Showing posts with label Slavoy Zizek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Slavoy Zizek. Show all posts

Monday, May 20, 2013


Eso’s Chronicles 169
The Misnaming of My Community (I)
© Eso A.B.

Fascism and not democracy is the ‘star’ issue of the 20th and 21st century’s politics. Nevertheless, the U.S. government and its European allies (NATO) in the East are sold on ‘democracy’ as the story that dominates the myth of now and the future. With the name of ‘democracy’ on its lips, government claims the right to attack and destroy my community by forcing on it the rule of banks and extinction by globalized fascism.

As long as Money was ubiquitous or could create the illusion that it was ubiquitous, it could and did sell the populations at large on “human rights”. As one well-known popular academic philosopher* of the West tells it: “….the decisive cut in the relation of domination … occurs with the passage from pre-bourgeois to bourgeois society. In the pre-bourgeois society civil society is not yet liberated from organic ties…. With the advent of bourgeois society this rich and ‘affective’ and ‘organic’ relations between master and his subjects lies in tatters.”

Yes, but…. What lies in ‘tatters’ today is less the ‘organic’ being than Money, which the inorganic or virtual world of the bourgeois rests on. Moreover, Money stood for the superego of the bourgeois striving to bring into organic reality its black-and-white dream of ‘human rights’.

Along with the disappearing worth of Money, we see disappear the post-pre-bourgeois ‘democratic’ civil society, which is replaced by Mr. Bernank’s (see reference at blog 165) black-and-white nightmare. I adapt it from one of my own dreams:

Into the room of the rejected ‘organic’ world intrudes a black shadow and rapes my beloved. I feel ‘murder’ in my heart, but cannot bring myself to become the rapist’s killer. Suddenly, almost miraculously, in the room appears a doctor. I recognize him as my ‘organic’ master, yet rejected superego. He stands next to a transporter bed, and looks at me with a condescending smile on his face. It is as if the doctor-master is saying: ‘You cannot act? Will you perhaps recognize me—if not before—now, and ask for my help?’ I swallow hard, and feel almost completely paralyzed by anxiety; then I point to the black shadow standing in the window and say: ‘Please, do something!’ The doctor goes up to the shadow, grabs it by its shoulders, then drags and puts it on the transporter. He then puts both of his thumbs on the shadow’s jugular veins, presses hard on them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNVgp0KthtY , and puts the intruder to sleep.

I then grab the body by its feet and ask the doctor to help me carry it out of the house. The doctor makes no objections, and we take the body of the shadow into my backyard. We put it by the bushes that grow along the fence, then go back into the house and lock the door behind us.

At this moment Mr. Bernank awakens with a feeling of guilt and cold sweat on his brow. He gets out of bed, goes to the kitchen and the refrigerator and takes from the freezer a small stash of marihuana, which he takes to the bathroom and flushes it down the toilet. By finding himself in his kitchen awake, Mr. Bernank realizes that his nightmare was not ‘virtual’ but ‘real’. He takes a deep breath, goes back to the bedroom, and crawls back into his bed, where his wife unwinds from a fetal position and snuggles up to Bernank reassuringly.

In real life, however, the nightmare is not over, but only beginning. The shadow moves on, and while not coming back into my house, it now wants to seize the day.

It is not the people of the West who wish to bring an eclipsed ‘democracy’ to Europe, Euro-Asia, and Asia, but the ‘cradle of liberty’ run out of all sense of responsibility toward life on our planet. The death denying West (with the help of its military forces burning up trillions of dollars in armaments and wars) is imposing ‘democracy’ on behalf of capitalism under the control of the propagators of ‘free markets’, the banks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rszNYFOF2g4, which care not if ‘democracy’ is bankrupt and an empty shell.

At the heart of most everyone is a demoralized subjectivity become subjected to the superego of ‘Democracy’—the banks. The banks believe that they have inherited the immortality of God, which expresses itself through the triumph of fiat Money. The banks no longer believe in the power of organic life or death, before which the people continue to stand in awe, nevertheless. Money cares not a whit if the ‘organics’ scramble to survive on top of rubbish heaps or live in NYC’s subway tunnels while others pay multi-millions for high-rise apartments http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-19/new-new-york-housing-bubble-park-avenue-maids-quarters-studio-39-million .

So, is it any surprise that the community, today identified with fascism and so-called ‘far right’, is raising its head and is being put down by capitalist lackeys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtjENQpdcSw such as Slavoy Žižek, who makes his living changing his tune according to multi-cultural standards? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7oD24MWRT0 ? The anti-imigrant populists of who Mr. Žižek speaks of in the link are for him unmentionable fascists rather than people who think that ‘my room’ remains ‘my room’ and while everyone (if I so choose) may on occasion be my guests, guests are not to take over ‘my room’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3KePdi2ObM as if it were their own even under the name of Žižek. Nor am I friendlier to immigrants if they happen to be the police breaking into my house https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4K1BD8hXBE .

*Slavoy Žižek, “The Universal Exception”, Continuum, p. 84-85.

Sunday, August 30, 2009


Copyright E. A. Benjamins aka Jaņdžs
NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
24 A Function of Awe


The civil war that began round about the year 1117, when Alexius I threw Basil (according to my theses also known as Jesus or John) into the pit of fire continues to this day.

After killing Basil (and the subsequent destruction of the empire of Alexius I by the French in a “Crusade”), Basil-John’s Holy Office was removed (1305) from Constantinople to Avignon. Seventy-three years later, in order to make the priesthood in Avignon look less French, the office was moved once more, this time to Rome. The Byzantine people were not happy, but perhaps this spiritual violence was mitigated by a promise that Basil-John would sit in Rome, where western princes would surely protect him from oriental despots like Alexius I. The protection, if such was offered, proved a lie. No Pope has ever sacrificed his life as John-Basil and his retinue of Johns routinely did before secular kings put them to death. Instead, the early popes—the brothers or in-laws of kings—called (actually renamed) John Jesus and wrote a new myth about his divinity.

While today neo-Christianity is a show that entertains a dead God, western thinkers stubbornly cling to western (Scaligarian and Petavian) chronology of history. Even atheists cannot shake off this lighter than air God and remain bound to a God, they claim not to believe in.

From the very beginning of this religious civil war, which essentially polarizes people in two economic camps, the allies of Jesus have had the upper hand. It is thus that they are able to impose on the world their version of the story-history of John. Indeed, the princes invented the story about Jesus we know. At the same time, this invention is the reason why the fire pit death of Basil is practically unknown.

The civil war is at its bloodiest today, even though to one of the economic poles it may appear to be bloodless. No matter how many thousands of images of dismembered and dead men, women, and children are shown on the internet and television they are as if not seen. This is because such scenes take place far away from the viewers living inside the protected zones of the powers-that-be.

Being the apparent winner of the civil war, the successors of Alexius I (symbols of state power and righteousness) claim to speak in the name of love and peace, and let the bloodguilt fall on unnamed secularist armies (their own and that of their enemies) as though these appeared outside the bounds of western foreign policies. Worse, the oligarchs (or their like) have not only killed Basil-John and changed his name to Jesus, but have installed Jesus-Basil as the ruler of heaven, where all his energies are consumed trying to sit on air.

Perhaps the “victory” of the successors of Alexius I will be carried forward yet another thousand years. However, there are reasons to doubt this. The torn social bonds that are the price of appearing to be victor of this war have turned the populace into an army of the dumb. This is not without its corrosive effects. Unable to resist the oligarchs, the poor play a waiting game. That is, they wait for the rich and their own to exhaust the resources of our planet, because it is only after the resources are exhausted will everyone be able to let the Earth go fallow and gradually resume a normal life again.

Poets, often true, but physically weak seers, have watched—real time and their mind’s eye—ignorant armies http://tinyurl.com/qk7mqr rush to be devoured by chaos http://tinyurl.com/2lhyc4 . Brazen men with brazen promises are in leadership positions http://tinyurl.com/pdujkd . Mountaintops (bald for loss of snow and forest cover) and deserts (jumping from Africa to Europe) have replaced the ancient Johns with Apocalypse sans Jesus in real time.

Waiting still, the poets see no sacrifice charismatic enough (whether by John, Jesus, or anonymous soldiers blowing their heads off in the field) to save humankind. Governments with high decibel sugars glaze all protests.

But wait! Is it not curious that the present winners of the civil war appear to hate most “suicide terrorists”? Is it not a “suicide terrorist” one who takes not only his-her own life, but the lives of everyone around, the lives of the innocent as well as the guilty? Does not such self-sacrifice speak of utter moral depravity, which gives the ruling elite moral authority by default? Most likely this is because the powers-that-be presume such moral authority as much as the terrorists do.

At this time, the losing side, the poverty stricken and superfluous, use tactics that they have learned from the winning elite, who camouflage their violence from the eyes of the ordinary citizens by controlling the communications media. We hear of remote controlled drones killing the opposition leader, but it takes a long time for the news to reach us that along with the leader, the dead include the bride, the groom, and most of the wedding guests. http://tinyurl.com/ncgx2m . While the tactics of both sides of the civil war are roughly the same and equally brutal, it nevertheless appears that only the side of the poverty-stricken and superfluous ones, has the option to practice true self-sacrifice. At a time when the internet is replacing newspapers, radio, and television as primary media as the disseminator of news and other information, the tools are available that will record and broadcast the self-sacrificial deed and censure it and keep it anonymous. The failure to express protest by using self-sacrificial death as a tool (what John-Basil-Jesus taught), may be seeing the end of its days.

Slavoy Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and at this time the director of the Birbeck Institute in London, approvingly cites Brecht, the German playwright. Writes Brecht (in “Baden Learning Play on Consent”): “To encourage a man for his death, the interveningly thinking one (der eingreifend Denkende) asks him to give away his goods. When the man gives away everything, what is left over is only life. Give away more, says the thinking one.” The ‘interveningly thinking one’, one assumes, is one’s own inner voice. [No doubt, the language is a bit heavy.]

Žižek then writes (“The Monstrosity of Christ”, pp 300): “This ‘give more’ is a true ethical answer to the false spirit of sacrifice: it hits the narcissistic satisfaction provided by sacrifice in the eye. Brecht’s real target here is the pathetic gesture of sacrifice….”

Nevertheless, one may object: What if sacrifice is essential, a kind of mirror of the Big Other mentioned in a previous blog, so that human kind will be reminded of itself by reminding itself to mind, which reminder is essential to the formation of a larger-than-life or virtual society?

What if with the mirror, which reflects back to one one’s true terror of death, puts the same one in awe of the (“pathetic”) sacrifice and breaks down the refusal of one’s otherwise ungovernable ego to submit to the compromise that is necessary to create a society larger than one’s immediate family and intimates?

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