"Hizbullah has a history of learning from its mistakes"

Interesting article on Hezbullah in the LRB.

We Want Discipline

In his work on seduction theory, Jean Laplanche has suggested that masturbation plus fantasy amounts to the zero level of sex – an ambivilant fomulation, since with this imaginary aspect we are already slammed back into the realm of the social. In this way, Laplanche makes clear that sexual pleasure is never a matter of cool isolation, since to determine proper scenographies, private dancers must first acquire colourful costumes and functional masks.

For this reason, whores turning tricks fake their own orgasms to make their clients come faster. But already clear here as well is an integral aspect of sublime deceit irreducible to the simple conscious deception one encounters with hookers.



The dynamic balance that the sexual relation requires inherently demands disavowal – to function effectively as an enjoyable fantasy, a masquerade must precisely conceal the fact that it is really just theatre. Except to a certain special breed of economist fetishist, excited by commercial power alone, a faked orgasm is nothing erotic at all.

It is at this point exactly that finally we enter into pornography proper. Laplanche speaks of codes and variants, letters and photographs, and argues that mental objects correspond to objects in space against the blue screen of unconscious causes. From this understanding, we give ourselves willingly to two connected aspects.

First, the basic contours of the fundamental problem of Deleuze – the problem of how to construct such a screen. This problem recurs throughout his work, but this is not the space for a detailed treatment. Our major issue here is rather the opportunist subversion of the screen-problematic that serves to produce pornography.



This subversion substitutes for the materialism of the screen problematic the resigned idealism of a correspondance dilemma. Relinquishing the hope for the new screen in the face of the various available pseudo-screens - smugly declared eternal and immutable by a bad axiomatics - one simply selects the most adequate option from the frozen aerarium. Pornography thus in the cantilever between surrender and drive, the most pleasurable way possible to exit the real, and enter instead into the sensational realm of the special effect – styles of spectacular variance swallowing history in a series of explosive integral moments.

(Part IV to follow next week)

Empire State

The white screaming noise in the midst of the shadowplay, Henry Spencer moves through the city to visit his child. In the crisp evening air choking, some crummy bedroom, with walls itching ants, and a floor shredded marble.

Mary X bending over the crib, dressed as a nurse, holding a bottle of chilled vintage champagne. Henry arrives, and the camera swirls into a rapture around them, with the brass section giving off glittering thuds, and the strings swooping with meaning.

In the cradle itself, the child bending itself through the differerent dimensions, twisting his limbs into tangles, and his spine into strange shapes. Teeth in the veins of some smile, some terrible tryst, and with his parents still kissing madly beneath the glare of the lights - it is hard to discern the truth of the matter.



In a difficult body decoupled from soil and site, his skin sloughing slime and his eyes oozing engine oil. In a while, he knows, the studio bell will sound time. The director will proclaim the wrap, the crew will abandon the set, and the actors playing his parents will collect their pay and go home.

Left alone on the soundstage, in the grey and blue darkness, with only the chittering recorders for company, he will sever neatly his ganglions with a pair of scissors, the shame of that cut, and the limit of that kind of gaze breaking fantastic gears. He will then picture himself on the deck of the Titantic sinking, now in the Hindenburg burning, then in the Twin Towers collapsing…

The incitation of vision, connected to actuality. It is not so much here a case of messianic purpose combined with virginal bliss, but rather a blank statement of conjuncture, in which everybody finally loses.

In the manner of a long lost love, combined with a fidelity without reserve, one constructs an integral perfect world composed only of light. This is the radical telos of what Deleuze meant, when he spoke in Cinema of a plane of immanence amounting to an endless flux of images. This situation of pure rapidity calling for the special image of a screen, something that could harness the power and in that movement create consciousness.



In the end it could only be contingent, and this contingency without an object. It is not so much that here we step out of phenomenology, clothed in just our blood. Rather, we here recognize, that even our blood carries with it certain dreams of how to bleed correctly, certain notions about the intersections between essential axes. It is not reducible to the idea of the subject of the brain - as Deleuze (with Guattari) would later claim. Instead, it enters into a difficult differential cartography, in which the non-representational territory of sticky fantastic pictures becomes the only map worth possessing.

(Part III to follow shortly)

Fucking in Rhythm and Harmony

[This post forms part of a symposium with bacteriagrl, k-punk, sit down man you're a bloody tragedy (I still dream of orgonon), infinite thought (the money shot and vintage porn), effay, poetix.]

"Aren't we all just cyber-whores, spamming that which is exterior to what we take to be ourselves with the perpetual and never-ending desire for love. Spam is the undead. A poignant indication of the essence of bored, boring modern man."
Martin Monk

The internet is entirely driven and dominated by pornography - and this statement is not a banal moralizing platitude, but rather a critical nomination.

The internet is entirely driven and dominated by pornography because the internet at root is pornography, and nothing but pornography.

Trick of this light: a sublimely secretive and naturally always-already sexualized indeterminate series of theoretical reaches and grips, fantastic clinches and grasps – certain erotogenic trajectories and casually variegated libidinal angles and actions – put discretely to work for a dreadfully charmed social production.

The dream has always been that some such endless series of sickly sweet corporeal decompositions will eventually find themselves - each to all - somehow strangely mutually attracted to each in the savage elsewhere - and then softly close together accordingly into a new arrangement, collect into an integral and singular mass - like snow falling gently on a fluorescent city at night.

The relentless and evil solar rays of enjoyment will finally spend and exhaust themselves in a vanishing vertex, overcoming obscenity somewhere over the rainbow and giving birth in the same movement to a new and superior Earth. This was the first dream of Heidegger, his velveteen sphere, but it finally just shredded like cotton – as Germany choked in the smoke of the burning thousand-year Reich.

Heidegger was cast into the black lights. In the manner of Dante, he abandoned the beaten track and became lost in the woods, but unlike the latter, foreclosed upon the ecstatic orient: drunken angel or else burning star.

In his later work, this kind of hysterical draining, careful and cut suffocation of all truth in the now – thus his own morbid attachment to poetry; his delicious slow transfer of all responsibility to it.

In fact, the real truth – as Paul Celan would later discover - was that Heidegger did not really like poetry; he did not really trust it. It was always just a little bit too confused and pathetic, too metaphysical – too sticky and strange.

The irony here is such is the innate and inherent problem of poetry: the machine at the heart of it that dictates its unfolding. But Heidegger could not accept this - what he wanted was sharpness and crystalline clarity, a haunted elaboration, a majestic ontology considered as prophecy.



In short – he wanted the money shot, the certain essential product, evading spectacular method and chatter, but nonetheless achieving the same. IT has already concisely stated this logic: “This passion for authenticity…the silencing of the woman with cum…is this not a battle over the very substance of language, an aggressive response to the non-relation that characterizes all human interaction? I believe that the future of the money shot will involve the impossibility of male ejaculation, which is still too human, too teleological. Impotent men will toss themselves off in vain while a pretty young girl gazes up at them as if at the cosmos itself. There will be no mediation”

Dissemination: seed cast wastefully outside. Derrida would later take Heidegger sharply to task for his weak prematurity, his complete lack of control. In a tangle with traces and clues, beneath the Menshevik/Tantric sign of a sex without end, the Messiah only always about to come, but never quite coming: instead only interminable play, and an anal-oral economy without either reserve or protection.

Every manner of différance squeezed out from your hips, my darling - your undecidable lips, the supplement of your tits: it is almost as if we could be in love…

[Part II to follow shortly]

Summer Collection

Courtesy of D. Murphy

Spectacular War

Yesterday, hundreds of heavily armed Government agents swarmed through Heathrow, frisking grandmothers, confiscating children's toys, and delaying more than 400,000 passengers. In the meantime, the home secretary John Reid went on television to issue a state of maximum alert, claiming that a massive terrorist operation on a scale comparable to 9/11 had been only just narrowly disrupted.

Yet the truth is that no evidence at all has been offerred to support these claims. Government security agencies have stated that the plot involved the use of liquid explosives, concealed in soft drink cans - but where are these explosives? If the Government had really found some, they would surely be parading them.



Perhaps the most interesting about this entire story is that Reid effectively trailed it - in the manner of a coming attraction - in the speech he delivered to Demos the day before. The mere presence of this fact already confirms that we are in the realm of the spectacular, the only question is: how deep does it go?

It is worth drawing attention here to the last disrupted terrorist operation officially compared to 9/11: the Chicago plot of June 2006. In that case, seven men were seized in Florida and immediately declared by the media to be Al-Qaeda operatives. Later, the FBI was forced to reveal that the group had no links whatsoever with Al-Qaeda, but rather only with a government informant who claimed this status for himself in order to infiltrate - and almost certainly entrap - the group - a group which moreover amounted in truth to a motley crew of impotent dreamers.

In this way, the Chicago plot was ultimately revealed to be not only a entirely homegrown operation, but moreover an entirely government sponsored and orchestrated one, entirely fabricated in order to meet the political economic imperatives of spectacular war. K-punk has already concisely summarized this logic: "the War on Terror is inherently and inescapably spectacular; it arises from the demands of the post 9/11 Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex: it is not enough for the State to do something, it has to be seen doing something."

This logic extends beyond rational limits - to the point whereby the State was must be seen to be doing something even and especially if there is really nothing to do. If terrorists do not exist, it is necessary to create them, since the spectacular control required by contemporary kino-kapital must be maintained, and the correct epistemological frame secured at all costs.

In his own comment on the Heathrow circus, George Bush made the point clearly: "The recent arrests, that our fellow citizens are now learning about, are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us that love freedom, to hurt our nation...It is a mistake to believe that there is no threat to the United States of America, and that is why we have given our officials the tools they need to protect our people... The American people need to know that, we live in a dangerous world, but our government will do everything we can to protect our people from those dangers."



The fact that every aspect of this statement is a transparent nullity is not the point. The point is rather that if you repeat something often enough, no matter how stupid, then it will eventually take on the aura of truth and accordingly start to function effectively as such. It was none other than Hitler himself who grasped this logic most fully: "The task of propaganda lies...in directing the masses toward certain facts, events, necessities, etc., the purpose being to move their importance into the masses' field of vision."

In the meantime the IDF continues to rain death and destruction onto the cities of Lebanon. It is clear that Blair and Bush are still considering a general expansion of that conflict to Syria and Iran, but both surely know too that such an expansion -the consequences of which which would be colossal - could not yet be realistically staged under present conditions. Hezbullah first need to be smashed in Lebanon, and dissent meanwhile crushed at home. The theatre of blood at Heathrow airport on Thursday will have bought Capital some time and momentum - such indeed was the purpose of it - and in the coming weeks expect to see it moving aggressively towards both of these goals.

We are not Hezbullah

The current SWP clinch with political Islam is entirely impotent, and must be dropped.

The fact is that we are not Hezbullah, and to claim otherwise amounts to a dangerous and damaging conflation.

The major point here is political. Communism cannot offer ideological support to political Islam, without simultaenously effecting to castrate itself in the process. Political Islam ultimately holds to a universalist vision of society fundamentally hostile to Communist ideals.



Everybody with eyes can already see this, but the SWP would prefer not to talk about it, believing that dogmatic insistence on this issue would only effect to alienate allies at a crucial conjuncture, thus effecting to weaken the movement as whole.

This belief is mistaken. A movement is only as strong as its weakest component, and political Islam is a very weak component indeed. This is not only because the Islamist program is itself undesirable, but moreover because success in politics entirely depends on the clear articulation of the universal, and a party cannot provide such an articulation if it is eternally diverted by the interminable task of endlessly justifying a particular position.

This point holds especially true if the particular position in question is an opportunistic position, transparently in contradiction with the major ideological thrust of a party, for the reason that in such cases the particular becomes infernal and shatters universality itself.

This is the situation with the SWP support for Islamism, and the reason why the Stop the War coalition has so far proven toothless. In implicitly accepting the binary terms which Kapital has imposed upon it - the Enlightened West versus the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist - and then only tripping the switches on these two terms and flipping their valences, Stop the War leaves the libidinal circuit completely intact, and thus gurantees that finally nothing will stop.



Since 9/11 the European left has been lurching confusedly from crisis to crisis, and failing to develop any significant political momentum. The reason for this simple - it has been fighting the wrong war, and in the wrong way. Politically esnared within an analytic scenario of an imaginary force against a fantastic object, it has accordingly found itself incapable of delivering anything more than a hysterical moralistic critique, when what has been needed is a true political critique - subtle, cool and mature enough as to be able locate precisely the various, and very real social points, at which we are ourselves complicit in what we would attack. Only in this way can we seriously hope to stop anything at all.

"You don't give a damn about the dead"

Blistering performance from Galloway on Lebanon.

Ehud Olmert, Tear Out Your Eyes

Israel has lost the Lebanon war - this much is already obvious. The IDF has proven itself once again weak and impotent, totally incapable of achieving any real military goal. It can efficiently terrorize cities and murder civilians, but it absolutely cannot destroy Hezbullah.

In fact, there is a simple reason for this: there is ultimately no Hezbullah - so considered in the terms of a discrete and individual entity - to destroy. Ultimately, Hezbullah is nothing more than a symptom of Israel, created as a direct result of the brutal conduct of the IDF during the first Lebanon war.

In many respects, this current war is really nothing more than a haunted repetition of the first one. It serves no obvious strategic purpose for Israel; in fact it will effect to make Israel less, not more secure, in the medium to long-term future. The bitterness which Israel has provoked in Lebanon will last for decades, and from the ashes of Beirut, Hezbullah will rise like a Phoenix, more determined than ever.

Subsequent to the massacre at Qana, several commentators drew analogies to the Soviet Union, asking whether Israel now has reached its Budapest moment. In fact, the real truth is that Israel reached this moment some time ago. Qana has happened before, indeed - all of this has happened before. The contemporary Israeli state is a zombie state, a state which is already dead, which only has not quite yet realized it.

In this way, the current campaign in Lebanon amounts to an act of pure pathological desperation. In attempting to combat Hezbullah, the IDF is doing nothing at all, except for resisting a trauma integral and inherent to Israel itself. It was Israel which ushered Hezbullah into existence, Hezbullah did not emerge out of nothing. Rather, Hezbullah emerged in the terms of a kind of avenging angel, a kind of pure expression of Israeli guilt and sin made manifest.

Hezbullah will only disappear once the Israel has settled the outstanding debt of the despicable crimes which it has commited in the past, and is continuing to commit today. Ultimately, this debt began with the crime of the annexation of Palestine, which is to say the foundation of Israel itself.

To put it bluntly: Israel itself is already a crime, and accordingly there will never be peace in historical Palestine, so long as Israel exists in its present form. This is to say, the form of a messianic Jewish homeland, divided along racial lines.

If Israel genuinely desires peace, even if it genuinely wishes to survive, it must cease to be Zionist. Otherwise, it will be sooner or later destroyed, at the hands of one or other of the enemies of its own creation.

Israel cannot stop creating these enemies so long as it remains Zionist. In the last analysis, Zionism is an ideology of racial purity, and so mandates accordingly logic of suicide: one must purify, and one can never purify enough.



Sooner or later during the next two weeks, Olmert will the mission accomplished, and initiate a general IDF withdrawl from Lebanon. In fact, nothing at all will have been accomplished, except for mass slaughter and carnage. This carnage can only be expected to intensify in the future.

The very real possibility is that Israel will deliver a second Shoah if it does not realize this, tantamount to a general cataclysm engulfing the entire middle east, itself included, in a future war which could consume the world.

Mirza Kabal

Israeli jets strike Qana, killing scores of civilians, most of them children. International criticism rises in pitch, Israel flatly denies responsibility. It claims that Hizbullah is responsible for these deaths, because it is deliberately and immorally using civilians as human shields, as sandbags.

Hizbullah is responsible for the massacre at Qana, it is finally responsible too for all civilian Lebanese deaths, on the same basis. It is naturally responsible for civilian Israeli deaths, since it is indeed launching the rockets which kill them, as equally it is responsible for IDF deaths, since it is actively engaged in fighting them.

The contours of the present Israeli-Hizbullah conflict reveal themselves as follows: Hizbullah is responsible for every single human death sustained by it. Israel does not kill, and cannot kill humans, such is a logical impossibility and if it does, this is only because some unforeseeable factor has unfortunately and sadly intervened.

Israel is spectacularly innocent, it cannot kill and will never kill, it is a democracy, the only democracy in the whole middle east, and democracies do not kill, they only defend with proportionate force against radically evil and barbaric attacks, made without motive by forces committed to killing, because they enjoy killing.

No other cause, none at all, is affirmed by a group such as Hizbullah, which is why Israel must destroy it, and indeed, why Israel can destroy it - because Hizbullah is inhuman. If Hizbullah were human, Israel could not destroy it, indeed Israel and Hizbullah could not even be enemies, since Israel cannot have humans for enemies, since it cannot kill humans, because it is a democracy.

Hizbullah is inhuman. It is inhuman, because it is able to coldly kill humans without compunction, and it is inhuman because, it is able to instrumentalize Israel itself towards this goal, it is able to force Israel itself to kill humans for it. In this way, it can clearly be seen that Israel faces a threat not just material, but moreover moral. Hizbullah corrodes as it kills, it corrodes the moral fabric of Israel, by forcing Israel to kill for it.

Hizbullah is inhuman, it is spectacularly inhuman. It is spectacularly inhuman, just as Israel is spectacularly innocent, which is to say, that it is Hizbullah who is responsible for this spectacular suffering which this war is creating. Hizbullah is responsible for it, Hizbullah is controlling it - in essence, it is Hizbullah has control over the spectacle, Hizbullah is a kind of mirza kabal.

If there is false appearance in the world, like the false appearance that Israel has killed, could have killed, then it is because of Hizbullah. It is because Hizbullah has dreadfully and deliberately managed to falsify the world, has managed to convert the world into a dreadful and dreamlike chimera.

It is clear that the world must be rejected. It must be rejected, because it has become Hizbullah. Hizbullah is spectacular, the world is spectacular, the world is Hizbullah. Israel must destroy Hizbullah, Israel must destroy the world - destroy it, in order to save it.

The world has become inhuman, and only Israel now still remains human, and because only Israel now still remains human, it is given to Israel to destroy this inhuman world. Destroy this inhuman world, this world of Hizbullah, this world of chimera.

Israel declares war on chimera, on Hizbullah, and on the spectacular. It can no longer believe in appearances, and so resolves to abandon them. It recognizes that it can no longer move, because every move it attempts would be the work of Hizbullah, only serving to strengthen Hizbullah, strengthen the inhuman which controls the spectacle: Israel must now no longer make spectacles, must no longer even itself present a spectacle.

Israel withdraws from Lebanon, and resolves to destroy itself: auto-da-fe.