Judging by y'alls' goodreads, most 'Zoners have read Marcel Proust. But whether you've read Proust or not, you've likely heard of "Proust's madeleines," described in the excerpts above. Proust was, among other things, an untrained master of psychology, and in his famous madeleine discourse he describes a sensation everyone has experienced, what he calls "involuntary memory." A taste or a smell recalls to us a pleasant sense of something past, an episode of time in our life (our prior life), sometimes hard to pin down, but which always comes with a sweeping feeling of nostalgia and a giddy sort of happiness. These involuntary memories don't have to be brought on by taste or smell alone, they can also be revived in us by the feeling of two uneven stones beneath our feet, the brush of a napkin on our lips, the clink of a spoon against a glass. In my own experience, these memories are most often attached to music. I'll read a long book while listening to some new album, and that album becomes henceforth the "soundtrack" of a whole period of my life. When, years later, I listen to that album again, I'm transported back to that time, or that book.
There are many different people out there. Most put their heads down and live their lives, not often examining what's around them. Some may be intelligent, but simply not introspective, not artistic, not alert; these people utilize their intelligence writing pages of analysis about the latest episode of Game of Thrones, or, more "productively," arguing the minutiae of some court case.
There are also those people who are more aware. I think many 'Zoners and wddps fall into this category. Some may be depressed, tormenting themselves with insecurities and second guessing, or miserable over their knowledge of the state of the world. Some also, and here I'd probably include myself, see things and feel things, but are incapable of expressing them sufficiently. It's as if, gazing at an enormous orchard of potential expression, we see stretching out to the horizon bright green trees bearing bright red apples, but have at our disposal only those few overripe fruits that have dropped to the ground before us. We simply can't express or even realize the depth of what we know.
"Involuntary memory" is likely a universal type of experience. Others have lived it, and others had even written about it before Proust. But he is the rare artist that sees things and is capable of expressing them. His brilliant language, by seducing the patient reader who plods his way through Proust's works, leaves that reader more receptive to his ideas, more able to relate to them and recognize parts of himself he may otherwise have not.
Proust does not limit himself to discussion of involuntary memory. He observes and has tantalizing insights every few pages, and this continues over the thousands of pages that make up his masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. He sees, and when I read him, I think, "Yes! Yes!!"
If I'd read his volumes fully prepared, I would have page after page highlighted in yellow, dozens of little sticky notes protruding from my books. I didn't do that, and even if I had, it would serve me better for a re-read than it would help form the basis of any kind of discussion on da rhizz. What I'll do instead here is focus on one particular part of the human psychology that Proust doubled back on again and again, not only more than any other idea, but which was the driver of entire volumes of the novel.
"I want the one I can't have." This feeling isn't unique to Proust and Morrissey; the phrase "playing hard to get" is part of contemporary vocabulary for a reason. But this emotion seems to resonate particularly with Proust, he comes back to it again and again. If you recall, he was ready to enact a rupture with Albertine until being frightened by her other potential romantic interests into a relationship that ultimately was the backbone of the entire work. Even while living with Albertine, one of the more climactic segments involves Marcel's intense fear of who she may meet out on an expedition one day. He frantically sends Jodi Dean's maid, Francois, out to retrieve her. He receives a reply that Albertine is with Francois on her home, and instantly, his agitation is diminished.
Proust revisits this psychological quirk extensively. In Sodom and Gomorrah, he writes:
Although everyone speaks mendaciously of the pleasure of being loved, which fate constantly withholds, it is undoubtedly a general law... that the person whom we do not love and who loves us seems to us insufferable. To such a person, to a woman of whom we say not that she loves us but that she clings to us, we prefer the society of any other, no matter who, with neither her charm, nor her looks, nor her brains. She will recover these, in our estimation, only when she has ceased to love us.
This is the same theme again beating us over the head, the suggestion is once more that we want what we can't have. But this line of thinking, taken to its natural conclusion, is alarming. According to Proust, one wants what one doesn't have, and, once having it, feels weighted down by it, is unhappy, finds it distasteful. The implications here are astronomic: simply, one can never be satisfied. There is no contentment for us in this life. For, if we are always wanting things we do not have, and rejecting things that we do, there can be no happiness. This, from a master of human psychology.
My initial thought was that maybe this is some defect unique to Proust, or, at least, not common to all men. Simply put, Proust is a genius, and his insight into the human mind is beyond measure. But after all, we're talking here about a mama's boy who never worked a day in his life, who lived with his parents until they were dead; a closeted gay man who, as he went continued with is masterwork, eventually turned every character in this magnum opus (besides himself) into a homosexual (♪♫ if you ever need self-validation / just meet me in the alley by the railroad station /it's all over my face ♪♫).
Certainly, the many people who enjoy lifelong loves and marriages stand as a testament against the implied contention of insurmountable discontent... unless these couples do experience boredom, resentment, or lustful wanderings, and simply do not have the personality to act on these things, simply value commitment above all -- such people, I'd argue, will ultimately lead more happy lives. I myself, from my life's experiences, am entirely confident I could completely commit myself to the right woman for life, and any temptations or unhappiness would be minimal, inessential. And yet I nevertheless connect with Proust's thesis here, except in a different way.
I realized that what's represented above is ultimately one more line drawn under the "I want what I can't have" idea. This excerpt, about a man about to engage in a duel, describes how only then, when he knows his life is at a possible end, does he wish to work, travel, climb mountains, live his life: ie, when he fears he cannot have these things. Is this not the same thesis applied once again, albeit in a different way? This could be the underpinning of the disease called procrastination; one doesn't do things now because one could do things now. We do not want what we have before us. It is only when the possibility seems it is going to be withdrawn that we suddenly regret all we haven't done, just as the procrastinator only begins his project at the last moment before his opportunity will vanish.
Proust himself did not explicitly make this connection, but clearly the description of the man approaching the duel suddenly desiring the utilization of his life is akin to Marcel wanting Albertine after discovering her other proclivities and fearing a loss. Likewise, he no longer wants her when he feels confident in his possession. These are all symptoms of the same disease.
This once again reminds me of myself. I've always been adept at math, scoring perfect on the SAT and ACT when I was young. Perhaps it is for that very reason that I turned away from fields like engineering and autism, at which I could have excelled, and instead am throwing myself into literature and dreams of writing, which I utterly lack the talent for.
What say you, my misshapen virgin creatures?? Will you analyze Proust's art with me??
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
mods edit tihs fucked up sentence "a closeted gay man who, as he went continued with is masterwork, eventually turned every character in this magnum opus..." to "a closeted gay man who, as he continued with his masterwork, eventually turned every character in this magnum opus..."
animedad posted:Hitler
thids looks cool as heck
This is the same theme again beating us over the head, the suggestion is once more that we want what we can't have. But this line of thinking, taken to its natural conclusion, is alarming. According to Proust, one wants what one doesn't have, and, once having it, feels weighted down by it, is unhappy, finds it distasteful. The implications here are astronomic: simply, one can never be satisfied. There is no contentment for us in this life
.
Interesitng but this simply isn't universal, not everybody is a fussy agitated flake
Edit: oh ok there's more scratch that for the moment
Edited by Ironicwarcriminal ()
tpaine posted:catchphrase
catchphrase
goodnight 'zzoners
I think a lot of these things can better be summed up by “the grass is greener” syndrome which is encouraged to a ridiculous extent in the modern age by the lure of advertising, possibilities, transforming and re-inventing oneself. While some people may be ‘naturally’ disposed to this, it strikes me as possible that most of these feelings are in actuality the cold shivers of wind and the increasing darkness as they run ever further from the house of God.
Marcel Proust was the son of a Christian father and a Jewish mother
Lol well there you go.
Religion came about because the insanity and unknowability of existing in a meaningless void drives people crazy, it does not and can not make sense and it’s why militant atheists so often fiend for drugs while chasing some other metaphysical dragon (Hitler and his speed or Sagan and his cannabis). The idea that God can be dismissed or diminished because we now have steam trains and iphones and HRT is the biggest fallacy of the modern age and it’s why everybody is in a state of constant agitation.
God is Love.
Edited by Ironicwarcriminal ()
For example Goatstein, Lessons and Cycloneboy are a few posters who are most dogmatically likely to reject any discussion or incorporation of the value of religious ideals into a conversation and they’re also the most fractious and divisive people here. Reddit is probably the peak.
tpaine posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:
(Hitler and his speed or Sagan and his cannabis)
catchphrase
this is probably my fave catchphrase from this page
This feeling isn't unique to Proust and Morrissey
animedad posted:Hitler
this does look very cool from the cover alone
Edited by wasted ()
Later today, Philpott, known as Shameless Mick, and his wife Mairead will be jailed after being convicted of manslaughter.
In the aftermath of the fire that tore through their Derby council home on May 11 last year, the 56-year-old father of 17 wrote to a friend that he and his 32-year-old wife would be freed and ''get pissed''.
Then after spending a day at his victims' graves, he and his wife would ''rape each other'', he wrote to friend Mick Russell last July while remanded in custody.
Philpott, who had previously been jailed for seven years for repeatedly stabbing a girlfriend and attacking her mother, says in the four-page letter: ''God, when we are free, which we will be, we're all going to get pissed.''
In the letter, reported widely today, he insists the couple are innocent and adds: ''But me and my darling beloved wife, the most important thing that we will do when this happens is to spend the whole day with our babies, at the graveside.
'We don't care if it's raining, gale force winds, snowing, I'm going straight up there.
''Then we shall probably, no, we will, rape each other ... then we can all celebrate our freedom as long as they get the bastards.''
He goes on: ''All we care about is justice for our beautiful angels. They are keeping us so strong together.
"'We will walk free and this will cost them coppers some money.
''I can't believe we are in these hell holes but you know me I'm f****** strong and I promise you both me and my beautiful wife are going to stay strong. We will walk free.
''What the hell are they doing? We all know who's done this.
''Them dirty bastards took away our pride and joys, they took away our most precious sweet beautiful baby angels.
''They've taken everything me and Mairead dreamed of and made real.'"
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/04/simple-courage-decision-leftist-tribute-thatcher
In the last pages of his monumental Second World War, Winston Churchill ponders on the enigma of a military decision: after the specialists (economic and military analysts, psychologists, meteorologists) propose their analysis, somebody must assume the simple and for that very reason most difficult act of transposing this complex multitude into a simple "Yes" or "No". W we shall attack, we continue to wait... This gesture, which can never be fully grounded in reasons, is that of a Master. It is for the experts to present the situation in its complexity, and it is for the Master to simplify it into a point of decision.
The Master is needed especially in situations of deep crisis. The function of a Master is to enact an authentic division – a division between those who want to drag on within the old parameters and those who are aware of the necessary change. Such a division, not the opportunistic compromises, is the only path to true unity. Let us take an example which surely is not problematic: France in 1940. Even Jacques Duclos, the second man of the French Communist Party, admitted in a private conversation that if, at that point in time, free elections were to be held in France, Marshal Petain would have won with 90 per cent of the vote. When de Gaulle, in his historic act, refused to acknowledge the capitulation to Germans and continued to resist, he claimed that it was only he, not the Vichy regime, who speaks on behalf of the true France (on behalf of true France as such, not only on behalf of the “majority of the French”!). What he was saying was deeply true even if it was “democratically” not only without legitimacy, but clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of the French people.
Margaret Thatcher, the lady who was not for turning, was such a Master, sticking to her decision which was at first perceived as crazy, gradually elevating her singular madness into an accepted norm. When Thatcher was asked about her greatest achievement, she promptly answered: “New Labour.” And she was right: her triumph was that even her political enemies adopted her basic economic policies – the true triumph is not the victory over the enemy, it occurs when the enemy itself starts to use your language, so that your ideas form the foundation of the entire field.
So what remains today of Thatcher’s legacy today? Neoliberal hegemony is clearly falling apart. Thatcher was perhaps the only true Thatcherite – she clearly believed in her ideas. Today’s neoliberalism, on the contrary, “only imagines that it believes in itself and demands that the world should imagine the same thing” (to quote Marx). In short, today, cynicism is openly on display. Recall the cruel joke from Lubitch’s To Be Or Not to Be: when asked about the German concentration camps in the occupied Poland, the responsible Nazi officer “concentration camp Erhardt” snaps back: “We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping.”
Does the same not hold for the Enron bankruptcy in January 2002 (as well as on all financial meltdowns that followed), which can be interpreted as a kind of ironic commentary on the notion of a risk society? Thousands of employees who lost their jobs and savings were certainly exposed to a risk, but without any true choice - the risk appeared to them as a blind fate. Those, on the contrary, who effectively did have an insight into the risks as well as a possibility to intervene into the situation (the top managers), minimised their risks by cashing in their stocks and options before the bankruptcy – so it is true that we live in a society of risky choices, but some (the Wall Street managers) do the choosing, while others (the common people paying mortgages) do the risking.
One of the weird consequences of the financial meltdown and the measures taken to counteract it (enormous sums of money to help banks) was the revival in the work of Ayn Rand, the closest one can come to the ideologist of the “greed is good” radical capitalism – the sales of her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged exploded again. According to some reports, there are already signs that the scenario described in Atlas Shrugged – the creative capitalists themselves going on strike – is enacted. John Campbell, a Republican congressman, said: “The achievers are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs /…/ who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.” The absurdity of this reaction is that it totally misreads the situation: most of the gigantic sums of bail-out money is going precisely to the Randian deregulated “titans” who failed in their “creative” schemes and thereby brought about the meltdown. It is not the great creative geniuses who are now helping lazy ordinary people, it is the ordinary taxpayers who are helping the failed “creative geniuses.”
The other aspect of Thatcher’s legacy targeted by her leftist critics was her “authoritarian” form of leadership, her lack of the sense for democratic coordination. Here, however, things are more complex than it may appear. The ongoing popular protests around Europe converge in a series of demands which, in their very spontaneity and obviousness, form a kind of “epistemological obstacle” to the proper confrontation with the ongoing crisis of our political system. These effectively read as a popularised version of Deleuzian politics: people know what they want, they are able to discover and formulate this, but only through their own continuous engagement and activity. So we need active participatory democracy, not just representative democracy with its electoral ritual which every four years interrupts the voters’ passivity; we need the self-organisation of the multitude, not a centralised Leninist Party with the Leader, et cetera.
It is this myth of non-representative direct self-organisation which is the last trap, the deepest illusion that should fall, that is most difficult to renounce. Yes, there are in every revolutionary process ecstatic moments of group solidarity when thousands, hundreds of thousands, together occupy a public place, like on Tahrir square two years ago. Yes, there are moments of intense collective participation where local communities debate and decide, when people live in a kind of permanent emergency state, taking things into their own hands, with no Leader guiding them. But such states don’t last, and “tiredness” is here not a simple psychological fact, it is a category of social ontology.
The large majority – me included – wants to be passive and rely on an efficient state apparatus to guarantee the smooth running of the entire social edifice, so that I can pursue my work in peace. Walter Lippmann wrote in his Public Opinion (1922) that the herd of citizens must be governed by “a specialised class whose interests reach beyond the locality" – this elite class is to act as a machinery of knowledge that circumvents the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the "omni-competent citizen". This is how our democracies function – with our consent: there is no mystery in what Lippmann was saying, it is an obvious fact; the mystery is that, knowing it, we play the game. We act as if we are free and freely deciding, silently not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction (inscribed into the very form of our free speech) tells us what to do and think. “People know what they want” – no, they don’t, and they don’t want to know it. They need a good elite, which is why a proper politician does not only advocate people’s interests, it is through him that they discover what they “really want.”
As to the molecular self-organising multitude against the hierarchic order sustained by the reference to a charismatic leader, note the irony of the fact that Venezuela, a country praised by many for its attempts to develop modes of direct democracy (local councils, cooperatives, workers running factories), is also a country whose president was Hugo Chavez, a strong charismatic leader if there ever was one. It is as if the Freudian rule of transference is at work here: in order for the individuals to “reach beyond themselves,” to break out of the passivity of representative politics and engage themselves as direct political agents, the reference to a leader is necessary, a leader who allows them to pull themselves out of the swamp like baron Munchhausen, a leader who is “supposed to know” what they want. It is in this sense that Alain Badiou recently pointed out how horizontal networking undermines the classic Master, but it simultaneously breeds new forms of domination which are much stronger than the classic Master. Badiou’s thesis is that a subject needs a Master to elevate itself above the “human animal” and to practice fidelity to a Truth-Event:
“The Master is the one who helps the individual to become subject. That is to say, if one admits that the subject emerges in the tension between the individual and the universality, then it is obvious that the individual needs a mediation, and thereby an authority, in order to progress on this path. One has to renew the position of the master - it is not true that one can do without it, even and especially in the perspective of emancipation.”
Badiou is not afraid to oppose the necessary role of the Master to our “democratic” sensitivity: “This capital function of leaders is not compatible with the predominant ‘democratic’ ambience, which is why I am engaged in a bitter struggle against this ambience (after all, one has to begin with ideology).”
We should fearlessly follow his suggestion: in order to effectively awaken individuals from their dogmatic “democratic slumber,” from their blind reliance on institutionalised forms of representative democracy, appeals to direct self-organisation are not enough: a new figure of the Master is needed. Recall the famous lines from Arthur Rimbaud’s “A une raison” (“To a Reason”):
“A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony.
A step of yours is the conscription of the new men and their marching orders.
You look away: the new love!
You look back, — the new love!”
There is absolutely nothing inherently ”Fascist” in these lines – the supreme paradox of the political dynamics is that a Master is needed to pull individuals out of the quagmire of their inertia and motivate them towards self-transcending emancipatory struggle for freedom.
What we need today, in this situation, is a Thatcher of the left: a leader who would repeat Thatcher’s gesture in the opposite direction, transforming the entire field of presuppositions shared by today’s political elite of all main orientations.
You just wasted five minutes of your life you will never get back.
mustang19 posted:I'm reading Zizek's tribute to Margaret Thatcher and derailing threads.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/04/simple-courage-decision-leftist-tribute-thatcher
In the last pages of his monumental Second World War, Winston Churchill ponders on the enigma of a military decision: after the specialists (economic and military analysts, psychologists, meteorologists) propose their analysis, somebody must assume the simple and for that very reason most difficult act of transposing this complex multitude into a simple "Yes" or "No". W we shall attack, we continue to wait... This gesture, which can never be fully grounded in reasons, is that of a Master. It is for the experts to present the situation in its complexity, and it is for the Master to simplify it into a point of decision.
The Master is needed especially in situations of deep crisis. The function of a Master is to enact an authentic division – a division between those who want to drag on within the old parameters and those who are aware of the necessary change. Such a division, not the opportunistic compromises, is the only path to true unity. Let us take an example which surely is not problematic: France in 1940. Even Jacques Duclos, the second man of the French Communist Party, admitted in a private conversation that if, at that point in time, free elections were to be held in France, Marshal Petain would have won with 90 per cent of the vote. When de Gaulle, in his historic act, refused to acknowledge the capitulation to Germans and continued to resist, he claimed that it was only he, not the Vichy regime, who speaks on behalf of the true France (on behalf of true France as such, not only on behalf of the “majority of the French”!). What he was saying was deeply true even if it was “democratically” not only without legitimacy, but clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of the French people.
Margaret Thatcher, the lady who was not for turning, was such a Master, sticking to her decision which was at first perceived as crazy, gradually elevating her singular madness into an accepted norm. When Thatcher was asked about her greatest achievement, she promptly answered: “New Labour.” And she was right: her triumph was that even her political enemies adopted her basic economic policies – the true triumph is not the victory over the enemy, it occurs when the enemy itself starts to use your language, so that your ideas form the foundation of the entire field.
So what remains today of Thatcher’s legacy today? Neoliberal hegemony is clearly falling apart. Thatcher was perhaps the only true Thatcherite – she clearly believed in her ideas. Today’s neoliberalism, on the contrary, “only imagines that it believes in itself and demands that the world should imagine the same thing” (to quote Marx). In short, today, cynicism is openly on display. Recall the cruel joke from Lubitch’s To Be Or Not to Be: when asked about the German concentration camps in the occupied Poland, the responsible Nazi officer “concentration camp Erhardt” snaps back: “We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping.”
Does the same not hold for the Enron bankruptcy in January 2002 (as well as on all financial meltdowns that followed), which can be interpreted as a kind of ironic commentary on the notion of a risk society? Thousands of employees who lost their jobs and savings were certainly exposed to a risk, but without any true choice - the risk appeared to them as a blind fate. Those, on the contrary, who effectively did have an insight into the risks as well as a possibility to intervene into the situation (the top managers), minimised their risks by cashing in their stocks and options before the bankruptcy – so it is true that we live in a society of risky choices, but some (the Wall Street managers) do the choosing, while others (the common people paying mortgages) do the risking.
One of the weird consequences of the financial meltdown and the measures taken to counteract it (enormous sums of money to help banks) was the revival in the work of Ayn Rand, the closest one can come to the ideologist of the “greed is good” radical capitalism – the sales of her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged exploded again. According to some reports, there are already signs that the scenario described in Atlas Shrugged – the creative capitalists themselves going on strike – is enacted. John Campbell, a Republican congressman, said: “The achievers are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs /…/ who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.” The absurdity of this reaction is that it totally misreads the situation: most of the gigantic sums of bail-out money is going precisely to the Randian deregulated “titans” who failed in their “creative” schemes and thereby brought about the meltdown. It is not the great creative geniuses who are now helping lazy ordinary people, it is the ordinary taxpayers who are helping the failed “creative geniuses.”
The other aspect of Thatcher’s legacy targeted by her leftist critics was her “authoritarian” form of leadership, her lack of the sense for democratic coordination. Here, however, things are more complex than it may appear. The ongoing popular protests around Europe converge in a series of demands which, in their very spontaneity and obviousness, form a kind of “epistemological obstacle” to the proper confrontation with the ongoing crisis of our political system. These effectively read as a popularised version of Deleuzian politics: people know what they want, they are able to discover and formulate this, but only through their own continuous engagement and activity. So we need active participatory democracy, not just representative democracy with its electoral ritual which every four years interrupts the voters’ passivity; we need the self-organisation of the multitude, not a centralised Leninist Party with the Leader, et cetera.
It is this myth of non-representative direct self-organisation which is the last trap, the deepest illusion that should fall, that is most difficult to renounce. Yes, there are in every revolutionary process ecstatic moments of group solidarity when thousands, hundreds of thousands, together occupy a public place, like on Tahrir square two years ago. Yes, there are moments of intense collective participation where local communities debate and decide, when people live in a kind of permanent emergency state, taking things into their own hands, with no Leader guiding them. But such states don’t last, and “tiredness” is here not a simple psychological fact, it is a category of social ontology.
The large majority – me included – wants to be passive and rely on an efficient state apparatus to guarantee the smooth running of the entire social edifice, so that I can pursue my work in peace. Walter Lippmann wrote in his Public Opinion (1922) that the herd of citizens must be governed by “a specialised class whose interests reach beyond the locality" – this elite class is to act as a machinery of knowledge that circumvents the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the "omni-competent citizen". This is how our democracies function – with our consent: there is no mystery in what Lippmann was saying, it is an obvious fact; the mystery is that, knowing it, we play the game. We act as if we are free and freely deciding, silently not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction (inscribed into the very form of our free speech) tells us what to do and think. “People know what they want” – no, they don’t, and they don’t want to know it. They need a good elite, which is why a proper politician does not only advocate people’s interests, it is through him that they discover what they “really want.”
As to the molecular self-organising multitude against the hierarchic order sustained by the reference to a charismatic leader, note the irony of the fact that Venezuela, a country praised by many for its attempts to develop modes of direct democracy (local councils, cooperatives, workers running factories), is also a country whose president was Hugo Chavez, a strong charismatic leader if there ever was one. It is as if the Freudian rule of transference is at work here: in order for the individuals to “reach beyond themselves,” to break out of the passivity of representative politics and engage themselves as direct political agents, the reference to a leader is necessary, a leader who allows them to pull themselves out of the swamp like baron Munchhausen, a leader who is “supposed to know” what they want. It is in this sense that Alain Badiou recently pointed out how horizontal networking undermines the classic Master, but it simultaneously breeds new forms of domination which are much stronger than the classic Master. Badiou’s thesis is that a subject needs a Master to elevate itself above the “human animal” and to practice fidelity to a Truth-Event:
“The Master is the one who helps the individual to become subject. That is to say, if one admits that the subject emerges in the tension between the individual and the universality, then it is obvious that the individual needs a mediation, and thereby an authority, in order to progress on this path. One has to renew the position of the master - it is not true that one can do without it, even and especially in the perspective of emancipation.”
Badiou is not afraid to oppose the necessary role of the Master to our “democratic” sensitivity: “This capital function of leaders is not compatible with the predominant ‘democratic’ ambience, which is why I am engaged in a bitter struggle against this ambience (after all, one has to begin with ideology).”
We should fearlessly follow his suggestion: in order to effectively awaken individuals from their dogmatic “democratic slumber,” from their blind reliance on institutionalised forms of representative democracy, appeals to direct self-organisation are not enough: a new figure of the Master is needed. Recall the famous lines from Arthur Rimbaud’s “A une raison” (“To a Reason”):
“A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony.
A step of yours is the conscription of the new men and their marching orders.
You look away: the new love!
You look back, — the new love!”
There is absolutely nothing inherently ”Fascist” in these lines – the supreme paradox of the political dynamics is that a Master is needed to pull individuals out of the quagmire of their inertia and motivate them towards self-transcending emancipatory struggle for freedom.
What we need today, in this situation, is a Thatcher of the left: a leader who would repeat Thatcher’s gesture in the opposite direction, transforming the entire field of presuppositions shared by today’s political elite of all main orientations.
You just wasted five minutes of your life you will never get back.
Lol if you don't think we need another bitter, envious, and self-hating idealist president.
Nixon on treacherous tongues who deceive the people through shameful distortions:
Nixon on how to deal with wikileaks:
Nixon on degenerate rhizzone posters and cynics:
Nixon on his tragic idealism:
wasted posted:Nixon on degenerate rhizzone posters and cynics:
4:23
As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion. - William Adams (born March 15, 1975), better known as will.i.am
Edited by ArisVelouchiotis ()
I just saw Stone's movie recently, it was transfixing, but did that thing with him going to visit the students at the lincoln memorial actually happen?
---Revelation 18:2
Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."
I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."
It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.
That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.
Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.
These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.
The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable -- some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.
It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.
It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."
Many were incensed about the howitzers -- but they knew there was nothing they could do about it -- not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.
The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.
Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.
The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments -- most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.
Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.
It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.
Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.
When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise -- a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.
Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him). It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.
Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.
For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director -- who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.
That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says -- and he is, after all, the President of the United States.
Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."
Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.
Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.
Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.
It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that -- but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.
Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.
Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.
He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
Hunter S. Thompson
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
wonderful.
ArisVelouchiotis posted:If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
wonderful.
It's a failure not to hate your enemy- Saint-Just
ArisVelouchiotis posted:If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
Big words from a woman-bashing drug addict
Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."
America's literary bad-boy is concerned behalf of anxious suburbanites and their values, what a joke.
Edited by Ironicwarcriminal ()
Ironicwarcriminal posted:ArisVelouchiotis posted:If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
Big words from a woman-bashing drug addict
Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."
America's literary bad-boy is concerned behalf of anxious suburbanites and their values, what a joke.
takes one to know one, imo
Ironicwarcriminal posted:ArisVelouchiotis posted:
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
Big words from a woman-bashing drug addict
Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."
America's literary bad-boy is concerned behalf of anxious suburbanites and their values, what a joke.
Goathe wrote a good thing about the hoopla/jibber jabber surrounding Byron.
"It still saddens me that Lord Byron, who showed such impatience with the fickle public, wasn't aware of how well the Germans can understand him and how highly they esteem him. With us the moral and political tittle-tattle of the day falls away, leaving the man and the talent standing alone in all their brilliance."
And he was talking about the despicable Byron. If HST was bad, Byron was the Devil hisself.