Something in the world forces us to think…
It may be grasped in a range of
affective tones: wonder, love,
hatred, suffering.
— Gilles Deleuze
Polemos: A Conference on the Work of John Brenkman
5/08/25 - 5/09/25
NYC
Keynote 5/08/25
A threefold problematic emerges from Max Weber’s work: the dynamics of bureaucracy in the modern state; the ethic of responsibility in politics as a vocation and the counter-forces that put stress on that ethic; and, third, the ethical tensions between scholarly inquiry and political advocacy in academic life. Last year I began to work through Weber’s ideas on these fronts with an eye to their bearing on contemporary events.
And then came the 100 days!
Two caveats are required in approaching Weber’s relevance to the turmoil Trump’s second term has unleashed.
The first regards theory….
Passages.
Keats
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
These lines open the third and final stanza of “Ode on Melancholy” and seem to express the thematic node of the poem: melancholy arises because whatever is beautiful dies, because pleasure arcs from ache of anticipation to poison of fulfillment, and because joy departs as soon as it is realized….
Rhetorics of Affect: Notes on the Political Theory of the Passions
I start from three interlocking premises. First, affective states and passions are an inherent dimension of politics and the political realm. Second, among the “ineluctable means” of politics, in addition to violence and deception as identified by Max Weber, is the power of rhetoric to arouse and dampen emotions, rhetoric in the double sense of the art of persuasion and the art of figuration. And, third, passions and affects do not exist independent of “discourse,” specifically rhetoric, in the sense that rhetoric does not simply convey or express passions and affects but in some sense forms them.
The place of rhetoric in political theory is, therefore, inextricably bound up with the philosophy of the passions….
From the Archive.
papal equinox
Pope Francis visited Philadelphia, the District of Columbia, and New York City in 2015, September 22-27. Speaking to the General Assembly during the UN’s annual gathering of heads of state, he sounded three themes: poverty, climate, and migration. The coincidence of the equinox gave those themes the aura of a planetary-solar convergence which I’ve recalled every autumn since.
As I write today, the equinox has been crossed….
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