Thursday, January 18, 2007


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2 comments:

citizen said...

hello billo

even in this technological moment I think your collections of pictures, thoughts, and words would make a wonderful book.
What Zizek says is very close to the truth, it surprises me how 'normalising' much of American society is, the US needs to rediscover some of that strain of cantakerous contrary'ism', but now that I say this maybe it is just this which permits it to play stupid and shut out alternative ways of thinking and doing, but I'm not so sure, for a society that prides itself on pragmatism, the present state of affairs strikes me as nothing less than a kind of institutionalised stiffening going on across the culture, a culture that can admit little eccentricity at least in the public sphere, there is a 'tyranny of being on-message' - a loss of the capability to truely respond, hidden of course behind all sorts of 'acting out' to use Zizek's terminology. To pursue the psychoanalysis further, I would suggest in the US this is a gender problem, specifically male. Speculating here - maybe this is the limit of a purely 'pragmatic' approach. Without the transcendental dimension you cannot have 'real acts' only simulations, again some finitude is a necessary basis for the transcendental. Zizek should have a warning sign attached, read a little and you start seeing dialectical shifts everywhere!
this 'lack of life' for Zizek is exactly what makes suicide bombing such a problem for us, and such an effective and disturbing tactic. Here are people who really do believe in something that however misguidely makes them feel alive. There is a truely perverse symbiotic relationship going on between western culture and the suicide bomber.
Beneath our obvious condemnation for this act, we should still love the perpetrators. At least speaking from my own religious background, this is the Christian thing to do, but what a scandalous thing to think ! A couple of years ago, I was in Montreal for Easter, and we went to a Catholic mass in French, my French is poor but the sermon was striking, I could remember only the association of Jesus/Scandal, this is true I think.
In regards to the 'freedom-compulsion' . Licentiousness has always been a too convenient category, but 'compulsion' today has little to do with the tradition bugbears of morality, in fact it is behaviour that has been emptied of any ethical consequence, almost 'beyond good and evil' -
I heard the 'start the week' discussion, I thought a key point was whether we would trade child-bearing for immortality - in a survey most women said no, perhaps there is hope.
really Woody Allen was right: there is only 'Love and Death'

8:13 AM
billoo said...

Ha! I nearly missed your comment Citizen, nesting under the bird there like that...

Always a pleasure to hear from you and always so difficult to keep pace with your thoughts!

"love the perpetrators"?
Good luck! I think a more useful starting point-at least politically-might be the instinctive question raised by so many Americans : Why do they hate us?

Of course, it is a bit too easy to talk of hate like this when in truth it is probably more about self-hatred.


I have nothing against simulations and acts-would culture even be possible without them? It's all this quest for a "real self", to dispense with superficiality and hypocrisy that is dangerous! There is a lightness that is profound and one that is empty...

your point about institutionalised rigidity is a fascinating one. I think Bauman would add, in late capitalism, liquid modernity, it is the contrarian spirit that is, paradoxically, insitutionalised. A *constant* striving for freedom is itself a form of compulsion. No? the most difficult thing to come to terms with: we are bound *and* free.

2:00 AM

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