for your

for your work.

eyesore me lookt-me

in-thee i-was

n-jin. mennee timez:

bee. for willbee a-genn co-knected

perfeckt sinn. mettree is hymn.

purr elastick. happshee dresst.

so quicklee cuzshee used

two dresstreel slow.

her lover

There is no such thing as a good story about nothing.

Your excitement should be symbolized.

To be frightened by the truth is understandable.

sometime last winter. her real body: red stockings and black panties, red lipstick and a black silk dress. the night before she dreamt she found a thin black plastic square. strangely attracted to the object she had inserted it into her vagina and used it to masturbate. and it had seemed to her that it was the object, and not her, which screamed when she came...

on the twenty-fifth of february she had broken down and cried. why did this occur? she could not say. nothing in particular had happened.

she recalled thinking:

of course, she thought, the square must have been him infiltrating the dream dimensional plane of the earthly sphere...who knows...who knows how many humans had sex with that night? what prodigy was now to be predicted?

she tried to find the words but couldn’t. it was like some kind of timeless emotion, all that is alive in any of us – in a mouse, a deer.

“you are killing me.”

they stayed at the hotel that night. it was like he was him, and she was her.

the theme for this one is...

LATER:

weare
livingin
helland
weare
allghosts.

LATER:

cut key to code -

once again you prove you are the master.

LATER:

she would have liked to have been caught. have deliciously, her cold blue wings teased off. her skin stretched into rainbows. then nailed gently to a wooden cross.

LATER:

you may just not be feeling -

barefoot, choking on a cigarette, with her belly swelled to bursting, and a cough.

END

[Anna O. & Josef K.]

Soyons realiste...

Five Provisional Theses on the Politics of Communism

Two excellent posts from Angela and then k-punk. Common to both, a shared desire - namely, for a politics of communism proper. This desire can be summarized in the form of the following theses:

1. A refusal of the politics and rhetorics of ressentiment. Such speech is henceforth defined as theoretically anathema to communism proper, and pragmatically anathema to action. The dialetics of ressentiment thus so considered can still be recognized as expressive testimony - like the screaming of a wounded angel - and thus can still be affirmed as actual on that basis, but is rejected from being understood as a representation itself as the real expression of the politics of communism proper.

2. A refusal of nationalism, both ideologically and categorically. The refusal extends as well to the notion of internationalism - so considered as a negation of the ideology of nation which nonetheless still remains dependent on the nation-form. The nation-form cannot be used to ground a properly communist politics.

3. An additional refusal to ground communism also in terms either of an idea or a name. This refusal is incorporative both of the idea of socialism and the name of Marx. The nature of this refusal is a strategic one, and represents the drawing of a axiom so designed as to prevent the signifier communism from sliding into an idealist dialectics of either authenticity or fidelity. Henceforth, communism so considered is to be designated neither as a transcendent gurantee, nor as a internal critique, but rather as an immanent condition, a real movement, a ceaseless practice. Thus both utopianism and apocalypticism - so designated as the fantastic therapeutic pallitatives of capitalism itself, rather than communism proper - are henceforth bracketed as inessential and misleading.

4. A refusal of morality and a commensurate reiteration of the problematic of desire. In this, again, a rejection of the politics of authenticity - a politics really more fascist than communist - and the commensurate reiteration that the politics of communism so considered must be recognized as an immanent and ontological concern. The question of desire is thus reiterated on a cartographic basis, in the terms of the essential stellar orient thought to be inseperable from the very definition of a situation as such.

5. A commensurate privileging of resistance above knowledge, in terms of that quantity so designated to be the fundamental unit of revolutionary theory/practice. So defined, resistance is recognized in terms of an affirmative desire itself, rather than the negation of desire. Correlatively, the concept of proleteriat is thus reiterated along these lines in the terms of a resisting agency - that which is, but which does not exist. Hence, the proleteriat is thus defined in the terms of that inexistent element, thought in some sense to be immanent to all and every situation.

Some contributions towards a better reading of Marx

Towards the beginning of the end of his work Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty writes: “The Marxist does not live with his eyes fixed on a transcendent future, forgiving deplorable tactics in the name of ultimate ends and absolving himself on account of his good intentions; he is the only one who denies himself such recourse.[1]” In my view, we should take this idea to be axiomatic when reading Marx, and especially so when reading the Marx of Capital, at the price that if we don’t do this, we become liable to deliver ourselves up accordingly to a damaging, and indeed dangerous, fundamental mis-take of his thought.

***

In the preface to the first German edition of Capital Marx writes: “In this work I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England. That is the reason why England is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas. If however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural laborers, or in optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad; I must plainly tell him, “De te fabula narratur![2]”

From this passage, two things can be drawn. First of all, the nature of the connection established here between theory and rhetoric: as Marx understands it, the former finds development in the latter, and furthermore, incorporated within this latter is thought to be the empirical world as such – it is in these terms that the given condition of “England” is mobilized - as an illustrative example of a theoretical undertaking thought as separate to it.

How can this methodology be thought to be legitimate? The picture that Marx paints of it in this passage seems to describe a procedure wholly self-confirming. Method as machine. Thought as proof cunningly produced – philosophy twitching like a phantom limb. And hence become moved to dismiss Marx himself - as effectively a zombie-signifier for a zombie system: rhetorically rubber stamping with selective facts a set of already established and invincible presuppositions. Either this, or else the opposite weighting – and canonize the name of Marx along the lines of some kind of a secular prophet preaching the gospel of a new religion – with Revolution as Messiah, and Communism as the Kingdom.

No doubt, Marx has been read in such manners before – whether more or less covertly - and by both his eternally sworn enemies, and his self-declared inheritors alike. In my view such interpretations are heretical, but it is not my intention to start naming names and taking numbers here – each must known their own. In any case - the key point here is in reality a simple one –there is a dimension which eludes these readings. And specifically, what this dimension amounts to is that one of the letter insofar it relates to fiction.

“De te fabula narratur!” – “This story is about you!” And in this statement, a confession. A direct avowal, an explicit declaration - this story is about you, this story is a story – and no doubt, at the same time, one imagines, a schematic, sure - but one so designated that it is marked indelibly by an aspect of the fabulous. In my view, we need to take Marx at his word here, and accept the consequences which follow come what may.

***

I have just been speaking in relation to the question of presuppositions, and it is useful on this score to draw attention to that specific one which Marx directly states. He writes: “I presuppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.[3]” At the risk of theorizing a truism: this statement is significant: the conceptualization of the process of reading which emerges out of it is a crucial element towards the understanding of the importance and the novelty of Capital in the work of Marx.

This proposition can be most formulated as follows: the precise theoretical cause which Marx understood himself to following in Capital was the elucidation of the “natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves,” Marx writes, “of these tendencies working with iron necessity toward inevitable results.[4]”

Following from this, and the basic ground of the relation between Capital and its reader can start to be sketched out in terms of a relation between on the one hand, a treatise on law, and on the other, somebody able to learn and to think for themselves.

How can this sketch be fleshed-out? Marx writes: “To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.[5]”

He goes on: “The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they occur in their most typical form and most free from disturbing influence, or wherever possible he makes experiments that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality.[6]”

These statements invite pause. The notions of “typical form,” “free from disturbing influence,” “experiments that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality,” - at first glance these formulation seem almost more idealist than properly materialist. But Marx explicitly denies this. He writes: “With me…the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.[7]”

And this statement too demands some close attention. What exactly is being said here, what precise process is Marx here describing? The question to inquired after here is this: what exactly is Marx taking here for the operation of the human mind? That which at once reflects the material world, and also furthermore translates into forms of thought – but how are these notions of reflection and translation being here understood? And how precisely can they be thought to relate to the microscopic forms of Capital – forms that on the one hand are fantastic, and on the other serve as scientific laws?

***

“De te fabula narratur!” – there is a yet further aspect to this phrase. Namely, that one contained within the pronoun “you” - in this, an imperative. Namely, this one: no beyond, no outside, no elsewhere - and indeed, no transcendent authority such that could be so established as such, and no acceptance for ressentimental projections - into, for instance, the picture postcards of the third, or fifth, fifteenth worlds. Rather: the state of things is here, now in this situation, this relation, this condition. Whatever this may be, and wherever it may lie: hence Marx here uses the example of the German reader, for the reason that Marx is here directly addressing that same reader. And so we are given to understand that in some sense present, in any instant whatsoever, is a connection to capitalist production – that mode of production which Marx is here specifically undertaking to critique – and that the problem of revolution simply is that one of some kind of an encounter or discovery.

To paraphrase Proust - what is being said here amounts effectively to the following: one does not want the landscape. Rather, one wants a something wrapped up in the landscape – with this something so defined in terms of an essentially fabulous universal situation, conceptualized along the lines of a certain set of laws, that at least theoretically could be potentially abstracted from the vanishing point of any point at all – any point at all - by means of a process akin to some kind of a translation.

Further: the authority of this process so defined is designated along the lines of an immanent property, inherent to the process itself - the analogy of translation is quite an apt one in this sense. And hence accordingly, the legitimacy of determinist deployments undertaken in the name of either/or the dumb and mute is denied before the fact.

***

Where does this leave us? Effectively here – we are speaking now of a situation – to be precise: in the terms of a relation to a situation – so defined and designated on the fine red line of a means without ends, and a meaning without certain function. What is the structure of this line? From point to point - in short, the flight, the nudge, the wink: it is the subject – so conceived in terms of the product of this situation, as opposed to the producer of it: an agens, not an agent – a subject that so long as it is rigidly defined is both radically decentered and divided, and thus for this very reason so empowered consequently - in the face, and the fact, of its own very negativity - to be produced out of a process that “includes in its comprehension an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.[8]”

What is this subject? Marx calls it by the following name: the proletariat – but it has other names as well. Perhaps an infinity of them – or perhaps a hundred – ninety nine declared, and one kept under wraps. But in any case: it first emerged in the work of Marx in the 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – where it found a romantic definition as “the heart” of the revolutionary movement[9] - but was subjected to a continual redevelopment and revision throughout the entire trajectory of Marx’s work – such that the case could plausibly made that it ultimately makes-up his most subtle and complex idea of all.

How, then, does it find expression in Capital? Three distinctly different forms can usefully identified. First, in terms of a social symptom – and interestingly, always also a displaced one. For instance: “The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil…could not possibly be absorbed…[and]…were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds…from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working-class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as “voluntary” criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed.[10]” In other words, then, effectively, the form of the abject persecuted “economic” proletariat of the (critique of) the Ricardian labour theory of value, still pregnant with the notion of an incarnated innate worth.

Second: in terms of an inevitable and ultimately unstoppable historical force – the proletariat as avenging angel. In theoretical terms this is actually ultimately the same proletariat as that of the above, only merely dialecticised from an industrial reserve army into an incipiently revolutionary one, and thus presented as a consequence with a greater rhetorical flourish. And thus Marx ends Capital Volume One by footnoting a quote from the Communist Manifesto. “The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable....Of all the classes that stand face-to-face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes perish and disappear in the face of Modern Industry, the proletariat is its special and essential product.[11]”

Finally – and most tightly - in terms of an integral subject-object that functions in some sense as the unnamed and indeed, unnamable, ground of the capitalist mode of production as such. This is the inexistent “scientific” form of the proletariat, which first begins to be developed in Capital itself, and which is related neither primarily to an authorizing symbolic block like philosophy - and nor to something like a value so considered in the terms of an internal and intrinsic property of itself. Rather, this proletariat is that one related to the immanent process of valuation itself – so conceived in the terms of a ceaseless and never-ending critique of value – the critique which after Capital Marx would strive to refine and to refine again - generating smaller and smaller quanta as he went – in manner analogous to a figure like Heisenberg. So that in the end, then, performativity comes into play and the final phase of the critique of value thus reveals and reveils itself as follows: if you know what I mean, then you do not know what I mean.

---

[1] Merleau-Ponty, M. Humanism and Terror: An essay on the Communist problem, trans. O’Neil, J. [Boston: Beacon Press (1969)] p.128

[2] Marx, K. “Capital Volume One” in the Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker [New York, London: Norton (1978)] p.296

[3] ibid. p.295

[4] ibid. p.296

[5] ibid, p..295

[6] ibid. p. 295

[7] ibid. p.301

[8] ibid. p.302

[9] Marx, K. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” in ibid. p.65

[10] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch28.htm

[11] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm (It is worth noting - this figuration has historically been prone to the most pernicious (mis)interpretations, and continues to be prone to them today. The specific problem with it is that it is so overtly valorizes the figure of the proletariat along the lines of a violent underdog that it tends towards the support of a cartoon so-called “Marxism” that in reality is simply adolescence masquerading by another name – a fact which renders it extremely powerful and compelling to certain people. Several recent unhappy conversations with associates have convinced me that this is a significant problem in its own right which demands an urgent refutation. See here and then here.

Nous sommes l'ecriture sur les murs

"Five Years in a PC Camp"

A couple of weeks ago I posted something on Alenka Zupancic's talk on Bergson's theory of comedy, and asked the question: what happens when a joke stops being funny? Well, now we know. A recent "discussion" of the subject of Lacan "whores" at the Weblog - ironically under the title of "Knowingness and How to Communicate It" quickly became misogynistic. Jodi Dean issued an objection, it wasn't well recieved, and the issue turned inflammatory.

Why did this happen? Two things might be said.

Firstly, there is almost always - whether latently, or this case manifestly - some aspect of sexism lurking in all determinate forms of what is now and then referred to as male bonding. I would suppose the same point to hold equally true for women. It cannot not be so - these are situations founded on the basis of constitutive exclusions. And what a joke does is to realize that constitutive exclusion, and to transform it into the basis whereby a shared identity (antipathy) can be experienced collectively - this is what Freud meant when he claimed that the function of joke was such that it was only really understandable within a parish. Why? Because, in contrast to comedy, a joke is never really funny in itself.

Secondly, the spectre of sexism in general. It it is a difficult thing to accept - particularly amongst those who would broadly identify with being "on the left" - the idea that one could be a sexist, or indeed a racist. After all: have we not all already committed to the fighting of such evil things? But then, the truth is that this is not really the question. Indeed: the truth is really more alarming: we do not need to be sexists to be guilty of sexism. Or racism, or homophobia,m or indeed, whatever - rather, it is like ressentiment - a kind of sin which one cannot help but on occasion to fall into sometimes - envy, fear - in general, in allusions - in abstract terms, in slips, in jokes. Patterns of thought - it happens. The crucial point is just to accept that it happens to ourselves as well - and why not ourselves? - and then to accept it when it does. And is this is not the fundamental lesson of Micheal Haneke's recent film Hidden? A film in which throughout, repeatedly, the character played by Daniel Auteil - an intellectual, a lover of books - is insistently, and repeatedly, given the opportunity again and again to face up to the terrible thing that he has done, only to refuse to do so every time. "My conscience is clear," he declares again and again, except his gestures betray him, and his actions betray him.

What would have happened had he done so? If in doubt, it always pays to go back to Freud. In his analysis of the dream of Irma's Injection from The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud goes through it line by line, only to uncover at the end the following revelation: he had wished to be innocent of Irma's illness. And that it was the impossibility of fulfilling this wish in reality - he had botched her treatment as a consequence of it - which had pushed his psyche to produce his dream. What to take from this? The following: that resistance drives imagination. Drives it to manufacture ideologies - like racism, like sexism, or else drives it to manufacture the "magnificent fictions" which Alain Badiou spoke of in his Fall lecture at Birkbeck. What is the difference? Where is the resistance? What is the desire? One to be innocent? Or one to enact a cure?

Theory and the Resistance to Marx

Socrates said that he knew nothing. But people didn't take him seriously. They thought that he meant that he, himself knew nothing, and that this was unfortunate for him. They didn't realize that in fact he was saying something else. Namely: that knowledge is impossible. Few people realize this, and those that do, find it hard to say. And there is a reasons for this. How do you say Nothing? One needs to invent a language - and as soon as one does this, than one can be misunderstood.

Recent communications with my redoubtable associate in Le Maquis have sharpened this problem to a pointlately. The idea that somehow a coherent revolutionary politics could be constructed from the ground of a superior moral fortitude - to my mind there no stance whatsoever that finally is less radical than this one. And not only on account for theoretical reasons either - the real point here is the strategic one: what kind of praxis does a moralistic framework of this nature ultimately suppose? In the last analysis, only an ineffective and hysterical one - in short: a politics of the very worst, one which ultimately is not worthy of that name.

In Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon wrote: "If you get them asking the wrong questions, you don't need to worry about the answers." And along these lines: somehow the idea has arisen, in the minds of the rebel class of our privileged Western post-societies, that exploitation is somehow always elsewhere. That capital is somehow always elsewhere. That these ideas, and these processes, are both realities that somehow only "they" are labouring under - they, the unhappy poor of the third, fourth, fifth, or fifteenth world. So that thus, from this, the resolution that is not one is arrived at: we must help them. Help them how? It is not known. But nonetheless - it only is the struggle of the outside which possesses meaning.

Suffice to say, this axiom is more theological than political. And for his part, Marx took pains to emphasize this fact. "If however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural labourers," he writes at the beginning of Capital, "or in optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad; I must plainly tell him, "De te fabula narratur!" - This story is about you!"

And no doubt - the same point in inverse also holds true. Displaced pessissim equally is a great sedative comfort. Because after all: if it is only what is happening over there that has any substance, and if I am not there, then, well, what can I do? The answer here is simple: nothing. And thus I deliver myself completely from all responsibility whatsoever, and further - knowing frankly that at root that this delivery has been illegitimate, slide as consequence into sanctimony and ressentiment.

We say that the University belongs to those that work in it

k-punk's recent experience of a craven, stupid university politics tallies with my own. At college on Tuesday, I heard a student bitching about the union action, how terrible it was, how she wasn't going to get her grades. I asked her about it, she said the following: 1) that the lecturers didn't go into academia because they thought they could make money; 2) that people didn't have the right to strike, 3) that she didn't want to talk to me about it, because she was talking to her friends.

Now, all of this would be easy to dismiss as simply ridiculous, but there is a serious point The fact is that, this student, at this august institution, had no idea whatsoever what was, and is, at stake in politics and capitalism, and in order to explain this troubling fact it seems necessary to think about how it is exactly that she has been so badly educated.

In my view, the reason is simple, and it is systematic: it has to do with the organization of the university system itself, and the division of labour operative within it. This is hardly an original thesis, but I mean something highly specific by it, which is the following: students are led to believe that what they do for their degree is work, and that what they do for the rest of their time is something else - what exactly never being said. Furthermore, various guidelines establishing how exactly students must go about producing work for their degree serve to reinforce an ideology of bourgeouis individualism - all work must be your own work, all work must be original, etc. As a consequence of both these points, students are encouraged into believing they are autonomous individuals somehow disconnected from the social, and that the things they learn about are somehow not related to them - but rather, only to some fictive other elsewhere. Like in history, for instance, or some mythical third world, or elsewhere. Perhaps Kansas.

In all of this, the fundamental drive remains the same: the denegation of the immanent, and the commensurate but secret and sublime valorization of transcendence. Time accordingly thus becomes changed into a series of discrete enclosures: term times, first years, so on and so forth- Foucault of course analyzed this in Discipline and Punish - and all desire correlatively becomes transformed into nothing more than the desire for escape. A false escape - one which traps the most tremendous violence, and conceals its real effect and name: this is to say, deliverance - to an analogous, or indeed, even more constrained environment - so that no gain is ultimately made and all desire is negated.

If there is any possibility for some kind of renegotiation of this situation, then it must occur on an immanent basis, in terms of a becoming-political of concrete situations carried out through a series of esoteric interventions which perhaps should not even bear the name of politics. After all: politics have become a dirty word, become in the contemporary imaginary equated to a total and repressive domain - that of the political, and in a certain sense, this is not even wrong. In the UK, the present official Leftist parties are exactly at the stage that French Communist Party was at in 1968 - the SWP and Respect both ultimately structurally compliant in the Blairism - if for no other reason than incompetence - with both essentially still mired in what is basically no more than a toothless crypto-Stalinist mode of organization.

The problem, then, is this: how can one enact a becoming-politicized that is not equivalent to a becoming-political? I can only suggest the following: the necessity is to avoid at all costs the politics of ressentiment. Even the politics which may appear as this: the "no" in fact is that provided by the government, and is that "no" that must be turned into an affirmation: we cannot expect or dream that the reverse could ever happen. Meanwhile, since the Government seems so intent on proleterianizing the University, then why not take them at their word, and push them to the limit?

What I mean is what Samuel Eto'o meant, when he began a monkey dance after burying a goal before the racist Spanish fans who had been abusing him: "If they're going to treat me like a money," he said afterwards, "Then I'm going to act like a monkey."

In other words: if they are going to treat us like proleterians, then we don't we start acting like it.

The Case of Zizek
A Philosophers' Problem

Selected Text

Preface

I have granted myself some small relief. It is not merely pure malice when I praise Deleuze in this essay at the expense of Zizek. Interspersed with many jokes, I bring up a matter that is no joke. To turn my back on Zizek was for me a fate; to like anything at all again after that, a triumph. Perhaps nobody was more dangerously bound up with Zizekizing, nobody tried harder to resist it, nobody was happier to be rid of it. A long story! You want a word for it? If I were a psychoanalyst, who knows what I might call it! Perhaps the cure. But the philosopher has no love for psychoanalysts ... neither does he love pretty words ...

What does an philosopher demand of himself first and last? To overcome his time in himself, to become "timeless." With what must he therefore engage in the hardest combat? With whatever marks him as the child of his time. Well, then! I am, no less than Zizek, a child of this time, that is, a hysterical: but I comprehended this, I resisted it. The activist in me resisted.

Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of hysteria, I had reasons. "Desire and Repression" is merely a variation of that problem. Once one has developed a keen eye for the symptoms of decline, one understands psychoanalysis too, one understands what is hiding under its most sacred names and arcane formulas: impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness. Psychoanalysis negates life ... For such a task I required a special self-discipline: to take sides against everything sick in me, including Zizek, including Lacan, including all postmodern "Marxism" - A profound estrangement, cold, sobering up, against everything that is of this time, everything timely: and most desirable of all, the eye of William Burroughs, an eye that beholds the whole fact of man at a tremendous distance,—below ... For such a goal—what sacrifice would not be fitting? what "cure"! what "transferrence"!

My greatest experience was a recovery. Zizek is merely one of my sicknesses.

Not that I wish to be ungrateful to this sickness. When in this essay I assert the proposition that Zizek is harmful, I wish no less to assert for whom he is nevertheless indispensable—for the philosopher. Others may be able to get along without Zizek; but the philosopher is not free to do without Zizek. He has to be the bad conscience of his time,—for that he needs to understand it best. But confronted with the labyrinth of the postmodern soul, where could he find a guide more initiated, a more eloquent prophet of the soul, than Zizek? Through Zizek postmodernity speaks most intimately: concealing neither its good nor its evil, having forgotten all sense of shame. And conversely: one has almost completed an account of the value of what is postmodern once one has gained clarity about what is good and evil in Zizek. I understand perfectly when a theorist says today: "I hate Zizek, but I can no longer endure any other theory." But I would also understand a philosopher who would declare: "Zizek sums up postmodernity. There is no way out, one must first become a Zizekian ..."

The Case of Zizek
Turinese Letter of May 1888.

1.

Yesterday I read—would you believe it?—Deleuze's masterpiece, for the twentieth time. Again I stayed there with tender devotion, again I did not run away. This triumph over my impatience surprises me. How such a work makes one perfect! One becomes a "masterpiece" oneself. And really, every time I read Cinema I seemed to myself more of a philosopher, a better philosopher, than I generally consider myself: so patient do I become, so happy, so scenic, so settled ... To sit five hours: the first stage of holiness!— May I say that the tone of Deleuze's prose is almost the only one I can still endure? That other prosaic tone which is now fashion, the Zizekian, brutal, artificial, and "innocent" at the same time and thus it speaks all at once to the three senses of the postmodern soul,—how detrimental to me is this Zizekian prosaic tone! I call it scirocco. I break out into a disagreeable sweat. My good weather is gone.

This writing seems perfect to me. It approaches lightly, supplely, politely. It is pleasant, it does not sweat. "What is good is light, whatever is divine moves on tender feet": first principle of my aesthetics. This writing is evil, subtle, fatalistic: at the same time it remains popular—its raffinement belongs to a thought, not to an individual. It is rich. It is precise. It builds, organizes, finishes: thus it constitutes the opposite of the polyp in music, the "infinite melody." Have more painful tragic accents ever been heard on the stage? And how they are achieved! Without grimaces! Without counterfeit! Without the lie of the great style!— Finally: this writing treats the reader as intelligent, even as a filmaker,—who is also, because of this, the counterpart of Zizek, who was, whatever else he was, at any rate the most impolite genius in the world (Zizek treats us as if— —, he says something so often, till one despairs, till one believes it).

And once more: I become a better human being when Deleuze speaks to me. Also a better philosopher, a better listener. Is it even possible to listen better? I actually bury my ears under this writing to hear its causes. It seems to me I experience its genesis—I tremble before dangers that accompany some risk, I am delighted by strokes of good fortune of which Deleuze is innocent. And how odd! deep down I don't think of it, or don't know how much I think about it. For entirely different thoughts are meanwhile running through my head ... Has it been noticed that cinema liberates the spirit? gives wings to thought? that one becomes more of a philosopher the more one becomes cinematic? The gray sky of abstraction rent as if by lightning; the light strong enough for the filigree of things; the great problems near enough to grasp; the world surveyed as from a mountain.— I have just defined the pathos of philosophy.— And unexpectedly answers drop into my lap, a little hail of ice and wisdom, of solved problems ... Where am I?— Deleuze makes me creative. Whatever is good makes me creative. I have no other gratitude, nor do I have any other proof for what is good.

2.

This work, too, redeems; Zizek is not the only "redeemer." With this work one takes leave of the damp West, of all the steam of the Zizekian ideal. Even the plot spells redemption from that. From Bergson it still has the logic in passion, the shortest line, the harsh necessity; above all, it has what goes with the torrid zone, the dryness of the air, the limpidezza in the air. Here, in every respect, the climate is changed. Another sensuality, another sensibility speaks here, another cheerfulness. This thought is cheerful; but not from an American or European cheerfulness. Its cheerfulness is Himalayan; fate hangs over it, its happiness is long, cool, without pardon. I envy Deleuze for having had the courage for this sensibility which had hitherto had no language in the cultivated thought of Europe,—for this more serene, icier, more glacial sensibility ... How the white nights of its happiness do us good! During it, we look into the distance: did we ever find the sea smoother?— And how soothingly the duration speaks to us! How even our insatiability for once gets to know satiety in this crisp melancholy!— Finally love, love translated back into time! Not the love of a "higher virgin"! No Oedipal sentimentality! But love as amor fati, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel—and precisely in this a duration of time!

Such a conception of love (the only one worthy of a philosopher) is rare: it raises a writing above thousands. For on the average, philosophers do what all the world does, even worse—they misunderstand love. Zizek, too, misunderstood it . They believe one becomes selfless in love because one desires the advantage of another person, often against one's own advantage. But in return for that they want to possess the other person ... Even God does not constitute an exception at this point. He is far from thinking, "What is it to you if I love you?"—he becomes terrible when one does not love him in return. L'amour—this saying remains true among gods and men—est de tous les sentiments le plus égoïste, et par conséquent, lorsqu'il est blessé, le moins généreux.

3.

You begin to see how much these concepts improve me?— Il faut viver la cinema: I have reasons for this formula. The return to time, frame, joy, duration, virtue!— And yet I was one of the most corrupted Zizekians ... I was capable of taking Zizek seriously ... Ah this old magician! how much he imposed upon us! The first thing his thought offers us is a magnifying glass: one looks through it, one does not trust one's own eyes—everything looks big, even Zizek ... What a clever rattlesnake! It has filled our whole life with its rattling about "the Imaginary," about "the Symbolic," about "the Real," with its praise of “the act” it withdrew from the corrupted world!— And we believed it in all these things ...

— But you do not hear me? You, too, prefer Zizek's problem to Deleuze's? I, too, do not underestimate it, it has it's peculiar magic. The problem of the cure is certainly a venerable problem. There is nothing about which Zizek has thought more deeply than the cure: his corpus is the corpus of the cure. Somebody or other always wants to be redeemed in his work: [....]

[....]

— What Marx might have thought of Zizek?— Marx once asked himself what danger threatened all romantics: the fatality of romanticism. His answer was: "suffocating of the rumination of moral and religious absurdities." In brief: Lacan — And then Badiou adds an epilogue to this! Holiness—perhaps the last thing the people and women still get to see of higher values, the horizon of the ideal for all who are by nature myopic. But among philosophers this is, like every horizon, a mere case of lack of understanding, a sort of shutting the gate at the point where their world only begins—their danger, their ideal, their desirability ... To say it more politely: la philosophie ne suffit pas au grand nombre. Il lui faut la sainteté.—

4.

— I shall relate the story of the "Real." It belongs here. It, too, is a story of redemption: only this time it is Zizek who is redeemed.— Half his life, Zizek believed in the Revolution as much as ever a Marxist believed in it. He searched for it in the runic writing of myth, he believed that in Lacan he had found the typical revolutionary.— "Whence comes all misfortune in the world?" Zizek asked himself.

From "Father" he answered, like all revolutionary ideologists. In plain language: from customs, laws, moralities, institutions, from everything on which the Father, the Fatherland rests. "How can one rid the world of misfortune? How can one abolish the Fatherland?" Only by declaring war against "Father" (tradition, ideology). This is what Lacan does. He starts early, very early: his very genesis is a declaration of war against ideology—he comes into this world through adultery, through incest ... It is not the saga but Zizek who invented this radical trait; at this point he revised the saga ... Lacan continues as he has begun: he merely follows his first impulse, he overthrows everything traditional, all reverence, all fear. Whatever displeases him he stabs to death. Without the least respect, he tackles old deities. But his main enterprise aims to annihilate woman—"to redeem Woman from herself" ... Lacan and Woman; the sacrament of courtly love; the rise of the golden age; the twilight of the gods for the old morality—all symptoms have been analysed ... For a long time, Zizek's ship followed this course merrily. No doubt, this was where Zizek sought his highest goal.— What happened? A misfortune. The ship struck a reef; Zizek was stuck. The reef was Hegel's philosophy; Zizek was stranded on a contrary world view. What had he transposed into thought? Perversity. Zizek was ashamed. Even a perversity for which Hegel had coined an evil epithet—negation. He was ashamed a second time. He reflected for a long while, his situation seemed desperate ... Finally, a way out dawned on him: the reef on which he was shipwrecked, what if he interpreted it as the goal, as the secret intent, as the true significance of his voyage? To be shipwrecked here—that was a goal, too. Bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci... So he translated the "Real" into Hegel's terms. Everything goes wrong, everything perishes, the new world is as bad as the old:—the nothing, the I would prefer not to, the Sadeian Circe beckons ... Antigone was initially supposed to take her farewell with a song in honor of duty, putting off the world with the hope for a heroic act in which "all turns out truthful," but now gets something else to do. She has to study Hegel first; she has to transpose the prayer book of "The Phenomenology of Spirit" into verse. Zizek was redeemed ... In all seriousness, this was a redemption. The benefit Hegel conferred on Zizek is immeasurable. Only the philosopher of hysteria gave to the theorist of hysteria himself — —

5.

To the theorist of hysteria—there we have the crucial words. And here my seriousness begins. I am far from looking on guilelessly while this hysterical corrupts our health—and music as well! Is Zizek a human being at all? Isn't he rather a sickness? He makes sick whatever he touches,—he has made music sick —

A typical hysterical who has a sense of necessity in his corrupted taste, who claims it as a higher taste, who knows how to get his corruption accepted as law, as progress, as fulfillment, as love.

And he is not resisted. His seductive force increases tremendously, smoke clouds of incense surround him, the misunderstandings about him are called "politics"—he has not by any means converted only the poor in spirit!

I feel the urge to open the windows a little. Air! More air! — —

That people in America should deceive themselves about Zizek does not surprise me. The opposite would surprise me. The Americans have constructed a Zizek for themselves whom they can revere: they have never been philosophers, their gratitude consists in misunderstanding. But that people in England, too, deceive themselves about Zizek! though there they are hardly anything anymore except philosophers. And in Argentina! where they guess things that aren't guessed even in England. How closely related Zizek must be to the whole of Western hysteria to avoid being experienced by them as a hysterical! He belongs to it: he is its protagonist, its greatest name ... One honors oneself when raising him to the clouds.— For that one does not resist him, this itself is a sign of hysteria. The instincts are weakened. What one ought to shun is found attractive. One puts to one's lips what drives one yet faster into the abyss.— Is an example desired? One only need observe the régime that those suffering from anemia or gout or diabetes prescribe for themselves. Definition of a vegetarian: one who requires a corroborant diet. To sense that what is harmful is harmful, to be able to forbid oneself something harmful, is a sign of youth and vitality. The exhausted are attracted by what is harmful: the vegetarian by vegetables. Sickness itself can be a stimulant to life: only one has to be healthy enough for this stimulant!— Zizek increases exhaustion: that is why he attracts the weak and exhausted. Oh the rattlesnake-happiness of the old master when he always saw precisely "the little children" coming unto him! —

I place this point of view at the outset: Zizek's thought is sick. The problems he presents on the stage—all of them problems of hysterics—, the convulsive nature of his affects, his overexcited sensibility, his taste that required even stronger spices, his instability which he dressed up as principles, not least of all the choices of his heroes and heroines, consider them as psychological types (—a pathological gallery!—): all of this taken together represents a profile of sickness that permits no further doubt. Zizek est une névrose. Perhaps nothing is better known today, at least nothing has been better studied than the Protean character of degenerescence that here conceals itself in the chrysalis of thought and thinker. Our physicians and physiologists confront their most interesting case in Zizek, at least a very complete case. Precisely because nothing is more modern than this total sickness, this lateness and overexcitement of the nervous mechanism, Zizek is the postmodern thinker par excellence, the Mesmer of postmodernity. In his thought all that the postmodern world requires most urgently is mixed in the most seductive manner,—the three great stimulantia of the exhausted, the brutal, the artificial and the innocent (idiotic).

Zizek represents a great corruption of thought. He has guessed that it is a means to excite weary nerves,—and with that he has made thought sick. His inventiveness is not inconsiderable in the art of goading again those who are weariest, calling back into life those who are half-dead. He is a master of hypnotic tricks, he manages to throw down the strongest like bulls. Zizek's success—his success with nerves and consequently with women—has turned the whole world of ambitious thinkers into disciples of his secret theory. And not only the ambitious, the clever, too ... Only sick thought makes money today; our big colloquia subsist on Zizek.

6.

7.

[....]

For the present I merely dwell on the question of style.— What is the sign of every literary hysteria? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the SENTENCE, the sentence reaches out and obscures the MEANING of the page, the page gains life at the EXPENSE of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole. But this is the simile of every style of hysteria: every time, the anarchy of atoms, disintegration of the psyche, "freedom of belief," to use moral terms,—expanded into a political theory, "equal jouissance for all." Life, equal vitality, the vibration and exuberance of life pushed back into the smallest forms, the rest poor in life. Everywhere paralysis, arduousness, torpidity or hostility and chaos: both more and more obvious the higher one ascends in forms of organization. The whole no longer lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial, an artifact. —

Zizek begins from a hallucination: not of ideas but of gestures. Then he seeks the semiotics of words for them. If one would admire him, one should watch him at work at this point: how he separates, how he gains small units, how he animates these, severs them, makes them visible. But this exhausts his strength: the rest is no good. [....] That Zizek disguised as a principle his incapacity for giving organic form, that he establishes a "dramatic style" where we merely establish his incapacity for any style whatever, this is in line with a bold habit that accompanied Zizek through his whole life: he posits a principle where he lacks a capacity (—very different in this respect, incidentally, from the old Kant who preferred a different boldness: wherever he lacked a principle he posited a special human "capacity" ...). Once more: Zizek is admirable and gracious only in the invention of what is smallest, in spinning out the details,—here one is entirely justified in proclaiming him a master of the first rank, as our greatest miniaturist in thought who crowds into the smallest space an infinity of sense and madness. His wealth of jokes, of tics, of the secrecies of crappy films spoils one to such an extent that afterward almost all other thinkers seem too serious.— If one would believe me one should have to derive the highest conception of Zizek not from what is liked about him today. That has been invented to persuade the graduate students, from that we recoil as from all too impudent fresco. Of what concern to us is the agaçant brutality of the Lenin book. Or the circus of ISR? Whatever of Zizek's thought has become popular also apart from the university shows dubious taste and corrupts taste. The “Christian Turn” I suspect of bonhommerie; the endlessly recycled examples are noise about nothing; the Sublime Object of Ideology furnished the first example, only too insidious, only too successful, how one hypnotizes with books (—I do not like whatever book has no ambition beyond persuasion of the nerves). But quite apart from the magnétiseur and fresco-painter Zizek, there is another Zizek who lays aside small gems: our greatest melancholiac in thought, full of glances, tendernesses and comforting words in which nobody has anticipated him, the master in tones of a lugubrious and drowsy happiness ... A lexicon of Zizek's most intimate phrases, all of them short things of five to fifteen measures, all of it insights nobody knows ... Zizek has the virtue of hystericals, pity — — —

8.

9.

10.

[....]

[....] Above all, graduate students understand him. The two words "Real" and "act" were really sufficient: they induced a state of incomparable well-being in them. It was not with his thought that Zizek conquered young student, it was with the "idea":—it is the enigmatic character of his thought, its playing hide-and-seek behind a hundred symbols, its polychromy of the ideal that leads and lures these youths to Zizek; it is Zizek's genius for shaping clouds, his whirling, hurling, and twirling through the air, his everywhere and nowhere, the very same means by which Lacan formerly seduced and lured them!— In the midst of Zizek's multiplicity, abundance, and arbitrariness they feel as if justified in their own eyes—"cured"—. Trembling, they hear how the great symbols approach from foggy distances to resound in his thought with muted thunder; they are not impatient when at times things are gray, gruesome, and cold. After all, they are, without exception, like Zizek himself, related to such bad weather, Lacanian weather! Lacan is their god: but Lacan is the god of bad weather ... They are quite right, these graduate students, considering what they are like: how could they miss what we others, we halcyons, miss in Zizek—la gaya scienza; light feet; wit, fire, grace; the great logic; the dance of the stars; the exuberant spirituality; the southern shivers of light; the smooth sea—perfection ...

11.

— I have explained where Zizek belongs—not in the history of philosophy. What does he signify nevertheless in that history? The emergence of the idotic in philosophy: a capital event that invites thought, perhaps also fear. In a formula: "Zizek and Bush"— Never yet has the integrity of philosophers, their "authenticity," been put to the test so dangerously. One can grasp it with one's very hands: great success, success with the masses no longer sides with those who are authentic,—one has to be an actor to achieve that!— [....] Zizek's stage requires one thing only—Americans! ... Definition of the American: obedience and long legs ... It is full of profound significance that the arrival of Zizek coincides in time with the arrival of the "Empire": both actualities prove the very same thing: obedience and long legs.— Never has obedience been better, never has seducing. Zizekian disciples in particular are worthy of an age that posterity will call one day, with awed respect, the classical age of war. Zizek understood how to command; in this, too, he was the great teacher. He commanded as the inexorable desire to himself, as lifelong self-discipline: Zizek who furnishes perhaps the greatest example of self-violation in the history of thought [...]

12.

The insight that our actors are more deserving of admiration than ever does not imply that they are any less dangerous ... But who could still doubt what I want,—what are the three demands for which my wrath, my concern, my love of philosophy has this time opened my mouth?

That the theater should not lord it over thought.
That the actor should not seduce those who are authentic.
That philosophy should not become an art of lying.

JOSEF K.

"Fuck You America"

Zabriskie Point - a movie with a curious history. Staring two non-actors, Mark Frechette as "Mark" and Daria Halprin as "Daria" - the latter later would go on to marry Dennis Hopper, and and five later Frechette would be dead in jail after a conviction for a bankjob.

Almost universally derided at the time - by critics who saw in it a regression from Antonioni's supposedly more accomplished previous film Blow Up, by the American establishment - who did all they could to prevent Antonioni from making it in the first place, by American New Left - who felt that the portrait Antonioni painted of them was a patronising one. In London: "Pointless" sneered Private Eye.

In any case: when everybody hates something, usually that means there is something to it. I saw Zabriskie Point on Sunday, and thought it was a masterpiece.

Patronizing, said the New Left - because Antonioni depicts them as confused and naive dreamers. Well, no-one likes being slandered as a child - but... wasn't this the essence of their heroism? "I don't want to grow up," sang Tom Verlaine, "It's just too much contradiction" - and at the end of Zarathustra, we find in the philosopher the figure of the child.

Near the beginning of the film, a casual and stupid act of cop brutality turns Mark into a militant. Near the end of it, and another one kills him. Not really for any reason, not even on account of any particular malice.

Rather, just simply because this is the way the brutal stupid cop mind works.

"There's a thousand sides to everything," says Daria to Mark at one point "not just heroes and villains. So anyway... so anyway... so anyway... so anyway ought to be one word. Like a place or a river. "Soanyway River." But she's wrong - and after finding out from listening to the radio about the death of Mark she dreams of destroying the whole fucking thing - starting with the expensive desert house, where her boss is negotiating a business deal to turn Death Valley into cash.

An extended sequence follows: a desperate fantasy of annihilation. And when Zabriskie Point was first released to its US audience, most of it was cut - Antonioni apparently had wanted to finish with an image of an airplane writing in the sky "Fuck You America!" I know he didn't get his wish, but what the final frame of Zabriskie Point now is - I don't know that either. Because the print I saw had been corrupted, and cut-out in the middle - so that after the apocalypse, the last image that I saw was a close-up of Daria, and then nothing. And it doesn't matter. Because the point still holds. Fuck you America.

The darker days of me and him

She'd written to him recently- something vague one tired evening in the city staring pale and polluted at the screen. She sent the message and forgot about the response. Perhaps she wasn't really writing to him at all; she hadn't for a long time. He read the message in the mountains where the snow was beginning to thaw. He didn't know how to reply; thought of the last time they'd met: Her red unfolded umbrella spokes dripped on the concrete floor of the bar. It was Christmas and they'd both become strangers to the town. She was wearing her white winter coat, her hair had grown long and he could see the dark dye was beginning to fade. He bought two whiskies (with ice) and sat at the table by the stairs watching her as she stood in the glare of the half-empty juke box they'd danced to all those times before looking for something to play. He rolled a cigarette and began to speak about Jean Paul Sartre. When they talked it seemed as though they were both straining to hear one another across the table. Occasionally their eyes met. His were blue. As he spoke she watched his chapped lips and thought of how she had hated him, had told him as much that night in the garden, drunk and she thought of that strange cold kiss planted on her forehead the morning after, so dry it made her shudder- But still she was laughing and said something she remembered about Simone de Beauvoir-a photograph of her and him and a typewriter. She spoke fast. She always spoke fast with him; spoke fast or not at all. And laughed, laughed too loudly (she was well aware) but somehow she just couldn't stop. Stop. They were getting drunk by now and walked up the hill to the cafe she had visited so often as a child. The band were playing Sara by Bob Dylan- 'I laid in the dune and looked at the sky'- He smiled remembering how, when they first met, she had told him that she couldn't sleep without listening to Shelter from the Storm (or was it Tangled up in Blue?) He didn't ask her, poured himself another glass of wine while she went to the bathroom- 'it's all so clear I'll never forget Sara, Sara loving you is one thing---'- She stood at the sink running hot water from gold taps watching as the pink liquid soap washed slowly off her hands. She stood there for a long time, too long and avoided her eyes in the mirror.

Free Translation into English From a Language I don't Know

The illusion of the past is dead:
That I was kissed by love.
And dead too is that cruel promise,
Of the life that it gave us.

With all the candour of our souls,
We thought that we were holy.
And never stopped ourselves, and thought,
About how crazy our love really was.

Mueren ya las ilusiones del ayer
Que sacié con lujurioso amor
Y muere también con sus promesas crueles
La inspiración que un día le brindé.

Con candor el alma entera yo le dí
Pensando nuestro idilio consagrar
Sin pensar que ella lo que buscaba en mí
Era el amor de loca juventud

Funny Ha Ha

Last night at Middlesex Universty, Alenka Zupancic gave a cool and subtle talk on the "The Meaning of Life in Bergson's Theory of Comedy." Working to subvert Bergson's vitalism with an artillery of Hegelian and Lacanian concepts, Zupancic's took pains to distinguish between the function of a joke, such as Freud defined it, which she recognized in terms of a discrete utterance that works in terms of regulatory social function "within a parish" and the function of the comic, which she sought to understand in terms of a more universalist phenomenon.

Zupancic drew special reference to the comic terrain of mimicry. Why, she asked, is mimicry funny? And why is it more funny the more accurate it is? As Zupancic understood it, the reason for this is because what mimicry draws attention to the fact that the "original" gestures of the subject supposedly being imitated are in fact themselves already imitations.

This example expressed the basic gist of what Zupancic was trying to do to Bergson. To be specfic: Zupancic perceived in Bergson a dualistic thinker working inside a conceptual matrix whereby an original, elan vital, unable to express itself in its full plenitude through the morbid machine of language, leaves a anxious gap behind itself in its various crude attempts to do so, which then themselves in turn demand laughter for the sake of decorum. Against this, Zupancic counter-claimed that it is in fact only through the morbid machine of language that any kind elan vital can emerge at all.

The structure, as she sees it, is this: an original, phantasmatic one is split into two by the beginning of a comic sequence. This sequence then operates to reveal through construction - by carrying the terms of this original splitting through different situations and scenarios whereby it is explored from a variety of angles. The crucial point is that, for a sequence to remain comic, this original splitting itself must be carried through it, so that throughout the time of comedy it is a split-one being carried through, rather than simply a plethora of new and accumulating distinct and seperate ones being independently juggled. This would just be nothing. As Zupancic understood in sonic terms, the point was follows: not a distinct number of proliferating cries, but rather, a single cry being constituvely split by silence, from itself, over time.

Question time, and Bartleby came up, in something like the following way: "What happens when something stops being funny, and simply becomes disturbing?" Good question, I thought, and I thought of William Burroughs. Apparently, the New York Public Library has just purchased his archives.

Something Kerouac once said: "Naked Lunch- a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork."