This is the dope:
'In an echo of Bush’s rhetoric, the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy declared a “war of civilisations” in response to attacks on “our freedoms”...
But just as there is a blindness in sections of progressive France about how the secular ideology used to break the grip of the powerful is now used to discipline the powerless, the right to single out one religion for abuse has been raised to the status of a core liberal value...
The absurdity was there for all to see at the “Je suis Charlie” demonstration in Paris on Sunday. A march supposedly to defend freedom of expression was led by serried ranks of warmongerers and autocrats: from Nato war leaders and Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu to Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egypt’s foreign minister.'
---S.Milne, The Guardian.
The mention of the word 'discipline' got me thinking about Foucault's 'Society Must be Defended' and how Nazism could be seen as an extreme form of state racism. Here we need to understand how Nazism is a modern phenomenon and trace some of its roots to colonialism (not just the Camps, of course). For example, what is colonialism with its civilisational mission, its categorization of inferior races, if not state racism? If biopolitical power is about the management of life, then one way in which power can be exercised is to weed out all those who make 'life' unhealthy, unclean and less pure, polluting the body (politic): which is why the Jews were "vermin".
And so to Charlie and all the hullabaloo over 'The Republic' (and, therefore, the fifth columnists who oppose it and true allegiance, loyalty..the "cancer" that is in our midst).
In previous times it was the lepers or the mad or the poor..the degenerates, the irrational, the barbarians who stood (or were made to stand) in the shadows, who-in a perverse way-showed us what it means to stand in the light. Cavafy: how we need those barbarians.
Of course, we will hear nothing of the colonial practices and ideology of the French (or the Belgians or the British) since racism is no longer a problem..the problem has to be fashioned into a war of civilisations. No-one-and I mean no-one-wants to talk about the Camps, the Gulags, the Trenches, and the Bomb because that throws us back to the difficult question of how the "civilized" state powers have unleashed so much violence in the modern world.
~~~
Walking back from Denmark street, past St.Giles, one look back to the sanctuary that is Foyles. The light rapidly dimming, breaking in the last hour, you keep your hands in your pocket and your memories of listening to Dylan in winter. I put a spell on you is too expensive, one for later, perhaps.
The faint smell of tobacco in the air is immensely comforting, a sign that the old ways still persist in a quick-changing world. Merton's essay on Ionesco and rain is wonderful: the usefulness of useless things, the uselessness of so-called useful things. Monasticism and freedom from the system. One has to either be expelled from it or accept one's defeat and 'get with the times'. To be expelled today is a kind of internal displacement, to be forgotten. Walser and the small, marginal life is another type of refusal.
~~
He [the Pope] said: “If my good friend Dr Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. It’s normal. It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”
'In an echo of Bush’s rhetoric, the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy declared a “war of civilisations” in response to attacks on “our freedoms”...
But just as there is a blindness in sections of progressive France about how the secular ideology used to break the grip of the powerful is now used to discipline the powerless, the right to single out one religion for abuse has been raised to the status of a core liberal value...
The absurdity was there for all to see at the “Je suis Charlie” demonstration in Paris on Sunday. A march supposedly to defend freedom of expression was led by serried ranks of warmongerers and autocrats: from Nato war leaders and Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu to Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egypt’s foreign minister.'
---S.Milne, The Guardian.
The mention of the word 'discipline' got me thinking about Foucault's 'Society Must be Defended' and how Nazism could be seen as an extreme form of state racism. Here we need to understand how Nazism is a modern phenomenon and trace some of its roots to colonialism (not just the Camps, of course). For example, what is colonialism with its civilisational mission, its categorization of inferior races, if not state racism? If biopolitical power is about the management of life, then one way in which power can be exercised is to weed out all those who make 'life' unhealthy, unclean and less pure, polluting the body (politic): which is why the Jews were "vermin".
And so to Charlie and all the hullabaloo over 'The Republic' (and, therefore, the fifth columnists who oppose it and true allegiance, loyalty..the "cancer" that is in our midst).
In previous times it was the lepers or the mad or the poor..the degenerates, the irrational, the barbarians who stood (or were made to stand) in the shadows, who-in a perverse way-showed us what it means to stand in the light. Cavafy: how we need those barbarians.
Of course, we will hear nothing of the colonial practices and ideology of the French (or the Belgians or the British) since racism is no longer a problem..the problem has to be fashioned into a war of civilisations. No-one-and I mean no-one-wants to talk about the Camps, the Gulags, the Trenches, and the Bomb because that throws us back to the difficult question of how the "civilized" state powers have unleashed so much violence in the modern world.
~~~
Walking back from Denmark street, past St.Giles, one look back to the sanctuary that is Foyles. The light rapidly dimming, breaking in the last hour, you keep your hands in your pocket and your memories of listening to Dylan in winter. I put a spell on you is too expensive, one for later, perhaps.
The faint smell of tobacco in the air is immensely comforting, a sign that the old ways still persist in a quick-changing world. Merton's essay on Ionesco and rain is wonderful: the usefulness of useless things, the uselessness of so-called useful things. Monasticism and freedom from the system. One has to either be expelled from it or accept one's defeat and 'get with the times'. To be expelled today is a kind of internal displacement, to be forgotten. Walser and the small, marginal life is another type of refusal.
~~
He [the Pope] said: “If my good friend Dr Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. It’s normal. It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”
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