"Don't romanticise them!" warns Zizek. These children are dangerous foreign intruder vermin and the state shirked its duty to do something about them to protect the landowners of Ambrus from the menace of their proximity.
Borut Peterlin (rootless cosmopolitan fiend no doubt) says instead:
While I was waiting I was playing journalists with Strojan’s children. Miranda Strojan age 6 years was a journalist and played the role incredible as she is really bright. When Elvis age 9 years answered that when he’ll grow up he’ll buy bulldozer and he’ll torn down all houses in Ambrus, she started to convince him that that’s not right. Here is an MP3 recording (size 4,2 MB) of the interview. We had really jolly time! Please do laugh at my silly questions, but asking silly question relaxes the person and it makes it easier to talk.
Today on Sunday, (Dec. 2006) Strojan family moved to a new location on the suburb of Ljubljana. I hope this is the end of agony of this family. Personally the whole story helps me understand the human nature and in this christmas time sheds a new understanding of the Bible.
I think you are exactly right when you talk about this type that defends this stuff being brain damaged. This is more than your usual nastiness, worked up over years through resentment and self-interest.
ReplyDeleteThese college kids from the States and UK, who must surely be largely indifferent to the Roma, who probably assumed everyone living in a place with a name like "Slovenia" was a gypsy, now willing to defend and justify and amplify Zizek's bigotry, so they can keep playing with this shit they find "useful". It's like something in their brains, the most primitive hardwired form of empathy, just shut down. Look at that atrocious post by this 'necessary agitation' creep which lenin has responded to. A guy in the comments accuses most of the left of "replacing broad class analyses with totemic cultural iconography and symbols." It's as if for him there is no Strojan family, nor could there be: they're just folklore, a sentimental superstition held by old wives who can't get to grips with or 'immanentize' their ineffable class analysis.
And any antagonism between Zizek and a socialist is just about "having a beef" or "an excess of snark" or - this from the ‘Sebastian Wright’ creep - because of "ressentiment about his marriage to an Argentinian model."
This emotional and intellectual blankness, this absolute inability to express oneself in anything but semi-literate garbled cliche: it is, as Seymour says, deeply disturbing.
the viciousness to seymour is astonishing.
ReplyDeletewe are learning that in fact zizek's fans are fascists. there's no two ways here. there is no step between terrorising children and driving them from their home and sending them to camps and gas chambers. nobody terrtoreises children that age unless they see them as animals, vermin, subhuman.
and nobody defends it unless they are caught up in fascist thought, affects, ABSTRACTION.
years ago i was walking home on 36th street. I was walking west from 1st ave. The street comes out of the midtown tunnel. the cars are barrelling crosstown. fast. I was in a daze and walmked past a police barricade on the sidewalk and suddenly see spme supercops, with semiautomatic weapons, by a parking garage. they have got two guys cuffed and lying face down in the middle of the street. they terrorised themù by not stopping traffic - letting the cars barrel up and screech to a halt by their heads.
a car theft ring had just been busted in the garage.
one of these guys has his young daughters with him - ages 6 and 8. The supercops had left them to sit on a brownstone stoop watching this and crying, all alone. I found myself standing there, I stopped, the cops started barking at me.
well this is a well to do neighborhood, and nobody lieks car theives, but people looked out their windows and flooded out to try to comfort and assist these little girls. They weren't ready to question whaty was being dfone to their father, but the idea that these children were left to watch this struck everyone as outrageous, as nazified.
it is only normal.
you cannot, simply cannot, have what those Ambrus landowners did without really vicious aryanist racism. it's impossible.
and you cannot have defence of it without the same supremacism. Zizek is a fascist. His fans are fascists He appeals to them by affirming their fascism and racism and making them feel it's universal.
But they feel ashamed and guilty and thus the insane viciousness ahainsy his critics. Every tactic against Seymour, from "there are more important things than this trivia..." "he's personally hurt by the criticism of Callinicos" ", charges of sectarian, the insane claims that he has done nothing but "name calling" that there's no case being made, that the issue is insigaificant...it's incredible. But predictable, because it's all the time. But usually the defenders can add some slurs and attacks about race card...
last fight I had there the main claim was that I was really attacking zizz because of his radical revolutionary bolshevism, and the issue - his fascism, his imperialism, his racism, his islamophobia, his sexism, his revisionism - was invented diversion, mere ruse, trivial and fictional both.
and all poerform this crazed defence, with the constant charges to read more, bring more proof, - have you even read his work? demand those who never quote a single word - pretending to be championing "the working class!"
yes, they are with zizek championing the racist fascist evil stupid working class and the murderous filthy roma children and the criminal terroristic brutal black folks of baltimore and the genocidal totalitarian communists.
Realkly these people show their hand when so eager to figure "the working class" as uniformally and always wearing pillowcases on their heads.
(the pogrommist leaders were actually gentry basically, but let's not nitpick...)
and: what fucking "white working class?" (The one that Owen Hatherley fantasises producing the wholesome sugar fortune of Henry Tate? White sugar goblins.)
I have to say Seymour is doing an unbelievable job. He deserves a medal.
And thanks to him, and to vitoria e certa, zizek's fad is probably finished. But the fascism that it has pumped up and exposed has not.
"o Strojan family, nor could there be: they're just folklore,"
ReplyDeleteYes, Carmen, Esmerelda, Shylock, Marlo, The Greek, the vampires menacing Buffy...
You forgot the 00s vogue for 'blacking' white comic book villains, and Candyman (although I always thought it was about the lethal dangers of white self-delusion)
ReplyDeleteYou just HAD to get that dig at Hatherley in, eh? I'm afraid that is just snark. He's not a card carrying Marxist, but he's no racist. Unlike the 'Elvis of cultural theory'.
sorry you miss my point entirely about bringing in Hatherley
ReplyDeletethe whole discourse is white supremacist - gypsies vs local people, strojans not local? or not people?
Hatherley is becoming quite an important figure of this nativist discourse in the UK - fretting in the pages of the Guardian about the stirlinbg going to a building built outside the heimat; fretting about oligarchitecture, and fretting about the foreign dubious funders of foreign curators bringing, he says, miscegenation to british art exhibitions.
miscegenation. this is hatherley's idea of what bourriaud's altermodern "creolisation" threatens.
that was his word. Hatherley's. miscegenation.
it mayu be he doesn't know what this word means. like syntax and replete.
but i think he does. don't you?
if it were only Zizek zizek wouldn't matter. It is not only Zizek. It is fascism, fascist ideas and feelings reviving among those who like are "angry" and identify as belonging to "the white working class."
please notice what the defenders of zizz are creating here...
they will watch the Strojans now intently, and when someone gets a parking ticket it will be "see? the state needs to do something about them."
please notice that it's all the same as original flavour fascism - yes yes he may be vulgarian rtacist but it's better than those dreadful cosmopolitan multiculturalists of the left!
do I exaggerate? You have read First as Tragedy then as farce? It is an astonishing non stop racist screen, complete with the most aggressive historical revisionism and the claim that the "intellectual" features of the Haitiazn revoliution were the achievments of white imperialists.
ReplyDeleteAbout the issue of the moment it says:
, Furthermore, when we talk about anti-imigration measures, about the diferent forms of immigrant exclusion, and so on, we should always bear in mind that anti-immigration politics is not directly linked to capitalism or the interests of capital. The free circulation of labor is, on the contrary, in the interests of big capital, since cheaper immigrant labor will put pressure on "our own' workers to accept lower wages. And is outsourcing not also now an inverted form of employing immigrant workers? Resistance against immigrants is primarily the spontaneous-defensive reaction of the local working classes who (not wholly unjustifiably) perceive the immigrant worker as a new kind of strike-breaker and, as such, as an ally of capital. In short, it is global capital which is inherently multiculturalist and tolerant.
The standard position adopted by the unconditional defenders of the rights of illegal immigrants is to concede that, at the level of state, the counter-arguments may well be "true" (Le., of course a country cannot accept an endless flow of immigrants; of course they compete in ways which threaten local jobs, and may also pose certain security risks), but their defense moves at a different level altogether, a level which has a direct link with demands of reality, the level of principled politicS where we can unconditionally insist that "qui est ici est d'ici" ("those who are here are from here') . But is this principled position not all too simple, allowing for the comfortable position of a beautiful soul? ,
this is Hatherley’s judgement:
, The analysis here is far more astute than the alternately guilt-ridden and baffled responses from the official “left”, whose fantasies of a nicer capitalism are mercilessly debunked here.
SO one cannot seperate Zizek's Brasillachism and Hatherley's. Hatherley himself has elected Zizek to represent his own idea of an astute alternative to the "official left".
Now I don't want to argue about who "is a racist". That is not the point.
The point is this is imperial apology and fascism.
Interestingly Zizek is now promoting his slyly misconstrued remark of Horskheimer that who doesn't want to talk criticall about capitalism should also keep silent on the subject of fascism.
I think we need to remember Poulatnzas here who said this is strictly untrue - it's those who won't talk about imperialism who should keep silent about fascism.
This is the astute alternative to the odious liberals and official left;
ReplyDelete[Once having grasped that great white intellect liberated the black Haitians], we white Leftist men and women are free to leave behind the politically correct process of endless self-torturing guilt. Although Pascal Bruckner's critique of the contemporary Left often approaches the absurd, this does not prevent him from occasionally generating pertinent insights-one cannot but agree with him when he detects in European politically correct selfflagellation an inverted form of clinging to one's superiority. Whenever the West is attacked, its first reaction is not aggressive defense but selfprobing: what did we do to deserve it? We are ultimately to be blamed for the evils of the world; Third World catastrophes and terrorist violence are merely reactions to our crimes. The positive form of the White Man's Burden (his responsibility for civilizing the colonized barbarians) is thus merely replaced by its negative form (the burden of the white man's guilt) : if we can no longer be the benevolent masters of the Third World, we can at least be the privileged source of evil, patronizingly depriving others of responsibility for their fate (when a Third World country engages in terrible crimes, it is never fully its own responsibility, but always an after-effect of colonization: they are merely imitating what their colonial masters used to do, and so on) :
"We need our miserabilist cliches about Africa, Asia, Latin America, in order to confirm the cliche of a predatory, deadly West. Our noisy stigmatizations only serve to mask the wounded self-love: we no longer make the law. Other cultures know it, and they continue to culpabilize us only to escape our judgments on them."
…
"The West is not detested for its real faults, but for its attempt to amend them, because it was one of the first to try to tear itself out of its own bestiality, inviting the rest of the world to follow it."
ReplyDeleteThe Western legacy is effectively not just that of (post)colonial imperialist domination, but also that of the self-critical examination of the violence and exploitation the West itself
brought to the Third World. The French colonized Haiti, but the French Revolution also provided the ideological foundation for the rebellion which liberated the slaves and established an independent Haiti; the process of decolonization was set in motion when the colonized nations demanded for themselves the same rights that the West took for itself. In short, one should never forget that the West supplied the very standards by which it (and its critics) measures its own criminal past…
…Someone who cannot be accused of softness towards the colonizers is Frantz Fanon: his thoughts on the emancipatory power of violence are an embarrassment for many politically correct postcolonial theorists. However, as a perspicuous thinker trained in psychoanalysis, he also, back in 1952, provided the most poignant expression of the refusal to capitalize on the guilt of the colonizers:
"I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible solely for the slave revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. . . . My black skin is not a repository for specific values . . . . Haven't I got better things to do on this earth than avenge the Blacks of the seventeenth century? . . . I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors."
oh
ReplyDelete"As a pot-boiler, a short book rushed out to coincide with a crisis"
maybe he doesn't know what miscegenation means either.
It may be 'Eurocentric' but Hatherley isn't 'fascist'. For the 'miscegnation' quote, I would like a link if possible for some context.
ReplyDeleteI don't see the point of political movements based on guilt, either. Reparations are even more remote a possibility than international revolution. The Jacobins DID influence the Haiti rebellion, as much as Marxism (among many other things) influenced anti-colonial and anti-racist movements. Of course, Zizek characteristically fails to mention that the main 'inspiration' to rebel was the actual experience of those enslaved. He's full of shit on anti-immigrant resentment being 'working class' too (the socio-economic make up of active racists is well -documented).
But should Fanon have put his energies into extracting guilt from whites? Why does his basic vocation need to be as a 'person of colour'? Instead of seeking solidarity with anyone achieving victory of the spirit?
"But should Fanon have put his energies into extracting guilt from whites?"
ReplyDeletethe question reproduces the bullshit you just decried.
I know Hatherley is not "a fascist". As I said I think the retro label that best suits his stuff is fabian.
And I don't know that "a fascist" is so discrete a thing until you're actually in a party or organisation. I read something recently that really showed me how much these traditions that are poresented as so discrete really intertwine - all the bourgeoisie and intellectuals of early modernism in the European metropolis shared quite a lot.
miscegenation; its his new left review piece:
The
Altermodern is held out as the aesthetic equivalent of the
‘Alterglobalization’ movement, the art gallery’s answer to the jingle
‘another world is possible’—curious, given the disdain for wider
political transformation displayed in Bourriaud’s previous works.
The other worlds that are apparently now possible are to be
‘discovered’ through travel and miscegenation, rather than merely
through visits to art galleries. Bourriaud’s text is pervaded by
notions of movement, translation and bastardization. The nomad and the
polyglot are the heroes of Altermodernity, though it is never entirely
clear what differentiates them in his schema from the less romantic
figure of the tourist....
...The
Radicant gives the impression that contemporary art, that playground
for retired arms dealers and competing oligarchs, is somehow outside
of the profit system. At this point the reader’s eye might be drawn to
Bourriaud’s current job description: ‘Gulbenkian Curator of
Contemporary Art at Tate Britain’. That is, he is funded by the
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, named after an Armenian oil magnate.
Aside from being a prolific sponsor of contemporary art since the
1950s, the Foundation is the sole owner of the Portuguese oil and gas
holding company Partex, which is particularly active in Abu Dhabi,
where an entire island has been set aside for the artistic
gratification of the ruling oligarchy. These facts do not in
themselves make what Bourriaud has to say worthless—dubious money is a
near-constant in the art world—but they do raise the question of
whether his disdain for corporate culture stems from political
considerations or simple snobbery.
There is an unmistakeable echo - including this sideling up at the club and lockjac whisper "at this point we may draw the reader's eye" to that greasy foreign syllables soiling with their proximity the innocent pink virgin Tate - of the kind of thing one finds constantly in the French press of the era of the Dreyfuss affair. Imagine it was Guggenheim not Gulbenkian. Is Hatherley so naive as to suppose that the portolio's of all these massive foundations, with good hearty british or nasty levantine and semitic names, don't have energy shares? It's ridiculous. It's smear composed of racist innuendo. And it's not on his blog or in a commnt box or at a little lecture - it's in the New Left Review. The idea that it's impolite to respond to this - a prohibition covering Zizz too - is how we end up with the kind of environment we have.
though admittedly again someone who doesn't know what a jingle is (does the confusion arise via jingoism?) may really not know what miscegenation means
ReplyDelete"Is Hatherley so naive as to suppose that the portolio's of all these massive foundations, with good hearty british or nasty levantine and semitic names, don't have energy shares? "
ReplyDeleteNo. As the quote says: "dubious money is a
near-constant in the art world".
I'm aware of Fabianism's occasional proximity to fascism (before fascism), but I've yet to see Hatherley advocate eugenics.
"the kind of thing one finds constantly in the French press of the era of the Dreyfuss affair."
Now your just being ridiculous. It's not racist innuendo. It's a snarky tone against energy oligarchs, their playgrounds, and their more prestigious servants. He's drawing the reader's eye to who owns the foundation (not exactly the wretched of the earth). Its 'greasy foreign syllables' obviously caught your eye. I just saw exposition about who's paying for what, as I would expect from a leftist periodical.
Not quite the same as a libelous apologia for pogroms (however much you seem to want it to be). Granted, it's a misuse of the word 'miscegnation' (he probably means 'integration', as used in its hollow corporate context) but, as you continue to point out, that may just be one of his occasional lapses of usage. Or maybe NLR's subeditor's are in on this sinister racist putsch?
" I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors"
ReplyDeletewhat is this doing in the text here? in this text? Zizek is exploiting the quote for his nasty bullying racist "case" against the slavery reparations movement, the restitution of the indemnity to Haiti, and now climate debt.
Fanon's bourgeois perspective by the way is hardly the last word- but here Zizek easily presents him as that figure, his black best friend forever, Toscano's Malcolm X, his buddy-movie buddy, who has seen through all his fetishism finally to realize the German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim is the realization of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination of freedom-that freedom which has its own absolute from itself as its purport.
Let us then admire his transcending of his fetishist condition, and especailly "his refusal to capitalize on the guilt of the colonizers"? That troublesome colonizer guilt! Shoot and cry, shoot and cry...
"dubious money is a
ReplyDeletenear-constant in the art world".
why of the two names - Tate and Gulbenkian - is the Gulbenkian the example of the dubious here? What does Hatherley "draw the reader's eye" to it?
"but I've yet to see Hatherley advocate eugenics. "
ReplyDeleteWell give him an award for that, he mist be the only person in the world who doesn't advocate eugenics. Except some other billions of people.
" He's drawing the reader's eye to who owns the foundation (not exactly the wretched of the earth)"
No the specific contrast is to the Tate.
He starts off saying look there are two foundations here - Tate and Gulbenkian.
One is neutral and european native, the other is oriental and dubious.
He's saying, Bourriaud is in the pay of Arabs.
That's what it says.
Zizek's a remixer. Cut and paste wikipedia jobs with his own lazy 'contrarianism' thrown in, like Aphex Twin adding fart noises to Glen Gould, and getting rave reviews for his radical strategy. the 'remix' tactic is used by many undergraduates these days, which probably plays no small part in endearing him to a certain audience during a given time. He's already had his 15 minutes.
ReplyDelete" Its 'greasy foreign syllables' obviously caught your eye."
ReplyDeletedesperate! oh yes it's me. I choose Gulbenkian instead of Tate as my example of dubiousness. I hjad to leave London and travel imaginatively to Emirates to find the wicked capitalists.
"Granted, it's a misuse of the word 'miscegnation' (he probably means 'integration', as used in its hollow corporate context)"
ReplyDeletelike "junk syntax" i think he may just have got it off the web; googling bourriaud will throw up some mentions of "cultural miscegenation"
but while the author may not know what the words he uses mean, the subscribers do.
why of the two names - Tate and Gulbenkian - is the Gulbenkian the example of the dubious here?
ReplyDeletebecause 'Tate' is the familiar brand, Gulbenkian not so much. And from the quote you offer, the 'dubiousness' is more about Bourriaud's 'anti-corporate' hypocrisy, not some racial phobia. Elsewhere he's written about the very white, very English money running art and architecture, and hardly treated that as 'neutral'.
i'm just defending my remarks here but am sorry to find myself in this argument.
ReplyDelete" Or maybe NLR's subeditor's are in on this sinister racist putsch?"
well they are zizz fans and they published pieces of his that are antisemitic and aryanist. and the publication has gone through an extended love affair with neofascists in the past as I meantioned, with the Croatian nationalists. but I think it was just a case of marshalling all possible ammo to abuse bourriaud for a perceived affront to authentic Britishness. That is why Hatherley makes a poiint fo defining Calouste Gulbenkian as a foreigner and not a "british philanthropist". Bourriaud's whole exhibit was pitched toward this issue and dismantling the categories ("Britishness and Brutishness", China=contradiction, for exampple) Hatherley wishes to preserve.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete", the 'dubiousness' is more about Bourriaud's 'anti-corporate' hypocrisy, "
ReplyDeletehow can he be accused of hypocrisy without the racist innuendo by someone who also claims to be anticapitalist but is funded by Deutschebank?
the racism is necessary for the purportedly anticapitalist indeed "bolshevist" beneficiary of capital designated aryan to call the beneficiary of capital designated oriental a hypocrite.
"because 'Tate' is the familiar brand, Gulbenkian not so much."
stretching. next it will be "because it's longer and more easily overlooked by the readers eye"
and if you read bourriaud you see he is not at all a hypocrite about this. He doesn't romanticise artists as "subversive" or outside commerce. This is Hatherley's tip, and he's engaged in denoucning others to disavow his own hypocrisy:
BS: It’s easy to be cynical about the idea of relationality and connectivity because
we heard it so often in the rhetoric of the dot-coms. Do you really think ‘90s artists
had an answer to the “What for?”?
NB: Because many artists in the ‘90s dealt with or used some of the crasser aspects
of capitalism—Maurizio Cattelan renting his space at the ‘93 Venice Biennale, Jason Rhoades working from a Ferrari—the question of motivation is confusing. But I
think that there’s no point in trying to hide behind a romantic or heroic notion of the
artist. In my upcoming book Post-Production, the idea is that art has definitively
reached the tertiary sector—the service industry—and that art’s current function is to
deal with things that were created elsewhere, to recycle and duplicate culture. Art
production now indexes the service industry and immaterial economy more than
heavy industry (as it did with Minimalism). Artists provide access to certain regions
of the visible, and the objects they make become more and more secondary. They
don’t really “create” anymore, they reorganize. There are two dominant figures in
today’s culture: the DJ and the programmer. Both deal with things that are already
produced.
"The Jacobins DID influence the Haiti rebellion, "
ReplyDeleteuhm wasn't it the other way around?
I have to say Seymour is doing an unbelievable job.
ReplyDeleteYes, he is on top form with this; it's a really important intervention and in professional terms a courageous one, given the 'collegiate' loyalty to Zizek in publishing and academic circles.
On Hatherley: I think you can clearly see what he is up to, and his debt to Zizek, in his obnoxious writing about Shanghai in the Guardian and on his blog.Sample:
China is actually approaching the stationary state, that it will soon enough be the most powerful country in the world and still a poor one. I found this hard to take when careering down a ten lane expressway lined with gargantuan skyscrapers, that made the place I'm coming from seem utterly petty and provincial, but after ten days and several books it started to sink in. Perhaps one concept that could be applied to what's happening here now is one taken from music, Simon Reynolds' notion of Hyperstasis. A whizz-bang brightly coloured gymnastic everything-at-once eclecticism which, while enormously immediate and sometimes completely thrilling, almost seems designed to hide the fact that no new forms are actually being created, that there are no new ideas behind it, and that any alliance between art and politics, any revolution of everyday life, has disappeared from the agenda. The hyperstationary state?
http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2010/11/megalopolis.html
'Hyperstationary': a portmanteau of the two most reliable orientalist cliches about China, the marvellous dizzying plenitude of Il Milione on the one hand, and on the other Hegel's China, "still outside the World’s History, as the mere presupposition of elements whose combination must be waited for to constitute their vital progress."
So after all there's no place like Heimat, and while London may seem a dreary backwater on the surface, it only seems so, because it's still the home of Birkbeck and Brutalism and My Best Friends, still a place where one can have "new ideas" about Chinese nonhistory and its potentially baleful influence on adminstrators of western capitalism.
I think you'd like this article about the treatment of "China"
in theory (Zizz, Agamben, others):
At the risk of sounding vulgar (to use a word often applied to unapproved types of political analysis), it is as if the knowledge about China that is produced in the West has to be as abstract and, in short, as
commodiWed as the other products of labor circulating between China
and its business partners. The homology between what passes for
knowledge about China today, on the one hand, and the workings of
abstraction and the value-form in capitalist exchange, on the other
hand, undergirds my comments below.
China in Theory, Vukovich
(do you think leninino is noticing that Dumas is having one of his villains denounce liberalism itself as fanaticism? there really is a great overlap of dumas and marx)
ReplyDeletethanks - have you read Ian Almond's the New Orientalists? (did we discuss this?)
ReplyDeletealso i wish i hadn't trashed the end of colonelchabert because there was some good comment stuff on foucault's use of borges "chinese encyclopedia" - that is really ther model fopr how they are all working wxith china, its fictional, avowedly fantastical, but then attached to a real place
you know kenoma though readfing LT thread now, seeing johng's comments and some others, i feel a little queasy coz i realize they were really just pretending not to understand and doing this dense act before, using all these tactics of evasion and non engagement that they now denounce as frustrating. that's quite eerie really.
ReplyDelete"The enourmous difficulty in getting anyone to engage in an argument about the relationship between Zizeks argument about racism and..contemporary racism is what is so bloody frustrating here."
ReplyDeletesays johng. after the swpers have been doing this stonewalling for years.
the apology for the pogrom is from 2006
i posted it in that LT comments box five or six times over the years.
johng has been saying "just bringing up the issue [of roma criminal lifestyle, of jewish question, of the whiteness of the communist idea etc] doesn't make him a racist..." as if this was the charge, just bringing up the issue, and not specifically what was said.
over and over this tactic was used, and the dlmenads "more proof!" and the spurious claims that i was not making an, argyument with textual evidence by just "name calling" without troubling myself to explain and "engage"
really is kinda eerie to see the whole corps (including Ray) switch sides like this and denounce the very tactics they were using before so aggressively and with such apparent conviction.
http://tinyurl.com/25rq8c9
oh and
ReplyDelete" to who owns the foundation "
no he doesn't. He makes a point of saying the funding of the Gulbenkian comes from the Abu Dhabi and that the founder was "an Armenian" whom he said here he believed must be "from Armenia". We are told nothing about the origins of the Tate's money or its current assets.
there's no such thing as "dubious" money; money is fungible. He was just evoking the kinds of stereotypes one gets in a certain tradition - from Count Dracula to "the Greek" in the Wire.
the fanaticism post is quite revealing too, i am sorry to have deleted all the gramsci on dumas i translated and typed into lcc too...
ReplyDeletebut here this really reveals the sleight of hand ands the neouniversalism that the toscano and badiou and zizzy crowd is up to
napoleon denoucned as fanatic by the royalist aristo villain of a dumas novel, seen by that character as a type, the type of egalité, must then represent "abstract equality", the great jacobin value...
yes "abstract equality" = concrete white supremacy and mass murder:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crime_of_Napoleon
there's no incompatibility, that's the problem with their abstract equality and claims to universalism - in reality it's Napoleon.
no the Jacobins did not inspire the Haitian revolt. The Haitian rebellion really got underway in the 1740s. The rebel slaves did not require the tutelage of the white Jacobins to learn they were human beings and the moral and intellectual equals/superiors of their white exploiters. The Jacobins sought to repress their uprising but were taught a lesson by the rebels. Did the white bourgeoisie learn the rebels of the carribean tried to teach them? Really learn? A few did, most didn't.
did they learn _the lesson_ the rebels...
ReplyDeleteLCC: you didn't save ANY of the old LCC stuff?!?!?! That's a real loss.
ReplyDeleteWe did discuss Almond yes - I read what I could from google books at the time, but never got my hands on a copy.
ReplyDeleteseeing johng's comments and some others, i feel a little queasy coz i realize they were really just pretending not to understand and doing this dense act before, using all these tactics of evasion and non engagement that they now denounce as frustrating. that's quite eerie really.
Yeah but johng - who has always been an awful opportunistic hack - is still using these tactics of evasion and non-engagement on that thread. "the relationship between Zizeks argument about racism and..contemporary racism": that's an awkward way of putting it, isn't it? The issue in Seymour's two posts on this issue hasn't been z's "argument about racism". It's been his racism, more specifically his racist slander of an innocent family and his justification of a racist pogrom. For Johng Zizek is still just 'bringing up an issue':
Its not about the personal beliefs of Zizek. Its about his argument...Its about the politics stupid one feels like saying.
What Zizek thinks about the Strojans is a 'personal belief', albeit one expressed in numerous public fora: it's idiosyncratic, marginal to his 'argument'. that argument about multiculturalism is wrong of course, it's simplistic, it misunderstands race and class, it gives ground to integrationist libs. (Worth talking about though, bracing stuff, you can really sink your teeth into it, must get him over for Marxism 2011 to really hammer this out).
Chabert, people love to hide the truth from themselves, even when they know it is true, if it means changing their lives and not benefiting from everything they benefit from.
ReplyDeleteThe point, and you do it so well, is to keep attacking so that they stop seeing that behavior as one that they benefit from. Make it cost something.
Anyway, Gopal Balakrishnan, editorial committee of the NLR, reviewing Badiou's "The Century" in another venue:
"Not so long ago, the final implosion of Communism prompted some bold new variations on an older discourse of lost epochal illusions. Coming from across the spectrum, these forays into the philosophy of history typically concluded with some disquieting judgments on the victorious world of elections, families, and money. Alain Badiou’s The Century, a collection of lectures given from 1998 to 2000, first published in France in 2005, and translated into English in 2007, takes us back to this moment, but stands out as a document of a less recognizable provenance.
Its grandiose portrait of the century as an epic war of the spirit was troubling enough to have deterred many of his most ardent English speaking admirers from giving it the reception that it arguably deserved. A glance at its first pages might convey a sense of why readers may have experienced a certain unease. Badiou begins by maintaining that the moral commonplaces of contemporary democratic opinion prevent any understanding of the “totalitarian” states and movements of the past century. This past persists, in a haze of complacent interpretation, as an uncomprehended aftermath because our conventions of measuring and classifying evil make it impossible to understand the motive ideas behind these states and movements. Uncomprehended, they threaten to return in some unrecognizable form, and the moral universe of the simultaneously cynical and humanitarian West circulates around the problem of this spectral return. What has to be grasped is not, of course, the intellectually negligible and barbarous official jargon of National Socialism, but its underlying philosophical statute, so to speak. This can only be done when we have under-stood it as a reactive or obscurantist variant of the of the Century’s self-destroying revolutionary movements in politics and art, as well as the “inner truth and greatness” of this self-destruction. This is what The Century claims to provide, in frontal opposition to the legitimating myths of the “anti-totalitarian” west."
Now, I haven't read the book and I'm not always great at parsing grammar, but it seems like he's saying that Badiou is somehow claiming that the "inner truth and greatness" of the self-destruction of revolutionary movements of the 20th century was National Socialism.
ReplyDeleteAgain, I'm not great at parsing grammar, but that would seem to imply that these revolutionary movements were inherently or necessarily self-destructive (rather than complex mass movements facing both external opponents and internal contradictions) and that this supposedly inherent "inner truth and greatness" of self-destruction was what National Socialism was. Maybe that's what that sentence means? I have no idea!
Maybe I'm an idiot. Or maybe it's obscurantist bullshit. Normally, when I've seen people talk about the hidden "inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism on the web before, it pretty much always made me ignore or laugh at whoever was writing.
But, you know, editorial committee of the NLR.
So I act like all those people you've mentioned as being evasive and I doubt myself. Maybe he doesn't mean what I think he means. Maybe if I gave Badiou a chance. Maybe if I didn't think that the historical record of National Socialism speaks so clearly and unequivocally for itself.
Or maybe I'm trapped in the false consciousness of the anti-totalitarian West. I guess it could be possible!
I'm no great philosopher, I don't know much about inner truth and greatness, I don't know much about Badiou or Zizek, but I thought that the Left was sort of over the masculinist fantasies of purifying violence.
I seem to recall there being a lot of work done by feminists denouncing the whole construct of the tragic hero as boring patriarchy no matter which side it comes from...But maybe I'm projecting.
Life gets confusing. Sometimes it's hard to remember that I really don't want anyone to think it would be a noble crime to be more violent than Hitler, yikes.
Btw I think a lot of the commenters are neglecting the other lie Z was telling in his little anecdote. He implies throughout that the villagers were just abandoned by the Slovene elite to the Roma family's "frightening" behaviour:
ReplyDeletenobody clearly answered the local “racists” what they should concretely do to solve the very real problems the Roma camp evidently was for them.
But of course the Slovene state did give the villagers exactly the answer they wanted, by 'negotiating' the resettlement of the family and then stealing their land.
Zizek's playing the cultural attache here, doing yeoman's work in whitewashing the state's facilitation of a pogrom: Ljubljana fiddled while Ambrus burned! That's the problem with the Slovene bourgeoisie, too damn nice, never get their hands dirty, just not Balkan enough sometimes!
Johng has bought into this. He draws an analogy between the Ambrus incidents and sectarianism in the north of ireland:
[Eamonn McCann] made the point that the logic of the peace process did very little to resolve the real issues of sectarianism for working class people, although for middle class people, a bit of mutual respect at the golf club would suffice (you know, respecting each others national mythologies in a theme parkish sort of way).What he didn't do was talk about the problems of living next door to a bunch of taigs. Its a small difference but it does matter. Its no news to socialists that the state does not solve the problems of ordinary people and that this lies at the root of ordinary working class people hating, beating and occassionally killing each other. We don't respond to that by blaming matters on the social habits of the oppressed...
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/01/moving-on-from-zizek-or-not.html#comment-123889389
This is bizarre stuff, because johng must surely have heard mccann, who is swp, talk on numerous occasions about how state-sponsored segregation in housing and education was massively increased after the ceasefires. the "problem" of prods and taigs living next door to each other hardly exists anymore because of this policy, and any solution to it is pretty much precluded too because of the active intervention of the state in ossifying sectarianism.
McCann is very clear that it's the state that perpetuates this situation among the working class:
http://tiny.cc/ilcai
This lurid Hobbesian picture johng paints "of ordinary working class people hating, beating and occassionally killing each other" isn't really that common, it's more a fantasy of what might happen if the state didn't do the stellar job of segregation it's doing.
But here's the thing: johng is misremembering what McCann has said for years about this because he's swallowed this Zizekian rubbish about the state's supposed impotent disengagement from intra-working class conflicts.
Notice as well that johng can't be satisfied with the fact that Zizek is just lying about the Ambrus pogrom. Because of the prestige of the liar, the lie must be given the prestige of a hypothesis worth talking about, parsing, comparing etc.
pinkerton! it was exatrcly your comments that i was wishing to fnd, and did, since they luckily were emailed to me.
ReplyDeletei lost much of LCC but not all - in the days following my manic obliteration, I managed to find a lot cached on google. But 80% or so was lost. The ones I wish I had saved were las meninas.
anyway you remarked:
Pinkerton a ajouté un nouveau commentaire sur votre message blog "Totalisation" :
Professor Marvel (a.k.a. Professor Foucault), though, does make a mistake in attesting that his crystal is somehow "genuine," somehow "magic," somehow "authentic." Professor Marvel would invoke "South American" experts...whereas Professor Foucault knows enough to intone: "Borges."
eggzackly.
Almond discusses Borges too, but he misses this aspect of the two layered scheme of modern neecheen individualist white supremacy MF mobilizes and deploys - Foucault folklorizes "Borges" exoticises/orientalises "China"....
i discovered twitter recently, through following "vitoria e certa"...annoying to read but this was good
ReplyDeletehttp://twitter.com/#!/traxus4420/status/17861902772207616
"annoying to read" - twitter that is, the format, not vitoria
ReplyDelete, as well as the “inner truth and greatness” of this self-destruction.
ReplyDeleteThat's some tricky prose from GB there. (Who is what leninino would call a "left Schmittian". Unlike most of the schmittians, GB is very smart and erudite though.) Is the Heidegger phrase Balakrishnan's interpretation of what Badiou is understanding fascism to be? Or is it Badiou's?
Either way the problem is clearly the utter ahistoricism and idealism of Badiou's "reading". And it is a sort of Biblical reading...he's reading The Century in this same way he reads Beckett...with a method that is a cross between the priestly interpretation of a Biblical parable and a movie review.
"but that would seem to imply that these revolutionary movements were inherently or necessarily self-destructive"
yes and this is always implied in Badiou's psuedo-history (he's vicious to Marxist historians who won't concede this and won't treat players like Robespierre as figures and embodiments of historical woowoo forces) - predestination à la Hegel - in this trope of the "sequence" but his English fans tend to deny it, and I discovered recently this could be partly because his English translators obscure some allusions of his work.
What is being lost always in the arguments about this kind of stuff is as I mentioned that the picture of these very discrete camps is an illusion - historically the bourgeoisie, bourgeois intellectuals and culture producers centred in Paris but also in other European capitals, London, Berlin, etc, shared a lot of ideas and concepts and assumptions. And they socialised with one another, the fascist and the anarchist intellectuals. Think of a writer like Barrès. Tilting right or left did not really mean a whole different philosophy.(How much was really exchanged in common cultural fields I learned from a phd thesis on the topic I read recently).
But what happened after the war is all the bourgeois intellectuals who worked in these fields of culture production, especially the traumatised (ethnically) Jewish emigrés but not only them, decided they had to blame the working class, the hoi polloi, for fascism, instead of their friends their mentors their lovers and their own beloved bourgeois culture. Of course, this was real trauma - consider the anguish - and also class contempt. Bourgeois supremacism fed by this need to not see how this happened and who dunnit -(Brecht and some others don't succumb to it). And so they got into Freud and used it metaphorically etc, and here we are today, with Badiou and Zizek.
that's what i think.
that is fascism arises from imperialism and the bourgeois explanation retains this imperialiust thought with its scheme of the primitive/barbaric and the civilised, the animal versus the cerebral, etc., laid over class in the core as well as core periphery, male female, white black etc
ReplyDeleteBadiou has really got history as a big cartoony Freudian mind there,
ReplyDelete"Zizek's playing the cultural attache here, doing yeoman's work in whitewashing the state's facilitation of a pogrom:"
ReplyDeleteyes seriously, very much so, because Slovenia was taking on the EU presidency and also the case of the erased was really getting attention fnally.
and that is why he writes as he does about Sarkozy's roma expulsions. It's amazing how people read in some disapproval - he's saying look all the spineless soft liberal multiculturalists were up in arms but he still did it! You know Zizz always admires that. And he saying so what? Why shouldn't we? Those who "righteously" condemn us Slovenes for out ethnic cleansing and pogroms are Brassillach, they want to same but haven't our Balls!
and those multiculturalist progressive liberals of course are horrified by this populist racism. but they are to blame for it! they want everyone to have pride in their heritage except we downtrodden whites! we have pride too! and you self-righteously attack us as racists, you are the racists: there is only reverse-racism because we really are superior. Our Christian hgeritage really is superior and really is threatened by the orientals and by our very christian kindness to them.
that's what the guardian piece says.
our "true racist conviction" is justified and our racism has a "perfermative efficiency" and has made us superior.
it's all clear once you grasp him once. to the naive giving him benefit of the doubt, it's confusing, a smear, a blurr, a flicker now ducky now rabbity. But once you familiarize yourself with his actual politics - fascist - and in a calm not alarmist way understand what fascism is and how its propaganda works, and take into account technological and cultural updates, he's very consistent.
he is called "despicable" but quotes it as "dangerous". people will say well what's the difference, it's much the same, Kirsch was crtiticising him wasn't he? So it's basicallty right. And then you seem to nitpick, as if there reallty is little difference between being dismissed as "despicable" and believed "dangerous" by the liberal establishment.
I never saw the Railway Children before but watched it last night.
ReplyDeleteloved it despite the patriarchy etc, especially the red petticoats becoming red flags.
feel i understand some persistent brit mythology much better now.
Re Chabert archives, trust in the Wayback Machine:
ReplyDeletehttp://web.archive.org/web/*/http://lecolonelchabert.blogspot.com
donkeyshine francis, alas no meninas...
ReplyDeleteabout zizz notice the Guardian
"The recent expulsion of Roma, or Gypsies, from France drew protests from all around Europe..."
the editor presumbly caught the attempt to misrepresent the expelled as "illegal" that passes in that weird rag In these Times (US):
"The recent expulsion oF illegal Roma (“Gypsies”) from France back to Romania sparked protests across Europe "
he's really such filth it's unbelievable.
itr gets worse:**"Socially, what is most toxic is the foreign Neighbor—the strange abyss of his pleasures, beliefs and customs. Consequently, the ultimate aim of all rules of interpersonal relations is to quarantine (or at least neutralize and contain) this toxic dimension, and thereby reduce the foreign Neighbor—by removing his otherness—to an unthreatening fellow man. The end result: today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism is an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness—the decaffeinated Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality while features like wife beating remain out of sight."
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6641/barbarism_with_a_human_face/
When the Communist regimes disintegrated in 1990, we entered an era in which the predominant form of the exercise of state power became a depoliticized expert administration and coordination of interests. In this new context, the only way to introduce passion into such a nonpolitical realm, to actively mobilize people, is through fear: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of ecological catastrophe and also fear of harassment (Political Correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear).
ReplyDeleteConsequently, the notion of “toxic subjects” gained ground. While toxic subjects originate from popular psychology warning us against emotional vampires, the frontier of toxic subjects is expanding. The predicate “toxic” covers a series of properties that belong to totally different levels (natural, cultural, psychological, political).
Socially, what is most toxic is the foreign Neighbor—the strange abyss of his pleasures, beliefs and customs. Consequently, the ultimate aim of all rules of interpersonal relations is to quarantine (or at least neutralize and contain) this toxic dimension, and thereby reduce the foreign Neighbor—by removing his otherness—to an unthreatening fellow man. The end result: today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism is an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness—the decaffeinated Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality while features like wife beating remain out of sight.
The mechanism of such neutralization was best formulated in 1938 by Robert Brasillach, the French Fascist intellectual, condemned and shot in 1945, who saw himself as a “moderate” anti-Semite.
How can this be printed in a purportedly left paper.? It's outright Narism. Gypsies and Jews are "toxic", social toxins, and the liberal multiculturalists ignore our toxic foreignness and pretend we are your "fellow men". It's right out of Mein Kampf.
LCC: way off topic with this thread, but your reading of Las Meninas was brilliant.
ReplyDeleteHe can't get his violence on if he actually has to listen to other people and not imagine how scary and polluting they seem to be in his fearful head.
ReplyDeleteInteresting that he seems to weirdly endorse k-punk's whole long tirade against "grey vampires" who stand in the way of noble projects by asking annoying questions.
(Not aware of the full context at the time, I thought that post seemed decent for pointing out the relevance of being a fan to certain kinds of commitment and that it might open up a possibility for discussions of different styles of being a fan.)
Anyway, this other slur was tossed out at adswithoutproducts mostly.
(See follow up here, if you haven't already.)
And then Zizek recycles it with the note about it coming from popular psychology as that little extra pseudo-legitimacy to introduce the suggestion that some people are just social poison, and oh look, it's Roma and Jews and Blacks and so on.
Searching Google Books for "toxic subjects" yields mostly pharmacology. Even adding psychology as a search term doesn't really yield anything that would ground his assertion that this is a known term of art.
That's not an exhaustive literature search. Maybe he got it from somewhere else, I don't know.
thanks so much pink
ReplyDeletei foolishly thought what i wrote was quite obvious but have since discovered i am the only person ever to suggest this reading.
strange,n considering it is just seeing it as "theology of painting" as might be depicted to illustrate Gracian with a splash to DQ.
the process the paingting guides the view through is
"desengaño"
and the painting also gives a kind of pun - gracian says "let reflexion assay falsity and exaggeration" and "self-reflection is the school of wisdom"
in other words, i am sure i am right and every art historian who ever wrote about this painting is wrong!
and foucault is both wrong and goofy!
so i'll have to try to reproduce all that stuff and maybe that will be my first posts at the new alphonse blog if ever i get the will.
eeesh. i really have not followed the mark fisher sagas. not surprised thought that he is busy defining some population that needs to be exterminated so those folkses mit kampfe can live.
ReplyDelete"toxic" Jews and Gypsies - he's reading nazis, that's the explanation. poison mushroom. he wants to revive this. it's really so obvious.
and the reason people like it now is exactly the same reason people liked it before. and it's the same kind of people.
As far as I know, your reading on Las Meninas was absolutely unique: and not unique for the sake of being unique, it was also true.
ReplyDeleteImagine!
that kvond is funny
ReplyDeletehttp://adswithoutproducts.com/2009/06/20/more-on-kpunk/#comment-2264
thanks pink. it is true, isn't it? once you see it, the whole picture plane as a mirror that at first is intended to seem a "door" to the "real world", it just seems very obvious, doesn't it? the painting becomes marvellously complete and coherent and its "theology of painting" very legible.
in my researches what I thought was odd was so many art historians puzzling over the self-portrait aspect and wondering what kind of joke velasquez is making by having a self-portrait with no implied mirror.
and it's like - jeez, how can they get so close and not see there has to be a mirror and that of course they are led to this question to point it out?
but then i remembered, the first time i saw the paitning in person, i didn't notice the picture plane is a mirror. Because the intensity of the relation to the figures blocks out your contemplation of this. In a way it becomes really obvious only with reproductions and the shrinking, being able to contemplate a small reproduction that you can contain with a glance, uinlike being confronted by the whole painting that makes your eye move and you move in relation to it and you feel you can step into it. and the figures look like they could tumble out.
but i bet if it were hung next to a big mirror everyone would have gotten it instantly.
also with a small reproduction the first thing of course you would do is find the vanishing point, and its just around the edge of the door, so you woulds sday, why there? and then you have to nortice something vanished there, and then you see the queen's door opener and closer, and you know it has to be the royal couple just "vanished" there, and then you "get" the contrast of eternal image/art and perishable matter.
ReplyDeletebut if you are looking at the canvas you are fooled about where the vanishing point is - you think it's more centered.
Absolutely. In person the painting is so big (and yet inviting...unlike fascist architecture...) that you can't think about it/understand it (which is one of it's points, of course...). Everything is gorgeous. And nothing is understood. And what you saw in that painting is what it is and what we always miss: it is, ultimately, in spite of all of the artist's skill and invention, a hymn in praise of obedience.
ReplyDeletei got five sentences into kpunk on fans and thought i would vomit seriously. there's something just so nauseating about him, so fake, so derivative, so in love with the sound of his own voice/prose, so embarrassing. he always reminded me of the ricky gervais Office guy, brent.
ReplyDeletea hymn in praise of obedience.
ReplyDeleteyes; one of the analysed pictures on the web has drawn a line which shows that the spot right bvetween the royal couple in the picture on the back wall - the spot that wpould signify their joining, coupledom, offspring - goes vertically right down through the bucaro not through the infanta. that's empire dirt and she's supposed to eat it to make her skin whiter. and she, gazing aty self, is "truth" there, limpieza de sangre
interesting as statement about images, the universe is held together it perfection by the image the artist supplies. he's very important for this reason - he should have his nobility.
the lost childish nietzschean thing perhaps about fouculat's reading is all the dopeyness arises from a stubborn determination to make the painting "subversive"
ReplyDeletefoucault exhibits himself as "fan" - he feels sure the painting must be subversive, episteme-shatteringly radically explosive, just because he likes it.
ReplyDeleteIf You Do Not Relent
ReplyDeleteMade known to the world by an itinerant painter
whose exact name few recall, the town
perches like an island in the air beside a river.
Feeling at home and not at home
in this place the inhabitants claim is called Toledo,
the painter, a bearded itinerant—
hardly more than a vagabond, let’s be frank—
makes every building look like a tower, every rooftop an elongated spire,
and he wraps each inhabitant—
those who speak to him and those who do not,
those who nod as he passes and those who pull their doors shut—
in a night of perpetual blue.
Here, in rooms assembled by brushstrokes,
scholars study the shape of the invisible world.
Inside indigo spires bells announce themselves to clouds of sparrows
and below, in the streets, stern laws are read aloud
by the town’s assembled wise men concerning the purity of blood,
claiming how one may spill blood
in order to maintain the purity of the blood—
a code they call limpieza de sangre—
and here, a few centuries later:
a stone grave whitened by the sun.
There is nothing blue in this town.
Instead: a white cemetery and a hot sky.
Instead: the bones of an old Jew buried beneath a stone slab
bearing the hopeful inscription “in Eden now.”
A skeptic, I doubt the destination
but watch with great interest
as a bright green locust advances, resolutely, paroxysm by paroxysm,
across the bright, vast expanse.
From the opposite direction
a large-bellied cat jumps on the locust
and swallows it, whole.
The assembled wise men are cats.
The old Jew is the locust.
I have immodestly thought of myself as another painter—
another traveler who arrived long after the first.
In my dream I have been making my way across the sun-whitened stone
of indifferent history, you see:
I have been making my way through the bright streets of a town,
bright streets I thought would be blue,
but that are nothing but white, stone white—
pure, stark, hot—
suspecting that the vagrant who preceded me,
who transformed every rooftop into a steeple,
who was besotted by his own contorted forms,
misunderstood all he saw:
because he did not reveal
that in the year of our Lord one thousand, four hundred, and forty nine,
laws had been issued in this town saying
that one may spill blood
to preserve the purity of the blood,
a code they called limpieza de sangre:
and I, skeptic that I am, repeat to myself that the dream of purity
is a dream born in the palest furnace,
even in such a beautiful town, even in a town
once wrapped in the night of perpetual blue,
on a rock in the air,
where plumes of red blood spouted in alleys and doorways—
I am, therefore, angry with the cat.
It probably isn’t even hungry, I think,
and I scowl at it as it reclines on its side,
overfed, senseless,
blinking in the sun—
until its screeching children appear from the shadows
and greedily feed upon milk,
suckling there upon the grave of the old Jew.
Dizzied, I am in Eden.
For a moment, I discern the shape of the invisible world.
For here neither the locust nor the cat know wickedness.
I have never been in a place
where there was no wickedness,
where only I know wickedness.
Made sad by knowledge
I tell myself: the world could not have been born unless
the rule of stern justice had not been eased,
thereby allowing for an imperfect world,
thereby assuring that a pious man,
and a foreigner with a box of colors,
and a skeptic such as I
would wander though the same town, each on a different day,
suspending judgment for just a moment
and, in doing so, quite by accident,
summoned from nothing, we see a white cemetery in a blue town
inhabited by the resident of Eden, and the locust, and the cat—
and I am grateful to them for teaching me how very little I know
about the movement of time,
about how little I have learned
by memorizing the names of painters
and by reading law books written by cruel men.
foucault exhibits himself as "fan" - he feels sure the painting must be subversive, episteme-shatteringly radically explosive, just because he likes it.
ReplyDeleteYep.
marvellous pink thanks.
ReplyDelete"there's something just so nauseating about him, so fake, so derivative, so in love with the sound of his own voice/prose, so embarrassing. he always reminded me of the ricky gervais Office guy, brent."
ReplyDeleteLOL but the snark is getting too personalised here, no? He writes a bunch of arrogant crap about trolls etc. and you accuse him of genocidal fantasies.
He's very parochial, very narrow, very British. I read it frequently when was simply 'what pisssed me off about TV last night' type stuff (although I can get that at the pub with more wit) but his bizarre turn of hubris switched me off. As for the 'theory' - eh? Funny how he's had nothing to say about Zizek lately (along with so many other Zizek fans).
But then, your accusations of a fascist mindset to tend to stretch way too far. I'm suspecting that its more to do with petty personal beefs.
"LOL but the snark is getting too personalised here"
ReplyDeleteit is he personally who is so particularly repulsive and ridiculous. I don't see him as representative of anything, or typical. That's why I never read his blog or pay any attention to him unless someone asks me to look at something.
"
But then, your accusations of a fascist mindset to tend to stretch way too far."
see even now you say this when we've got the "toxic foreigner" and "Zig raus!" and "the half-Jew Charlie Chaplin, the Jew Herz..." "half-ape blacks whose grandparents jumped in trees like apes in Africa" and "when blacks tell you you can call me nigger that means they really accept you". All this is not enough just because "fascism" is the thing that is never there. it's mythic. Thus not Heidegger and Schmitt, much beloved today...
the reason people don't recognise fascism now as fascism is they are really not familiar with fascism, with what they claim is the standard for comparison. TYhey don't read Mein Kampf and the Protocols and the Internationl Jew, and what works of fascists they read they exclude from fascism in order to keep it the thing that never is...Heidegger, Schmitt; people read and love this stuff but pretend its not fascist intellectual product, as if the authors had "two bodies." Fascist culture product isn't just grunting and writing kill kill kill! It's touching uplifting stories and angry stories, stories about corruption and redemption, about sacrifice and purity. Mark Fisher, the last thing I read of his on his blog without being asked to was a complaint that Big Brother wasn't Nietzshceanly excellent enough because a dumb blonde won instead of someone more truly excellent. Big Brother would have been excellent Nietzschean lofty culture if someone different had won.
Theweleit, Male Fantasies - really a great book.
"Funny how he's had nothing to say about Zizek lately (along with so many other Zizek fans)."
ReplyDeleteWell their tactic is to ignore it because in fact it will blow over in a day and there is nothing about the pogroms that actually disturb them. They like this. BECAUSE THEY ARE FASCISTS.
there's a commenter at the tomb, Ta290568, who keeps saying zizz was not lying about the Strojans and acting like there's no way to find out the facts of the months long mass media headline story from 2005/6:
ReplyDelete"By "repeatedly explained" I think you mean "repeatedly asserted". Is it a hallmark of Marxist organizations that if everyone repeats a denounciation repeatedly and passionately enough it becomes an absolute truth which must then be "explained" to ignorant, dense and recalcitrant? And what's RS' source for his claim to know that Zizek is a liar? "The internet"...brilliant. Thanks for "explaining" to me Duncan.
As for the point about tabloids vs academic writing, do you take everything so literally and dogmatically?
Can you not see that it might make a difference how you phrase an argument, where you make it, and what point you're trying to present it within? Maybe even if Zizek *did* get this one wrong - the fact he did it as part of an analogy whereby the possibly/possibly not racist"mob" were analagous to Le Pen - and as part of an argument for militant anti-racism - should at least make *some* difference to you, no?"
I replied but it was not approved. My reply said:
Zizek: "There was even a murder in that gypsy settlement"
It's a lie. Call POP TV news, they will be delighted to speak to you. Or contact the Slovene justice department.
If you are going to keep contending its not a lie, name the murder victim and give some details.
And he's not in favour of "militant anti-racism" at all, on the contrary, his argument is that nobody has the right to criticise Le Pen, and nobody has the right to criticise, prevent or punish the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and pogroms, not the "liberal multiculturalists" "in the big cities" who foist the criminal "toxic" minorities on the good clean living and virtuous "local people", not the "left":
So you see, we, the leftists, we have no right, absolutely no right, to take this arrogant view of offended tolerant people who are horrored
and of course especially not the victims themselves who have not only an alien but thoroughly "illegal" and criminal way of life that is a "toxin" in the society;
In his In These Times piece he writes of:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6641/barbarism_with _a_human_face/
The recent expulsion of illegal Roma (“Gypsies”) from France "
illegal!
and continues:
While toxic subjects originate from popular psychology warning us against emotional vampires, the frontier of toxic subjects is expanding. The predicate “toxic” covers a series of properties that belong to totally different levels (natural, cultural, psychological, political).
ReplyDeleteSocially, what is most toxic is the foreign Neighbor—the strange abyss of his pleasures, beliefs and customs. Consequently, the ultimate aim of all rules of interpersonal relations is to quarantine (or at least neutralize and contain) this toxic dimension, and thereby reduce the foreign Neighbor—by removing his otherness—to an unthreatening fellow man. The end result: today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism is an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness—the decaffeinated Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality while features like wife beating remain out of sight.
...The mechanism of such neutralization was best formulated in 1938 by Robert Brasillach, the French Fascist intellectual, condemned and shot in 1945, who saw himself as a “moderate” anti-Semite. Brasillach put it this way: “We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew; and the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz...."
...After righteously rejecting direct populist racism as “unreasonable” and unacceptable for our democratic standards, they |liberal multiculturalists] endorse “reasonably” racist protective measures.
What he objects to is not the "reasonable racism" but the "righteous rejection" of the bold barbarism that he equates in conclusion with genuine Christian love.
(Before you say he is just referring to some existing discourse involving the common use of "toxic" in this way, remember that you will have to support the contention that it is common with at least several widely distributed examples and that you will fail to find even one, just as you will fail to find the name of the man you claim was murdered on the Strojan property outside Ambrus and you will fail to find evidence to support Zizek's claims that they did not own their land.)
What he is doing here in ITT is presenting Roma (and Jews) in the old guise of the "poison mushroom" and foreign intruder. Like Streicher before him he claims to speak for the true natives, the good "modest" people, the real Slovenes, and takes aim at the cosmopolitan liberals who, he claims, seek to disguise or minimise the danger presented by these toxic others to those decent "ordinary" "local people". He contends that these "liberal multiculturalists" ignore the wife-beating and, as he said at the lecture, daughter-raping way of life of "foreign" Neighbours and want to make the wholesome good native people, who are not foreign, with your excellent leitkultur that forbids these things, your superior civilisation, live with them, endure their beatings, shootings, thefts, murders and harrassments, and tolerate their crimes out of respect for their criminal culture.
ReplyDeleteAnd these "liberal multiculturalists" even want to deny you wholesome European folk the right to demand these "foreign" Neighbours - Jews, Muslims, Roms, people who take advantage of "affirmative action" and listen to "rap music" - understand they are guests on this your native soil, not in their own country or own homes but guests who should conform to the culture of the "host" society, your Christian values, your Enlightenment, in which you have a justified pride. This is the "liberal multiculturalistsr'" most offensive hypocrisy - they want to let everyone have pride in their culture except you white Europeans, the owners of the truly superior culture!
Sorry if I shock someone, but I think we do need what Germans call Leitkultur, leading culture. Just it shouldn’t be nationally defined. We should fight for that. Yes, I agree with right-wingers. We need a set of values accepted by all.
Of course he sums up denouncing "liberal multiculturalists" who think they can disguise the wife-beating Gypsies, multifariously toxic Jews and daughter-raping Pakistanis as "ordinary" "fellow men" as the "greatest threat" to your "Christian legacy", "cloaked" as its defenders.
It's just Hitler's kvetchig and Streicher's mythology microwaved.
end comment...
ReplyDeleteso i think there is just a limit to what they are willing to see even when he is being criticised.
that is, there is an agreement to not see his fascism. and it could not be more obvious to anyone familiar with what fascism actually names.
As a coda:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.social-europe.eu/2010/10/surprise-result-the-most-influential-european-thinker-is-an-american/?
Ecch...
Ps. Word verification 'idiom' (!)
my comment appeared there
ReplyDeletei have shortened it
number three
ReplyDeletesew grewss!
This "detoxification" of the other that Zizek sdpeaks of...
ReplyDeleteis what Hitler described "the Jew" using his press to do with his own image, detoxifying his otherness, denying the true evil and celebrating the supêrficial charming entertaining "difference":
In order to mask his activity and lull his victims, however, he talks more and more of the equality of all men without regard to race and color. The fools begin to believe him.
Since, however, his whole being still has too strong a smell of the foreign for the broad masses of the people in particular to fall readily into his nets, he has his press give a picture of him which is as little in keeping with reality as conversely it serves his desired purpose. His comic papers especially strive to represent the Jews as a harmless little people, with their own peculiarities, of course-like other peoples as well-but even in their gestures, which seem a little strange, perhaps, giving signs of a possibly ludicrous, but always thoroughly honest and benevolent, soul. And the constant effort is to make him seem almost more 'insignificant' than dangerous.
-Hitler, MK
"Well their tactic is to ignore it because in fact it will blow over in a day and there is nothing about the pogroms that actually disturb them. They like this. BECAUSE THEY ARE FASCISTS"
ReplyDeleteBut their fascism was not brought to their consciousness by YOU, Ms. Sour-Faced Cockroach, whereas MY FASCISM (I'm am now a proud card-carrying goddam fascist) WAS caused by you. You have also turned me into a part-time racist and a part-time misogynist. Zizek didn't do that, you did. I think you are one of the most repulsive people I have ever run into, exactly what you wrote about k-punk, and you do pull out all the stops when it comes to them, as you and Ms. Edge loosen each others' girdles.
Because you couldn't even take the accusation of 'being too personal' from retarded fluff, the loathesome [sic] Ms. Edge: "it is he personally who is so particularly repulsive and ridiculous."
That is not esp. inaccurate, but it also describes you personally. You're disgusting, and I ENJOY telling YOU, not him, because I once thought something of you.
"Well their tactic is to ignore it because in fact it will blow over in a day:"
So much for your enormous contribution in 'stopping Zizek', eh old bitch? You just hemmed and hawed and THAT WAS IT.
What is impossible for you to understand is that you can say 'Nietzsche was wrong' (even thought he wasn't), and you do not understand that it is even possible for someone to say to a hag like you 'Marx was WRONG' (and he was).
Okay, delete if you care to, I was just hoping to add to the difficulties you are currently experiencing, and will just copy and paste this at Dejan for posterity.
IN all of your self-righteous moralizing posturings, you have proved nothing but your stinginess of heart, your eternal wizenedness. As such, anybody with half a brain would follow even Jodi Dean's nauseating bullshit, or Nina Power's half-assed articles.
Thank you and fuck you.
and a good afternoon to you too.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteoh gosh can you change that to say natural futurism dot? It's probably a crime to link to it from here.
ReplyDeleteyes it's wierd he's not colbertting his hitler as luch as his stalin.
ReplyDeletehe seems more really sincere about his hitlerianism, his fascism.
he's certainly a real antisemite and this was plain before he started doing his stalinist act, when he was a lacanian "post marxist" thinking to sell himself in the west as a courageous dissident from yugo.
but like probably many originbal flavour nazis, he's really a kind of lib dem who is just worried about communists taking his riches and superiority away (and making him live near racial others)
he says so sometimes.
"he's really a kind of lib dem who is just worried about communists taking his riches and superiority away (and making him live near racial others)"
ReplyDeleteGee, I don't know who you're talking about, since I was afraid to follow that illegal link, but this sounds just like memememememe! Having lived with racial others, I rilly don't see how I could stand to live near them--and I don't just mean helpless African-Americans, but Hindu technocrats from Indiana, Koreans, and Sikh Indians with Birth Defects.
Thank you.
reposted w/o the actual link:
ReplyDeleteZizek's and the EDL's turn towards supporting Israel, meanwhile, looks like nothing so much as if they've been reading this hilarious website and actually agreeing with it:
nationalfuturism
this guy has been made fun of for years on far right websites, even by a handful that entertain zionists as possible colleagues.
but it's really just a step beyond where they've already gone.
from "comedy stalin" to "comedy hitler."
Dot: for Zizek's affinities with European neo-fascism, you'd be better off looking at the likes of Alain de Benoist, a 'right'-schmittian ideologue of the Nouvelle Droite, than the nutter you cite. This could be Zizek, for example:
ReplyDelete"What exactly is European culture?" is a very interesting question, but one so complex as to require a whole book just to try to provide an answer. First, Europe is diversity itself: every time it is reduced to a particular characteristic it is simultaneously impoverished. Because it is so diverse, the reflexive narration it produces can only be speculative in nature. In that sense, the European mind is above all philosophical. Philosophy can only arise where there are no definitive behaviors and solutions, and philosophy means distance from oneself -- a distance which generates both tragedy and irony.
Or this:
You say that "the hegemonic pans" of the US "are nothing but a cultural extension and development of the best of European culture." Well . . . After all, most Founding Fathers considered European culture simply evil -- an evil they had to leave behind in order to create a New World. I do not like this WASP hegemony. It is too filled with morals and economics, while lacking consideration for the poor. I do not like "Bible and business." I detest this puritan heritage, which forbids the normal expression of feelings, turns everything into a "problem" ("What's your problem?"), reduces daily life to using set formulas for solving these problems (how-to books, programs, etc.) and seems to forbid normal relations between the sexes. Frankly, there is something hysterical in the Prohibition of yesteryear and in today's campaigns against smoking, sexual harassment, sexual abuses, etc.
http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain15.html
And actually, if this doesn't sound exactly like Zizek, it's because de benoist is more refined stylistically (he's punctilious in his observance of academic conventions for example). Because he's a rightwing propagator of Evola and the like, he's got to be careful: he certainly won't be caught gossiping about murderous Roma in public.
And de Benoist is a right-Gramscian you know. He may have some dodgy ideas, but you know he should be credited with keeping alive this important part of the marxist tradition. You can't just dismiss de Benoit outright, unless you're sectarian.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments and posts on Zizek, LCC, here & elsewhere - I've found them really valuable.
ReplyDeleteThe line now appears to be that Zizek was lost in such lofty contemplation of philosophical profundities that he couldn't possibly be expected to keep track of whether or not someone was actually murdered at the settlement - it's such a petty detail, and really why should a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Institute of Sociology be expected to know the facts about such matters of Slovenian current affairs, it's not as if these facts were in the (international) news, or accessible with five minute's research. The willed ignorance from the fanboy audience is staggering. The insistence, also, that Zizek's intentions can only have been pure, that we know this, because it's vulgar and theoretically unsophisticated to think he's racist. This is the way the successes of anti-racist politics have been appropriated: the idea that it's simply beyond the pale for someone to be racist; therefore it's simply beyond the pale to call someone a racist; therefore no one is racist - at least no one we know.
I think your intellectual history in the other recent thread here is spot on - the postwar move to blame the working class for fascism, this sense of betrayal also, that resulted in the Frankfurt school and then Badiou & Zizek. Also the cross-over between left and right intellectual spaces pre-war. It's the same now I think, with the difference that in the specific cultural milieu that Zizek sells to it's usually taboo to identify oneself as on the right, so it's all labeled as 'radical' left, and I think a lot of people really can't tell the difference, just-about-crypto fascists like Zizek working hard at destroying the space's ability to distinguish between left and right - all presented and accepted as insight and critique, presented as the nuanced contamination of essentialist categories and revelation of unconscious desire, rather than the deliberate trashing of empirically and politically important distinctions.
I think there are two or three separate groups, though, absorbing and defending Zizek's stuff: people who would be fascists or similar - anarcho-fascists, whatever - if it were a socially acceptable category (or really just name, because the category itself is getting rehabilitated), who are furious at presently existing social relations and have been persuaded or are willing to pretend that this fury means they're on the left, rather than the right. Then people for whom none of it refers at all, it's all just a social game of citations and 'sophistication' and a particular kind of graduate-school prestige. And then those who really are fooled - who aren't good at parsing texts or identifying racist argument, who really do want socialism and oppose racism, but who are confused by the general intellectual confusion Zizek and others are assiduously disseminating. I think we disagree about how much of the defense of Zizek falls in the latter category - I think a fair bit of it does. But even so. There comes a point where one asks: what does it take to convict someone of racism? I literally can't think of how Zizek could make his politics any clearer - but it's like the very possibility that he might be racist, that he might be facist, is considered too ridiculous, too crass and 'unsophisticated', for these people to consider.
Anyway, thanks for the Zizek posts and analyses - good to see others making similar critiques.
Thanks, kenoma, for the reference and the good point.
ReplyDeleteI was just thinking about:
a) this New York Times article from September with the EDL/Tea Party/Kachist connection
b) Zizek having previously claimed atheism as only really atheism if you are european, then okaying Christianity as long as it is Pauline, then claiming that Israel gets approved as well for being basically atheist with issues.
(But actually being some sort of postmodern Jew and conceiving of God as radical alterity is not acceptable to him.)
and
c) the attempt by some really inept people, seemingly influenced by Zizek, most especially Walter Benn Michaels to paint the Tea Party as populist, anti-capitalist, or anti-neoliberal, which was all basically a bunch of crap.
Anyway aside from that speculation about possible connections between EDL/Tea Party/Islamophobia/Kachism/and the Zizek & Badiou project, Z part of the Z/B project includes:
ReplyDeleteReviving Paul, Wagner, Christianity as stepping stone to atheism, denouncing corrupt liberalism for failing to deal with "toxic" others, saying that Hitler wasn't violent enough, repeating quotes from or about Himmler over and over...
This is the fascist playbook. and not just any fascist playbook, this is specifically the National Socialist playbook, stripped of a few of its most obvious elements, but drawing from some of its more obscure ones, and stretched out over several years.
duncan,
I think part of the problem and the unwillingness to see what this stuff is comes from a variety of demographic issues at work:
1) A lot of people don't know what fascist arguments are/were/have been, they don't what to look for.
2) People who benefit from systems of structural racism really love to ignore how, that's built into them
3) Mainstream American Jews, who have some closer knowledge of what historical National Socialism was, have moved so far from the far-left in the past forty years and after the failures of 2003 in particular that they haven't been paying any attention to this stuff. (They didn't even really respond to Bill O'Reilly's annual "War on Christmas" from 2005 to 2009, so it's clear that the mainstream is incapable or unwilling to challenge anything.) Meanwhile, Israeli society needs racism to such an extent that I doubt there would be much interest in looking carefully at what Zizek says, especially if he seems to favor Israel sometimes. I don't know enough about the Jewish community in Europe in the past decade to say much about receptions of Zizek there.
4) People like Chabert who have been pointing this stuff out get laughed out, demonized, and ignored. Or accused of being bourgeois multiculturalist liberals who deserve to be laughed at, demonized, and ignored.
So that's how this stuff works: it appeals to people who don't want to have to listen to feminists, to anti-racists, to anyone who challenges their own power, especially because they already feel furious and powerless and trapped by Capital, and don't want to have to see that they cannot undo how capitalism works unless they are also willing to undo how they themselves still benefit in the short-run from the oppression of others.
Fascism works by getting people to confuse revenge with justice, by getting them to dehumanize enemies, and by getting them to buy into masculinist fantasies of purgative violence. That's how it works.
If you don't know that and you are angry and you are a middle class person who is becoming cognizant during a crisis that you also work for a living, that this thing called the working class includes you, this sort of fascism is very seductive, because it wants to mobilize that anger and validate it and minimize any criticism or theory that complicates or threatens the force of the new movement.
thanks duncan:
ReplyDelete" but it's like the very possibility that he might be racist, that he might be facist, is considered too ridiculous, too crass and 'unsophisticated', for these people to consider."
this - the amazing wall that goes up, the fingers in the ears "I Can't Hear You!" - does though strike me as the kind of thing Freud described as suggesting repression. And I think much can be accounted for this way, as repression of the knowledge of and pleasure in the racism. I think we have some excellent evidence for this for example that everyone who does this belongs to what Zizek and fascism defines as a superior race.
But yes I think there are a considerable number of people who just see the rabbit not the duck. They saw it that way first and everything is somehow fit into that, thus for these people he seems very very sloppy and inconsistent. These people really don't read, their digi-av people, they don't read or use language as we do but respond to icons and prods. So just that he keeps saying "as a radical marxist I say..." is incontrovertible, it's a brand on the screen, a network identification.
They need menus to choose from. Younguns!
But also - as kenoma pointed out - there are always people in his audiences who don't hear a word, his speech impediment and the sound and his incoherence guarantee it, but who are prompted to laugh and applaud by his gestures and by the lead laughers and applauders in the audience. They go along.
as for not being able to recall there was no murder - funny. I wrote to him in 2006 to correct him as did others. But the contortion - can't recall there was no murder in his own house too? Can't recall whether there was a rape in his office at office hours yesterday? Jeez he's just lying! Like with Chomsky. Like with the ICC and the ICTY - I wrote repeatedly to correct him and so did others but he just kept writing these were the same, because he's lying. He's a propagandist.
dot -
"Mainstream American Jews, who have some closer knowledge of what historical National Socialism was, have moved so far from the far-left in the past forty years and after the failures of 2003 in particular that they haven't been paying any attention to this stuff."
this is very true - he's really so helpful to Israel that calls off anything like Foxman and the like.
But there was that New Republic piece by Kirsch, and it made some of the points. But it almost seemed like an act, a collusion - that Kirsch would denounce Zizek as a fascist and antisemite as a preemption. Because why was Kirsch and the New Republic even paying atttention to Zizek? Did they ever reveiew a Versobook before that? Ever? Strange things like this, and also his swift antisemitic attack on Soros just when Soros had written that he thought the Bush regime were fascists, makes you feel he is really a psyop, because certainly the New Republic is an organ very close to the state and intelligence.
"Fascism works by getting people to confuse revenge with justice, by getting them to dehumanize enemies, and by getting them to buy into masculinist fantasies of purgative violence. "
ReplyDeleteyou can add his admiration for ayn rand to the list:
http://www.aynrandstudies.com/jars/v3_n2/3_2toc.asp
http://www.lacan.com/frameXII5.htm
very zizzian piece
What was most enlightening, ah-ha-ish for me with Zizek was the introduction to the English translation of Joly's Dialogue in Hell. Because one feature we have to remember always is that he's a fascist but declaring himself, branding himself, identifying himself as a Marxist-Leninist. So positioned as treacherous friend to some and discredited demonic laughable foe to others.
speaking of himmler -
ReplyDeletehe writes in the Guardian and elsewhere that the show 24 the heroes are depraved himmlers. as if dispproving - we assume "depraved himmlers" are bad to be and to glorify.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jan/10/usnews.comment
(the main propagandistic function of this article was to establish as uncontroversial and assumed that torture is inflicted to get information to save lives and that it does in fact produce reliable info*)
but later he comes out and explains oh no, it's very good actually!
You see he worked laboriously like Ariel Sharon to reconquer cultural territory, to make his present production possible. The development of his "big black guy" story; it was years and years before he dared affix the "nigger" punchline. But it ws implied from the begining. However if you, the reader, noted this - if you explained how he was evoking this antebellum fantasy, there was deniability. And the deniability has become so assumed thaty ebven when he drops the veil and sayus "nigger" and "white racism is true" and "blacks are inferior" people still say "I see nothing racist here."
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/07/21/the-editors/apology/comment-page-1/#comment-1813
*"The CTU agents, as well as their terrorist opponents, live and act in a shadowy space not covered by the law, doing things that "simply have to be done" to save our societies from the threat of terrorism....The CTU agents, after all, are dealing with the sort of "ticking-bomb" scenario evoked by the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz to justify torture (why not torture someone who knows the location of a bomb that is just about to kill hundreds of thousands of people?)....24 should not be seen as a simple popular depiction of the sort of problematic methods the US resorts to in its "war on terror...The problem for those in power is how to get people do the dirty work without turning them into monsters. This was Heinrich Himmler's dilemma....There was a further "ethical problem" for Himmler: how to make sure that the executioners, while performing these terrible acts, remained human and dignified. His answer was Krishna's message to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita (Himmler always had in his pocket a leather-bound edition): act with inner distance; do not get fully involved....But what if such a distance is possible? What if people do commit terrible acts as part of their job while being loving husbands, good parents and close friends? As Arendt says, the fact that they are able to retain any normality while committing such acts is the ultimate confirmation of moral depravity.
So what about the response to this hair-splitting? Some argue that at least the US is now more open and less hypocritical about its behaviour towards terrorist suspects....When we hear people such as Dick Cheney making statements about the necessity of torture, we should ask ourselves why he has decided to make a public statement about it. The question to be raised is: what is there in this statement that made the speaker decide to enunciate it? This is 24's real problem: not the content itself but the fact that we are being told openly about it. And that is a sad indication of a deep change in our ethical and political standards."
Ah poor Himmler, poor us.
It really is unbelievably depraved. But canny how he latched it to this hit show which was already deluging his audience with pleasures and also with guilt.
the comments were tampered with by the moderator here, not just some deleted and rearranged but some people's comments rewritten by the moderator, but still worth look back
ReplyDeletehttp://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/2006/03/the_kettle_logi.html
re: "zizek/badiou"
ReplyDeleteI think this is zizek's creation actually - one of his jobs seems to be to neutralise badiou. He paints him in the US as an antisemite always, appearing to defend him. As he paints Aristide as violent and anti-democratic in the guise of cheering him on.
Badiou hates the hoi polloi across the board. He has sympathy for people he sees as "non existent" or whose "intensity of existence" is very low. People whose agency he recognises repulse him. Voters, the NPA, he sees them as all kind of inconvenient clods of filty earth mucking up his divine idea. He really is a misogynist I think. But there's a huge gulf between hum and zizek and zizek is the one creating the package of them both for the academic market.
they just seem like pals, is all.
ReplyDeleteanyway, Zizek has also been reviving Renan, who he also mentions in this recent speech (if I recall the clip correctly).
I feel like before Zizek, if someone wanted to talk about the lies of the nation, they'd mention James Loewen, Benedict Anderson, or even Leo Strauss, but with Zizek, no, it's Renan, racist, anti-Semitic Renan.
The whole thing is grotesque. It's like the entire body of work on analyzing and undermining the mechanisms of racism, colonialism, and so on just get ignored because it is cute to make a movie about this wild and crazy guy from over there, who can tell us about communism because he "lived" it.
And if what is left of "the academy" after this ruling class purge is a decimation of the humanities, of history, of arts, of languages, and only a counterfeit Left presence that doesn't have the guts to even see through Zizek and call him out, then we are really screwed.
You said they want the 19th century. They do, they really really do.
yes this kind of thing is a oattern, this reversion to the 19th century and the erasure of radical marxist, (feminist, antiracist) culture politics and the accomplishments in that sphere, which were considerable, and remain so, but need defending.
ReplyDeletebut when you do defend these accomplishments, the volunteer stormtroopers pf snark and sarcasm, the petty bourgeois internet brownshirts of irony really attack. ferociously
they are the swarm in truth. the petty bourgeois clerks who defend the status quo. the swarm are "fans", consumers under the influence of increasingly subtle and effective advertoisoing and marketing. they don't know where their impulses come from, but they swarm.
Macherey:
http://stl.recherche.univ-lille3.fr/sitespersonnels/macherey/machereynegri.html
(I translated a lot of this into english if anyone is interested)
the losurdo piece i liked above is also an example, appears to be the stuff of which toscano's god orful retro-hegelian fanaticism book was plundered. It's like he took the essay, stripped it of class analysis and historical analysis, injected extra strenght idealism and ahistoricism, stuffed it into the badiouvian loop of Pauline zeal and divine heroic bourgeois reformer savonarolism, and slapped a nietzschean label on to divert attention from its failure to meet any criteria of social scientific product - this is a crazed rant from grandiose blowhard in the great tradition of crazed rant from gradiose blowhard to be treated as excuseable on ther monkey at tyypewriter and broken clock principles.
it's interesting to discover though that the real target of the vitiation that is that retrohegelian white supremacist "fanaticism" fable is the marxist analysis of the role of intellectuals in political struggle.
"liked" - linked!
ReplyDelete" so on just get ignored because it is cute to make a movie about this wild and crazy guy"
ReplyDeleteyes exatcly. he puts his understanding - pretty banal but in part right - of how the mass media can sell a patronising exotic identity to real use. He makes himself this slovitzian madman, and uses the sympathy and condescension in his favour; mlearning the lesson from the success of Milan Kindera (ohg yes, its like so backlash old male chauvinism but he's a time traveller! from Prague, where you can trade your Levi's for a car!) It's like oh the funny slovitzian how can he know not to call someone Jew constantly when you are debating her? How would he know not to make those noises and gestures and evoke "half ape blacks" whenever the subject of black people arises? They do it watching football in Lublijana!
So he knows how to exploit this traveller from the East figure, with the beard and the slovenly appearance and the corny old jokes and the devoted fascination with american mass culture.
"Badiou hates the hoi polloi across the board."
ReplyDeleteYes, I do too.
"He has sympathy for people he sees as "non existent" or whose "intensity of existence" is very low. People whose agency he recognises repulse him."
It's not your agency that repulses me, though. It's that you're so hoi polloi, and that's why you spend $5000 a year at the opera, so you can sit next to people who use colognes.
"Voters, the NPA, he sees them as all kind of inconvenient clods of filty earth mucking up his divine idea."
Except they're failing. The Soviet Union is reduced to North Korea by now.
"But there's a huge gulf between hum and zizek and zizek is the one creating the package of them both for the academic market."
That's so generous of you to discriminate like that.
"yes this kind of thing is a oattern, this reversion to the 19th century and the erasure of radical marxist, (feminist, antiracist) culture politics and the accomplishments in that sphere, which were considerable, and remain so, but need defending."
So who needs goddam Verdi then? It is fascinating how you have, by your incredible repulsiveness, convinced me to radicalize in the opposite direction. Yes, I want an 'erasure' of everything you stand for.
"but when you do defend these accomplishments, the volunteer stormtroopers pf snark and sarcasm, the petty bourgeois internet brownshirts of irony really attack. ferociously"
I only wish I could attack more 'ferociously'. But since you're 'thought police', I just have to store the material about the 'come back to da raf, Huck Honey' at Dejan's for safekeeping.
"they are the swarm in truth. the petty bourgeois clerks who defend the status quo. the swarm are "fans", consumers under the influence of increasingly subtle and effective advertoisoing and marketing. they don't know where their impulses come from, but they swarm"
One contribution you have made is that when you use these terms that are meant to belittle people intellectually, you do at least convince them that even were that literally true, it would be better than what you offer, which is profoundly nothing but filth.
Oh, and yes, you've definitely turned me into a TOTAL BROWNSHIRT. See what FEMINIST AGENCY can accomplish, you sour-mouthed cockroach.
"they just seem like pals, is all."
ReplyDeleteyeah they are. and so now Badiou is calling everybody a fascist, every feminist is covertly a fascist, in a mad defence of this fascist friend who has attached himself to his clique.
actually that argument at long sunday in 2006 really shocked me. I had no idea how much backlash there'd been since say 1999. The things these young "scholars" were saying about "europe" really shocked me, like as if they were arguing for a flat earth or that masturbation causes blindness. Especially since they were mostly declared derrideans - it seemed to me that if someone had said "the west" or "european civ" like that in say 1999, people would just have laughed. And if they persisted, if it had been a freshman, they'd have said "oh we deconstructed those a hundred years ago! you have to catch up!" Instead they were advancing the oldest white supremacist imperial fables as if they were hot off the presses insights and incontestable knowledge at once. And citing Weber as the authority for Chinese history and things, just like cartoon English Edwardian windbags. And also like the wonderfully frightful Harold Pinter's Bertram in Mansfield Park, discoursing on the sterile "mulatto"...and wala here is Zizek even restoring that to the discourse,
http://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2010/11/introducing-zizeks-mule.html
and his white fans just love it but of course pretend they don't even notice.
But this was evident back in 2006 with his attack on the protestors against the Danish racist libels, a defence of that racist screed so reactionary at first I thought surely this is some kind of joke. Having not paid attention to academia for a fewyears I'd missed what the reaction had accomplished already. But the intensity of the defensiveness was also very revealing - the ferocity, the wild claims of being injured and wronged and abused when the entity "european civilisation" is questioned, is how you know you are among fascists.
"the wild claims of being injured and wronged and abused when the entity "european civilisation" is questioned, is how you know you are among fascists."
ReplyDeletePrecisely why it's so important for you to do your Communism in Paris, a city with a long history of Petainisme, in case there weren't enough ancien regimistes still to occupy the total worthlessness of Proust's j.o. fantasies, which is, as Mao often said, all they really were.
Maybe they'll release you from your House Arrest just like the Burmese Lady in about 13 years. The terrorist cartoons were Swedish, by the way, even if published in Denmark. There's a high alert in Britain today, as a result of Bin Laden supporters like you and Warszawa, which reminds me: Owen Hatherley is in Warszawa's Snowy Climes as we don't speak. Does that mean that in the Spektakle, we can expect a new Paris Hilton sequel 'One Night in Warszawa'. This would be a 'bridge-building' type of porn, since warszawa champions Owen against your will. You haven't made anybody hate Owen, with all your disagreeable putrefaction.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's fair to disregard a swarm of fans so quickly, it's just important think about the composition of those fans and how they relate to one another and what they oppose and why and what they are silent about.
ReplyDeleteI say this because the feminist side of science fiction fandom (which engages in a sort of pseudo-socialist community of co-production of fan works, among other things) has been on fire since early 2009 and basically keeping the torch alive in some ways, even if this has all been basically disconnected from what's going on on the larger geopolitical stage.
http://blogs.feministsf.net/
http://rydra-wong.livejournal.com/146697.html
thanks dot, good point
ReplyDeleteties in to the problems with Hatherley's hysterical attack on Altermodern and his fears pf miscegenation, associated with capital to replace the real problems created by capital
what was that big feminist antiracist fan uprising in "scifi community" a few years ago called? I didn't really follow but read something about it that was very intriguing...
i feel i will be quoting this often
ReplyDeletehttp://vassilissa.livejournal.com/919932.html
in future
it was called RaceFail09, except it didn't end in 09, it didn't end in 2010, in many ways it is still going on.
ReplyDeleteat this point, it has involved probably thousands of people around the world, but because it is genre fiction, and fandom, and Other People, and women, somehow this doesn't get included in how some people think of what being a fan means and how getting caught up in a movement can be like and what these moments can be about or for.
http://seeking-avalon.blogspot.com/2009/01/open-letter-to-elizabeth-bear.html
ReplyDeletepeople could learn a lot from this;
isn't it odd how there is so little communication between spheres of people much the same age working in much the same industries, wathcing the same stuff, wanting the same kinds of politics...but its incredible to compare the discussion in the sphere you linked to what goes on at LT around zizz. it's like the latter is from a century earlier. not Seymour himself, but his task there is sissyphusian.
confession - as I was reading, and the list is growing, i am as if in fear that she will point out a problem with captain sisko. I am a huge avery brooks fan, he was the acting teacher of a friend and i saw him a lot in ny on the stage before he got that part on trek. and i just thought he was great and the part was some redeeming in the dubious double sided race discourse of trek (a show that affords itself some good antiracist practise by displacing racial discourse into species, the fictional substitutes for "races" that validate all the race discourse the casting and other elements within the earthling race reject and overcome and abolish). so i was relieved she didn't see anything i missed in sisko and son!
just my own fandom confessional there.
ReplyDeletei also learned a lot from ann herendeen recently about fanfiction and the birth of slash fiction out of it.
this is also a case of a cultural politics achieving a lot, structured as swarm.
i thibnk there are limits to the sorts of challenges this swarm structure of fandom can achieve. but they are really important areas of struggle and justy how important is becoming very painfully clear as some of the achievements are rolled back.
so i acknowledge my fail there on fans. fanfail. and thanks for setting me right.
ReplyDelete" so i was relieved she didn't see anything i missed in sisko and son!"
ReplyDeleteexcept one should actually notice that his wife has to be sacrificed to the success of this character. as if he's just too good for any black woman the show could countenance.
no problem.
ReplyDeletewe have better discourse, they still have public services. if only it could be both/and.
I feel like part of the disconnect is that in the BRD and the US, 1968 involved a lot of generational "just what the hell did you all sign up for???" rage from the children of fascists and some of the red diaper babies. My sense is that a similar generational anger didn't emerge in the UK until 1977.
The same generation in the UK that lived through Thatcher and the miners' strike, 88/89/90, the rise of the EU, and Tony Blair, in the US this generation lived through the culture wars, queer nation & act up, riot grrl, rodney king, dlc & nafta & contract with america, the normalization of the religious right, seattle, bush, failures of 2003, immigrants rights movement, and now this.
At least, that's how I see it.
Neil Kinnock's anti-militant purges of the Labour party, Falklands war, the dominance of Rupert Murdoch, Thatcher's borrowing of far-right immigrant policy, Tony Blair's borrowing of far-right muslim policy, the abolition of free university education, the death of local/public service tv, clampdown on spending/powers of local councils, the militarisation of the police, the criminal justice act (no right to assembly beyond 5 people without police permission), the sale of public housing/property 'boom' mania/bust, 2nd/3rd gen multiculturalism (and EU integration) and the deafening hostility to it from all corners of the media, privatisation and Blair's rewriting of the Labour constitution to preserve it, the massive boom in the drug trade, epidemic levels of mental illness, the substitution of oppositonal politics with new ageism and and continental nihilism.
ReplyDeleteThat's only my generation - and I ain't young.
Audrey Lorder, 1984:
ReplyDelete"It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory in this time and in this place without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, black and third-world women, and lesbians. And yet, I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented."
this is heard widely before the backlasg sets in.
and the backlash does not triumph:
Zuky: The Greatest Cliché: The Unexamined Propaganda of "Political Correctness"
As it's commonly used, "PC" is a deliberately imprecise expression (just try finding or writing a terse, precise definition) because its objective isn't to communicate a substantive idea, but simply to sneer and snivel about the linguistic and cultural burdens of treating all people with the respect and sensitivity with which they wish to be treated. Thus, the Herculean effort required to call me "Asian American" rather than "chink" is seen as a concession to "the PC police"
but then Zizz is about trying to secure that triumph and infliuct that final defeat, offering collaborator brownshirts kewl and alibis for the ressentiment, using sarcasm especially and turbocharged white privilege. so you get this explosion of confident sneering, mockery...
audre lorde!
ReplyDeletecut off quote to soon, she goes on -
ReplyDelete" What this says about the vision of this
conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are
inseparable. To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women
have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women's culture and
silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power. And what
does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women
who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it
mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of
that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of
change are possible and allowable."
"most Founding Fathers considered European culture simply evil" - Just the most minor of footnotes, but this claim sounds like it came from Glenn Beck's version of U.s. history.
ReplyDeleteTeaching yourself French was a common leisure time activity among the Foundering Fatherers. Several grew up in French-speaking households. In Massachussets, New York and South Carolina. In effect, everywhere. In circles as small as those of colonial ruyling class, several was a lot.
Not to mention that you could even consider Great Britain part of Europe. Although Benoit apparently doesn't. If you do, you pretty well cover the rest.
Ignorant Euro-yahoos condescending on the basis of pure stereotype about our ignorant yahooism just rouse my ire.
"Ignorant Euro-yahoos condescending on the basis of pure stereotype about our ignorant yahooism just rouse my ire."
ReplyDeleteheheh!
fasicnating though how in the US ideology europpe plays both parts without anyone minding the contradiction, the decadent to the American fresh, the basis of cultural/civilisational superiority to the savage.
have you read charles brockden brown's novels? (did i ask you this already? sorry if i did)
No I haven't read any Brockden Brown. Maybe a couple of pages, since at one point I'm pretty sure I had checked one out, but ended up turning it back in after it had laid around for months without getting read.
ReplyDeleteDoes he write about this? Or exemplify it? Not to distract attention from the reception question.
Rarely acknowledged and oddly overlooked, it was Brown who first--in home-grown literary fiction at least--suggested that the American experiment was a complex matter and that the "New Order of the Ages", was, well, not necessarily all that new, and certainly not innocent. Hawthorn (in "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux," for one example) and Melville were both influenced by him re: the conjunction of history and the self. Well worth a read. "Wieland" in particular. He's no James Fenimore Cooper, though, of course...
ReplyDeleteYes, Wieland was the one I didn't read. Of course, I didn't read all of them. But that one in particular. I knew it had a German name.
ReplyDeleteAs soon as I finish Robert Heinlein.
Heinlein wrote a great short story called "I Met the Monkey and the Monkey is Me," wherein an unnamed narrator lands on Mars and then has several intersellar seafaring adventures with one Charles Brockden Brown. Highly recommended!
ReplyDeleteWow - i didn't know that about the Heinlein story...
ReplyDeleteWeiland - yes I was thinking of this one especially...
as a vision of this wqay the "new worlder" of philadelphia positions himself between civilisation and nature/savage. (And much else) Strangely spookily anticipating Freud too, in this very gothic literalised manner. But then this literalisation is like a materialist critique of the traditions of fiction.
Geez, Pinkerton, here I am trying to reestablish my cred as a pulp-chomping yahoo, and you turn it into a literary allusion to American receptionalism. Cut a guy a break.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you saw it already, by furthering my own conspiracy theories, the Arizona assassin was considered by friends to be liberal/radical-left until 2007, then became reclusive, added Mein Kampf to his reading list and became a fan of the Tea Party.
ReplyDeleteincredible that this shooter is now positioned as that extremist disgruntled left who just can't be pleased no matter how socialist the democratic party gets.
ReplyDeletei find this very disturbing.
chuckie you are going to like CBB - it's in the era of your recent researches and - as is common in his genre - full of the turmoil of the communist-romantic emancipatory push simultaneous with the wave of individualism, imperialism and capitalism.
Do you know the novel Hermsprong? Robert Bage? This is an interesting English companion to CBB.
"Hermsprong? Robert Bage?"
ReplyDeleteNow this book and this author I have never even heard of! Now I feel more secure in my yahoohood again.
On the shooting, I guess I will mention here too. For those who don't mind an old, long, tediously presented exercise in historical sociology, I am recommending Peter Merkl's Political Violence under the Swastika. Shortly after the constitutional coup that handed power to the Nazis, the party solicited brief political autobiographies from its earliest members.
Merkl analyzed these autobiographies for demographic information and for what are basically ideological themes.
His analysis shows that mentally disturbed racial haters with a propensity for violence are heavily represented among the early Nazis.
One clear conclusion, although it is not one drawn by Merkl as his interests lie elsewhere, is that the mobilization of these mentally and emotionally ill thugs can contribute substantially to radical-right movement building.
Sociopath and radical-rightist are not identical, but neither are they exclusive, and they are demonstrably historically associated.
The reduction of the specific content of the radical right's agitprop productions to its weighting on the scale of extremism and to its "partisanship" cannot combat this vile political thinking and organization.
it's embarrassing but i am full of fear for what could happen in the US, what is already happening, what also may already be happening (where are all those "illegals"? people vanish) and what may be about to happen.
ReplyDeletethere has been what seems to me a relatively sudden "brutalisation" of thought
a friend said "i look at the ads on tv now, they are all about hurting someone to get ahead, all about how fun and good and cute and smart it is to hurt someone else, your competitor"
someone recommended Black Swan movie, obviously about race but veiled, and obviously about competition, individual fight for survival. and ti's critique is "oh, women are such pathetic narcissists" (self-exploitation!)
my friend happened to cross paths with this fleet of herses that were taking the unclaimed dead soldiers from iraq to burial somewhere on long island. lots of bodies nobody's come for.
one has to assume they are mostly latin americans who were going for citizenship, whose families are eityher in the US now illegally so afraid to cvome for the bodies, or too distant to be able to afford to come.
i think people underestimate how terrorised the US population has been by the Bush regime, all that tasing etc - with the www you only need to brutalise a small number of people to have the terrorising effect of doing it in every town, because everyone sees it over and over.
ReplyDelete"Hermsprong? Robert Bage?"
ReplyDeleteNow this book and this author I have never even heard of!
oh it's really good, I love this book.
there really is brain damage, mind damage out there. A twit arguing before with RS about Zizek tweets this in defence of Zizek, to show how not racist he is!
ReplyDeleteWith the reports of New Orleans' descent into chaos [after hurricane Katrina], Marx's old saying that tragedy repeats itself as farce seems to have been inverted ... The U.S., the world's policeman who endeavours to control threats to peace, freedom, and democracy around the globe, lost control of a part of America itself. For a few days, New Orleans apparently regressed to a wild preserve of looting, killing, and rape. It became a city of the dead and dying, a post-apocalyptic zone where those the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls 'Homini sacer' - 'people excluded from the civil order' - wander. A fear permeates our lives that this kind of disintegration of the entire social fabric can come at any time, that some natural or technological accident - whether earthquake or electricity failure or the hoary Millennium Bug - will reduce our world to a primitive wilderness. This sense of the fragility of our social bond is in itself a social symptom. Precisely when and where one would expect a surge of solidarity in the face of disaster, there is a fear that the most ruthless egotism will explode, in the way it did in New Orleans." - Zizek, S. (2008). Violence. New York, NY: Picador. p. 93.
http://twitter.com/#!/khephir/status/24198529295589376
what complete crap.
ReplyDeleteDANZIGER BRIDGE
the police shot unarmed black men.
they did it. and they they tried to cover it up.
Danziger Bridge
FACTS.
and people think Zizek isn't a racist.
good god.
people are assholes.
yes in Violence, it's just startlng how open the racism is. He goes on and on about "bklacks" exploding in barbaric violece, and the explosion in New Orleans being like the Rodnbey King riots, etc. Then in the middle he has to cncede there were "reports" of child-rape in NO that proved unfounded. then he gfoes through this whole lacanian dance saying but image they were reazlly all true! and then he ends saying so political correctness says we are not allowed to report when blacks commit crimes when immigrants mistreat women...etc. He lies, he concedes a little truth, then he retracts it, building his whole argument on the supposition that all the racist lies were true, until the reader forgets that he conceded they were not true, then he poses as the "problem" that political correctness forbids us telling the truth about their crimers and evils, then he says "but i have a more radical solutioon - tell of their criumes and evils but in a not racist way! be mike me, without racist feelming as you deplore their crimes and evils!"
ReplyDeletethis is after a long section explaining how "blacks" really are "inferior" as white racists say because white racism as "performative efficiency".
it's in. credible.
then there is the story of the "murderous Muslim reaction" to the Danish cartoons, and how that murderous reaction began targeting Denmark then widened to all of Europe.
Murderous. Over and over he uses the word - the "murderous muslim mob" to describe the (completely nonviolent in fact) protestors against the cartoons.
and the "easy meat" story of Mr Straw has a precedent in Violence also;
, For the Western Liberal there is also the problem of the brutal and vulgar anti-Semitic and anti-Christian caricatures that abound in the ress and schoolbooks of Muslim countries. There is no respect here for other people and their religion - a respect that is demanded from th West. But there is little respect for their own people, either, as the case of a particular cleric exemplifies. In the autumn of 2006, Sheil Taj Din al-Hilali, Australia's most senior Muslim cleric, caused a furore when, ager a group of Muslim men had been kailed for gang rape, he said; "If you take uncovered meat and place it outside on the street...and the cats come and eat it...whose fault is it - the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meatis the problem." The explosively provocative nature of this comparison between a woman who is not veiled and raw, uncovered meat distracted attention from another, much more surprising premise underlying al-Hilali's argument: if women are held responsible for the sexual conduct of men, does this not imply that menare titally helpless when faced with what thety perceive as sexual temptation, that they are simply unable to resist it, that they are utterly in thrall to their sexual hunder, precisely like a cat when it sees raw meat?
the book is really just another endless racist screed patched together from his msm punditry, the bullshit about the "phatic" car burning in France, hymns to Oriana Fallaci, the murderous muslim anticartoon mobs, the explosion of barbaric violence in New Orleans, the truth of Jewish evil, the political correctness that forbids us from speaking odf all this, the Muslims are terrorists because they know they are our inferiors, they lack anything like our wholesome "racist" conviction in the superiority of our culture, etc.
ReplyDeleteVery weird (i.e.: can't talk about the obvious) U.S. media moment re: the shootings in Arizona....
ReplyDeleteWolf Blitzer (of CNN): "Other than the fact that the shooter listed 'Mein Kampf' as one of his favorite books, do we have any evidence that he was actually anti-Semitic?"
Besides that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
have to fit today's headline into the "happy talk"
ReplyDeleteWould you mind telling me why was my comment deleted? Other than calling you "ignorant" I wasn't being offensive in any way. I followed the discussions on Richard Seymour's blog about the same issue and he did the same thing more than once -- leaving only the most benevolent oposing statements he could easily debunk. What the hell people?
ReplyDeleteMaking bold statements and then deleting traces of everyone challenging them... Hm? This is wrong and you know it very well.
"Would you mind telling me why was my comment deleted?"
ReplyDeleteit was libellous. as you know.
and knowingly publishing libels makes one liable in several countries.
you did not "challenge" anything, yopu made patently false allegations that you know to be false
ReplyDeletea. that the Strojan family from Ambrus were immigrantrs
b. that they were illegally squatting outside Ambrus
c. that a member of the Strojan family (whom you decline of course to name) assaulted someone on their property and beat him into a coma
d. that the Strojan's principle income was from auto theft
All these things are lies, easily debunked, and you know they are lies.
That's why your comment was deleted.
http://tinyurl.com/239mfc6
ReplyDeletehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/nov/27/eu.politics
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/13/world/europe/13slovenia.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPgnze0vGQY
Making bold statements and then deleting traces of everyone challenging them... Hm?
ReplyDelete(Ustaša types have all these fantasies of deleting the traces of people. It's like their only theme. So quick to shriek they're being wiped out as they go about their helpful pest control! They're being erased!Just for speaking the truth! Erased by the liberals! The Gypsies! The Joooz!)
http://borutpeterlin.wordpress.com/2006/11/22/strojan-family-are-still-refugees/
ReplyDeletehttp://borutpeterlin.wordpress.com/2006/12/21/strojans-house-is-demolished/
http://borutpeterlin.wordpress.com/2006/10/28/refugees-from-slovenia-in-slovenia/
http://borutpeterlin.wordpress.com/2006/10/29/sad-day-for-myself-for-slovenia-for-eu-and-for-the-world/
The articles you linked are all mentioned in my deleted comment under "ignorance".
ReplyDeleteA photographer takes a picture of a man attacking another man. Because this is exactly what those articles are. Still photographs. Dumb redneck fucks yelling Zig Raus and old ladies threatening to put other old ladies' grandchildren on fire do not make the photo look rational you got that right.
And good game with all this deleting. Thank you for acknowledging your defeat.
Wait, what?! I don't know under what rock Borut lives (the Slovene blogger who supported the Strojans) or whether everything was as well known at the time as it is today (I sure knew it, and so did Žižek, obviously) but the last time I read about them in our newspapers the majority of their family was in jail. They are not just any "gypsies" - they are criminals which were not properly taken care of by the police at the time. There is a difference. I hope the kids were placed in foster care.
ReplyDelete