it is the moral authority of abstinence over greed that keeps austerity alive as a viable alternative

(1) does decreasing government spending in times of Great Recession renew economic growth?

(2) the dismal track record of austerity policies over the course of their long history: from Aristotle to Margaret Thatcher, no argument against spending has ever successfully refuted the Keynesian logic of anti-cyclical government stimulus.

(3) austerity’s long life is due to its moral and political underpinnings – not to economic justification. The moral authority of abstinence over greed has kept austerity alive in public discourse despite empirical shortcomings.

On Florian Schui, _Austerity: the Great Failure_ (Yale UP, 2013).

Nancy on the "just meaning" of the ex-istant

"For [Jean-Luc] Nancy, sense is there, like the world, 'just like that', as he puts it. This 'just like that' means that existence is ungrounded, that we are 'just' open to existence and to the world. The 'just' is of course the whole problem. At a time when every 'us' is under suspicion and we allegedly live in a 'crisis of sense', the evidence of 'we' and/or 'sense' is so to speak no 'common sense'. For Nancy, this so-called crisis makes clear that we are, that existence is nothing but sense: 'One must think against the times, or despite the times, since it is still the time of the crisis' (Nancy, 1997a: 15). In other words, that there is sense and that we are there is the radical consequence of the unfolded space that the 'global' world is to us today."

Ignaas Devisch, "The Sense of Being(-)With Jean-Luc Nancy," _Culture Machine,_ Vol 8 (2006). http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/36/44

But: Doesn't Nancy's assertion that we' re "just open" to meaning entail some kind of non-dualist system ala Berkeley (esse est perciipi) or perhaps Derrida (there's nothing outside language) positing reference sans refererer?

phatic

Florida