Hmm. In a few essays from now, and also as a primary basis for the manuscript I'm working on for a leftist publisher in the UK, I'll write about the collapse of bios and zoe in the modern age. Briefly put, the different categories of life (how it is lived on a social level and how it is lived physically) are no longer kept separate. Zoe is 'animal life' or 'raw life,' the life of the body, that "animalistic existence" that Hobbes was so terrified of. It wasn't "nasty, brutish, and short" as he painted it (it's ultimately the life of uncolonized primitive peoples, the same peoples which other Enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau wrote enviously of).
That kind of life is now subject to politicization on all levels (Foucault's 'biopower') so that we cannot even talk of sex (which is zoe) without politics (consider the way an asexual might call overt talk of sex as "oppressive"). But sex, and the rest of zoe, is the opposite of bios ("the way life is lived", i.e. socially). They collapsed into each other in our minds through the increase of political reach into our private, personal existence.
So the question of "what is there instead?" is answered best by "everything we've already been without the state." People not only just living, but "being," existing for themselves and each other without a grand political narrative directing their daily lives towards profit and ideological formations.
More concretely, the answer to that question is what you, your family, your friends, and and your neighbors already are, minus politics.
That sounds like a beautiful way to live; what would that look like for rights and government? Tax incentives would be given to, say, "partners" or "partners with children" or "individuals with children"? Could that be a solution in the public sphere? I believe strongly in rights-based law, but I also think when we get to granular in our definitions, we're defeating the purpose (as seen, IMO, in the LGBTQIATS++ alphabet soup, where the quest to be inclusive through naming has rendered the very act of naming exclusionary and/or meaningless).
Whoa.
>"to admit that it is neither possible or desirable to create society from the top down or to enforce cultural norms through education and discipline"
I'm having a failure of imagination here: what is there instead? All I can conjure up is a Hobbesian animalistic existence.
Hmm. In a few essays from now, and also as a primary basis for the manuscript I'm working on for a leftist publisher in the UK, I'll write about the collapse of bios and zoe in the modern age. Briefly put, the different categories of life (how it is lived on a social level and how it is lived physically) are no longer kept separate. Zoe is 'animal life' or 'raw life,' the life of the body, that "animalistic existence" that Hobbes was so terrified of. It wasn't "nasty, brutish, and short" as he painted it (it's ultimately the life of uncolonized primitive peoples, the same peoples which other Enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau wrote enviously of).
That kind of life is now subject to politicization on all levels (Foucault's 'biopower') so that we cannot even talk of sex (which is zoe) without politics (consider the way an asexual might call overt talk of sex as "oppressive"). But sex, and the rest of zoe, is the opposite of bios ("the way life is lived", i.e. socially). They collapsed into each other in our minds through the increase of political reach into our private, personal existence.
So the question of "what is there instead?" is answered best by "everything we've already been without the state." People not only just living, but "being," existing for themselves and each other without a grand political narrative directing their daily lives towards profit and ideological formations.
More concretely, the answer to that question is what you, your family, your friends, and and your neighbors already are, minus politics.
That sounds like a beautiful way to live; what would that look like for rights and government? Tax incentives would be given to, say, "partners" or "partners with children" or "individuals with children"? Could that be a solution in the public sphere? I believe strongly in rights-based law, but I also think when we get to granular in our definitions, we're defeating the purpose (as seen, IMO, in the LGBTQIATS++ alphabet soup, where the quest to be inclusive through naming has rendered the very act of naming exclusionary and/or meaningless).