The Olympic stadium in Munich, supposedly attended by no other but the Fürer himself, is where an epochal football match between German Philosophers and the Greek philosophers is about to start in Monty Python’s sketch. The German line up consisted of: Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Shelling, Schlegel, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger, backed up by Beckenbauer and Jaspers; the Greek’s consisted of: Plato, Epictetus, Aristotle, Sophocles, Empedocles, Plotin, Epicurus, Heraclitus, Democritus, Socrates, and Archimedes. Confucius is the referee and the two side referees are St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. The whistle blows; Germans are to start the game, but Hegel, who is supposed to kick the ball, falls instantly into a deep meditation along with he entire German team of philosophers. Overburdened with harkening the Logos and being more Greek then the Greeks, he allows Archimedes to steal the ball. Short passes between him Socrates and Heraclitus lead to a spectacular goal and Greek victory. Συνέχεια
Tag Archives: financial crisis
An absolute refusal? Notes on the 12 February demonstration in Athens
1. The 12th February demonstration in Athens, consolidated, what is becoming clearer in the past weeks: a growing majority of the Greek people support the refusal of the memorandum no.2 no matter what. In spite of the fear mongering spread by the pro-memorandum forces that a negative parliamentary vote would entail an immediate euro exit and the ensuing Africanisation of Greece, the popular support for the new EU-ECB-IMF loans and the correlated austerity measures is waning significantly. The formal political debate is increasingly based on a politics of fear: the government’s and mainstream media’s principal argumentation is stripped, on the one hand, to the bare threat of what a disorderly Greek bankruptcy would entail -invoking often assumed similarities with Greece’s plight during the World War II occupation by German and Italian troops- with basic food and medicine shortages and a lack of basic public amenities like gas, heating, electricity; on the other hand even mainstream media cannot but be critical vis-à-vis the most dismantling provisions of the memorandum no.2 for any sign of consensual legitimacy, such as the automatic decrease by 22% of minimum wages, the content and scope of collective bargaining and so on, insisting however ‘in the final analysis’ that the dilemma posed leaves only one choice. Συνέχεια
Nomadic universality 