Capitalism and Life

On the one hand, the time of life, and on the other, the time of capital, though this is not a dialectical opposition. Capital does not rise out of life and transcend it, but is always immanent to life. It distorts this relation by making itself appear as though it were the origin of life. Thus the businessman thinks without him there would be no life, whereas in fact it is he who is the parasite. Today we see this thinking everywhere. We cannot think of life except as the result of economic necessity. 'There is no alternative,' they say over and over again. The absence of possibilities is the end of life, for life is the possible and nothing else.

Two Futures

Begin with the two futures: the future of capital - the Futures Market and Messianic future - these are two very different temporalities. What conceptions of time are hidden there - the future of capital is the endless repetition of the same - the same instant again and again. The future of the Messianic is the interruption of the present by the future - the interruption of time - but the endless future of capital (which is its particular form of secular redemption) isn't really a future at all, but merely hides the real future which is the future of the disaster - human and natural catastrophe.

Messianic Prophetism

Religion as redemption that is what interests me and not as a belief in a world beyond this world. What are the resources of a language of redemption still left within religion? How do I measure the world against the possibility of justice for all and not just for the few?

Time is a Relation

The present contains within itself the past, and is pregnant with the future.

Cassier

The elements of time (past, present and future) are not counter-posed to one another as though they were hermetically sealed segments on an infinite line. Rather than the past and the future being opposed to the present from the outside, they are contained in the present. They are part of the present, however, only as excessive. Both the possibilities of the past and the future exceed what has been actualised in the present. What could have been is always greater than what has been, and events of the past can announce the possibility of a different future.

The past and the future are virtual in relation to the present. This means that their real possibilities are not determined in advance by the actuality of the present. This is why the real future, as opposed to the endless repetition of the present, is always a surprise.

Kant's Antinomies

A good place to start is Kant's antinomies. Basically they are lesson in what goes wrong if you start with the common sense view of reality and then apply it to experience, rather than applying experience to our perception of things. Take the idea of the world. The antinomy is that either in the world every substance is simple or composite, and every composite substance is composed of parts, or there are no composite substances consisting of parts and everything is simple. The solution to this antinomy, as we know, is not to show that one view is false and the other not, but that contained in both is a reification of the idea of the world. The world as a whole is not something that I can experience either as a simple or composite, because it is not a substance at all, but an idea. But if the world is an idea, what kind of idea is it? It is not an idea as essence (as it would be in Plato), but a relation. It precedes the experience of things as such. Each thing I experience is related to another thing and so on, and without this network I would not be able to experience any individual thing, but it itself is not a thing, nor could it ever be a thing. It is the non-perceptible openness in which each thing exists, suspended beyond itself in reaching out to another infinitely. I do not know the world, if you mean by know, experience some thing, rather I have to be it.

God

God is not a thing, being or substance. But nor is God an idea, thought, or consciousness. God is first of all a relation. From this relation, we might then think of things and ideas, but first of all we have to think of the relation on its own terms. But what does it mean to think of the relation first of all? It means that we have to start with the relation and not the terms of the relation. Or, the terms are an effect and not the cause of the relation. The relation is a condition of the terms of the relation and not the other way around.

God is not a thing. This is what Kant teaches us. But what does it mean to say beyond Kant that God is not an idea? This is what I am trying to answer when I say that God is a relation. Neither dogmatic nor transcendental metaphysics; you have to pick your way between these two.

In the Beginning is the Relation

In the beginning is the relation, not the word or the deed. There is no thing that is given first of all without context, relation or function. Without these, I could not experience or perceive anything, but they are not themselves perceptible. This does not mean they are pure ideas floating above experience. Experience is neither real nor ideal, but an admixture of both. What is ideal is real; what is real is ideal. This is why the old divisions between idealism and materialism, or rationalism and empiricism, no longer make sense.