Fwd: Re: [-empyre-] Zizek While-U-Wait

Thu Jan 10 16:27:20 EST 2008

Begin forwarded message:

>
> From: "David Chirot" <david.chirot at gmail.com>
> Date: 10 January 2008 6:44:17 AM
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Zizek While-U-Wait
>
>
> Dear Chrstina--
>
> Many tahnks for sending this!
>
> I also am a great fan of Mike Davis' work--
> his Buda's Wagon A History of Car Bombing is a fantastic and much  
> needed book--it appeared in spring 2007--
>
> I recently read a very long and interesting essay by Zizek re Badiou--
>
> it's very interesting to me the manner in which Badiou,
>  considers the Cultural  Revolution--
> i need to read more by him in this regard, as some of what i have  
> read seems bizarrely unaware of the Machiavllian genius of the  
> Cultural Revoltuion, which was from that point of view an   
> exploitation of the youth revolutions of the West by turning it not  
> agsint Power, but making of it a tool for the increase of Power--
>
> of the State and especially of Mao himself--
>
> it has made me want to reread the old familiars, both The Little  
> Red Book (the title of an American hit song of the mid 1960's  
> hilariously enough, which had nothing to with THE Little Red Book-- 
> in the strict sense)--and Mao's Poetry--
>
> Naomi Klien's The Shock Doctrine is a great book re Disater  
> Captialism--
> an area that i've done a lot of art work with in realtion to Walls--
>
> (a book in color of sixty of these will be out in a few months)
>
> i also began an interrelated set of series which have to do with  
> cars which includes car bombs--"the poor man's air force)
>
> there is an incredible mass of materials which has appeared just in  
> the last year that i've been working with in creating stories,  
> essays and poems--
> the areas of dis-information, forgeries, dis- and mistranslations,  
> faked and planted evidences, is fascinating to me in the ways in  
> which it has become an ever more powerful force in economics,  
> politics and the military/security systems--
>
> the ways in which "intelligence," "news," and may other areas of  
> "fact" and "evidence" are fictions to generate Fear with which to  
> "drive economies" "up" or "down" or "into the ground"--is another  
> i'm very interested in--
>
>
> thank you very much for sending these Zizek--
>
> david
>
>
>
>
> On Jan 9, 2008 11:40 AM, Christina McPhee  
> <christina112 at earthlink.net > wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> While staying up late last night waiting -almost endlessly-- for
> Photoshop to render a commercial photo project my mind strayed to the
> languishing list, and
> meanwhile a newsflash from lacan.com caught my eye.  Zizek is in his
> usual Cassandra-esque top form:   I thought
> if anyone wants to check it out, this essay has some interesting
> things to claim about traumatic landscapes and what they (don't) mean,
> and what is the function
> of visual art (the image anyway) in this 'ecology of fear' (pace Mike
> Davis).
>
> (guests coming soon, this weekend...........)
>
>
> -christina
>
>
>
> >
> >
> >
> > SLAVOJ ZIZEK
> >
> > CENSORSHIP TODAY: VIOLENCE, OR ECOLOGY AS A NEW OPIUM FOR THE MASSES
> > Part 1 - http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm
> > Part 2 - http://www.lacan.com/zizecology2.htm
> >
> >
>
>
>
> Here is Zizek Raw:
>
>
> from lacan.com
>
> > This need to discover a meaning is crucial when we are confronting
> > potential or actual catastrophes, from AIDS and ecological disasters
> > to holocaust: they have no "deeper meaning." The legacy of Job
> > prohibits us such a gesture of taking a refuge in the standard
> > transcendent figure of God as a secret Master who knows the meaning
> > of what appears to us as meaningless catastrophe, the God who sees
> > the entire picture in which what we perceive as a stain contributes
> > to global harmony. When confronted with an event like the holocaust
> > or the death of millions in Congo in the last years, is it not
> > obscene to claim that these stains have a deeper meaning in that
> > they contribute to the harmony of the Whole? Is there a Whole which
> > can teleologically justify an event like the holocaust? Christ's
> > death on the cross thus means that one should drop without restraint
> > the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the
> > happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology -
> > Christ's death on the cross is the death of this God, it repeats
> > Job's stance, it refuses any "deeper meaning" that obfuscates the
> > brutal real of historical catastrophes.
> >
> > And the lesson of ecology is that we should go to the end here and
> > accept the non-existence of the ultimate big Other, nature itself
> > with its pattern of regular rhythms, the ultimate reference of order
> > and stability.
> >
> > However, this lack of the big Other does not entail that we are
> > irrevocably caught in the misery of our finitude, deprived of any
> > redemptive moments. In his The Cattle Truck, Jorge Semprun reports
> > how he witnessed the arrival of a truckload of Polish Jews at
> > Buchenwald; they were stacked into the freight train almost 200 to a
> > car, traveling for days without food and water in the coldest winter
> > of the war. On arrival all in the carriage had frozen to death
> > except for 15 children, kept warm by the others in the centre of the
> > bundle of bodies. When the children were emptied from the car the
> > Nazis let their dogs loose on them. Soon only two fleeing children
> > were left:
> >
> >     The little one began to fall behind, the SS were howling behind
> > them and then the dogs began to howl too, the smell of blood was
> > driving them mad, and then the bigger of the two children slowed his
> > pace to take the hand of the smaller... together they covered a few
> > more yards... till the blows of the clubs felled them and, together
> > they dropped, their faces to the ground, their hands clasped for all
> > eternity.
> >
> > One can easily imagine how this scene should be filmed: while the
> > soundtrack renders what goes on in reality (the two children are
> > clubbed to death), the image of their hands clasped freezes,
> > immobilized for eternity - while the sound renders temporary
> > reality, the image renders the eternal Real. It is the pure surface
> > of such fixed images of eternity, not any deeper Meaning, which
> > allows for redemptive moments in the bleak story of the Shoah.
>
>
>
>
> -c
>
>
>
>
>
> >
> >
> > SLAVOJ ZIZEK
> >
> > CENSORSHIP TODAY: VIOLENCE, OR ECOLOGY AS A NEW OPIUM FOR THE MASSES
> > Part 1 - http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm
> > Part 2 - http://www.lacan.com/zizecology2.htm
> >
> >
>
>
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