The Last Days of Israel

In the face of the continuing castrastrophe being wrought in Lebanon by Israel, words fail.

The Israeli military is now actively engaged in war-crimes of the most severe magnitude - so much is already obvious to everyone with eyes. But Israel will not look itself in the eye, for fear of seeing staring back the same murderous gaze that constructed the Shoah.

Israel has dreamed of Auschwitz every night since it was founded. Beneath this dream, this dark desire: it wants to be annihilated. It wants to be annihilated, because it wants to stop dreaming this terrible dream, and cannot imagine another way out. In a flat voice emptied of affect, over and over and over again, Israel tells itself this: "We must repeat the Shoah. We must repeat the Shoah to end the Shoah; the Shoah must never happen again, it must happen again to make certain it never happens again."

Israel has become a prisoner of a symbolic structure drained of all movement. It has elevated the Shoah into more than an origin; it has become a telos. The pure incarnation of everything which Israel already is, and would secretly like to become: a pitiless death-machine. Everything Israel despises, transformed into an implacable alterior gaze, which by hook or by crook it will realize.

The building of the settlements, the engineering of Hezbullah, the brutal occupation of Palestine. The current campaign in Lebanon is only the latest iteration of a seemingly endless series of suicide missions carried out by an Israeli state, fanatically desperate to make itself a tyrant, to be destroyed as such, as all tyrants eventually are, in the secret hope which Israel still clings to, but cannot admit: that there is justice on Earth, and that God will dispense it for his chosen people.

This deal with God: deliver us from this evil that we have become. Let us be driven into the sea, and let the sea part for us, as it did once before - this time, let us let Pharaoh go: this time, the Messiah could really arrive.

Let Israel become-Messiah, and finally make itself worthy of the title it has assumed for itself: King of the Jews. Let the chosen people choose to become a truly free people, by abandoning this state of exception which is making them slaves to a past charred to cinders, and a future soaked in blood. Israel must sacrifice this compulsion to sacrifice, it must kill the korban itself. Let the sectarian Jewish state end, in a universal rebirth, let Israel become the most universal state of all.

In the silence you don't know

The estimable Dominic Fox responds with typical brilliance to my post on Beckett. He acutely notes that the ecstatic moment in which desire becomes drive presents itself as an experience of subjective destitution, and further draws from this the consequential conclusion that authentic judgement must proceed according to a standard of failure, as opposed to a standard of success.

The full radicalism of this point cannot be underestimated, since nothing less than knowledge itself is founded upon it. In the final analysis, knowledge is nothing less than the integral symptom of failure, born from the root error and madness that is called life on this planet.



Knowledge itself has never tired of repeating this point, but has rarely been heard. Failure folds back upon itself, rendering itself in the process impossible. Failure, then a failure to communicate this failure, and then a failure to communicate even that... In this way, the history of the world presents itself as an vast and inexorable accumulation of shit.

Knee-deep in filth and stained with blood, sick with nausea and recognizing itself as such, materialist philosophy, the purest and most perverse expression of this world, makes a simple wager: that there is a hidden affinity between the future and the past, such that the problem, which is never the same, is really always the same - like music.

Believe it or not

"For Ripley," writes K-punk, "only the big Other exists."



The only question is, what precisely does it want?

Between the invisible man Ripley of the The Talented Mr. Ripley, and the man-of-wealth-and-taste Ripley who emerges in the later books, Ripley undergoes a definite alteration in his libidinal economy. Initially, he had appeared as dominated by a generic anxiety, oscillating between existential and status-related poles. However, when Ripley joins the leisure class, this existential element more-or-less drops away, becoming replaced by a new feeling: boredom.

As K-punk puts it, comparing Ripley to Brian Ferry:

Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure, those exercises in learning and unlearning of accent and manners, are Pop’s equivalent of The Talented Mr Ripley. The clothes, the bearing and the voice are faked, but not yet perfectly. The roots still show, and the painful drama of becoming something you are not still carries an existential charge. Stranded and the subsequent albums, meanwhile, are the equivalent of the later novels; here, success is assumed, and the threats to the tasteful but banal idyll come from ennui, a certain unease with contentment, and - most ominous of all - the danger of the past returning. The vapid bucolia of Roxy's Avalon - recorded when Ferry was himself married to an heiress and living on a country estate – would be the perfect soundtrack to Ripley puttering around in...Belle Ombre, with his wife, Heloise.

Between status-anxiety and boredom, the two sides of the Big Other, the former in a sense the Left deviation, and the latter the Right one, from the splitting in the centre which amounts to the subject itself. It is this splitting which is ultimately the the cause of the existential anxiety which serves - in a displaced form - for the fundamental motive force of Ripley. In respect to it, his basic psychic strategy consists of transmigrating it into the sign-language of status, so as to master it.

But this strategy ultimately fails - by it, Ripley manages to acquire only the material trappings of success; success itself eludes him. K-punk nominates Avalon, equally Once in a Lifetime by the Talking Heads could serve as the Belle Ombre soundtrack here, "And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife/And you may ask yourself - well, how did I get here?"

In the case of Ripley, in fact we already know this, as K-punk points out, "by killing Dickie, Tom ‘earns’ his place in the unproductive leisure class... The difference between Tom the common thief and con artist and Tom the member of the leisured elite is a successful act of violence."

But how successful really was this act anyway? "'What Tom does fear is unmasking; not merely the unmasking of himself as Dickie or even the unmasking of himself as a killer but the unmasking of his lack of a real self and therefore his self-perceived inadequacy in the face of others - there is no appreciable difference between fear of discovery for his tax scam or for his murders. His main fear is that of socially not quite making the grade."

Two questions emerge here. First, who is grading, and precisely what is being graded? Second, why does this tribunal still remain sitting subsequent to Ripley's succesful entrance into the leisure class?

In fact, the key concept here is perhaps better expressed not as existential anxiety, but rather performance anxiety. The very special delirium of Ripley is that, effectively, he is being judged by the big Other on precisely how well he performs the part of Ripley. Either, the big Other states, the scenography is not glamorous enough - as is the case for the status-anxious Talented Mr. Ripley, or else, there is not enough action - the dilemma that plauges the ennui-filled later Ripley.

The major point here is two-fold. First, Ripley can never ultimately win, even as he equally cannot really lose, since there is no ultimate criteria that the judging big Other really depends upon. Rather, it only just enjoys passing judgement, and hence will tend to employ - like a perfect Deleuzian - whatever material is ready-to-hand, and fit for the circumstances. In this way, Ripley's problem is actually not that he does not possess a real self, but rather the opposite one, that his self is much too real, it has made real by the ceaseless dissociated scrutiny he himself has placed it under. This leads on to the second point: Ripley's problem is ultimately all our problem. What better expression could there be of ceaseless externalized judgement of your very ability to be yourself, than our modern risk society, in which enjoyment itself has become a duty, and you can be anything you like, and indeed, will have have to be, so long as it pays.

The Perfect Computer

The perfect computer: the idea of an infinite prediction machine, more or less unable, and constitutively so, to calculate the effect of prediction itself: the problem that, at a certain logical point, the computer will have to compute the effect of a prediction upon itself, the prediction-effect of predicting a prediction.

Here is your moebius strip, the key point here is that this algorithim goes on forever, entering into a dreadful, dreamlike mirroring of itself; it is a spiral, a labyrinth, a mise-en-abime.



The irony here is that this machine really exists: it is called the Oedipus Complex, after the immammorial myth-man who gave monstrous birth to it. What was it precisely which drove Oedipus mad?

The mere brutal fact that he murdered his father, and married his mother? But of this he was entirely innocent - he did not desire this outcome, and could not have foreseen this.

Instead, perhaps it was a much more terrifying, evil unstoppable thought, that he could not live with: the very fact that he had somehow been compelled to discover this fact, and thus destroy his life and hence the lives as well of everybody around him: he was guilty, but not guilty, guilty, but not guilty, guilty, but not guilty - love me, love me not.

Like a marionette - all of this written, in blood, in the stars, since the beginning of time.

Writing as Drive

In the late nineteenth century, Baudelaire defined modernity as “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent,” – at the time this statement was revolutionary; but does it still remain revolutionary today?

It is not easy to tell, the orient has altered; the class that Baudelaire stood against has long since ceased to exist. The high-capitalist world of the nineteenth century European Bourgeoisie; triumphant, optimistic and confident of sustained inexorable rule has passed into history, become an immemorial golden age for all those necromantics who would worship the dead, just like Rome, Florence, Athens, a ghost civilization of a distant past epoch.

In the immediate aftermath of World War I, facing an organized mass socialist movement which had already claimed Russia, and was making key gains in Germany, the European Bourgeoisie were forced to decisively abandon their cultural values to preserve their political power; goodbye now to genteel decorum and refined rarefied manner, even skin thin as it was. Twentieth century fascism and our contemporary control societies have been the result of this sacrifice; the childish innocence that the modern west pleads against these phenomena is a spectacular lie.



In prizing contingency and immanence, Baudelaire had sought to manoeuvre against the spectacularly anachronistic aesthetic of his own epoch – he wanted to confront the false modesty of a demure Bourgeoisie, that could not stop speaking in classical tongues, with the shock of contemporary style - this as a deliberate strategy, an artistic Trojan horse, by means of which the world-denying Bourgeois would be forced to acknowledge - in the real terms of the present, the effects of the constitutive violence they wreaked upon the world, and upon which they depended.

In these terms, Baudelaire makes good on a strange, but nonetheless certain affinity spanning decades and genres, between himself and Wittgenstein. They both sought to take the object of thought back to the ground of social practice, they both came to reject direct political action as a viable means towards this goal, and as such both of them - each in his own individual, but nonetheless similar way – ultimately serve to shed light on the same basic issue: namely, that the real problem is not at all to take the sublime and fantastic back to the concrete, and thus there to kill it, but rather to demonstrate how the concrete itself gives birth to the fantastic sublime – as Hegel concludes the Phenomenology, citing Schiller,“from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for Him his own infinitude."



In fact, Baudelaire - and Wittgenstein too – clearly both already knew this, their own sublime and fantastic creative productions testifying as much, but more to the point, in fact, they each both declared it outright. Wittgenstein ends the Tractatus by assigning the last word to the silent supracognitive force of his own foundational principle; Baudelaire speaks in the second half of his famous quote of eternal and immutable qualities – suggesting that these transcendental elements finally join hands with the contingent and fleeting in the domain of art.

In fact, both these of two separate and distinct formulations - the silent on the one hand, the aesthetic on the other - are both equally insufficient, with the real general protocol belonging in truth to an act, neither heroic nor brilliant – although in another way, both of these things - but rather instead only just faithful to an anxiety recognized as more than just individual, this is to say, universal.

This is the proper meaning and value of Beckett, the Beckett ceaselessly cited who cannot, must, will go on – this resolution, equating to much more than mere stoicism; amounting to a kind of beautiful and stolen freedom. In this instance, which might be any instance whatever, Beckett realizes his own impotence, his own irrelevance, his own spurious stupidity, but despite it all, he steals himself and continues. In this specific case, continues to write - the truth that Beckett expresses here occurs at an immanent textual moment, relating immediately to further textual production, but – contra all vulgar Derrideans, who would genuflect before language - this is not the important point, which is rather the following: what Beckett decides here, in this phrase, in this moment, elevates writing - elevates it by subtracting from it, manoeuvring thus on this basis to change it from an exalted activity – vulnerable on such a basis to the implacably reactionary superego, into an incidental and cool generic procedure of truth.



“I can’t go on, I must go on, I’ll go on,” – the key term is this middle one, temptation switches sides here, becomes a temptation to quit, from the original temptation to move, which had in fact had spurred the initial beginning, at some point before this phrase even has begun to be seen. In other words, taking leave from a personal and idiosyncratic pathology, Beckett has become unable to proceed on this basis, for the reason that this basis now seems pathetic and weak against the tremendous weight of the work he has done, which threatens to explode language itself. The excess of this supremely immodest consequence is now oppressing the writer in an insistent and authoritative voice: “Who am I to say these things, do these things, who I am to write in this ridiculous way?” The genius of Beckett is he realizes the answer, “I am nobody at all – and for the very reason, the reason that I am nobody at all, I am anyone – and since I am anyone, I will go on, with this axiom, to serve as my watchword: because somebody could.”

This is the task for contemporary writers, writers in the most generic sense of that term, those who would be modernists, those who would create their own lives - word by word, mark by mark, point by point: to realize that, in this very act, one becomes something less than a writer, a writer in the sense of a fantastic identity, but acquires at the same time a prize a great deal more precious – namely, writing, and not just mere writing, in the terms of expressions and scrawls, but instead, more than this: writing as truth. In the instant where you would say that you are not equal to such a task, that it is too much for you, remember this, and only this: the wretched of this earth walk with you.

Ten to One

Ten to one!
Ten to one!
Time for the IDF,
To have some fun,
They like big bangs,
And have big guns,
And have big bombs
To drop,
On Lebanon!

Ten to one!
Ten to one!
Viva democracy!
Viva freedom!
Kill terrorists,
Kill everyone!
God bless Israel,
And Israeli guns!

Ten to one!
Ten to one!
Extra points,
For Arab children,
See if we can't,
Make them run,
And then kill their families,
In front of them!

Ten to one!
Ten to one!
This time in Beirut,
Next time in Tehran!
Just tell yourself,
They had it coming!
And remember -
Keep the score,
At ten to one!

In Beirut

Yona is tied to the bed by his wrists, still wearing his tags. Mina is smoking a cigar by the window, wearing only her underwear.

In Beirut: screaming children bleeding from burned and ruined faces, modern jets smashing medieval streets to shreds, an evil sky choked-up by thick black acrid smoke; all this is invisible. In the West: an eloquent commentator who has learned how to lie - and with a disabled daughter he loves and supports unconditionally - decries terrorist violence in a satellite newsroom.

Mina would like to castrate Yona, and feed it to him. In a way, Yona wants this too. But she does not do this – rather, just keeps looking sadly out the window, and Yona continues to feel sick with shame.

The room is hot and dusty. Mina drinks some water, and gives Yona some, and watches a cockroach scuttle across the floor.

In New York, I swallow three hundred sleeping pills, and slit my wrists in the bath because my lover has left me. Briefly, and fitfully, sinking into hot water cooling, I dream about some day in the future, the country house of some leader, long since retired, and now without security, with a knife against his throat, and then a short sharp swipe across his neck: we do not forget. Somebody calls an ambulance, they arrive in time, and I spend the next two weeks recovering in a private hospital, paid for by my parents.

In East Hastings, a summer cottage is hit by lightning and catches fire; it burns to the ground in a matter of minutes, killing a respectable couple. In Beirut, Mina takes off Yona’s pants and sucks on his cock, and then fucks him in his ass with her fist.

On Disturbing Writing

There is a certain style of writing that dominates theoretical discourse, both ideally and materially - sober, calm and clear, controlled and rational.

In effect - a kind of compassionate writing, a writing with a conscience, that considers feelings, that avoids creating anxiety. This writing wants to keep everything under control, strives to cause no unnecessary duress in the course of neutral pursuit of pure function, it dreams of carefully effacing from itself all traces of trauma, and signs of struggle. In serene moments, cool and collected, it compares itself to breathing: not a struggle, not a risk - rather the easiest, simplest, and most natural act in the world.

The value of this style is obvious - communication is better helped by it, concepts better clarified by means of it. In this way, one could say that this style is a techno-style, an expression of the instrumental will towards an absolute telos of pure efficiency. On the other hand, the principle of reason underpinning this style is actually profoundly inefficient, in that it implicates itself in a meshwork of humanist assumptions, all of them ultimately unreal and misleading; constitutive communicative stylistic guidelines bleeding inexorably into constitutive communicative formalist laws, backed by sovereign superego force.

This is the limit-experience: in the midst the story is different, but still questionable – at root relating to a certain conservative impulse, difficult to dismiss on the one hand, but on other hand tending towards undeathly boredom. If enjoyment has turned into a disturbance, and secret prohibitions stand against disturbing writing, the normative need becomes to drain disturbance from writing, in order to render it sensible to the superego and hence permissible to the omniscient, omnipotent big Other.

The fundamental problem here though is that at root, writing is driven by precisely disturbance, and thus acceptance of a catechism of non-disturbance will quickly turn into a kind of masochistic hell, for the reason that it ultimately cannot be met, except by renouncing writing altogether - a choice which in fact would only make matters worse.

In this way, the following axiom seems necessary: the acceptance of both the possibility and fact of disturbing writing, while avoiding the elevation of a disturbing writing style into the position of a new normative. This axiom extends to encompass the acceptance of the possibility and fact of disturbing writing in theoretical discourse as well – to do otherwise would be to argue for maintaining class division with respect to the sacred realm of theory, which is untenable.

The radical consequence of such an axiom amounts to the following - a renewed license for formal experimentation in writing without reserve, beyond the limits of the pleasure principle – this is to say, into the disturbing. In fact, not just a license, but a call: for risk like this, exposure to terror like this, vulnerability like this.

Burroughs once stated that unless his writing could match the intensity of a bullfight, it was nothing. What writer today would dare to agree with him?

Paris 2006

The entire telos becoming less than clear, the question of the body starts begging ugly questions, such as: who I am in this space, what do I feel, what I am for?

In fact, the answer here is simple, the simple product of a drive that will not quit, that demands attention, affirmation, intention and elation - in short order and rapid succession.

In Paris, the image of an authentic avant-garde, neither burned nor silenced.

In the saddest landscape in the world, Julie - whose skin was beautiful and dark, and who was in any case too young. He met her on the train, and at that moment realized he was improving his command of this particular vocabularly.

his dream:
he is impotent, and worthless, she loves him anyway.

her dream:
she castrates him, and then afterwards they hold hands, licking snow cones, and feed him together to the birds in pieces.



In a weaker, or else stronger moment, they would have screwed each other in different cities until they had both starved to death.




Beckett had Joyce, and I have a master of my own to kill.

The fact is, at some point in time I decided to open my veins, and, amongst others, this was the result - I still do not know whether or not this decision was a good one.



Faye Dunaway, when Bonnie and Clyde came out, said: "You know, I just tried to give people what they wanted."

"Honey don't do that. You'll use up everthing you got trying to give people what they want."


We are recording here tonite.

Against Nomadism

“We are all nomads now,” declared Constant Nieuwenhuys in 1956, leaving the question open as to whether we should be entirely happy about this fact. Nomad also means fugitive, and a surveilance society with no need to take prisoners. Terrorist hearts, smart-tatooed skins, and no-use-for-a-mouth under this thousand year reich, except either for pledging allegiance, or swallowing sweetly the line – or else in flight on the surface of the cellular earth, encircled by spy satellites and predator drones.



In his book of the same name, and elsewhere as well, Paul Virilio has discussed the concept of polar inertia – in short, getting nowhere fast: the idea that under conditions of late capitalism our most blessed of all planets has reached a point of terminal velocity, and thus delivered itself into a glacial stasis: like the undead aviator Howard Hughes, impotent and friendless in the Desert Inn Hotel, surrounded by Mormons and watching endless repeats of Ice Station Zebra.
This sad fate, or something like it, is not just a freak insurrection of incidental desire pathology, but rather the natural and inevitable outcome of the kind of desperate lifestyle anarcho-nomadism Hughes served to herald, if not yet embody. The logic here is double - on the level of affect, the insatiable need for speed and cunt, on the level of the law, the elevation of boredom into an ethical principle. Hughes himself took these two different trips in sequence, thus at least managing to preserve a little personality along the way - his contemporary spiritual children, on the other hand, have fused them together, like a speedball.

Hence, the evil host of psychic car-wrecks, twisted mutant remades combining desperate exhibitionism with almost autistic affective flatness, which presently dominates our current necromantic society. This condition is exemplified by the reality television show Big Brother – an almost conceptually impossible production, which seems to have perfected the technique of sustaining grotesque inanity and rank psychosis, together, indefinitely, on the same basic unchanging and unwavering room tone sine-wave hum of total dreariness – a truly remarkable technical achievment.



Make no mistake: truly, what the Pyramids were to the Egyptians, and the Parthenon to the Ancient Greeks, Big Brother is to our own civilization – namely, the very incarnation of every value and desires it holds dear, the sacred place where those values and desires can be encountered at their purest. Contingency, flexibility, precarity – the battle hymn of the new reformed republic, where else can this tripartite ban of all modern thought be percieved so sublimely and perfectly as in the spectacular facility-of-exploitation provided to all participating media outlets by easily disposable, use-once-and-throw-away, non-celebrities, like the dirty hit stars of the syndicated screen?

“I admire Hughes,” Ballard once commented caustically, “above all for the casual way in which he closed the door on the world. Lying back on a couch with the blinds drawn, popping pills and worrying about fad diets…Hughes may well have been more in touch with reality than one assumes.” Under discussion here is a reality which, over the last thirty-eight years – since the Soixante-Huitard non-event - has systematically moved to assassinate truth whenever it has encountered it; worked to reduce love to sexuality and call this liberation; redefine science as wisdom – like tarot or astrology - and say this is spiritual progress; bury art under culture - and then claim that art can be anything; and replace politics with hysterical impotence – why not a sing a cute little song about it, and then we all will save Africa? Howard Hughes spent his last years in Las Vegas, carefully archiving his own urine – in many respects, this appears a cool move in relation.



1,2,3,4… The predatory and pathological James Bond, with a new girl on his arm in every movie, never the same, and yet somehow, always the same. It would not even be so tragic, if at least he was aware of his own imbilicity. Program for a revolutionary détournement of James Bond: James Bond is an old man, MI6 has dispensed with his services, he is shown visiting gay porno theatres, National Front pubs, losing a bet on a horse, losing his nerve over an actual encounter, picking fag butts off the street, sadly filling out a local election ballot for New Labour to stop a resurgent Respect in his local constituency, etc…The dreary endless stream of self-help manuals written by gimcrack gurus in sharkskin suits, instructing the existentially impoverished how to actualize themselves and unveil reality. If they only really did, and saw the void, then this would be be something. But then again, not something comforting - at least not immediately. Mom and dad in essence masks tend to make for better sales, in our sad age where people prefer the familiar to the Real. The monotonous repetitition of the same insipid and irrelevent pseudo-intellectual journalese polemics every time the insipid and irrelevent Turner Prize is announced – “But is it art?” the crowd cry as one, in an orgy of strident individualism and clear-thinking dissent. The Stuckists are boring and stupid, but at least they have this much right: 2001 winner Charles Saatchi, 2002 Sir Nicholas Serota, 2003 Sir Nicholas Serota…The steady proliferation of radically infantile-alternative groups - such as CIRCA, such as the Space Hijackers, speaking in the borrowed rhetoric of their betters, and already dedicated on the level of their manifesto commitments to bravely and resolutely changing absolutely nothing. This, and then on the other side of the hyperpassive/hyperactive divide, the idiot fascist thugs of the state-subsidized Black Block, actually actively fighting to change nothing - what is especially depressing, is that not all of these people are cynical agents, some of them are really sincere.
The central problem with all of this is expressed neatly by the slogan that Burning Man (perhaps the supreme example of contemporary anarcho-nomadic yuppie smugness) has proudly taken for its mantra: leave no trace. Intended to express a certain kind of basic sense of ecological care, in fact it denotes the opposite – a kind of bloody-minded apathetic stupidity, since (as is abundantly clear to everyone with eyes) the continued existence of the Burning Man festival - with its much-trumpeted gift economy, self-proclaimed radical self-reliance, self-satisfied radical self-expression - depends completely on the material surplusses generated by superefficient American capitalism. To drive to the desert, take acid, and fuck is all very well – but to claim it is inherently ethical is frankly ridiculous.



The point here is not to hypocritically castigate complicity itself – to a certain extent, living where we do, and as we do, we are all complicit - such is the state. Rather, the point here instead, in a certain sense, is simply to point this fact out. In opposition both to bourgeois morality, always so careful and keen to establish that the source of the evil resides in this inaccessible outside, as well as vulgar nomadism, this phony, becoming-capital dream of ultimately somehow locating oneself in this outside, we need to ruthlessly assume the full implications of Gandhi’s famous maxim: “Become the change you want to see in the world.”

Against the Space Hijackers

In the insipid spirit of the sixties, and slavish genuflection before poorly understood metaphysics, since 1999 the London anarchist group the Space Hijackers have been involving themselves in a series of self-consciously anti-capitalist actions, whilst all the while spouting pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric, and bad poetics of transgression.



In mock heroic terms both of distance and irony, they proclaim, “Our group is dedicated to battling the constant oppressive encroachment onto public spaces of institutions, corporations and urban planners. We oppose the way that public space is being eroded and replaced by corporate profit making space.”

The utter poverty of ambition this statement evinces is simply staggering - here is a group smugly declaring that they are dedicated to battling, and then saying no more. Not only does this conception lack even the very notion of victory, but moreover the radical thrust here in fact expresses a fundamental hostility to the even the very possibility of such an outcome. This group expressly declare that they dedicated to battling, if victory was attained than battle would have to cease, thus insofar insofar as this group truly is dedicated to battling, it logically follows that they must also be dedicated to somehow preventing victory at any cost – whether by hook or by crook, finally no distinction is necessary.

This point is not just clever rhetorics, and this same kind of sad, self-defeating structure – democracy, contingency, blahblahblah - is by no means unique to the Space Hijackers alone. We encounter it again in the work of Simon Critchley, and in fact Critchley himself is just the most intelligent exemplification of a much more widespread tendency – namely, the sweetly sick undead Derridean brood, still indefinitely deferring their slouching towards Bethelehem to be born as we speak.

In the Ethics of Deconstruction, Critchley puts it like this, “within the suspension of choice, within the undecidability of a double reading, a certain decision or event announces itself, a heteronomous moment of alterity that interrupts the text of philosophy and maintains itself as an interruption or blind spot within philosophical or critical discourse. This event is the ethics of deconstructive reading.”

To put it briefly, the problem with this is not that it is wrong. The problem is – to paraphrase Pauli – is that it is not even wrong. Unwilling to committ to anything beyond a certain specious fidelity to his master, what Critchley is saying here effectively amounts to nothing at all - it cannot even be criticized, since it carefully avoids making anything even close to a statement.



We are hereby invited to consider the ethics of deconstructive reading in terms of an interruption of radical alterity into a hithereto more or less homogenous philosophical text – an interruption that, we are told, maintains itself as a blindspot. The problem here is – how exactly can this be an ethics? It is heteronmous, it seems to issue no demands, it appears as entirely circular in both content and form, it explicitly positions itself as precisely leading nowhere, and it seems to come and go more or less mystically - essentially beyond the scope of any conscious thinking - according entirely to its own devices. Clearly, there is a certain vital reality to this picture – but that is entirely the problem, since the point of ethics is not to get back to brute reality, but rather to escape from it, while at the same time still remaining inside it – this is to say (and I am not afraid of this phrase) take a transcendental position upon it.

In the name of alterity, Critchley evades this demand, and from here we are only one short step away from the axiom of sophism par excellance – namely, that such an evasion itself constitutes truth. Smiling vacantly, blinking their big stupid eyes, the Space Hijackers blandly put it thusly, “We are not attempting to produce some kind of revolutionary other, which is almost destined to fail.”



This basic squint-eyed, mean-streak of principled conservativism makes for an especially ugly sight when it is combined with self-serving rhetorical radicalism – in cases like these, it goes beyond just a bad smell: one can almost already taste the rotting undead flesh, as it comes lurching idiotically towards you.

Could there be a Television of the Real?

Series 7: The Contender is arguably one of the most depressing films ever made. It blends together the brutalist aesthetic of Michael Haneke, and the subject of reality television, producing as a result unremitting queasy despair. Nonetheless, it does at least succeed in making itself clear, in making clear the nature of the fundamental problem with reality television. Namely, the problem that the production design strictures of reality television imposes, upon those who choose to participate in it, this certain immutable and unchangable frame finally not subject to subversion, critique or contestation of any kind.



This was the fundamental mistake made first by Germaine Greer, and then subsequently by George Galloway, in the flirtations of each with reality television - both believed that they could détourne reality television by means of the power of their charisma alone.

They should each have read Marx a little more closely, or Guy Debord for that matter - if they had, then they would have realized that such a strategy simply could not succeed. The major point here is an obvious one - as with all modern forms of spectacular domination, power in reality television belongs to those who control the temporal interval - this is to say, the final cut. It is irrelevent how charismatic you are on camera, so long as somebody else with a hostile agenda has the power to leave all of your brilliance on a cutting room floor.



This tragic fate is ultimately that of the young lovers of Series 7 as well, who near the end of the movie finally reject the artificial war-of-all-against-all frame, and recognize their real enemy - those who have imposed this frame upon them. Joining forces, they revolt - but the last laugh belongs to Capital. They are assassinated, a whitewash is enacted, and planning for "Series 8" has already begun.

Some Questions on Architecture This Course Will Hope to Answer

1. What is architecture? What is the ontology of architecture, and the architecture of ontology? The integral fantasy of architecture, the integral architecture of fantasy? What is the atom of architecture? The zero of architecture - upon what ground exactly does architecture stand? Is it even possible to speak of a singular architecture - is it not clearly the case that architecture is plural, that it is truth architectures? Or is this understanding a withdrawal already?

2. What dimension of time does architecture exist in, to what degree is architecture in a state of becoming? At one certain time an architecture was built - is this the corrrect understanding of how architecture constructs and sustains itself through a continuum? Static, solid, within the frame of a freeze? Or is it more like a text, swimming like a fish through a significant sea?

3. Is there a distinction, pace socialism before the fall of the Berlin wall, between architecture, and actually-existing architecture, and if so what might be this distinction? Furthermore what was the architecture of the Berlin wall anyway - did they built the wall, or did the wall build itself? Is architecture like sex, always-already embedded in attendent holistic processes of sexualistion, such that it is finally impossible to speak of discrete sexual acts, or is architecture rather monumental and priapic - somebody, the socius, erecting a substitute cock?

4. Is there gender in architecture? An architecture of gender? Masculine/feminine - since performance must be involved. From desire to drive - and could there be a queer architecture? Do we really want there to be?

5. What is the experimental in architecture really experiments in? Experiments with no control, under control, in control. What is the relation between architecture and utopia? What exactly is the architecture of no place at all?

The Situationists - Fifty Years On

Future City - the excellent new architecture exhibition at the Barbican, takes its leave from a point of extreme ambiguity: the double-edged Situationist critique of modernity and modernism, as it found expression through their more positive visions - specifically Guy Debord's psychogeography and Constant Nieuwenhuys' New Babylon. This former, the ur-philosophical praxis of urbanism. This latter, the incipient effort towards a concrete application model. No doubt, by this curatorial decision a certain ghost is invoked, a certain spectre established - specifically, in the anxious place of a kind of spiritual guiding star, for most of what later twentieth century architecture tried to invent and discover.



Is this the right spectre? Clearly, other choices also were possible. Experimental utopianism twists and turns through the graveyard of history - from the avenging angel of the Communist Manifesto, to the millions living who never died of fascist future Berlin, perhaps even possibly the fevered, invisible architecture of Daniel Paul Schreber.

Nonetheless, assigning the origin here to the Situationists is a smart move: it presents something crucial, and presents it clearly. Namely, the insight already had by Hegel: that the essence of pure (mis)perception is nothing to do with particular, subjective positions distorting things from the outside, but rather relates to a line of spectacular ambivalence, which is already internal to the objective movement of history itself.

After all - who really were the Situationists? Amongst other identities, nothing if not for Hegelians, but then just like in noir, this point rebounds back - who were they really working for? What were they really fighting for? This strange combination of Bolshevism, Anarchism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Urbanism - Lautreamont to the right of them, and Lenin to their left? The likelyhood is that they did not know themselves - despite the fact that they, and especially Debord, saw almost everything else with truly stunning clarity - for instance, Debord's 1988 mature masterpiece Comments on the Society of the Spectacle is more deeply penetrating on the question of the state control mechanisms of the "War on Terror" than any account published since.



Hal Foster today claims an art-critical context for the Situationist legacy - and on the basis affirms The Society of the Spectacle as one of the great singular masterpieces of twentieth century art-critical literature. This assertion is not ridiculous, but rather ironic and tragic. Debord himself dismissed art criticism a mere second-degree spectacle, and remained terrified throughout his career of his work being recuperated by it.



Marx already knew that although men make their own histories, they cannot choose their circumstances. This same point extends to legacies, and influence also - that which is assimilated, the idea succesfully passed on to a new generation. Clearly, some of what Debord and the Situationists passed on was not what they would have wanted to pass on - indeed, was reactionary, even harmful. As the anarchist magazine Freedom put it in 1975, 'Situationism seems to have “caught on” in the U.S.A., particularly in California, that playground of the ideologies...The American situationists seem to be repeating the pattern of mutual exclusion and criticism as occurred in Europe, and to be employing a fairly impenetrable Hegelian vocabulary.'

The deepest irony of all here is that Debord himself expressly and repeatedly rejected the very idea of "Situationism" - as he understood it, this was 'a meaningless term improperly derived from [the idea of a situationist]. There is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationists.'

[This post kicks off the different maps new month-long special series of posts on architecture and related matters emerging out of the current "Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956 - 2006" exhibition now being shown at the London Barbican - who should send me a check for my trouble immediately. Zizek at Birkbeck is now over - those still with Slovenian-shaped monkeys on their backs are advised to check-out Padraig's excellent photo-montage transcription of "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" at Subject Barred.]

Pere Jouissance has Left the Building

Transferred now to a new location for his final session (the call and response show) Zizek undaunted nonetheless picks up from where he left off last time.

‘Before beginning questions,” he says, “I just want to go back over question asked yesterday, “Where is Program?”’


‘Now, what I want to know is – why do people expect a program from someone like me? Because you know, not even Marx ever really offered program, all he did was criticize. And even Lenin – okay, he made detailed plans, but when time actually came, if you study his works closely, you realize that in actuality he did the opposite of what he said he was going to do.’

‘So I think my duty here is to step back, and ask the question, “What exactly is implied by very expectation of program itself?’

‘Richard Rorty, whose work I respect very much, I think he is very much like – and I mean this in good way – Left-Liberal Ayn Rand, a few years ago he made claim in his book Contingency, Solidarity, Irony, that philosophy basically doesn’t matter, that it is always instantly laid to one side when any real issue of importance comes up.’

‘Now – I do not agree with this, but nonetheless it must be admitted: Rorty has point. I give you example of Habermas and Derrida – for years, story was like, “Oh! They hate each other!” – but then actually, you know, whenever any serious political matter came up, they would always lay aside differences be on same side.’

‘This make me think, that their differences were not really big differences in first place – and actually you know, both basically did share the same problematic, this is the problematic of openness to other.’

‘Habermas, Derrida, Levinas – in fact almost all contemporary intellectuals [what a move!] share this same problem. There are a few who don’t, such as Badiou. But majority I think do, and in regards to it basically take up political positions just a little bit left of left of centre. Now, this is exactly where I don’t want to be.’

Dicatorship of the Proleteriat, Again


‘To clarify further concept of dictatorship of proleteriat, imagine a dispute between a hermeneuticist, a deconstructionist, and an analytic philosopher. In this, what will be at stake is not just a contest between different positions, but rather the meaning of the whole field – the meaning of the dispute itself.’

‘This is because, ultimately every position has its own universality – no mater what, when I make claim, by very act of making claim, I impose alongside of claim universal frame. This, basically, is dictatorial level of discourse: already the struggle over the field of struggle itself.’

The Mad Poet of Llubjana

‘There is an idea in philosophy – that the essential problem is basically, how to de-reify language, how to return it to ground of concrete of life-world. But actually I think – and here I am good Badiouian – that in fact it is the opposite problem that is really the interesting one. This is, problem of how, with language, we can break out of concrete life-world.’

'Now, on this day – which is summer solstice, I think I would like to leave with quote from Shakespeare play, Midsummer’s Nights Dream. God, I am such good Englishman.’

More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

‘Now, idea here is about gap between ordinary reality and sublime other dimension – you notice this gap in each of figures Shakespeare discusses, but crucial point here is, you notice - is that with each figure, gap reduces each time.’

‘So first of all, you have madman, and in his case gap is experienced as pure mistake, misperception, one for the other. Then you have lover – and here idea is acceptance of reality, but also understanding there is immanent sublime dimension within this reality. And then finally you have poet – and here idea is creative transubstantiation, ability to intervene in sublime dimension, and so actually make something radically new appear in reality: what more can you ask for from a poet?’

Question Time

‘So,’ Costas kicks off the interrogation, ‘The obvious question is, madman, lover, poet - which one are you?”

‘Definitely a madman,” Zizek responds, “I depise poets. You know in America they talk about military-industrial complex? Well, in Yugoslavia we have military-poetic complex!’

‘Or perhaps I am mad poet – maybe division is in poetry itself. Between mad poets, and true poets – and by the way, I do not mad poet in Foucauldian, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful, they are all mad,” way – no, I mean mad, I mean they really are crazy.’

Psychoanalysis as global meta-theory of (its own) failure

‘One of the insights Freud had early was that psychoanalysis was always doomed to fail – that it could only really have ever succeeded in a society that did not required.’

I think this is true, but I also believe as well that it is almost for this very reason – and this was what I argued in my London Review of Books article – that the time of psychoanalysis has now arrived.’

‘Radical point here – which is against vulgar critics who say, “Oh! Psychoanalysis is ahistorical!” – psychoanalysis is specific social practice, it could just disappear. But I think that only way psychoanalysis can survive, is if it understands itself as global theory. If it tries to present itself as just one therapeutic option amongst others, it is lost.’

The Curse of the Mad Foucauldian

Mr. Irrelevent, wearing as always his trademark “Retail Advisor” T-shirt, stands up once more, and now for the final time, the fanfare roaring behind him.

“Professor Zizek,” he begins, “I have only three thousand and ninety seven small points. First, you claimed that panopticism involved fantasy. This is a total imposition. Foucault’s theory of panopticism in fact states the subjects are subjectively subjectivated according to subjectitified processes of subjectoid subjectification…”

‘Well,’ Zizek responds, ‘I will respond – I think you have just provided brilliant example of what I mean by Dictatorship of Proleteriat, because you didn’t confront me with arguments, but rather only with positions. But anyway, I will tell you – one thing I really love about Bentham is that he is ultimate anal economist, everything must be made useful. Do you know, in one of his texts – god, I am so predictable – he actually devises theory where what he was going to do, was he was going to take urine…’

‘Slavoj,’ Costas cuts short the madness, ‘I have question – let us say that my friend here is a Foucauldian, that he sees the world through a Foucauldian prism, and that this is his fundamental premise. You have your own fundamental premises that inform your own work, and one of the reasons perhaps why some people are moved to reject your work, is because they do not agree with your premises. Now, my question is – would you agree that there is a limit to rationality, that we can argue rationally only up to a certain point, but then beyond that point, basically we can only fight, there can only be war, there can only be different premises fighting.’

‘Well,’ Zizek puffed thoughtfully on his pipe. ‘I think there is a way out of this, which is - there is one certain presupposition that underpins this idea of argument – this is, presupposition that you have a certain premise, and that I have another. Now, as a Stalinist, I do not agree with this.’

From (the ethics of) Desire to (the ethics of) Truth

Woman in the front row, ‘What is the difference between Lacan’s ethics of desire, and Badiou’s ethics of truth?’

‘It is good question. But my view is that Lacan’s ultimate position is not really ethics of desire at all - but rather ethics of drive.’

‘When you read Lacan, you notice that most of his formulas are like theoretical Reals, coming up again and again. But in contrast to this, the famous formula from Lacan ethics seminar, “Do not give up on your desire,” – in fact Lacan only mentions this formula twice, and then more or less abandons it.’

‘My point here is that - far from Seminar VII, “Ethics of Psychoanalysis” being pinnacle of Lacan - in fact it is one of his most problematic works. What it amounts to, it is basically Lacanian formulation of pure ethics of signifier, ethics of “pure” desire. But very soon after this, you see Lacan drop it. So in Seminar XI, you have him saying, “The desire of the analyst is not a pure desire.” And this statement is very important – basically, it marks shift to focus on ethics of drive.’

‘The major effect of this shift is shift in theoretical status of love. In ethics of desire, Lacan idea is basically that love is imaginary, it is narcissistic illusion. But then in later Lacan, love becomes real, become way of fundamental opening into reality.’

‘Badiou’s critique of Lacan is basically critique directed against Seminar VII ethics of desire, his big problem is that ethics of desire essentially result in a transgressive model of the real – because of idea that is everything is just illusion, but occasionally amazing holy transfixion happens that we are powerless in face of, and it is like, ‘Aaooh!!”’

Lacklau

‘This brings us to Ernesto Laclau. Laclau move is basically, he transposes Lacan logic of desire into Gramscian idea of hegemony. So theory goes: there is primordial thing, primordial thing is always lost, what is left are just fragments – objets a, and then one of these then itself becomes substitute, stand-in for thing.’


‘Now, I appreciate this move. I think it is very clever. But nonetheless, I do not agree: my idea is that real logic in fact, is logic of drive, which is logic that states that the real object is not ‘lost object’ – but rather the very loss itself.’

‘To give you example, in Buddhism,’ Zizek sighs, ‘Always Buddhism – logic of drive would be Bodhisattva who is in Nirvana but wants to return to Samsara, but really for any reason, but just for sheer fuck of it, to screw things up.’

The dynamics of Capitalism, and the Realness thereof

‘Again – you know, many people get very nervous when I insist that capitalism is Real. But they are missing crucial point here! In Lacanian idea of the Real, the crucial point is: the Real can be changed!’

‘This is because, what Real essentially amounts to is Real of situation – and situation can be changed! Except – and this is key point – only from within, by means of universal exception. Because – and now I am starting to sound like vulgar Derridean - “outside” has always-already been incorporated into inside, in form of supplement.’

From Ethics to Politics…and Back!

Man three rows back, ‘Earlier in this series, you referred to the Russian doctor who insisted upon the truth..’

Zizek, ‘Zdanov Jewish doctors, yes…’

Man, ‘And you said that this represented a paradigm of the ethical act. But then later you said that the political goal was dictatorship of the proletariat. It seems a long way between these points. Could you help fill it in a little?’

‘I will explain – I believe in the idea of political suspension of the ethical. But only as an ethical act! The problem is that any direct ethicization of politics creates the worst disasters – because basically force of evil comes into play.'

'You see this in how West employs doctrine of Human rights in order to justify military interventions overseas. For example, shortly after invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair was asked questions in Parliament about difference between civilian casualties inflicted by terrorists, and civilian casualties inflicted by Western bombing. And he said that there was a difference, because the terrorists were trying to kill as many civilians as possible, whereas the West was trying to minimize civilian casualties. So you see the sophistry here – Blair is here invoking superior moral intentions of West as legitimate justification for West to murder civilians.’

Israel

Man on the left, ‘Professor Zizek, you’ve come out against the idea of academic boycott of Israel. I would just like to know what your precise position is – do you believe that the Israeli and the Palestinian sides are symmetrical?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘OK, but then what is your position – on the Wall, and so on.’

‘Well, my idea about Wall, which I have said before, is that fall of Berlin wall created proliferation of new walls, of which Israeli-Palestine wall – and solution to this, of course, is to destroy fundamental wall, which is class system.’

‘My problem with idea of Israel academic boycott, is I think it is playing with fire, idea of boycotting Jews – and I know it is not the same, that Israel is not Jews, and that many of supporters of academic boycott, Steven Jones and so on, and themselves Jews – but nonetheless, I still think it is very dangerous.’


‘The problem of how intellectuals should deal with power – classic example here being Giorgio Agamben refusing job in America because of US biometric tattooing program – shortly afterwards I remember having long telephone conversation with Alain Badiou, and he said - do you know, in France for years the French government has been using biometric processing for immigrants?”’

‘So Agamben action had a little bit of class privilege about it, you know, “Oh, now we intellectuals are affected; now it has gone too far.” And in fact, Agamben later came to regret what he did, feeling it did achieve desired effect, and so on – and point of this really is that ultimately matter of judgement, of choosing strategy carefully.’

‘Recently, I was invited to attend 2006 Jerusalem film festival. Now, I am not stupid, I know what the plan is - they invite me, and then I go, and then all of sudden I am booked in to do roundtable discussions, publicity and so on.’

‘This is what I said – I will agree to attend, but I will appear only at one place, screening of new Udi Aloni film, “Forgiveness” – which is kind of metaphysical fantasy of Palestinian victims of Israel, and Jewish victims of Holocaust, finding solidarity with each other in afterlife.’

Shall we hold hands?

Man a couple rows back, ‘Professor Zizek, in your book on Deleuze, and elsewhere as well, you came out very strongly against the idea of nomadism – can you just explain. Why does this idea trouble you so much?’

‘My problem with nomadism, is I think there is something obscene about it, about the conflation it makes between refugees and yuppies – because you know, you get these radical academics in America, who say things like they think they can understand refugee experience, because you know, they as well travel around a lot of time. I mean…I mean you know I am myself a nomad; I am travelling all the time. Once a month I go to Argentina, North America is like a local flight for me. But I am upper-middle class man, I stay in nice places, sometimes I even travel business class. I don’t think this is same experience as refugees.’

‘My other problem with idea of nomadism – is that capitalism is already nomadic! You know, idea that there is no longer job security, but that this is good thing, because it means we can perpetually reinvent ourselves and so on…’

‘But Professor Zizek, there is another idea of nomadism – nomadism as simply this kind of radical unhomeliness.’

‘Ah yes, I think I see what you mean. Because, of course, great irony is Deleuze himself, he never went anyway, he just stayed in Paris. Something like radical nomadism, as simply like experience of being in the love-world.’ Zizek hears the words as he says them, ‘Oh my god...’

Pere Jouissance Has Left the Building

‘The question of the role of the intellectual – but who am I? I am like that Zapatista guy, I am nothing, and you all speak through me.’

‘I think that one of the interesting things about our present situation is the popularity of figures like Dawkins, Hawking, and so on – this is symptom, I think, of fact that world we live in today, it almost forces us all to be philosophers. Things like stem cell research, virtual reality, which involve basic questions of philosophy – what is life, what is reality, and so on.’

‘People say, “Oh, there is no longer anymore idea of public intellectual, but I am not sure – has the role of the intellectual ever really been greater than it is today? The fact is, that our current condition calls for intellectuals, and they are turning up everywhere – only not yet in the right place.’


[Thank you, and goodnight.]