COMMENT

PHILOSOPHY: Can a way of thinking where becoming, growth and change are fundamental, open up new and more ecologically fruitful understandings of and attitudes towards the world? For Deleuze and Guattari, desire does not begin with lack and is not desire for what we do not have. Through a focus on desire as connection and connection – an understanding of identity and subjectivity as fundamentally linked to the intermediate that the connection constitutes. What they bring out by pointing this out is how Oedipal desire and capitalism are linked to each other, and to the constitution of a particular form of personal identity or subjectivity. But in this essay by Kristin Sampson, Anti-Oedipus is also linked to the pre-Socratic Hesiod, to something completely pre-Oedipal. MODERN TIMES gives the reader here a philosophical deep dive for thought.

PHILOSOPHY: the problem with a hopeful optimism is that it does not take the current climate crisis seriously enough and ends up accepting the state of affairs. But is there a hope and a utopia that hides a creative and critical force? MODERN TIMES takes a closer look at German Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope. For the German Ernst Bloch, one must rediscover the fire in our concrete experience that anticipates possible futures in the real here and now.

NOW: Barely 50 years after the publication of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the work has not lost its relevance according to the Norwegian magazine AGORA's new theme issue. Anti-Oedipus has rather proved to be a prophetic and highly applicable conceptual toolbox for the examination of a financial and information capitalist contemporary. In this essay, reference is also made to the book's claim that there is no economy or politics that is not permeated to the highest degree by desire. And what about the fascist where someone is led to desire their own oppression as if it meant salvation?

ESSAY: The Bible, according to Erwin Neutzsky-Wulff: The testaments in the Bible are related to a "peculiar mixture of Babylonian mythology, myths, and historical falsification". For him, no religion has produced as many monstrous claims as Christianity, and none has taken the same for self-evident truths to the same extent. Neutzsky-Wulff is fluent in ten languages ​​and claims that no external world is opposed to the internal. Moreover, with a so-called subjective 'I' we are prisoners in a somatic prison. Possible to understand?

FOOD SAFETY: Fiction and reality in EU agricultural policy: The chemical industry and lobbying companies such as Copa-Cogeca and CropLife Europe delayed and derailed the EU's Farm to Fork strategy. In total, the lobbying contracts were worth over 50 million euros in 2020–2023. In November 2023, the SUR law (Sustainable Use Regulation) was stopped and voted down in the European plenary meeting in Strasbourg. What happened?

IRAQ: In Iraq, young people trust neither the politicians nor the parties. MODERN TIMES has met the director and producer of the film Baghdad on Fire, which deals with the mobilization of the youth fighting for change in the bad governance of the country's leaders. Karrar Al-Azzawi says the following about the US invasion in 2003: "They brought 'democracy', but we got only chaos and corruption – with politicians who only wanted to steal. The religious leaders were also involved in this."

Are we responsible for our actions both individually and as companies and industry? As individuals, in most areas we can be asked...

UKRAINE/RUSSIA: Talking about an "unprovoked Russian attack" is pure propaganda. The Minsk agreement with Ukraine in 2014 was supposed to ensure Ukraine's neutrality and integrity and give the Russian-speakers in Ukraine the right to practice their mother tongue. But in 2021/22, Kyiv and Washington canceled the agreement at the same time as the US built up militarily in Ukraine. Today, journalists and other commentators do not understand why Russia cannot afford to lose the war. How is it possible that the entire Norwegian, and much of the Anglo-American, media world could be bewitched by such propaganda?

MEMORIAL WORDS: Johan Galtung. Could the 21st century see the abolition of war – just as slavery was abolished in the 19th century and colonialism in the 20th?