“It was a passionate adventure, a laboratory of ideas, very distant from orthodoxies and -isms of the time.”1
“I would say, briefly, that an attempt at an open Marxism, of a revised and corrected Freudo-Marxism and, finally, a post-Marxist and post-Heideggerian thought were elaborated [at the journal Arguments], but not without difficulties.”
“Globalization names a process which universalizes technology, economy, politics, and even civilization and culture. But it remains somewhat empty. The world as an opening is missing. The world is not the physical and historical totality, it is not the more or less empirical ensemble of theoretical and practical ensembles. It deploys itself. The thing that is called globalization is a kind of mondialisation without the world.”
“Philosophy, as philosophy, is not alive any more. It is reflected in the history of philosophy, and is replaced by technical sciences — of nature, humanity and its works, theories and social-historical practices. These technical sciences ignore what they cross. As such philosophy sees its end. Those that succeeded Hegel should not be called philosophers, but thinkers.”
“The world deploys itself as a game. That means that it refuses any sense, any rule that is exterior to itself. The play of the world itself is different from all the particular games that are played in the world. Almost two-and-a-half thousand years after Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Fink and I have insisted on this approach to the world as game.”2
Notes
-
Kostas Axelos, “Mondialisation Without the World,” Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 2005), https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/interview/kostas-axelos-mondialisation-without-the-world. ↩
-
Alexander Galloway has recently discussed what I might call, with Axelos, the school of errancy, in his essay “The Swervers.” Galloway describes this school as consisting of a “curious cocktail of pragmatism, empiricism, and realism,” with an emphasis on the ethical implications of theory. Axelos seems to me a part of this trend, or rather a precursor to it, but less naive than the theorists (or “thinkers”) Galloway critiques. Indeed, Henri Lefebvre considered Axelos to be “the last philospher” (see State, Space, World, 259), and I similarly see in his thought a fruitful engagement with the history of philosophy that evades Galloway’s categorial challenge. What, then, if we were to read errancy and itinerance with the opacity and contiguity of the One, drawn from Galloway’s interlocutor Laruelle? Do we not, in the opening of the world, encounter the blackness (beyond and before the darkness) of the region (see Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 89)? But this too is a game… ↩