Bara Kolenc
University of Ljubljana
Bara Kolenc is a research fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana and a president of the International Hegelian Association Aufhebung. She is the author of Repetition and Enactment (2014, DTP, Analecta, in Slovene) and, together with other authors, a recipient of The Highest Honor for Research Achievements in 2021 from the University of Ljubljana for the publication Hegel 250 – Too Late?, Problemi International, 4/2020. She is currently at work on her new book Repetition and Subjectivity: On the Psychoanalytical Concept of Repetition as the Topical Mechanism of Modernity.
Speaking at the conference
Thursday, 22 September, 4pm, Kosovel Hall
Spacemen and Earthlings: Sublating The Falsification of Capitalism
Our line of argument leans on Hegel’s critique of a qualitative differentiation of being and nothing, and subsequently also of finitude and infinity, which understanding (and the history of philosophy) clings to in a variety of falsifications [Verfälschungen], the most adamant of them being the idea of the eternal being of perishing. Raising the question on the end of capitalism and its supposed infinity, which has been advocated until recently, we claim that capitalism cannot end not because the end is not inscribed in its very structure, as some critics of Marx’s utopianism would argue, it very much is, but because the end is inscribed in its structure in such a way that finitude and infinity are held apart in a falsification that, supported by the ideology of neo-liberal conservatism, deeply represses their fundamental intertwinement. Similarly, both the posture of the post-historical era and the recent atmosphere of the expectation of the catastrophe, keep on holding apart finitude and infinity, and thereby maintain the existent state of affairs. If we are to change the devastating effects of capitalism, it is of crucial importance not only to re-evaluate our utopias and deal with our fantasies, but re-constitute, both functionally and ideologically, our relation towards finitude and infinity. Recognizing the master-slave dialectics and its phantasmal capes in the age of digital manorialism – one of them being that of spacemen and earhlings – well contributes to this process of a reconstitution.
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