žižek’s non-lucid reading of Saramago’s Essay on Lucidity [Seeing]’ (Vanhoutte 2013).
- 5.
It is quite interesting to note that Žižek is not the only (non-)philosopher who has been found convinced of the existence of this saying and its Chinese origin. The question that needs to be posed is, obviously, whether it was not Žižek who was the actual origin of the other references to these ‘interesting times ’. Among the other voices who refer to this presumed Chinese saying is Zygmunt Bauman . The British sociologist from Polish origin who is probably most known for his theorizing of a liquid society, wrote in his non-diary on the 12th of February 2011: “Ancient Chinese wisdom considers the wish ‘to live in interesting times ’ to be a curse. Contemporary wisdom is of two minds. Many would see that wish as a blessing” (Bauman 2012, 152). Another, and considering the possibility of Pratchett being the ‘origin’ of this saying, much less surprising surfacing of this non-saying can be found in Justin Lee Anderson’s comical novel Carpet Diem (Anderson 2015). When the main character, a multimillionaire hermit, realizes that he is in the midst of a celestial battle between good and evil in which he will more than probably lose his life, it was ‘interesting’ to discover that this peculiar situation had been described by the author as ‘he was living in “interesting times ”’ (Anderson 2015, Chapter 4). Whereas with Žižek (and Bauman) we still had doubts of the ‘origin’ of the saying, with Anderson it can hardly be different than finding ourselves with a reference to Pratchett.
- 6.
The earlier mentioned Thanzung or struggle sessions are evenly exotic but less ‘mistaken’. They (unfortunately) truly did exist.
- 7.
Borges’s book is his 1942 El idioma analítico de John Wilkins and the passage, the taxonomy, from the Chinese encyclopedia went under the title of Emporio celestial de conocimientos benévolos.
- 8.
Derrida’s philosophical work is emblematic on a double account here. Not only does Derrida treat on a manifold of occasions practically and technically the question of tradition-translation-betrayal, the ‘passing on’ or the ‘handing over’ (the paradoxical paradosis) of deconstruction (becoming, for example, deconstructionism) is an example itself of betrayal—and how at times being wrong does involve making little to no sense; see, for example, the interesting volume of Herman Rapaport entitled The Theory Mess (Rapaport 2001).
- 9.
We could speculatively suggest here that besides the figure of the scapegoat—as studied by Girard (1986)—, another figure that is equally essential in human history, needs to be placed on the forefront of tradition: the traitor (the traitor is, obviously, present in Girard’s work, but not ‘thematized’ as such). In fact, the transformation or evolution of all mythology (mythologies which contain the tales of the scapegoat at all communities’ origins), as Girard explains, consists of a form of treason. To mythological tradition, or better, the mythological tales, on the verge of becoming mythological traditions, go through a process of disintegration, of distortion and suppression—through an active process of elimination and manipulation, or a ‘process of suffocation and strangulation’ (Girard 1986, 93)—where (all) the traditional rabidly harsh tales are ‘translated’ into the almost purely rationalist and much less violent myths (cf. Girard 1986, 78–80).
- 10.
That it was promising can be deducted from the fact that Žižek chose it as title for (embracing as such) the afterword of one of his more provocative works (which Living in the End Times is).
- 11.
Or my fellow countryman, Joost Vandecasteele and his Opnieuw en opnieuw en opnieuw, his Massa and even, although less (de-)pressing, his Jungle.
- 12.
Bernard Stiegler speaks, interestingly, even of an ‘ordinary, everyday apocalyptic feeling’ (Stiegler 2013, 10) that has developed over the past years. The reason for this feeling is, according to Stiegler, not caused by an actual presence or nearness of the end (of time [s]), but from what he calls the ‘addictive turn’—we have become, in the consumerist society all like addicts, and consumption itself is a source of unhappiness, but a necessary, druglike, addiction (cf. Stiegler 2013, 27). A similar thought to Stiegler’s ‘addictive turn’ can be found in Byung-Chul Han ’s (pathological) characterization of the twenty-first century by neurological illness (Han 2015, 1).
- 13.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy , whom I will confront as second example of apocalyptic thinker, makes an even harsher statement when he says that ‘[B]elief in the Apocalypse appears to be more widespread just now, in the early part of the twenty-first century, than ever before. The only difference—an enormous difference, it must be conceded—from earlier, almost forgotten ages is that in our age it is not, or not only, members of gnostic sects who warn that the end of time is drawing near, but also scientists, engineers of various kinds, even a far-sighted statesman or two. So many clouds have gathered on the horizon by this point, it is difficult to say that their pessimism is unfounded’ (Dupuy 2014, 66). One is left to wonder why Zygmunt Bauman made the clearly incorrect observation in his Liquid Modernity that ‘dystopias are no longer written these days’ (Bauman 2000, 61).
- 14.
At times Žižek insists that his understanding of the apocalypse follows the religious one of ‘revelation’ (which goes back to the original Greek meaning of the word and signifies ‘unveiling’ or ‘lifting of the veil’) and not catastrophe . See, for example, his interview with Liz Else in the New Scientist (Žižek 2010). This, however, is also contradicted by his claim that his apocalypse is separated from any eschatological consequence (Žižek 2014, 129: ‘the thing to do is to separate apocalyptic experience from eschatology ’) which, on its turn, is contradicted again by his allowing for an ‘eschatological apocalypticism which does not involve the fantasy of the symbolic Last Judgment’ (Žižek 2009, 148).
- 15.
When Žižek reacted to the responses by some of those he criticized in his article for the London Review of Books, he acknowledged that 3 claims had been made against his critique . Whilst he answered (attempted to answer) critique 2 and 3, the first one remained without any comment whatsoever. The first claim was that his message was that ‘all we can do is to “sit at home and with the barbarity on television”’ (Žižek 2007).
- 16.
Žižek is correct in insisting (elsewhere) that one should abandon the ‘misleading opposition of activity versus passivity’ (Žižek 2009, 153), but his final answer, that basically remains the same in all these years and that consists of doing nothing (as it is better than doing something … that is wrong), does not appertain to the spheres of upheaval of the dichotomy of activity vs. passivity.
- 17.
Although Agamben turns time and again to this fundamental Aristotelian theory, a very concise summary of the main lines of what is at stake can be found in his ‘On What We Can Not Do’ (Agamben 2011, 43–45). We will return to this problematic in the closing chapter of this volume.
- 18.
Whatever Žižek may hope for, our present socio-cultural and political systems will not be dethroned by similar, weak and delusionary, yearnings.
- 19.
Gray had stated a very similar idea already earlier (2004). In the introduction to his collection of contributions to the New Statement—entitled Heresies—he had written in an almost identical vein: ‘[J]ust as Marx’s revolutionary socialism had done, the global free market promised an end to history. As could have been foreseen, history continued—with an added dash of blood’ (Gray 2004, 1).
- 20.
What is at stake in this time-frame is the easy transition into reality of something considered impossible exactly up until its point of becoming reality. It is in Bergson’s description of his incredulity at the declaration of war between France and Germany in 1914 that Dupuy discovers an accurate example of this inversive-ness and invasiveness of the catastrophe and its time. ‘Horror-struck as I was’, writes Bergson, ‘and though I felt a war, even a victorious war, to be a catastrophe , I experienced what William James expresses, a feeling of admiration for the smoothness of the transition from the abstract to the concrete: who would have thought that so terrible an eventuality could make its entrance into reality with so little disturbance? The impression of this facility was predominant above all else’ (Bergson 1935, 134).
- 21.
We should, in a somewhat paradoxical way, become fatalists in order to avoid fatalism. It is in this sense that we should read Dupuy’s call to ‘plead in favor of a < fatalist > interpretation of the evils that assail us’ (Dupuy 2002, 50—my translation) whilst affirming that ‘the time of the project is not a fatalism …’ (Dupuy 2002, 193—my translation).
- 22.
It is as with a gambler who always believes that the worst is going to happen. That the worst is going to happen is, however, as Dupuy himself explains, not what the gambler ‘believes regarding the actual future’ but regards ‘how [the gambler] thinks regarding future conditionals: if I would do this: then this is what will be produced’ (Dupuy 2002, 117—my translation). It has to be stressed, however, that there is a fundamental difference between the gambler and Dupuy’s catastrophic enlightenment. The gambler’s reasoning is, in fact, a purely subjective (individualistic) and purely psychological based reasoning, whereas Dupuy’s stance regards an ethical and intellectual necessity; said differently, that regards, or at least aspires, universalistic solidity.
- 23.
For Dupuy’s understanding of panic as an inner or interior evil of (a) society, see his La panique (Dupuy 2003).
- 24.
As Dupuy adds a page further: ‘[I]t is not the uncertainty [of the future catastrophe ], scientific or not, that poses the biggest obstacle, it is the impossibility to believe that the worst is going to come’ (Dupuy 2002, 142–143—my translation).
- 25.
I have translated Borges’s phrase directly from the Spanish. The English translation I refer to at the end is slightly different: ‘The future is inevitable and exact, but it may not happen’.
- 26.
In a certain sense, Dupuy’s ‘catastrophism’ can remind one of Baudrillard’s far less elaborated understanding of the catastrophe as well. Also for Baudrillard ‘crisis’ is not the concept to refer to, but catastrophe is the correct one (cf. Baudrillard 1983, 71). Furthermore, also for Baudrillard one should try to avoid applying to the catastrophe that strictly linear vision that is imposed on us. One should reconsider the concept under its etymological understanding as curvature, according to Baudrillard, which leads to its limit of meaning. One should thus attempt to ‘exceed this ultimatum of meaning in order that catastrophe itself no longer appears as the last, nihilistic day of reckoning, such as it functions in our current collective fantasy’ (Baudrillard 1983, 104). ‘Negativity’, in fact, ‘engenders crisis and critique ’, whereas, ‘hyperbolic positivity for its part engenders catastrophe …’ (Baudrillard 1993, 106).
- 27.
This, for example, is the stance of Naomi Klein ’s rather worrisome The Shock Doctrine (2007). Why try to avoid disasters when ‘… responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the non-profits …’ (Klein 2007, 13). And a rather long laundry list of other examples can be found in this provocative book of hers.
- 28.
Bruce Chatwin’s unconventional main character Kaspar (von) Utz from his novel Utz (Chatwin 1998) is a good example of what is at stake here. Utz, a wealthy collector of precious Meissen porcelain, is able to preserve his private (!) collection throughout the Second World War and the years of the oppressive Stalinist regime in Czechoslovakia’s Prague. And although Utz’s goal can be considered, up to a certain point, noble (preserving art from destruction by barbaric regimes is a noble cause), the only possible way he was able to achieve this was by compromising himself with both of these totalitarian, destructive, regimes. Utz was not a Nazi neither a Stalinist, but the utter visceral need to preserve his collection made him completely blind towards the other, and absolute, necessity (and the only truly good cause), namely to destroy these totalitarian regimes.
- 29.
We could refer, for example, to Jean-Clet Martin ’s interesting speculations (truly revelatory and non-eschatological end-of-the-world in comparison to Žižek’s only supposedly or claimed revelatory and non-eschatological apocalypse ) on the end of the (this) world and the coming about of a plurivers (Martin 2010)—an idea, the plurivers, that was elaborated, albeit slightly differently, also by one of my teachers in those same years (cf. Mascarenhas 2010).
- 30.
- 31.
By the way, Screwtape, C. S. Lewis’s shrewd Senior Devil we just met had the following piece of advice for his junior partner in crime Wormwood on progress: ‘You keep him [the human being] well fed on hazy ideas of Progress and Development and the Historical Point of View, …’ (Lewis 2001, 46) as that will lead him straight into to good direction of the underworld.
- 32.
We think his whole progress-argumentation is mono-dimensional, largely superficial and implies a reduction of cognition to calculus. Numbers are not all there is and measuring is a tricky business to be handled with care and not so sluggishly as, for example, Norberg does. Furthermore, his tasteless and particularly sad treatment of the Holocaust was already denounced 30 years ago by Vlademir Jankélévich. Jankélévitch wrote in L’imprescriptible (1986) about one of the more abominable pieces of journalism who had, ‘alas!’ discovered how ‘the differences between Hitler’s crimes and other crimes were simply (!) quantitative’ (Jankélévitch 1986, Chapter 1—my translation). One can justifiably wonder whether Norberg (basing himself on Pinker) does not represent another example of abominability when he writes that: ‘[T]he fact that there are many more people in other places, living in peace, does not make the Second World War any less atrocious. But if we are thinking of the risk of being harmed or dying because of war, then we must also think of proportions and rates, just as we think of poverty rates and unemployment rates. In that context, no matter how counterintuitive it might sound, there is actually a case to be made that the twentieth century was the least violent century ever’ (Norberg 2016, Chapter 5). It is not counterintuitive, as Norberg claims, to state something of this kind, it is simply repulsive this downplaying of the Shoah. In fact, there is something deeply problematic, even profoundly troublesome (repulsive, to repeat the word once more), in thinking that it is ‘numbers’ that which is at stake in the Holocaust. What is at stake is the ‘novelty’ of the industrialization of the extermination of the entire Jewish people and culture, and the Gypsy culture, the handicapped and homosexuals would have met the same fate if the time had been made available (to say it rather crude). Its scale, its ‘measure’—if quantification is of necessity to the poor of mind—is beyond any comparative numerology. What probably obliges Norberg to make this horrendous claim is, as John Gray so accurately writes, the awareness (something which he has to downplay as much as possible) that at all the massacres that litter the twentieth century ‘were premeditated for the sake of vast projects of world improvements’ (Gray 2003, 96) or ‘to elevate the human condition’ (Gray 2004, 5); that is, they took place to allow his beloved (imaginary) progress. All this is, in the end, nothing more than another sad example of what Jean-Pierre Dupuy described as the twentieth century’s capacity to simply digest the worst abominations without any particular embarrassment (cf. Dupuy 2002, 85).
- 33.
Pinker’s recrimination of Gray, of being ‘flat-earth wrong’, is quite intriguing and should be considered at full value. In fact, as the late Umberto Eco correctly argued some years ago, the accusation that most of our ancestors, especially the Christian ones, believed that the earth was flat was highly questionable (Eco 2013, 11–23). Some did believe the earth was indeed flat, but the largest majority of Christians, as well as a large part of pagan sages who lived well before the rise of Christianity were already firmly convinced of the earth’s roundness. It regarded a false accusation made by nineteenth century lay (secular ) thinkers who were irritated and fed up with Christian doubts on evolutionism. If religious people could have such absurd ideas as believing that the earth was flat, how could one take their doubts on evolutionism serious (Marshall McLuhan voices another interesting theory [which does not rebuke any of the major claims that result from Eco’s observation], where the ‘striking flat’ of the earth is one of the greatest achievements of the sixteenth century and later, mainly based on the innovations of the press [Gutenberg] and the map [Mercator] (cf. McLuhan 1962, 182)). A lie (a ‘lie for the truth’ as pure ideological lies are always) was needed to make the point of these positivist scientists (if we can call them accordingly). The question we thus need to pose before anything else, regarding Pinker’s accusation, is whether his resorting to this same recrimination is not a revelation of his own ideological bias (with its one-size fits all approach so typical of ideology—an approach that, by the way, is also found in Norberg’s volume Progress; it suffices to look at the chapters: food, sanitation, poverty, violence, the environment, literacy, freedom, and equality, all is simply better) and not an argument against Gray. We obviously think it is.
- 34.
It suffices to look at the global peace index to realize that there are still a lot of people living in ‘interesting times ’.
- 35.
The circularity of her reasoning is somehow also admitted by Roitman herself when she states that ‘[M]any academic authors, including myself, take crisis to be the starting point for narration’ (Roitman 2014, 34). The conclusion was present from the very beginning.
- 36.
By giving credit to de Man’s thesis here, we are taking our leave from a strictly observant ‘Koselleck-ism’. In fact, Koselleck claims that when one can note an inflationary usage of the crisis-language, one that covers almost all aspects of life so far that one could conclude that one is living in an all-embracing crisis, then ‘this conclusion attests more to a diffuse manner of speaking than it contributes to the diagnosis of [one’s] situation’ (Koselleck 2002, 236).
- 37.
Hegel’s famous Owl of Minerva, the goddess of Wisdom, is known for spreading its wings and flying out only at dusk; that is, when day (the event) has already passed.
- 38.
Also because it is not unseen that even what is considered by almost all reasonable people to be (have been) a crisis will not have been so for some others. Take, for example, the Asiatic crisis of 1997: the financial meltdown of some of the so-called Asian Tigers (Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, etc.). In his best-selling book The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Friedman 1999), Thomas L. Friedman, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times journalist, described this financial meltdown that caused so much damage—especially on the populations of these crashing nations—as merely ‘exposing the crony capitalism’ (Friedman 1999, 452) of those regions. It was, however, according to him, ‘not a crisis’ (Friedman 1999, 453).
- 39.
- 40.
A similar claim is made by Bernard Stiegler (cf. Stiegler 2009, 48).
- 41.
A possible way out of Roitman’s situation could be found in Sara Ahmed ’s take on crisis narratives in her The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) where this element of the ‘production of the crisis’ is present as well. What is missing in Ahmed (but is present in, and detrimental to, Roitman’s project) is any sort of denial or underplaying of an actual crisis. In fact, also for Ahmed the announcing ‘of crisis is to produce a moral and political justification for maintaining “what is” in the name of future survival’ (Ahmed 2004, 77). However, if there is no actual real crisis, fundamental is ‘the very production of the crisis that is crucial’ (Ahmed 2004, 76–77). So if there is no crisis already active, one needs to be created for it to be operative.
- 42.
An almost identical phrasing of the just reported quote is present there as well. ‘The true crisis’, as Critchley writes just before he commences the section dedicated to the topic of ‘Philosophy as the production of crisis’ (Critchley 2001, 72–75), ‘of the European sciences [Critchley was discussing Husserl’s study entitled precisely Crisis of the European Sciences] or what Heidegger calls “the distress of the West” is felt in the absence of distress: “crisis, what crisis?”. The real crisis is the absence of crisis, the real distress is the absence of distress. In such thoughtless amnesia we sink to the level of happy cattle’ (Critchley 2001, 72).
- 43.
For Roitman, as we already indicated, the entanglement of crisis and critique was inspired by Reinhart Koselleck . For Critchley, on the contrary, it is a fundamental part of the whole enterprise of what is known to be Continental Philosophy (Critchley 2001, xv).
- 44.
Roitman seems to have taken the historical affirmation of Koselleck, that the ‘critical process of enlightenment conjured up the crisis’ (Koselleck 1988, 9), as having metahistorical value (even having retro-active effects upon the meaning of the concept of crisis itself). This is, however, stretching the limits a bit too much. Furthermore, it completely misses out on the importance of the veiling/unveiling game played between crisis and critique so important in Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis. The critical enlightenment process, first of all, was itself also a crisis, and the concept itself of crisis already had a well-defined and -known meaning—a meaning upon which this enlightenment critique will have a profound influence (upsetting, as I will attempt to demonstrate, its temporal and spatial structures). No retro-active effects on the concept of crisis are observable, only the obfuscation of crisis by critique (something which is still active in Roitman’s discourse itself as we discovered).
- 45.
It should not go unnoticed how the concept of crisis seems to be identifiable with the concept of war.
- 46.
Crisis is not (!), and neither does it express ‘something positive, creative and optimistic’ (Bauman and Bordoni 2014, 3) as Carlo Bordoni argues in his quatre mains text written with Zygmunt Bauman . Something positive or creative might come out of a crisis, but that is by no means assured by the crisis itself (the same obviously holds for a possibly negative or depressive counterpart). Crisis itself is a neutral concept.
- 47.
As already indicated, in our covering of the meaning and history (etymology) of the concept of crisis, we are generally following the already mentioned German scholar Reinhart Koselleck ’s, by now classic, research on the concept of crisis. Regarding this etymological history of crisis, we base ourselves particularly on his ‘Some Questions Regarding the Conceptual History of “Crisis”’ (Koselleck 2002, 236–247).
- 48.
In a 2012 PhD dissertation by Argiri D. Aggelopoulou, it is claimed that Aristotle ’s definition of the passions, as proposed in the second book of his Rhetoric, has a very similar implication and utilization of the concept of krisis (we were made attentive to this text in too late a stage of the writing process to be able to include it).
- 49.
As W. H. S. Jones correctly remarks in the general introduction to the publication of the Corpus Hippocraticum in the Loeb Classical Library, there is ‘no inner bond of union [of these texts] except that all the works are written in Ionic dialect and are connected more or less closely with medicine on one of its allied sciences’ (Hippocrates 1923, xxviii). So Hippocrates , like many other ancient authors, more than a ‘proper’ name represents a collective one.
- 50.
Obviously, Roitman’s arguing for a decisive shift from one (pure?) meaning of the word crisis in favor of a new one (once more pure?) goes against the singular-plurality and mélange-ness of pregnant (social) words, as we described in the beginning of this chapter. In what follows, we will, however, not argue against this unreal theory of linguistic purity she seems to adhere to. We will simply attempt to demonstrate that her argumentation for this shift is not sustainable. As such, we will have offered—that is, in case our argumentation succeeds in its attempt—a sideways demonstration in favor of the proposed non-monolithic ‘origin’ of (most) words.
- 51.
Koselleck’s understanding of ‘secularized’ is similar to the one we described in Section 1.5 as inadequate. Did he (and Roitman) use and understand the concept of secularization in a more correct way, no mention would have been made of these erratic shifts in meaning.
- 52.
One should not forget either that crisis is more than just a particular meaning in a specific ambient. As Roland Barthes remarks accurately, ‘crisis is a cultural model’ that surpasses field-limitations. The crisis-model, in fact, and still according to Barthes, has ‘marked Western thinking about the organic (with Hippocrates ), the poetic and logical (Aristotelian catharsis and syllogism), and more recently the socio-economic’ (Barthes 1990, 52) and we could add the theological to this small list as well.
- 53.
As has already been indicated in precedence, Hippocrates was the most famous physician of the Island of Kos. So to translate Derrida’s observation in the language we have used in precedence, saying that Plato was following the doctors of Kos is synonymous as saying that Plato is pledging allegiance to the Hippocratic school, or as W. H. S. Jones defined it: the Corpus Hippocraticum.
- 54.
Richard Rorty has ‘invented’ a rather nice analogy, although, we have to admit, he is discussing something completely different, that we like and that can be used here to explain the ‘curing of one’s symptoms’. Rorty writes: ‘It is as if a psychiatrist were to explain to a patient that his unhappiness is a result of his mistaken belief that his mother wanted to castrate him, together with his muddled attempt to think of himself as identical with his Father. What the patient needs is not a list of his mistakes and confusions …’ (Rorty 1981, 33).
- 55.
It might not surprise that, as Naomi Klein reports, Milton Friedman saw his ‘shock doctrine ’—the completely erratic and ideological conviction that through destabilization and a precise mixture of well-balanced private and public terror one is able to render docile all possible obstacles so as to create a tabula rasa from which a utopian Edenic new beginning can commence—as the ‘only medicine’ available to save the (world’s) economy. At least, this is what he said to the friends of his loyal follower, the Chilean ruthless dictator Pinochet (reported in Klein 2007, 81). It has to be added, and Klein acknowledges this too in her book (Klein 2007, 140), that Friedman was convinced a less warlike and terror-stricken policy than applicated by, for example, Pinochet would suffice for his shock doctrine to be applicable. In fact, as he interestingly wrote in the 1982 preface to his bestselling Capitalism and Freedom: ‘Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around’ (Friedman 2002, xiv). Friedman’s capitalism is a pure pharmakon .
- 56.
This “circle” in question is the kula, the circle-styled system of inter- and intratribal trade to be found in the Trobriand Islands, as it was theorized by Marcel Mauss in his The Gift . The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies (2002).
- 57.
Although, on this occasion, Agamben is not criticizing Derrida, it has to be acknowledged that both authors follow, language-related, quite a different agenda.
- 58.
And although this ‘de-localizing extension’ almost necessarily means an opening up to the universal, we believe this is not a necessary aspect (the opening up to the universal) for the functioning of the de-localizing extension.
- 59.
That the paradox that crisis is can still be operative regards the fact that its paradox of contraction and expansion unfolds itself on the two different planes of temporality and spatiality.
- 60.
According to Koselleck: ‘Rousseau was one of the greatest forecasters, whether it was a matter of forecasting the perpetual state of crisis or registering the subjugation of Europe by the Russians and of the Russians by the Asians’ (Koselleck 2004, 23).
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Vanhoutte, K.K.P. (2018). Crisis. In: Limbo Reapplied. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78913-2_4
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