Abstract
This chapter concerns the phenomenological dimension of crisis as a nihilist separation between humans and the profane world that they inhabit. Crisis is problematized as a nihilist temporality that purports either a state of submission towards a transcendental world or a permanent acceptance of societies of control. Thus, two forms of experience of crisis are considered: crisis as decision and crisis as indecision. Theoretically, this twofold experience of crisis is explored through Marx’s investigations on the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall and Taube’s indagation on modern eschatology. Based on these investigations, the chapter aims at a critique of the figure of the militant during the 2007 crisis protests in Portugal.
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Notes
- 1.
The entanglement of a judgement that one wants to do on a critical moment reflects the shared conceptual history between crisis and critique. In modernity this entanglement will be manifested, for instance, in the XVIII century criticism of the western absolutist state: “Does the Absolutist State still rule? Or has the new society been victorious? That is the question that arises here. The indirect stance no longer suffices. The critical process is coming to an end. A decision is unavoidable but has not yet been arrived at. The crisis is manifest—it lies hidden in the criticism” (Koselleck 1988: 103).
- 2.
Jonas briefly summarizes gnostic eschatology in the following way: “there is past and future, where we come from and where we speed to, and the present is only the moment of ‘gnosis’ itself, the peripety from the one to the other in a supreme crisis of the eschatological ‘now’” (idem: 335).
- 3.
However, the organic composition of capital may still rise with the increase of constant capital through capitalist technological development and investment (idem: idem).
- 4.
This means that the higher the organic composition of capital the higher the relative surplus population.
- 5.
Such aspect can also partly explain how banks in Portugal collapsed and were subsequently bailed out by the state, leading to the IMF intervention in 2011 and following austerity measures to “back” the bailout. However, my focus is not to offer empirical explanations of the 2007 crisis in Portugal but rather how Marx’s analysis of the LTRPF is useful to consider the relation between subject and this particular crisis in capitalism.
- 6.
This episode of police violence is analysed in more detail on the second chapter.
- 7.
A verse from Grandola Vila Morena, the famous song that passed on the National Emission and gave the sign for the Army Forces Movement to start the coup d’état against the fascist state.
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Nunes de Almeida, J. (2020). Experience of Crisis. In: The Sacralization of Time. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46543-8_5
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