The dangerous divide

between weak thought and practical politics

Lucas Ross Perkins

Michael Gillespie

Michael B. Allen

pp. 137-149

in: Silvia Mazzini, Owen Glyn-Williams (eds), Making communism hermeneutical, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala's Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx presents itself as a book offering political guidance to the world's downtrodden and as an antidote to the forms of thought and power that repress and exclude the weak. We take hermeneutic communism to be the more overtly political program corresponding to Vattimo's so-called weak thought, and argue (a) that weak thought is a potentially powerful form of thinking, whose contributions should be seen as primarily ethical, and (b) that the jump from the ethical (weak thought) to the political (hermeneutic communism) within the book is an awkward one at best. If we adopt a proper conception of the political as a tragic sphere perpetually demanding decisions from us on the ground, then we must hold serious doubts as to the potential contribution to politics as a form of thinking operating at such a high level of generality. Furthermore, the existing political movements and institutions praised by Vattimo and Zabala (including e.g. the regime of Hugo Chávez) seem to have little discernible connection with the basic thrust of the books' more philosophical claims. In general, we seek to cast doubt upon the potential political contributions not only of weak thought but also of all similarly-rooted forms of epochal thinking, but also to argue that those forms of thinking might be of great value to our understanding of ethics in a post-modern age.

Cited authors

Heidegger Martin

Marx Karl

Vattimo Gianni

Zabala Santiago