Another Great Intellectual of Our Time on Gaza

here

Ah, Intellectuals..

here

Un Nuevo Mouffe

¿Qué es un mouffe? Un mouffe es algo tan estúpido que solo un intelectual podría decirlo…

Según un conocido filósofo argentino,

hay sabiduría oriental y filosofía occidental. la filosofía no es sabiduría, ni siquiera conocimiento. Los filósofos son los Caballeros de la ignorancia. Exponentes modernos: kant, kierkegaard, nietzsche, marx, heidegger, wiittgenstein, sartre, deleuze, foucault.

Tantos millones de chinos, japoneses, coreanos, hindúes, filipinos, etc sin filosofía ni filósofos. Sería difícil encontrar una muestra más acabada de cierto orientalismo cool. ¿Qué carajo piensa que Amartya Sen y Jaegwon Kim por ejemplo, hacen con sus días?

A New Mouffe

Following on from a previous post, I hereby add a new word to the English language. The word is “mouffe”, it is a noun and is used to describe a statement, spoken or written, that is so stupid and/or disgusting that only a person with pretensions to being an intellectual could possibly say it or write it. A perfect example of a mouffe was provided yesterday by Pablo E. Chacón here, he says:

las estadísticas sólo sirven para enmascarar sus propias condiciones de producción

which in English is,

the only thing that statistics are good for is disguising their own conditions of production.

Thank you, Pablo

Mouffe

Perhaps I should open a category in this blog for “Things so stupid that only an intellectual could say or believe them”. In an interview in Página 12 today Chantal Mouffe says:

Vivimos en un mundo unipolar, con un centro de poder que es Estados Unidos. No hay posibilidad de disentir con eso a través de canales legítimos.

Which in English would be:

We live in a unipolar world with one centre of power, which is the United States. There is no way to dissent from it by legitimate means.
———–

No way? No way at all? I wonder if she has heard of Hugo Chávez; he may be a buffoon of the first order and about as much a revolutionary as I am a banana but it seems pretty obvious that a large part of his political project involves vigouously dissenting from the regional hegemony of the United States. He does this by bombarding his neighbours with Bolivarian rhetoric and economic largesse. It’s dissent and it’s by legitimate means, even though it’s also probably a huge waste of Venezuela’s oil wealth.

Another example: the German people elected Gerhard Schroeder to a second term of office on the basis that he wouldn’t play ball with the Americans in the invasion of Iraq, an invasion the execution of which was made costlier and more dangerous by the refusal of the Turkish parliament to grant passage to US forces.

And just one more: Kirchner and Lula scuppered the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas – a project dear to the heart of the United States for some time – for the foreseeable future at the 2005 Organisation of American States conference at Mar del Plata.