Some good Sunday thoughts from Levi Bryant – especially interesting are his comments on the way(s) that politics come to replace theology. Here is a snippet:
“Where the humanities used to be organized around theology and knowledge of God and advancement of his glory, the humanities encountered a void in the movement towards secularization. Something was needed to function as a telos or justification of our work. Politics became that replacement. But it’s been a weird sort of politics that is seldom addressed to the broader population and that seldom takes to the streets. I repeat, who is it for? What does it do? It’s as if we can’t admit that we just genuinely love Shakespeare for his own sake.”
These days I find myself feeling deeply weary where discussions about ethics and politics are concerned. I reflect on this, I wonder why. Why is it that I grow so tired, so jaded, whenever discussions of politics and ethics come up. I’m divided between two tendencies, two orientations. On the one hand, there is my desire for justice, equity, and fairness. On the other hand, there is my Lucretian and Spinozist desire for peace of mind and beautitude. Ethico-politico desire, the first orientation, is a desire to transform the world, to render it just, and to denounce injustice; injustice that we see all about it. The desire for beautitude and peace of mind is something quite different. It is a desire to simply delight in the machines of the world, the beings of the world, taking them for what they are. The person who has what Spinoza called an “intellectual…
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the anthropo.scene 
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