Excerpt from Chapter One of Frank Engster’s Book: Das Geld als Maß, Mittel und Methode Das Rechnen mit der Identität der Zeit (Berlin: Neofelis Verlag UG, 2014)

The question of the book is how a radical critique of capitalism is possible when critique in the tradition of Kant and Hegel means that the criticized subject itself has to “give” the measure of its critique. The thesis is that, while in Kant this reflexivity is achieved by transcendental subjectivity and reason and in Hegel by self-consciousness, self-relation of the concept and the absolute reason of spirit, in Marx we find a materialist turn. The turn shows that capitalist society became reflexive by a kind of self-measurement, done by the functions of money, on the one hand, and the valorization of labour power and capital, on the other. Money, by its function as the measure of value and the means of its realization and mediation, measures in the commodities the productive relations of their production, thus determining from the past valorization of labour and capital the magnitudes necessary for their further productive valorization — and hence for a productive use of money itself. That is howl, in money’s capital form, the measured magnitudes become reflexive, while money itself becomes in its capitalist self-relation the form to measures the same valorization process which by this form becomes possible in the first place

The Voice of the Author in Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Gulliver’s Travels was first published in 1726 and several reprints, each with minor changes in text, were issued within a few years’ time, with the 1735 edition being generally regarded as the more authentic version. Since then, the popularity of the book has never ceased to increase. Swift was as hostile as Pope and the other founders of the Scriblerus Club to the regime of his time and the Hanoverian court and this attitude is reflected in various ways throughout the book, but Gulliver’s Travels suggests that we should look further than the confines of the eighteenth-century world. This paper explores the author’s voice in the narrative in order to look closely at the impact of Swift’s ideas on the reader. The attempt to identify several roles of the author suggests that the reader is perplexed by the narrator’s attitude and challenged to reformulate the entire perspective on the human race. The article, therefore, surveys the book by looking at different authorial voices used by Swift as a technical device to communicate his radical critique of human nature.

“The Imam of modern Egypt was a sceptic”: Mustafa Sabri's Radical Critique of Muhammad ʿAbduh and Modernist Theology

This article re-examines the theology of Egyptian ʿalim Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) through the writing of Late Ottoman sheikh ül-Islam Mustafa Sabri (1869–1954) and his radical critique of the Muslim reform (tajdīd) movement. One of Mustafa Kemal's most implacable foes, Sabri was alarmed to find Egyptian ʿulamaʾ and intellectuals advancing the positivist-materialist agenda he had challenged in Istanbul before fleeing in 1922 from Ankara's victorious nationalist forces. Debating the leading lights of the modernist movement in Egypt of the 1930s and 1940s, Sabri came to see its reform theology as little more than a calque on Enlightenment notions of religion; his ideas became influential through his close relationship with Hasan al-Banna and other figures from the Muslim Brotherhood. Examining Sabri's work in Istanbul and Cairo, ʿAbduh's early and later writing, and texts such as ʿAbduh's famous debate with Farah Antun, the islāmiyyāt literature of Egypt's liberal age, and material by Sayyid Qutb, I argue that Sabri was instrumental in formulating the hostile discourse that came to dominate Muslim views of ʿAbduh in the later twentieth century once the ideologies of Salafism and Brotherhood Islamism had eclipsed that of the reformers.

Calling of education: challenges and achievements of independence

Education is a broad way to the individual, collective and societal success and independence: it consists of pedagogical efforts, learning and upbringing. All these components are united in educational communication that revealed personal vocation to some job and future profession, on the one hand, and spiritual strategic calling of life. The vocation itself is a challenge for the individual, local community and for the state, because it often requires the effort of all forces and the full revealing of one’s creative potential – to get a good citizen and successful member of community. At the same time, it is through the implementation of his or her vocation that the individual receives the resources and abilities giving him or her the strength and ability to respond to numerous external challenges. To give a proper answer for these challenges personality should find own core, reveals oneself and choose priority values. To get some benefits from job as a vocation it is necessary to find your calling in life – its main, strategic purpose, its intrinsic meaning: our calling gives us goals and our vocation gives us means to achieve these goals. Friedrich Nietzsche called for a genuine academic freedom as only honorable aim for student and researcher and gave a radical critique for the university bureaucracy and academic officialism. Such systematic and total criticism, not as nihilism, but as a component of the systematic search for an authentic vocation and sacred calling, is taught by education, and best of all, by academic education. Independence is not a gift or a trophy, it is a state of searching for one's own authenticity and a sense of pleasure in the struggle for it. Therefore, independence can and should be both personal and common – because human is always no less a social being in unity with others than in gaining his or her own autonomy through others.

How to Overcome the Crisis of Symbolism with the Help of ‘Populist Ideas’? V.F. Chodasevič’s Critical Essays of the Early 1910s and the Article Nadson

This paper analyses V.F. Chodasevič’s early 1910s critical essays and his article Nadson, read in 1912 in the Literary and Artistic Club. Although the article did not play an important role in the critic’s work, because it was only during the exile period that Chodasevič criticized Nadson’s poetry, yet it represents the first example of Chodasevič’s appeal to the aesthetic model proposed by the utilitarian critics and the ideas of patriotism and civic virtues (graždanstvennost’), which were important in his poetry and later critic works. Chodasevič delivered a speech at the Club’s anniversary meeting which conveys his views on how to possibly overcome the crisis of symbolism. According to the poet, literature should restore and fully embody the ideals of the early Aesthetic Movement. The aim of the present research is to analyse the concepts, aesthetic ideas, and quotations used by Chodasevič in Nadson, and ascertain which sources influenced the author and how they relate to the literary context of the time (early 1910s). I argue that Chodasevič’s text echoes, to some extent, symbolist aesthetics while also reflecting elements of radical critique of early Aestheticism. Chodasevič only reproduces politically radical intentions that were present in the texts written by symbolists after 1907. Chodasevič’s article and his social views correspond to the evolution of Blok’s thought during the so-called ‘synthesis’ period; he, in fact, employs Blok’s ideas and introduces indirect quotations from his essays. Chodasevič’s speech at the Literary and Artistic Club was received as advancing principles which were seen too eclectic and old-fashioned, and which, most importantly, did not fit into the established literary context. Notwithstanding Chodasevič’s strategy of turning to Belinskij’s and Pisarev’s literary views was unsuccessful, since his intentions were misunderstood by the audience, he followed a similar pattern in several essays from the early 1910s. Chodasevič used symbolist aesthetic ideas in a number of texts written at the end of the exile period, where it can be seen that his approach and social and political views changed.

A Virtual Dialogue between Gandhi and Levinas

Mahatma Gandhi and Emmanuel Levinas have much in common. They interpret religion in a radical ethical way and develop an ethical hermeneutics of religious sources. Levinas’s thoughts on a holy history, not to be confused with history, are comparable with Gandhi’s swaraj as the spiritual independence and self-transformation of India. Escaping war logics, they maintain a “beyond the state” in the state and insert ethics in politics. Yet, Gandhi’s ethico-politics works with radical interrelatedness, whereas Levinas differentiates more between the self and the other. Gandhi trusted that, in the end, the good would vanquish evil. Levinas, in turn, did not venture into the future: the present was under “eschatological judgment.” Gandhi’s love of the enemy and his attempt to soften the opponent’s heart are absent in Levinas’s metaphysics. In addition, Levinas does not radically deconstruct the term self-defense, although Gandhi notoriously made also exceptions to his ahimsa. A dialogue can be established between Levinas’s ethical metaphysics and Gandhi’s ahimsa and satyagraha. Both thinkers make a radical critique of a peace based on rational contracts and equate peace with universal brother- and sisterhood. Without underestimating the many similarities between Levinas and Gandhi, I also highlight their dissimilarities. I argue that precisely the differences between both thinkers allow for a “trans-different” dialogue, which respects specificities and promotes communication, in a movement of hospitality and mutual learning.

Consequentialism as an Intergenerational Ethic

Consequentialist morality is about making the world a better place—by promoting value and producing valuable outcomes. Consequentialist ethics competes with non-consequentialist alternatives where values are to be honored or instantiated rather than promoted and/or where morality is based on rules, virtues, or rights rather than values. Consequentialism’s main rivals in intergenerational ethics are contract-based theories. This chapter first argues that consequentialism has significant comparative advantages over its contract-based rivals, especially in relation to non-identity, the absence of reciprocity, and the need for flexibility and radical critique. These advantages outweigh the challenges facing any consequentialist intergenerational ethics—including cluelessness, counterintuitive demands, and puzzles of aggregation. The chapter then explores many varieties of contemporary consequentialism, arguing that the best consequentialist approach to intergenerational justice is agnostic, moderate, collective consequentialism. Different possible futures—including futures broken by climate change or transformed by new technologies—present new ethical challenges that consequentialism has the flexibility to address. Collective consequentialism can also resolve long-standing debates about the aggregation of well-being. The chapter ends by asking how consequentialist intergenerational ethics might evaluate threats of human extinction, incorporate the value of nonhuman nature, and motivate its potentially extreme demands.

Algorithms and the Critical Theory of Technology

This chapter argues that the radical critique of computation and calculation must work from the register of capital. Using the example of the automation of control rights, it links 'algorithmic regulation' with mature capitalist logics — where capital dominates the labour–capital antagonism — to show why computation is necessarily a venue for radical political advocacy, an urgent task on the 'hard road to renewal'. The chapter treats 'data politics', or more precisely digitalization as a signature element within late neoliberalism. It uses two case studies involving property rights and differential class power to suggest that there are many good reasons to foreground Marxian-inspired contributions. The chapter attempts to specify a venue and criteria for politically meaningful scholarship. The issue is more than just analytical precision. At stake is the continuing relevance of a critical theory of technology that is politically adequate to understand the latest manoeuvre in the always-ready impulse of value towards the realization of its own totality.