**Links to:** [[🅴🆅🅴🅽🆃🆂]], [[Desire and Capital]], [[Desire]], [[Postcapitalist Desire]], [[Desiring machine]]. [[Freed from Desire]], workshop w/ Ryan Kopaitich, Brienenoord Summer School, August 2nd 2024. # Desire: how much? / How much does a philosopher cost? ![[the being, the feeling good.png|400]] <small>Quote extracted from hotel advertisement, July 2024.</small> How much does a ‘philosopher’ cost? _How much you got?_ And, depends on what you want. Also, _who’s counting?_ Surely, if we’re talking metrics, whoever is counting knows, so they can keep checks and balances for the sake of _insert desire of choice_. In truth, everyone can know exactly how much a philosopher costs, most pay scales are public. But this isn’t quite what we mean when we ask the question. At the very least, we are asking: what is philosophy worth, what value does it give us? In this regard, the illicit philosopher, the philosopher unaccounted for, can prove useful.  If something like the (EUR) faculty of philosophy exists, for now, it’s because there are desires sustaining its relevance (though ones which still have profitable/extractive value). This confronts us with the politics of desire—that is: **what people inevitably reveal about what people think people should do**, whether consciously or unconsciously. In our context: “philosophy” is being financially eroded and made irrelevant quite clearly and publicly—from the well-intended “everyone is a philosopher” or “philosophy is everywhere”, to the more nefarious: “what’s the point?” It’s clear that philosophy is not only metabolically costly, but questionably costly for the contemporary schemes of efficiency guiding “academia” and “science,” always inevitably constrained by the landscape of capitalist desires. If desire is opaque, unlocalizable, fleeting, etc., what do we make of it when it confronts concepts such as value, cost, profit, money, etc.?  How much does a philosopher cost? How much you _got_ → This is the answer, and the question. Ryan will talk about the illicit philosopher and Sonia will talk about the intransparent abyss that is desire during this workshop. We’ll meet halfway, as always, at the eternal dead-end of capital. In preparation please come with a sentence or two that, in your words, defines or characterizes “desire” as a concept or phenomenon.  ## References Gala Rizzatto - _Freed from Desire_ (1997) [[Desire]] [[Desideratum]] [[Contradictory desires]] [[Meat puppet]] [[Xpectator]] [[05 Prediction]] [[Pronoun]] ## Structure | How long | What | | -------- | ----------------------------------------------------- | | 5 min | Introductions (only name + sentences) | | 10 min | Desire: how much? / how much does a philosopher cost? | | 10 min | Abyss → Sonia | | 20 min | Discussion walking | | 10 min | Illicit → Ryan | | 20 min | Discussion walking | | 5 min | Closing off |