[from] Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking - Walt Whitman
A word then, (for I will conquer it,)
The word final, superior to all,
Subtle, sent up—what is it?—I listen;
Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?
Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?
Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,
Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death,
And again death, death, death, death
Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous’d child’s heart,
But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,
Death, death, death, death, death.
Which I do not forget.
But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother,
That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok’s gray beach,
With the thousand responsive songs at random,
My own songs awaked from that hour,
And with them the key, the word up from the waves,
The word of the sweetest song and all songs,
That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,
(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet
garments, bending aside,)
The sea whisper’d me.
DEATH KNOWS MY NAME: Žižek the Authoritarian
In a post last week, I quoted Johann Hari on the myriad problems with Slavoj Žižek. Not surprisingly, fans of Žižek were quick to write to me about why Hari is wrong. The blogger at Interruptions, in fact, pointed me to an interesting piece by Graham Harman that serves…
This is an amazing article on the implicit authoritarianism in Zizek’s work, I would urge everyone to take a look.
ahaha what
Johann Hari is seriously one of the hackiest pundit-“journalists” around. I’m trying to remember what other shitty article he’s written before, but I know he’s been floating around this usual slew of center-right liberal bullshit for most of his cretinous career.
I mean, look at this quote from the article. Just look at it.
This kind of thought can only be entertained because nobody would ever take it seriously enough to act on it. When Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say we should all become schizophrenic, when the gay Michel Foucault embraces the murderously homophobic Ayatollah Kho meini, when Zizek suggests a return to Leninist terror - these very positions are admissions that postmodernism is merely an unserious confection by intellectuals. It leads nowhere except to demoralisation and disaffection.
How the hell does anyone take people who write this tripe seriously? It simply reveals an obvious lack of actual intellectual engagement on any of their work and a focus on easy, empty slander based on out-of-context statements that are quickly picked up on by the Hari’s of the world.
It’s no accident that all the people praising this article seem to have exactly the same ideological axe to grind, from admitted plagiarist and pro-Iraq War Johann Hari to this I’m-a-liberal-but-still-teach-marx-i-swear kohenari dude. The fact that the latter seems to believe the former has Zizek’s number down is beyond irony. It really is about ideology, kids. Three cheers for tepid liberalism and the shallow castigation of anyone with an actually radical vision, preferably through the use of reviews by their critics and quotes with suspect secondary sources.
(via propaganda-duende)
Source: kohenari
Hymn of Hate
For the sailors that drown when your ill found ships go crashing on the shore,
For the mangled men of your railroads, ten thousand a year or more.
For the roasted men in your steel mills, and the starving men on your roads,
For the miners buried by hundreds, when the fire damp explodes,
For our brothers maimed and slaughtered for your profits every day,
While your priests chant the chorus “God giveth - and God hath taken away.”
For a thousand times that you drove back when we struck for a living wage,
For the dungeons and jails our men have filled because of your devilish rage.
For Homestead and for Chicago, Coeur D’Alene and Telluride,
For your bloody shambles at Ludlow, where the women and babies died,
For our heroes you hanged on the gallows high to fill your slaves with awe,
While your Judges stood in a sable row and croaked, “Thus saith the law.”
For all the wrongs we have suffered from you, and for each of the wrongs we hate,
With a hate that is black as the deepest pit, that is steadfast and sure as fate.
We hate you with hand, and heart, and head, body, and mind, and brain.
We hate at the forge, in the mine and mill, in the field of golden grain.
We curse your name in the market place as the workman talks with his mate,
And when you dine in your gay cafe the water spits on your plate.
We hate you! D’Amnyou! hate you! we hate your rotten breed.
We hate your slave religion with submission for its creed.
We hate your judges. We hate your courts, we hate that living lie,
That you call “Justice” and we hate with a hate that shall never die.
We shall keep our hate and cherish our hate and our hate shall ever grow.
We shall spread our hate and scatter our hate ‘till all of the workers know.
And The Day shall come with a red, red dawn; and you in your gilded halls,
Shall taste the wrath and the vengeance of the men in overalls.
The riches you heaped in your selfish pride we shall snatch with our naked hands,
And the house ye reared to protect you shall fall like a castle of sand.
For ours are the hands that govern in factory, mine and mill,
And we need only to fold our arms and the whole wide world stands still!
SO GO YE AND STUDY THE BEEHIVE, and do not quite forget,
That we are the WORKERS of the world and we have not spoken - yet.
The Anti-Militarist
The thrill of a myriad war lusts beats upon me;
The churning of a million passions is abroad.
I will not cast myself into this frenzy.I will be a rock of irony.
I will be a rain of pity.
I will be a wind of scorn.My arm is strong to destroy, but I withhould it;
I will destroy only that which stands
in the way of our red redemption.
Q:how come all your critical theorists are white dudes
It’s certainly unfortunate that structural racism throughout history up to today has resulted in a predominance of white dudes in critical theory. And it’s still ongoing if you look academia today. I haven’t made many posts on this tumblr and the selection so far has obviously reflected this deplorable aspect of the canon. But in terms of thought that informs theory that I find interesting who aren’t simply white dudes, I would emphasize off the top of my head Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Simone de Beauvoir, Huey Newton, Josefina Ayerza, and Thomas Sankara. There are obviously many others, but it also begins to be perverse to simply list people of color or women for the reason of their identity alone.
Hegel was right to point out again and again that, when one talks, one always dwells in the universal - which means that, with its entry into language, the subject loses its roots in the concrete life world. To put it in more pathetic terms, the moment I start to talk, I am no longer the sensually concrete I, since I am caught up in an impersonal mechanism which always makes me say something different from what I wanted to say - as the early Lacan liked to say, I am not speaking, I am being spoken by language. This is one way to understand what Lacan called “symbolic castration”: the price the subject pays for its “transubstantiation” from being the agent of a direct animal vitality to being a speaking subject whose identity is kept apart from the direct vitality of passions.
All signifying material of the erotic order is made up of nothing but the outfits of slaves (chains, collars, whips, etc.), savages (negritude, bronzed skin, nudity, tattooing) and all the signs of the dominated classes and races. This is how it is for the woman in her body, annexed to a phallic order which, when expressed in political terms, condemns her to a non-existence.
(via sublimehysteric)
Source: lucjanlocke
The denunciation of scandal is always an homage to the law. And Watergate in particular succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal - in this sense it was a prodigious operation of intoxication. A large dose of political morality reinjected on a world scale. One could say along with Bourdieu: “The essence of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such and to acquire all its force only because it dissimulates itself as such,” understood as follows: capital, immoral and without scruples, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever revives this public morality (through indignation, denunciation, etc.) works spontaneously for the order of capital. This is what the journalists of the Washington Post did.
But this would be nothing but the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu states it, he takes the “relation of force” for the truth of capitalist domination, and he himself denounces this relation of force as scandal - he is thus in the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists are. He does the same work of purging and reviving moral order, an order of truth in which the veritable symbolic violence of the social order is engendered, well beyond all the relations of force, which are only its shifting and indifferent configuration in the moral and political consciences of men.
All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. Because these are the same, which can be thought of in another way: formerly one worked to dissimulate scandal - today one works to conceal that there is none.
Why is nearly every critique of Zizek out of context?
Zizek’s “empirical” refutation of Adorno (I read this in a paper just now) was literally:
To begin with, one is tempted to venture an ‘empirical’ refutation of this notion of an inherent link between philosophical ‘totalism’ and political totalitarianism: on the one hand, the philosophy that legitimizes a totalitarian political regime is generally some kind of evolutionary or vitalist relativism…
[The Invisible Remainder]
This is an empirical refutation. You can take your science, history, and “facts” and suck it. Empricism is now just another one of Zizek’s enigmatic “and such”s.
And yet you just took half of an off-hand remark from the introduction of one of Zizek’s books out of context. Not to mention his qualification of “one is tempted to venture” as well as putting “empirical” within quotes: denoting some irony, that the word isn’t suppose to be taken with its full seriousness, that this is Zizek having fun. He’s not attempting to begin a serious, exhaustive, scientific, and empirical refutation of Adorno. In fact, his point is more towards a discussion of Schelling contra Popper than trying to “refute Adorno.” And, in that half sentence, he’s merely commenting that history, ‘empirically,’ seems to disprove the link between philosophical ‘totalism’ and political totalitarianism.
Here’s the full context:
It is clear how these two surpluses comprise in nuce the logic of the opposition of commodity fetishism and of the Althusserian Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs): commodity fetishism involves the uncanny ‘spiritualization’ of the commodity-body, whereas ISAs materialize the spiritual, substanceless big Other of ideology.
However, are not Schelling’s obscure ruminations about the Absolute prior to the creation of the world simply out of touch with our post-Enlightened pragmatic universe? Among the numerous platitudes proposed by Karl Popper, one idea stands out as more inane than the rest: that of an inherent link between philosophical ‘totalism’ (‘strong’ philosophy striving to grasp the Absolute) and political totalitarianism - the idea that a thought which aims at the Absolute thereby lays the foundation for totalitarian domination. It is easy to mock this idea as an exemplary case of the inherent imbecility of analytical philosophy, of its inferiority to the dialectical (and/or hermeneutical) tradition - however, do not Adorno and Horkheimer, the two great opponents of the Popperian orientation, put forward what ultimately amounts to the same claim in their Dialectics of Enlightenment?
To begin with, one is tempted to venture an ‘empirical’ refutation of this notion of an inherent link between philosophical ‘totalism’ and political totalitarianism: on the one hand, the philosophy that legitimizes a totalitarian political regime is generally some kind of evolutionary or vitalist relativism; on the other hand, the very claim to a ‘contact with the Absolute’ can legitimize an individual’s resistance to a terrestrial political power - the link is thus far from necessary and self-evident; rather, the opposite. Is not the ultimate argument against this link provided by Schelling, who advocates the strongest version of the philosophy of the Absolute (in Part I of Weltalter he attempts to present the Past as the ‘age’ of God Himself prior to creation), yet who, in the name of this very reference to the Absolute, relativizes the State - that is, conceives it as something contingent, unachieved-incomplete in its very notion?
In fact, his use of Adorno and Horkheimer in that section is to signify that Popper’s argument, despite seeming inane, perhaps requires some thought as Adorno et. al. apparently arrive at the same claim. It’s certainly annoying that most complaints of Zizek seem to derive from incredibly uncharitable readings of small excerpts of his work.
Source: autochthones
There is no place yet in America for a third party, I believe. The divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in that tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality, and almost each particular section of the possessing class has its representatives in each of the two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully. Only when the land — the public lands — is completely in the hands of the speculators, and settlement on the land thus becomes more and more difficult or falls prey to gouging — only then, I think, will the time come, with peaceful development, for a third party. Land is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native- born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America. But, of course, who can count on peaceful development in America! There are economic jumps over there, like the political ones in France — to be sure, they produce the same momentary retrogressions.
The small farmer and the petty bourgeois will hardly ever succeed in forming a strong party; they consist of elements that change too rapidly — the farmer is often a migratory farmer, farming two, three, and four farms in succession in different states and territories, immigration and bankruptcy promote the change in personnel, and economic dependence upon the creditor also hampers independence — but to make up for it they are a splendid element for politicians, who speculate on their discontent in order to sell them out to one of the big parties afterward.
The tenacity of the Yankees, who are even rehashing the Greenback humbug, is a result of their theoretical backwardness and their Anglo- Saxon contempt for all theory. They are punished for this by a superstitious belief in every philosophical and economic absurdity, by religious sectarianism, and by idiotic economic experiments, out of which, however, certain bourgeois cliques profit.
