Advancing Conversations: Srecko Horvat-Subversion - Softcover

Horvat, Srecko; Bown, Alfie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785354965 ISBN 13: 9781785354960

Verlag: John Hunt Publishing, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

In a world dominated by capitalism which is dangerously sliding into a new kind of fascism, Srecko Horvat's new book explores the concept of subverting the dominant paradigm in politics, technology and love. Drawing from his own experience of participating in different protest movements all around the world, working closely with WikiLeaks and being one of the protagonists of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, Horvat resists the prevailing melancholy of the Left by offering new political imagination beyond traditional concepts. Instead of the tension between horizontal movements or vertical political parties, “Subversion” opts for a radical dialectics of both methods as the only way out of our current deadlock. If there is a crack in everything, the way to use the light that gets in is constructive subversion.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Srecko Horvat is a philosopher and author of more than 10 books, most recently "The Radicality of Love" (Polity Press, 2015) and "What Does Europe Want?" (together with Slavoj Žižek, Columbia University Press, 2013). He is one of the founders of Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25)

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Advancing Conversations: Srecko-Horvat

Subversion!

By Alfie Bown

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2016 Alfie Bown
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78535-496-0

Contents

Introduction, 
Interview One: Politics, 
Interview Two: Love, 
Interview Three: Technology, 
Interviewer's Reflections, 
Endnotes, 

CHAPTER 1

Interview One: Politics

Alfie Bown: In your book co-written with Slavoj Zizek, What Does Europe Want? (Columbia University Press, 2014), you describe a global situation today in which there is no unity left, only decay that inevitably leads to disaster. Can I open with a general question and one that is a bit trendy at the moment: is it inevitable that capitalism is leading to disaster? Is this a crisis or disaster for capitalism, or the disaster that is capitalism, or both? How does this relate to your idea of "permanent civil war"? How bleak is our political situation today?

Srecko Horvat: Although What Does Europe Want? was published in 2014, it seems that only a year later all its darkest fears and warnings were, unfortunately, coming true. All that Slavoj and I did, is that we had been closely reading symptoms of Europe's disintegration and concluded that, if there isn't a radical change, Europe would soon diminish. And then came 2015, a year which was even more characterized by what Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks, called "morbid symptoms." There he says that the old world is dying and that the new world cannot be born yet, and it is at this moment that a series of "morbid symptoms" appear. We live precisely in such an "Interregnum" today. One of the morbid symptoms was the case of Greece which started with huge enthusiasm because of Syriza's victory in January 2015 and ended up, after the historical OXI referendum in July 2015, in a new defeat of the Left which accepted and now implements even worse austerity measures then previous Greek governments. So this was just one of the morbid symptoms of capitalism, where even a democratically elected government had to go against its own political principles and against the will of its own people. Another of the symptoms of disintegration is the still ongoing war in Syria. Another is the refugee crisis which won't end so soon, with more than five million displaced Syrians of which more than one million entered the EU only in the last months of 2015. Not to mention all the refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia and other war-torn countries which are rarely mentioned anymore. And then, of course, another symptom of this permanent crisis is terrorism, from Paris to Brussels, cities which after the attacks in 2015 look like war zones, with armies on the streets and frequent "terrorist alarms" during the week. At the same time you have the rise of the far-right parties and even governments – Hungary, Poland, Croatia, just to name a few – across Europe. And then in 2016 came Brexit as a final nail in the coffin of Europe as we knew it. We can see new borders, walls, fences, terrorism, displacement of whole populations. So, yes, all these symptoms point in the direction that we really live in a permanent state of civil war or, we could even go so far as to say, permanent war. It is the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben who recently proposed the theory of stasis. He says that we live in a new phase where civil war is a paradigm for our current situation. And I think today's Europe – but also other parts of the world – perfectly fits into this definition.

AB: So you are saying, via Agamben, that the concept of civil war need no longer refer to a concrete example of a nation fighting within itself but to the condition of Europe as a whole? Is it rather that civil war describes the structural condition of Europe today?

SH: Yes, I am afraid that's correct. So, Agamben calls this stasis, which is actually a term from Ancient Greece. In the 4 and 5century BC, there was a struggle inside the Ancient Greek society between the oligarchic and democratic factions, so it was the city's struggle against internal revolt. What I think we have today is a general experience of this situation on a global level. In what sense? Well, in the sense, firstly, that we have a lot of wars going on in the world at the moment. If you take the case of the war in Syria: it has more than 20 different players involved. These range from the US to Russia, from China to the EU, from Saudi Arabia to Qatar to Israel and so on. All of these players are involved on a geo-political level in the bloody game in Syria. So you can expect that this war also has at least some affects in all of these countries, and you can expect consequences in all these regions, because we live in a globalized and hyper-connected world.

How did the war in Syria start in the first place? It started already with Libya. How did that war start? It started, as was revealed by Hilary Clinton's emails recently made public by WikiLeaks, because the US and France had interest in natural resources and because Western oil companies were heavily indebted to Gaddafi. At one point Gaddafi even proposed to them – what the Troika never proposed to Greece – that they could re-negotiate the debt and even offered to get rid of the debt, but they did not want to do that, so the civil war started. So after the civil war in Libya, part of the arms and so-called "freedom fighters" went to Mali where again France had an interest in natural resources, some went to Niger where wars started as well, and some went to Syria. And why Syria? For at least two reasons. The first is that in Syria, before the so-called "Arab Spring," new natural resources were found, and the second is that Syria was the only country in the Middle East that was not indebted to any international monetary institution. That was a big problem, because you need indebted countries to keep the system running. Then there are Russian interests, Turkish interests, US interests, Israeli interests, etc. This is close to Agamben's definition of stasis but it is still not stasis: you could still say that these are just "normal" geo-political conditions and that they have occurred many times throughout history, where there have always been wars between countries for land and resources. But when you come to the refugee crisis or terrorism, as two consequences of these wars, then these conditions develop into stasis. Why? Because the war, as a boomerang, returns home – precisely where it started.

If you have this situation that we just described, and then on top of that millions of people are forced to flee, and on the other hand, terrorism starts to occur all around Europe, then as a result you have a massive increase in militarization. Just a few days after the attacks in France, in the UK there was a 15% increase in military spending, while there were 20% cuts in other budgets. Then David Cameron decided to abolish the divide between the army and the police and sent ten thousand troops onto the streets of Britain. At the same time, if you walk the streets of Paris or Brussels today you can see not police but the army on every corner. This is quickly becoming a new "normal" and it reminds me of Alfonso Cuaron's wonderful dystopian movie Children of Men (2006) in which terrorism, the army and refugees are in full view all the time but no one is surprised any more. It was supposed to be science-fiction, but obviously we are living in a documentary version of Children of Men today. All these "morbid...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Hunt Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1785354965
• ISBN 13: 9781785354960
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 96
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar