Eso’s Chronicles 270 / 10
30—Decharismatized...
© Eso A.B.

Sometimes I have difficulty concluding a series, because once the ‘last’ blog gets written, there come yet another idea that needs saying. In this case it is my objection to Slavoy Žižek’s attempts to destroy human subjectivity by making it synonymous with irrationality. While I find Žižek quotable, I also discover him often enough an opportunist, who will not hesitate to in-verse his own arguments to further his ‘pop’ fame, as he does when he defends the anarchistic Pussy Riot (…”They are conceptual artists in the noblest sense of the word: artists who embody an Idea.”) with a government he calls Prick Riot simply because he likes to kiss with the West for pursuing the war against the East. Here is a quote (at length) from the ‘pop star’ in which, when all is said, he ends up supporting the Prick Rioters:

“Constitutional monarchy is a rational Whole, at whose head is a strictly ‘irrational’ moment: the person of the monarch. The essential thing, here, is the irreducible abyss between the organically articulated rational Whole of the rational State, at whose head is a strictly ‘irrational’ moment: the person of he monarch. The essential thing here, is the irrationality of the person who incarnates supreme Power, by which the Power receives the form of subjectivity….” Žižek concludes: “The essential thing… is the irreducible abyss between the organically articulated rational Whole of the constitution of the State, and the irrationality of the person who incarnates supreme Power, by which the Power receives the form of subjectivity….” Žižek ends his argument by quoting Hegel: “….in a well ordered monarchy, the objective aspect is solely the concern of the law, to which the monarchy merely has to add its subjective ‘I will’.” In short, let monarchy be dictated by a ‘democracy’ or, to put it another way: “Chaos, Thy will be done!”

Since Žižek is retained by the Birkbeck Institute in London, I presume that the closest example he has in mind with regard to the ‘irrational’ is the British monarchyas represented by Queen Elizabeth and her son Charles. This writer is more interested in Charles than his mother, because Charles, in an establishmentarian way (the same as Al Gore), is interested (subjectively no doubt) in protecting the environment, which includes forests, such as the Amazon, England’s own, and perhaps in an indirect way also that of Latvia. My trouble with Prince Charles subjective interests is that I do not sense him projecting the kind of charisma and attention, which I feel the subject requires and that his office accords him. In other words, being King within a ‘democratic’ establishment means nothing today.

I assume that Prince Charles is merely implementing his passive “I will” that Hegel and Žižek say he is good for. Nevertheless, the constraints put on a monarch’s subjectivity by Hegel and Žižek and the bureaucratic totalitarianism they both support acts as a constraints on all who would just as soon be rid of all three, which takes me back to the idea expressed by Carl Schmitt that the nature of democracy posits the identity of the ruler and the ruled as one—even if in practical terms the unity may be blurred in favor of the elite (the bureaucracy in this case). This is why in the event of an emergency or exceptional case, the bureaucracy can only deliver Chaos, while the King’s ‘exceptional’ and decisive word, is dismissed by the ‘mechanics’ (the lawgivers) of democracy.

Our time has quite forgot that a King’s decision was called ‘divinely inspired’ because at the end of his life the King nullified his  transgressions (incurring of ‘wrong’ decisions) through a no lesser sovereign and charismatic act--self-sacrifice of his life.

This course of action chrism (charismatic action) was followed by the ‘damned and vilified’ German Reich’s Chancellor Hitler in 1945, but was not followed by the ‘damned and vilified’ Stalin (1953) who may have been assassinated (1953) by someone of his inner court, likely the head of the secret services Beria http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1953/beria-purge.htm . The possibility that Stalin was assassinated, just as the fact that Lenin requested poison to end his life, despite their failure to execute a clear-cut self-sacrifice, saves their reputation from clear-cut condemnation as murderers (which slur is typical of  the political elite of our times).

Protest as much as we may against the acts perpetrated by either of the mentioned dictators, their death as a self-sacrifice in one case, and a self-sacrifice denied in the other, cannot be judged any individual’s personal and ‘obscene’ judgment (a word Žižek uses often). The act of self-sacrifice straddles the word ‘sacer’, in the sense that it encompasses the meaning ‘sacred’ and ‘accursed’, and denies anyone the authority to judge either Stalin or Hitler, even when placing them at the edge of ‘obscenity’, the mass graves that evidence the results of their wills.

As in the last paragraph of the following link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt  its anonymous writer states: “The direction all this leads, and the reason why Schmitt has been taken so seriously by political theory, is to the theorization of the crisis and state of emergency not as exceptional moments in political life, opposed to some stable normality, but as themselves the predominant form of the life of modern nations.”

This writer agrees that ‘political life’ in our times projects a state of ‘crisis and state of emergency’ and predominates in the life of nations. The desertification of the biosphere and elimination of ‘naked life’ by technology continues at an ever greater pace http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25599249 .

Political life today—as evidenced by the Soviet Union, the German Reich, the United States of America, and China--is too much for any bureaucracy to handle. While the U.S. emerges as the last of the crisis obsessed and state of emergency torn super states, it has been able to survive only as a result of taking part and being an obscene ‘victor’ in the annihilation of the German Reich and Soviet Union. By making an attempt to ‘globalize’ (the better word would be to ‘catholicize’) the planet under its one ‘democratic’ political system, which is little more than finding another name for slogans synonymous with: “workers of the world unite” and “Lebensraum”, the U.S. confirms itself as ‘Chaos in Charge’. If Žižek’s argument on behalf of repressing subjectivity has discovered some instrument that makes appear that ‘democraacy’ can prevail for a while longer, we may be sure that death will number in the  billions.