The philosopher Laurent de Sutter in his home in Brussels on October 30th. Delmi Alvarez
In Laurent de Sutter’s cozy office-library, in his apartment in Brussels, surrounded by walls of books that keep spilling over the attic, it makes you want to forget the outside world. But escapism is not what characterizes this philosopher and professor of legal theory (Brussels, 1977), a prolific author – he has published more than 20 essays – who always questions current events from an unexpected perspective. He doesn’t try to convince. He claims: “We never convince, not even with facts.” It points to the phenomenon of flat earthers, who to this day believe that the earth is flat. “And there are more and more,” he emphasizes. So is thinking, philosophy useful? De Sutter believes in this because he can “open or close ideas.” Philosophy opens up paths that can be used to view the world, to speculate about the possibility of another reality, to other ways of seeing and thinking. What the essayist strives for is liberation from concepts. Something he does with a varied work in which, from the world of art, through Jeff Koons (Pornography of the Contemporary, from the publisher Isla Desierta, 2021), he analyzes the stunned state of a society that submits to established power ( Narcocapitalism, reservoir). Books, 2021) or about what connects us as subjects in magic. A Metaphysics of Social Bonding (Herder, 2023), his latest book published in Spanish. On October 18th he gave the conference at the Ateneu in Barcelona: What would happen if the law was the last manifestation of magic in a world that thought it could do without it?
QUESTIONS.The war between Israel and Hamas has reignited the debate about the right to self-defense, respect for international law and the limits of each individual right. Is it possible to take sides?
ANSWER.From the moment things are built on one exclusion or another, it is impossible to reconstruct them. The only possible thing is to create a growing spiral of aggression. It was clearly Hamas’ intention to show a red flag to the far-right Israeli government and achieve this result to justify its own actions. To take sides with one or the other means to participate in this situation. We are left to think. What could have been going through the minds of many European countries after the Second World War? They said something like, “Okay, we feel bad about the Jews and we’ll give them a piece of desert,” so they disappear and leave us alone. And they do this by treating the Middle East region as an insignificant playing field, even though there are other people there. Today, 75 years later, this magical and gratuitous, abstract and colonial thinking of some European states still affects the people living there.
QCould it be that the values with which the world was rebuilt after World War II and which led to the creation of organizations like the UN no longer serve?
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R.They no longer work, or perhaps never will, but previously there was an institutional and political system that ensured they continued. In any case, we didn’t think too much about it. I don’t know if we are in a new moment, but we live in a world that requires new tools to try to understand it. You have to start all over again. We live in stressful, disturbing and violent times, but it should stimulate the imagination. We have the opportunity to radically shape our intellectual and political equipment.
QAnd what would the new design look like? Shouldn’t we also consider the other regions and powers that have been ignored so far?
R.The world is no longer the same as it was half a century ago. The discussion revolves around the question of independence and dependencies. European history is part of a discourse of political philosophy that concerns independence: the independence of individuals, nations, communities… What we have now realized with the massive return of the countries of the global south, China, etc., In connection with the Russian crisis or the gas problems is that there is no independence and that the idea that we can be an independent nation or culture, even an independent, freely developing individual, is a complete illusion. We must nourish what keeps us alive: our addictions. We must choose the addictions that make us better or that improve our lives.
QMaybe we live in a world with too many uncertainties today? It seems that we are going from one crisis to another, from economic, political, climate crisis… Isn’t that too much at once?
R.We forget that nothing was ever stable. We are always faced with disaster. Life is a catastrophe and we spend our time confronting catastrophic proportions. But today there is a difference: its intensity. Disaster discourse circulates much more easily than in the 19th century.
QIn his latest book, Superfaible (superweak, not yet translated into Spanish), he analyzes criticism and the end of reason as it has been understood since the Enlightenment.
R.The Enlightenment was very important, but today we realize that this is also the problem: it gave us very powerful tools for thinking about the world, so powerful that whenever we use them, we win and always, always right have. The coordinates of everyday thought are coordinates associated with violence: the best argument, the most powerful idea, the most solid position… It is a warrior vocabulary, a vocabulary of confrontation and victory. And it is a problem when thought is essentially something that serves to defeat illusions, to destroy illusions, to destroy errors, to destroy stupidity… That is the program of modern thought.
QHer work is very diverse and in some ways unconventional. You’ve thought about art and pornography, about the numb state of society in the face of capitalism… What moves you?
R.I don’t know if trends in philosophy or thought can really be manufactured. I always look at things from the perspective of individual works, those that break away from trends to invent something that goes beyond what everyone repeats. For it is true that in the age of mass universities and mass publishing, philosophy has become a university discipline. Therefore, most of what is produced today under the label of philosophy is uninteresting. It’s a kind of flowery tautology. They are simply more or less sophisticated, more or less cultured, more or less elegant ways of saying or repeating what everyone already knows, what is good and what is bad, what is beautiful and what is not.
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