An economist called by the name of Logos ( λόγος ) [ ver.2 ]

  This article is translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version).  Please refer to the original article (our blog post "ロゴスという名のエコノミスト／An economist called by the name of Logos ( λόγος )") for details.

Seki Hirono "Thinking about Desire" (1985)
〔The above essay is included in the book below.
   Seki Hirono, "Ye Society as Barbarians" (Agora Sosho), Ochanomizu Shobo (1987), pp.345-347〕
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◆Modern Thought, Date of Birth
　If someone asks me what kind of thought can be characterized as modern thought, I would like to say that it is an idea that has a definite date of birth and has been generated as a historical event. In other words, modern thought is an idea that originates from the crisis of Western civilization in the 19th century. Even if today the status of Europe has plummeted and "anti-Westernists" are everywhere, this only means that the crisis in the West in the 19th century has become a global phenomenon. And it is a fact that all thinkers, Marxist or not, must approve of the fact that Hegel and Marx are the most brilliant embodiments of this crisis, which has unleashed countless daemons of both good and evil.

 ◆From existence to desire
　Hegel, like Janus, was a thinker with two faces. Hegel's philosophy of speculation, which distinguishes between reason and enlightenment, was the climax of Western rationalism. But at the same time, in Hegel's distinction between reason and enlightenment, the basis of Western thought shifted from reason and existence to desire and history. Kant's philosophy of enlightenment, which Hegel's philosophy of reason was intended to overcome, can be said to be in many ways a radical realization of the traditional Western jurisprudential concept of man. The human being who plays a leading role in Kant's philosophy is the jurisprudential "personality" person, a human being whose existence is defined by the concepts of rights, duties, and values, and who forms society by contractually binding each other on the basis of the distinction between "my thing" and "thy thing".

 ◆Who is Logos?
　In Hegel, however, it is desire that fundamentally defines man. Moreover, desire is what gives birth to consciousness and spirit. This is because to desire is nothing more than to think in others and with others through others. Therefore, as long as man's desire is to think and desire others, his thinking has the stamp of political economy on it from the beginning. In other words, Hegel's philosophy is potentially economics, and classical economics is potentially philosophy insofar as it is trapped in a strange desire to pursue abstract existence and is obsessed with the substance of "value" that transcends the phenomena of markets and prices. It was against this problematic backdrop that the young Marx wrote a series of articles that would later be called the "Economics = Philosophy Manuscript". Smith and Hegel's critic Marx foresaw that the Western Logos, masquerading as God, law, and truth, was an originary economist.

 ◆Logos narcissism
　From Socrates to Hegel, the Logos is under the spell of the desire for the other within oneself, or the desire for oneself as the other, and is tormented by this desire. That is why Logos does not try to think deeply about the problematic nature of desire. It runs away from thought to labor under the guise of love for knowledge, and fulfills its desire through labor. It creates others as its own alter ego through its labor, reconciles itself with itself as the subject that controls the production process of others, and becomes a self-identical being. There is something obscene about the possession of the other by Logos. This is because it sees only the negativity of one's own desires in the other, and the substance of the other is nothing more than the product of Logos' narcissism. In fact, replacing rationalism with raw philosophy or mysticism does not help. The problem is to expose rationalism as a desire, to see that reason is another name for certain obscene desires (come to think of it, didn't the rebellion of the school in the sixties arise out of revulsion and antipathy to the obscenity of reason? 

◆The Politics of Desire
　Modern thought is patiently walking the consequences of the turn of thought from being to desire in the nineteenth century West. Hegel's crushing of Kant's jurisprudential anthropology at the genesis of this turn was set against the backdrop of the Romantic era. The disintegration of the class society produced a solitary, free individual who desires. In Marx, however, desire is linked to the problematic nature of modern technology. As the growing influence of technology makes man's relationship with reality increasingly fluid, plastic, and interpenetrating, the historicity of desire becomes an urgent and revealing issue. The discussion of money, commodities, and capital ultimately boils down to the question of what and how we, as who and what we desire, think. And despite the deluge of consumer culture, modern man has continued to dodge this dangerous question, which threatens to destroy his own existence - perhaps the only Dadaiste exception to the rule. Human desires have always involved others, and therefore remain poorly understood as inherently political desires. The economist named Logos is still alive and well. The technocrats in the north and the party bureaucrats in the east are no better than the customers in a porno shop in clinging to a belief in the obviousness and directness of desire to mend the lack of thought.
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