View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Ghazali also notes that there might also be a problem of one person not even needing what the other has to offer, but this is almost an afterthought; for him, the real problem is conceptual. How do you compare two things with no common qualities? His conclusion: it can only be done by comparing both to a third thing with no qualities at all. For this reason, he explains, God created dinars and dirhams, coins made out of gold and silver, two metals that are otherwise no good for anything:
Dirhams and dinars are not created for any particular purpose; they are useless by themselves; they are just like stones. They are created to circulate from hand to hand, to govern and to facilitate transactions. They are symbols to know the value and grades of goods.
They can be symbols, units of measure, because of this very lack of usefulness, indeed lack of any particular feature other than value:
A thing can only be exactly linked to other things if it has no particular special form or feature of its own for example, a mirror that has no color can reflect all colors. The same is the case with money—it has no purpose of its own, but it serves as medium for the purpose of exchanging goods."
From this it also follows that lending money at interest must be illegitimate, since it means using money as an end in itself: "Money is not created to earn money." In fact, he says, "in relation to other goods, dirhams and dinars are like prepositions in a sentence," words that, as the grammarians inform us, are used to give meaning to other words, but can only do so because they have no meaning in themselves.
Money is thus a unit of measure that provides a means of assessing the value of goods, but also one that operates as such only if it stays in constant motion. To enter into monetary transactions in order to obtain even more money, even if it's a matter of M-C-M', let alone M-M', would be, according to Ghazali, the equivalent of kidnapping a postman.
lol
Nixon floated the dollar in order to pay for the cost of a war in which, during the period of 1970-1972 alone, he ordered more than four million tons of explosives and incendiaries dropped on cities and villages across Indochina-causing one senator to dub him "the greatest bomber of all time." The debt crisis was a direct result of the need to pay for the bombs, or, to be more precise, the vast military infrastructure required to deliver them. This was what was causing such an enormous strain on the U.S. gold reserves. Many hold that by floating the dollar, Nixon converted the U.S. currency into pure "fiat money" - mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the United States government insisted that they should be. In that case, one could well argue that U.S. miltary power was now the only thing backing up the currency. In a certain sense this is true, but the notion of "fiat money" assumes that money really "was" gold in the first place. Really we are dealing with another variation of credit money.
estimated page
In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism's own unacknowl-edged need to limit its future horizons, lest speculation, predictably, go haywire. Once it did, and the whole machine imploded, we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged. About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.
To begin to free ourselves, the first thing we need to do is to see ourselves again as historical actors, as people who can make a difference in the course of world events. This is exactly what the militarization of history is trying to take away.
Neoliberalism is what plantation politics look like now. It is the idea that you are responsible for your life in a system that is rooted in the death project, which itself is rooted in the oppression of Black and brown bodies in order for it to profit. It profits from death and containment of our bodies, whether on Turtle Island or in Europe. Neoliberalism takes collective responsibility and makes it personal. Neoliberalism is the idea that if you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you'll be fine, except, of course, if you don't have any boots or have a pair without laces.
Neoliberalism is New Age politics: it's all your fault. You just didn't save enough, you didn't work hard enough, you you you ... never enough.
[...] Deconstruction in this, its most rigorous form acts as a constant reminder of the ways in which language deflects or complicates the philosopher's project. Above all, deconstruction works to undo the idea--according to Derrida, the ruling illusion of Western metaphysics--that reason can somehow dispense with language and arrive at a pure, self-authenticating truth or method. Though philosophy strives to efface its textual or 'written' character, the signs of that struggle are there to be read in its blind-spots of metaphor and other rhetorical strategies.
[...] Once alerted to the rhetorical nature of philosophic arguments, the critic is in a strong position to reverse the age-old prejudice against literature as a debased or merely deceptive form of language. It now becomes possible to argue--indeed, impossible to deny--that literary texts are less deluded than the discourse of philosophy, precisely because they implicitly acknowledge and exploit their own rhetorical status. Philosophy comes to seem, in de Man's work, 'an endless reflection on its own destruction at the hands of literature'.
[...] Thus Barthes (drawing on Saussure) refers metaphorically to 'the speaking mass' in a context which purportedly invokes the totality of language, but which appeals even so to actual speakers and their speech as the source of that totality. Barthes may state, as a matter of principle, that language is at once the 'product and the instrument' of speech, that their relationship is always 'dialectical' and not to be reduced to any clear-cut priority. In practice, however, his theorizing leans upon metaphors which implicitly privilege individual speech above the system of meaning that sustains is.
Derrida's line of attack is to pick out such loaded metaphors and show how they work to support a whole powerful structure of presuppositions. [...]
this shit is wild
[...] Deconstruction is therefore an activity performed by texts which in the end have to acknowledge their own partial complicity with what they denounce. The most rigorous reading, it follows, is one that holds itself provisionally open to further deconstruction of its own operative concepts.
[...] Nietzsche saw nothing but blindness and multiplied error in the various attempts to arrive at truth through logic or abstract reason. Philosophy had based itself unwittingly on a series of buried metaphors none the less potent and beguiling for their common and commonsense usage. Nietzsche carries out what amounts to a full-scale programme of deconstruction, attacking every last vestige of philosophic truth and certainty. The fundamental 'laws' of Aristotelian logic are held to be expressions of our present inability to think beyond them, rather than possessing an absolute validity. [...]
[...] The end-point of deconstructive thought, as Derrida insists, is to recognize that there is no end to the interrogative play between text and text. Deconstruction can never have the final word because its insights are inevitably couched in a rhetoric which itself lies open to further deconstruction reading. Criticism can only be deluded in its claim to operate (as Eagleton puts it) 'outside the space of the text' on a plane of scientific knowledge. There is no metalanguage.