24 June 2007
hysterical materialism
UPDATE: Very interesting discussion re my comments on Milbank over at An und fur sich.
(From Local Angel: Theological Political Fragments by Udi Aloni (2004).
Aloni: This is what Judaism does: I'm here to convert you. I'm on a mission from my rabbi.
Zizek: What's your reward then? Not just forty virgins, you get forty older, experienced women...who can really do it...)
The Materialism conference was fundamentally flawed and floored by fundamentalists - Christian of course: John Milbank's weird Daily Mail-ish clerical Schmittian fantasy for a Feudal nationalism delivered in a bellowing windbaggish way was deeply reactionary and a pompous flirtation with fascism. It is not enough that we are all 'anti-capitalist': we are not the same kind of anti-capitalists as you, 'sir', nor will we ever be!
Badiou's unfortunate (though hardly unusual) absence stood in for the manifest lack of all kinds of calm reasoning. Zizek himself was surprisingly on form, Ali Alizadeh dared/bothered to pose the question about why the theologians were there, the psychoanalysts were clever and friendly, and Alberto Toscano proved to everyone once again that he doesn't just read books, he eats them.
However - there is a form of public irrationality - manifested by certain of the paper-givers and some of the audience alike at this conference - that is just creepy. The recurring vision I had of someone getting up and shooting randomly at the crowd (mollified neither by the three-and-a-half-hour breakless sessions nor by the lack of windows at Birkbeck) only increased when certain speakers got up to speak their right-wing brains and certain commentators declared things like 'I'm a Doctor and a pot smoker and I believe in height as a measure of political virtue!' I am of course committed to a form of rationalism that takes linguistic and political capacity to be universal, but empirical evidence to the contrary makes me feel a kind of cold shame on behalf of no one and everyone.
(From Local Angel: Theological Political Fragments by Udi Aloni (2004).
Aloni: This is what Judaism does: I'm here to convert you. I'm on a mission from my rabbi.
Zizek: What's your reward then? Not just forty virgins, you get forty older, experienced women...who can really do it...)
The Materialism conference was fundamentally flawed and floored by fundamentalists - Christian of course: John Milbank's weird Daily Mail-ish clerical Schmittian fantasy for a Feudal nationalism delivered in a bellowing windbaggish way was deeply reactionary and a pompous flirtation with fascism. It is not enough that we are all 'anti-capitalist': we are not the same kind of anti-capitalists as you, 'sir', nor will we ever be!
Badiou's unfortunate (though hardly unusual) absence stood in for the manifest lack of all kinds of calm reasoning. Zizek himself was surprisingly on form, Ali Alizadeh dared/bothered to pose the question about why the theologians were there, the psychoanalysts were clever and friendly, and Alberto Toscano proved to everyone once again that he doesn't just read books, he eats them.
However - there is a form of public irrationality - manifested by certain of the paper-givers and some of the audience alike at this conference - that is just creepy. The recurring vision I had of someone getting up and shooting randomly at the crowd (mollified neither by the three-and-a-half-hour breakless sessions nor by the lack of windows at Birkbeck) only increased when certain speakers got up to speak their right-wing brains and certain commentators declared things like 'I'm a Doctor and a pot smoker and I believe in height as a measure of political virtue!' I am of course committed to a form of rationalism that takes linguistic and political capacity to be universal, but empirical evidence to the contrary makes me feel a kind of cold shame on behalf of no one and everyone.
