Camus's Absurd End

"Camus was only 46 when he died in an automobile accident. Ironically, he had once said that he could not imagine a death more meaningless than dying in a car accident."

From Understanding Philosophy, Joan A. Price

Notes on Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations

A general picture of Huntington's argument: Great division among humankind will be cultural instead of ideological and primarily economic. Non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history. Civilization: Highest cultural grouping people, broadest level of cultural identity people that distinguishes humans from other species. Two major variants: European-North American Islam has its three subdivisions: Arab, Turkic and Malay. Civilizations differ from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and religion. Cultural identity turns into civilization consciousness. Why civilizations will crash?

The Civilization of Clash - A Critique

Samuel Huntington, the writer of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ article, imagines a disagreement between major cultures of the world. He suggests, for the future, a certain separation between civilizations that cannot be avoided. Through the centuries, a fault line between civilizations was created by the different views of God and man, the individual and the group, and so on. This line is also gradually growing because of the unbearable Western military, economic and cultural superiority to others. The line will not soon disappear because it is more fundamental than the separation created by political approaches.

Multiple Histories of Capital

In his chapter on Marx’s critique on capital, Dipesh Chakrabarti ( Provincializing Europe : Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton 2000) tries to deal with the idea that provincialized Europe has a universal and overarching character. Marx criticized capital on two categories: the abstract human and the idea of history. As historicism assumes that capital arose in Europe out of the Enlightenment rationalism and humanism, it constitutes a unity both in time and space. For Chakrabarti, and Marx, the main reason behind this assumption is the need for a homogenous and common unit for measuring human activity. This measurement will of course be designed to reduce diversity and human belongings into one category called ‘labor’. Abstract labor, therefore, is to destroy differences among workers. Abstract labor is abstracted from any empirical history, it is like a ghost. However, paradoxically, capital is in need of a human, concrete, labor in advance in o...

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