[...] totalitarian regimes are by definition regimes of mercy: they tolerate violations of the law, since, in the way they frame social life, violating the law, bribing and cheating, are conditions of survival.
no longer Wagner as the poet of Teutonic mythology, of bombastic heroic grandeur
The key moment of any theoretical – and indeed ethical, political, and, as Badiou demonstrated, even aesthetic – struggle is the rise of universality out of the particular lifeworld. The commonplace according to which we are all thoroughly grounded in a particular, contingent lifeworld, so that a…
One is tempted here to use that old Levi-Straussian term ‘symbolic efficiency’: the appearance of égaliberté is a symbolic fiction which, as such, possesses an actual efficiency of its own.
not really sure what it means here tbh
Isn’t one of the topoi of Western liberalism the elevation of the Other as leading a life that is more harmonious, organic, less competitive, and aiming at cooperation rather than domination?
