Eso’s Chronicles 198/ 8
Death Reversal?  (8)
© Eso A.B.

In this short series of blogbuster blogs that begin with post 191/ 1

“Capitalist Radicals?”, and makes mild fun of the sometimes radical  posts at one of the more informative sites about the state of finace and business on the internet, I begin with a quate from “Looking away” by philosopher Slavoy Žižek. Žižek, who writes (p 78): “…love is an exemplary case of what Jon Elster calls ‘states that are essentially a by-product’ an innermost emotion that cannot be planned in advance or assumed by means of a conscious decision.

What if I replace the word ‘love’ with the word ‘death’? Might not ‘death’ also be “an exemplary case of what… is ‘essentially a by-product’ of an innermost emotion that cannot be planned in advance or assumed by means of conscious decisions?”

So, how do we arrive at the ‘essential by-product’? I have to resort to a rather personal dream and story in which ‘it’ manifests itself as death and as ‘nothing’ and as ‘love’.

Dream: the space I find myself in is black-and-white. I come into this space as if by a door into a room. I am gripped by a feeling of terror that comes from no one or specific place. But it appears to me to be a more than real presence. I am not sure if my fear is of death or something unknown that is generated by the ‘within of myself’.

I slowly move deeper into the room, when peripheral vision lets me see behind me an ambulatory bed. If it has a sheet, it is not white, but a dark dark red. In front of me and the bed there also appears a person, whom I guess to be a doctor. I look at him—still filled with dread—and he returns my look with a humiliating smirk on his face. Nevertheless, I make a plea for help. And ‘help’ he does.

We shift our positions to a right angle left, where the ‘doctor’ stands directly in front of me and I have retreated from him a step or two. Out of nowhere there appears before the ‘doctor’ a man, somewhat young by appearance. The man is unresisting, a bit like a doll, and his head comes up to about the chest cavity of the doctor. The ‘doctor’ then places both of his hands with the forefingers on the man’s throat about where the carotid arteries are. He presses his fingers down, and the man collapses as if dead.

Dread however stills fills me, and again I ask the ‘doctor’ to help me. Again he does. He picks up the limp man by his shoulders, while I pick him up by his feet, and both of us, with me moving backward, move for the door that leads out of the house and is behind me.

We walk down the steps of the house with the ‘corpse’ held by its shoulders and feet, and move across the yard to a brown wood board fence and hedge, which stands about ten yards from the door of the house. We place the body behind the hedge and beside the wood fence, then return to the house.

Once inside the house, the ‘doctor’ and ambulatory bed have disappeared. Nevertheless, I am still filled if not with dread, but great anxiety as I look to the other end of the room, where there is a floor to ceiling window with a bed to its right. Before the window stands a great guerilla like black shadow; but in the bed, her knees drawn up in a fetal position and her chin tucked to her chest lies my ‘love’.

I awaken with a hollow feeling in my stomach and ask myself: “What was that about?” still vividly recalling the sense of terror that I apparently held but a few moments ago. The question lingers with me for a few days, but no interpretation comes until I read the word ‘nothing’ somewhere. Suddenly, I realize that the shadow is Nothing. It was this Nothing who made this incursion in the dream within me. It was death itself that had come visiting.

Questions, still remain however. Or I should say there are yet facts which have to come and contribute to the interpretation. One fact that I have not mentioned yet is that I dreamt the dream about two weeks before my eightieth birthday. Another fact is that I have fallen in ‘love’ with a woman not yet thirty. Some may be tempted to say the word ‘playboy’, unfortunately, far from so. A third fact is that I am single, financially down to the basics, which allows my eye row without guilt, because I know that not only can I not pay for what my eye likes, but am forced by circumstances to remain frugal and then some. The fourth factor is that the young woman in the dream who lies in a fetal position is the young woman to whom I am attracted by desire or, if you wish, ‘love’.

Because the black shadow stands just at the foot of the bed and appears to looks out the window, this may suggest that the young woman has drawn her legs into her lap out of fear of it. On the other hand, it may be that she is in the position she is, because she feels no less dread than I do, but this is because of an entirely different reason--because I may have proposed (symbolically) to her. If I were a man of means, I indeed would do so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laBTtJJxCnw. Yet because of my age, and because I may shortly die, ‘love’ is a deadly experience for both of us. ‘Love’ becomes the curtain in front of a tabernacle for both of us

And the space before the tabernacle becomes the stage in front of which the dream performs-demonstrates to me the impossibility of my desire.

When I realize the meaning of it all, I understand and become rather contrite. I regret the circumstances for, both, me and her. Yet whoever may read this, there are yet a couple of other factors within which the unconscious dreamer, the Nothing, dreams. One is that I am on my eleventh day of a water and juice diet protesting the stone face of the government under which I live. Two is that the young woman is planning to shortly work at a nursing home.

Regarding the government which I protest: it practices what the leader of the opposition calls shadow politics, which he describes thus: “…when it comes to evaluating questions regarding the future of the nation, the commentators are always state bureaucrats or paid government advisers.”

Tibet socialist villages http://www.bbc.co.auk/news/world-asia-china-23100427  

  

 

 

Eso’s Chronicles 169

The Misnaming of My Community (I)
© Eso A.B.

Fascism and not democracy is the ‘star’ issue of the 20^th and 21^st 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.

© Eso Antons Benjamins, aka Jaņdžs

POSTSCRIPT 2 / Epilogue
99 Let Us Have Alterity or
Come The Alternative —….

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter. http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/  

First, as to the word "alterity" in the title. According to the dictionary “alterity” means: otherness; specifically the quality or state of being radically alien to the conscious self or a particular cultural orientation

Second, I have mentioned in my blogs in the past Michael Taussig, the anthropologist. I acknowledge my debt to Taussig here by citing him and his analysis of Walter Benjamin’s thought from his own thought provoking book, “Mimesis and Alterity”, Routledge, 1993. I am referring specifically to Chapter 3, ‘Spacing Out’ (Latvians would probably use the word “iedomāties”, to think into).

Taussing quotes Walter Benjamin: “The gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else.” I cite this passage, because I do not believe that for Latvia today those “former times” are past, but are of profound relevance and need to be exercised today.

This is because as things are in Latvia now, it is a state with a failed government. While there are many mundane administrative functions that can be fixed without a change of government, the chief problem is that the state’s would-be orthodox reformers et al, are insufficiently alive in their imaginations and articulations to probe and try alterity. Indeed, at a time when it is clear that the “West” (capitalism) is as failed an affair as the recent “East” (communism), and yet the ossified model of the former inspires the Latvian reformers in the midst of ongoing social turmoil—even death (suicides) and pain (look at the teeth)—one has to wonder whether the inarticulateness of the ‘picture’ of the state of Latvian society (such mimesis of the community’s self as there exists) is not in fact a process realizing the intolerability of the situation by acting out a communal dying.
Of course, the “good” reformers will not admit that the old Latvia is dead or shout with me “Long live the other Latvia!” They will ask: “What other Latvia?”

This bloggers proposal of how to achieve the “other” Latvia is suggested in Blog 98. I suggest that the only hope of projecting Latvia into alterity that is other than a dying present is to wage a successful “not-vote” campaign. It is possible for 700,000 not-voters to do so. I do not mean that being “successful” must necessarily end in a victory (though it is desirable), but that a “not-vote” campaign draws sufficient attention to itself to become the kick-start (the electric shock to a stopped heart) necessary to assemble a Constitutional Revision Assembly, a Referendum Committee, empower an Interim Government to do all that is possible to do to stop Latvia from bleeding empty of its people by out-migration and demographic death-spiral put into motion by a series of failed governments, and of course many more issues.

In order to survive, Latvia needs to imagine itself a survivor. This survival must include the possibility of seizing on radical direct not-violent actions as means to survival. The Latvia of tomorrow must shed its dead orthodox skin. This skin—a distorted history of pagans, peasants, and neo-Christian preachers—has been let overwrite a people who were in their proto-Latvian stage artisans (weavers, carpenters, potters, smiths, cobblers, gardeners, etc.) and were better known as Johns Children (Jāņu bērni). These were hobbled in the recovery of their identity, when in 1888 the figure of the itinerant teacher John (still visible on the Lihgo flag of 1874) was replaced by one Bear-Slayer, a figure lifted out of Luther’s Illustrated Bible (where he appears as Samson the Lion-Slayer).

The switch away from John in favour of Bear-Slayer happened not only because in 1881 Tsar Alexander III came to power and provoked pogroms against the Jews, but because he threatened many of the people living in the tsardom by attempting to have their language replaced with Russian. Among these people were Latvian speaking people. The tensions exploded under Tsar Nicholas II with what we know as the “1905 Revolution”. While dissatisfaction with economic development was one of its motivating forces, there were other motivations not tied to economics. This is the reason why the image (and the alterity) of Bear-Slayer, a macho character, found fertile soil in what had formerly been a kingdom held together by itinerant story tellers, who served equally well as saints. By making Bear-Slayer the hero and then leaving him to replaced John was a fatal mistake.

Indeed the institutions that diminish the proto-Latvian people (the populist substrate always at odds with a government presenting itself as neo-Christian) have a long history. And this is why the life of the Latvian community’s subjective self was permanently at odds (and often not for the better, though the why-fores are understandable) with democracy under the direction of a parliamentary government. Today direct participatory democracy is still spoken of only in the context of a President directly elected by the public rather than the Parliament. The Parliament remains a club of and for “political” parties.

At the same time, the death rattle may be just what the doctor ordered if we understand the anxieties of the subjective self of Latvians as they enter the death spiral caused by out-migration, an increasingly low birth rate, and not least by a parliamentary government believing itself to know better, though responsible for the time of troubles. This may be an opportune moment for Latvians to recapture the moment of self-identification lost in the last half of the 19th century and—with the help of alterity—re-identify themselves.

To cite Walter Benjamin (by way of Taussig) again: “If the theory is correct that feeling is not located in the head, that we sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree not in our brains but, rather, in the place where we see it, then we are, in looking at our beloved, too, outside ourselves. But in a torment of tension and ravishment.”

If the people who once knew themselves as Johns Children still retain in themselves something of the power of “mimesis”, that curious desire to be someone, something or somewhere else, an alterity remains a possibility. Though one cannot accomplish this directly of course, one can feel one’s self into it, and there are many ways of doing it. The copy machine is as much a mimesis machine as a wreath of grasses and flowers on one’s head. The latter was how the Latvian Children of Johns felt themselves into the role of being the children of John, their hero, the maternal male storyteller come on Johns Eve to keep them awake and make sure the Sun rises on Midsummer morning. Today, however, we have for alterity the young Latvian woman, who imagines she comes from impoverished peasants (perhaps kolhozniks), who conceives a child in England with the seed of an irresponsible Latvian boy also imagining he has endless generations of impoverished peasants in his background. Such is the result of the alterity that the parliamentary government of Latvia presents its people with.

Walter Benjamin is writing about his “ravishment” (his feeling his way into an alterity) while thinking of a young Latvian woman, a theatre director, (“a Russian revolutionary from Riga”—circa 1920s) with whom he is infatuated. Asja Lācis is an object out there in Walter Benjamin’s field of vision, that—to paraphrase Benjamin in first person singular—…cuts a one-way street through me, and by that cut stimulates my commitment to Marxism…. Walter and Asja live together for two years in Berlin (no doubt this is the time when Asja cut through Walter Benjamin with arguments that she makes ever so much more profound than words on paper). An intellect bound together by love (be it infatuation) is able to make the quantum jump from singer to linden tree in blossom time, to the song of bees in the blooms, and to the Revolution. So can’t government acting as if it has the rights of state and can go riding piggy-back on the wagon of history pushed onto the steel rails of a neo-liberal capitalist economy.

An important point raised by Michael Taussig is Benjamin’s perception of history. Writes Taussig: “The radical displacement of self in sentience—taking one outside of oneself—accounts for one of the most curious features of Benjamin’s entire philosophy of history, the flash wherein ‘the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at an instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.’ Repeatedly this mystical flash illuminates his anxiety for reappraisal of past in present, this understanding that ‘to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.’”

Taussig continues: “This flash marks that leap ‘in the open air of history’ which establishes history as ‘Marx understood revolution’ as ‘the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the ‘now’.’”

The government of Latvia, the one in office for the last twenty years, perceives the history of Latvia as a homogenous empty time. By so doing, the government causes the Latvian people to perceive their history as an “empty time” as well. The Latvian government of today empties the people of their “now” as a community and replaces it with visions of conspicuous consumption. In the end, conspicuous consumption is a form of cannibalism performed by the government on the people so that when everything else has been consumed, they consume themselves. The subjection of and then the limitation of the peoples’ subjectivity to Pop globalizes the world for freedom to be a Conspicuous Consumer, but it fails to impress the community of proto-Latvians, 200,000 of who have voted with their feet and left Latvia.

The Latvian people describe the consumption of their state with the phrase “the stolen state”, a word combo that is one of the top ten in Latvia. It is  "the stolen state", the nicely crisped body with green garnishes on the long dining room table, that is the centre piece of attention of the guests.

I trust this explains what alterity has to do with vision, with tomorrow, with a people at peace and a purpose. The “not-vote” campaign continues. To not-vote must be done to ensure humankind an alterity beyond that of the Conspicuous Consumer. It is worth as a consciousness raiser. My 99 blogs lead toward it.

Copy leaflet at 98 and pass it on.