universal – objet (a)

The Combahee River Collective Statement

NONAME BOOK CLUB

https://nonamebooks.com/Free-Reading-Program#combahee-river-collective-statement

We are excited to announce the launch of our political education series! Each month we will offer 1 essay as an alternative to our monthly book picks. For #BlackAugust we will read “Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free”.

Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free: Barbara Smith and the Black feminist visionaries of the Combahee River Collective
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Reference reading:
The Combahee River Collective Statement
by The Combahee River Collective

BLM

There are services police providYake that can be provided by

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1745746499555

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-june-1-2020-1.5592953/police-brutality-continually-treated-like-a-one-off-in-canada-says-desmond-cole-1.5592954

Community led safety solutions. Sinking money into policing while scrapping programs that keep like affordable housing, health, violence prevention, renter protection, community solutions, make critical investments in things we know keep people safe. George Floyd died for counterfeit $20 bill that is a crime of poverty.

Not our call to tell our communities how to grieve.

Desmond Cole

Regis Korchinski-Paquet: 5 hours after she fell to ground, her body was still on the ground in a body bag.

Defunding the police: money could be going to organizations to better protect the community. The way to stop violence is to go to the source, the police are the source of the violence for black people. It’s legalized force, up to taking somebody’s life.

Transforming violence into services and support for black people. The uncomfortable conversation is that white people are be protected by police violence, white people and their property. When police get paid $110,000 year to police black communities … indigenous children in child welfare today, and white people have made careers of managing the files … the racism white people get to benefit.

Until people burned down a police station, then murder charges

That flame was a hope. We are allowed to defend ourselves and fight back. We have to build on this one moment after 400 years of oppression. Stop policing, stop sending people with a gun for somebody in crisis.

DESMOND COLE: I’m really tired of using the term relationship as though these are two equal parties. The black community is not an equal party to the state sponsored police force. We are under subjugation to the state sponsored police force. And there are so many different ways that that’s happening that there isn’t even enough time in this segment. But in Toronto, this situation with Regis Korchinski-Paquet of her falling off of this balcony after an interaction with the police might seem strange or rare to people, but there are so many instances just in the last year or two in Ontario of people hearing a knock on the door. Police. It’s police. It’s police. And then that person ends up on the ground dead. No charges against the officer. Someone has a warrant for breaching probation. Police come and knock on their door. They’re found dead at the bottom of an apartment building. This is happening in Ontario all the time. But we’re not focused on accountability for the police, we’re focused on clearing the police and saying it wasn’t their fault. And so black people, people on low incomes, living in some of these high rise apartment buildings, people who may be in crisis, we are all falling victims to police brutality and it’s being treated every time like a one off and it’s very insulting to see that.

retroactive

December 7, 2012

However, the moment we take account the retroactivity of universal necessity — the fact that each “use” of particular moments for some universal goal, as well as this goal itself, emerge retroactively in order, precisely, to “rationalize” the symptomal excess — we can no longer accept the Hegelian Cunning of Reason in its standard sense. 524

Less than nothing

Nov 30, 2012

Page 467

Hegel is the ultimate thinker of the process of the emergence of necessary features out of chaotic contingency of contingency’s gradual self-organization of the gradual rise of order out of chaos

How, then, can necessity arise out of contingency? The only way to avoid the obscurantism of “emergent properties” is to bring into play negativity: at its most radical, necessity is not a positive principle of regularity that overcomes contingency, but the negative obverse of contingency: what is “necessary” above all is that every contingent particular entity find its truth in its self-cancellation, disintegration, death. Continue reading “Less than nothing”

General Will by Rousseau

General Will:
that the laws decided upon by subjects will operate equally for all: ‘since each man gives himself to all, he gives himself to no one; and since there is no associate over whom he does not gain the same rights as others gain over him, each man recovers the equivalent of everything he loses, and in the bargain he acquires more power to preserve what he has’.

cited in Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude: Badiou and the Political Subject by Nina Power in The Praxis of Alain Badiou. Eds. Paul Ashton, A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens 2006

Ž Ukraine Rabinovitch

Žižek. Barbarism with a Human Face in London Review of Books, 25 April 2014

The entire European neo-fascist right (in Hungary, France, Italy, Serbia) firmly supports Russia in the ongoing Ukrainian crisis, giving the lie to the official Russian presentation of the Crimean referendum as a choice between Russian democracy and Ukrainian fascism. The events in Ukraine – the massive protests that toppled Yanukovich and his gang – should be understood as a defence against the dark legacy resuscitated by Putin.

The protests were triggered by the Ukrainian government’s decision to prioritise good relations with Russia over the integration of Ukraine into the European Union.

Predictably, many anti-imperialist leftists reacted to the news by patronising the Ukrainians: how deluded they are still to idealise Europe, not to be able to see that joining the EU would just make Ukraine an economic colony of Western Europe, sooner or later to go the same way as Greece.

In fact, Ukrainians are far from blind about the reality of the EU. They are fully aware of its troubles and disparities: their message is simply that their own situation is much worse. Europe may have problems, but they are a rich man’s problems.

Can we think of the Ukrainian protesters’ reference to Europe as a sign that their goal, too, is ‘to reach the standard of an ordinary Western European civilised country’?

But here things quickly get complicated. What, exactly, does the ‘Europe’ the Ukrainian protesters are referring to stand for? It can’t be reduced to a single idea: it spans nationalist and even fascist elements but extends also to the idea of what Etienne Balibar calls égaliberté, freedom-in-equality, the unique contribution of Europe to the global political imaginary, even if it is in practice today mostly betrayed by European institutions and citizens themselves.

Between these two poles, there is also a naive trust in the value of European liberal-democratic capitalism.

Europe can see in the Ukrainian protests its own best and worst sides, its emancipatory universalism as well as its dark xenophobia.

Fanatical defenders of religion start out attacking contemporary secular culture; it’s no surprise when they end up forsaking any meaningful religious experience. In a similar way, many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they end up flinging away freedom and democracy if only they may fight terror.

The ‘terrorists’ may be ready to wreck this world for love of another [world RT], but the warriors on terror are just as ready to wreck their own democratic world out of hatred for the Muslim other.

Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalise torture to defend it.

The defenders of Europe against the immigrant threat are doing much the same. In their zeal to protect the Judeo-Christian legacy, they are ready to forsake what is most important in that legacy.

The anti-immigrant defenders of Europe, not the notional crowds of immigrants waiting to invade it, are the true threat to Europe.

Mainstream liberals tell us that when basic democratic values are under threat from ethnic or religious fundamentalists, we should unite behind the liberal-democratic agenda, save what can be saved, and put aside dreams of more radical social transformation.

But there is a fatal flaw in this call for solidarity: it ignores the way in which liberalism and fundamentalism are caught in a vicious cycle.

It is the aggressive attempt to export liberal permissiveness that causes fundamentalism to fight back vehemently and assert itself.

When we hear today’s politicians offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression, and triumphantly asking the rhetorical question, ‘Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their rights?

Do you want every critic of religion to be put to death?’, what should make us suspicious is the very self-evidence of the answer: who would want that?

The problem is that liberal universalism has long since lost its innocence. What Max Horkheimer said about capitalism and fascism in the 1930s applies in a different context today: those who don’t want to criticise liberal democracy should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.

Rabinovitch, a Jew, wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why, and Rabinovitch answers: ‘Two reasons. The first is that I’m afraid the Communists will lose power in the Soviet Union, and the new power will put all the blame for the Communists’ crimes on us, the Jews.’

‘But this is pure nonsense,’ the bureaucrat interrupts, ‘nothing can change in the Soviet Union, the power of the Communists will last for ever!’

‘Well,’ Rabinovitch replies, ‘that’s my second reason.’

Imagine the equivalent exchange between a Ukrainian and an EU administrator. The Ukrainian complains: ‘There are two reasons we are panicking here in Ukraine. First, we’re afraid that under Russian pressure the EU will abandon us and let our economy collapse.’

The EU administrator interrupts: ‘But you can trust us, we won’t abandon you. In fact, we’ll make sure we take charge of your country and tell you what to do!’ ‘Well,’ the Ukrainian replies, ‘that’s my second reason.’

If Ukraine ends up with a mixture of ethnic fundamentalism and liberal capitalism, with oligarchs pulling the strings, it will be as European as Russia (or Hungary) is today. (Too little attention is drawn to the role played by the various groups of oligarchs – the ‘pro-Russian’ ones and the ‘pro-Western’ ones – in the events in Ukraine.)

But there is another kind of support which has been even more conspicuously absent: the proposal of any feasible strategy for breaking the deadlock. Europe will be in no position to offer such a strategy until it renews its pledge to the emancipatory core of its history. Only by leaving behind the decaying corpse of the old Europe can we keep the European legacy of égaliberté alive. It is not the Ukrainians who should learn from Europe: Europe has to learn to live up to the dream that motivated the protesters on the Maidan. The lesson that frightened liberals should learn is that only a more radical left can save what is worth saving in the liberal legacy today.

The Maidan protesters were heroes, but the true fight – the fight for what the new Ukraine will be – begins now, and it will be much tougher than the fight against Putin’s intervention.

A new and riskier heroism will be needed. It has been shown already by those Russians who oppose the nationalist passion of their own country and denounce it as a tool of power.

It’s time for the basic solidarity of Ukrainians and Russians to be asserted, and the very terms of the conflict rejected. The next step is a public display of fraternity, with organisational networks established between Ukrainian political activists and the Russian opposition to Putin’s regime.

This may sound utopian, but it is only such thinking that can confer on the protests a truly emancipatory dimension.

Otherwise, we will be left with a conflict of nationalist passions manipulated by oligarchs. Such geopolitical games are of no interest whatever to authentic emancipatory politics.

self-difference Žižek

Žižek reality of the Virtual 2004

UNIVERSAL and PARTICULAR
The category of the REAL is a purely formal category. REAL is not formless content disturbing order, it is a pure structural GAP. It is ENTIRELY NONSUBSTANTIAL category.

Minimal self-difference

It is a difference but a pure difference. A difference which is paradoxically prior to what it is the difference between.

It is not that you have two terms and difference is the difference between the two terms. Paradoxically the two positive terms appear afterwards as attempts to dominate/cover-up this difference.

If you ask a right-winger how the entire social field is structured you will get a totally different answer from a centrist and a left-winger. There is no neutral way to define the difference between left and right, in itself it is just a VOID. The point is that there is no neutral way to define the difference between left and right, you either approach it from the left or right.

Crucial philosophically is this ‘pure formalism’ and we should precisely insist on purely formal materialism, the minimal feature of materialism is that there is pure difference, an antagonism within the ONE, a primordial fact is pure self-difference. Self-Difference and not mythological polar opposites ying-yang man-woman light-dark

Deleuze asserts some kind of primordial multitude as ontological fact. NO!

Multitude is already an effect of th inconsistency of the ONE with itself. THE ONE CANNOT COINCIDE WITH ITSELF. We don’t have primordial polarity between male-female etc.

No its more radical, as Lacan puts it, the binary signifier is primordially repressed, the second element is always missing. We have one but not the accompanying other. This original imbalance sets in motion the generation of multiplicity.

Woody Allen
Tolstoy where is Dostoevsky (the other of Tolstoy) In one short scene, all the big titles of Dostoevsky’s novels appear.

ONE cannot coincide with itself, because of pure difference the multitude explodes.

Today’s idealism/spiritualism no wonder the greatest spiritual movie director Tarkovsky, was at the same time practically obsessed with matter in decay. When heroes pray, the litteraly immerse their heads in mud. Oppose spiritual materialism, the pure formalism of true radical materialism. Quantum physics, you don’t need positivity of matter you can do it all with theorems.

How to think difference which is prior to the elements which it is the difference of.

KANT: Negative Judgement/Infinite Judgement.

excess over humanity which is inherent to humanity itself.
UNDEAD: You are alive precisely as dead. Human freedom has exactly status, it is neither NATURE, NOR CULTURE. Culture is already symbolic laws, and symbolic regulation. The conclusion to be drawn cultural symbolic prohibitions try to regulate is not directly nature, but this EXTIMATE KERNEL OF HUMANITY, the inhuman, the undead, not external to humanity, some MONSTROUS EXCESS WHICH IS INHERENT TO HUMANITY ITSELF.

POLITICS OF PURE DIFFERENCE
it won’t be what emerges today, the so-called identity politics, recognizing tolerating differences. Recognizing differences

Žižek Croatia May 2013, Brazil July 2, Greece

July 8, 2013 Only 14 minutes and mostly a gloss on his ideas developed in Zagreb, Croatia

May 16, 2013 Croatia

June 2013 Greece with Costas

How do we experience ourselves as persons, we are now directly linking our thoughts directly to things, a wheelchair that runs directly on thoughts. What will become of us, our very identity is based on this difference between my inner life and outer life.
Greatest philosophical book of all times, a story but a crazy story, Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit. We should let readers discover for themselves why big fat book is relevant.
To return to Hegel is answer to deadlock failure of today’s left. Stalinist commie failed, I told Fukuymama, maybe capitalism won, but did commies prove they are best managers. We should not play boring game, idea is good they just did it wrong in Russia, no Hegel says if idea goes wrong in reality, there is something wrong with the idea itself.
Hegel was fully aware for logical conceptual necessity to realize itself, it has to attach itself to contingent moment. Monarch, he is not divine, he is idiot like all of us, if you have a government justified by higher right, divine right, you get alienation, no at the top there must be an idiot like all of us. We need a jury for example, selected from our peers, the Monarch is just representation of utter contingency.
LOVE
Retroactive reversal of contingency into necessity, something contingently happens but once its here it is necessary.
Subject is reduced to point of emptiness, but at this moment there is a possibility of reversal
what crisis? East Asia is growing, Africa in some parts is progressing. There is only a crisis in western Europe. You leftists love to be anti-Euro, but hey … yes I agree, first at this immediate economic level, its only west Europe in crisis, what this NEW FORM of capitalism, WHAT WILL IT BE? This new capitalism will be more and more capitalism with Asian values, not despotism, simply autocratic capitalism. Eternal marriage of democracy and capitalism is on deathbed. Lee Quan Yew founder of modern Singapore.
Gradual opening gives rise to expectations, not in darkess Stalinism, its when relative expansion of capitalism will render situation even more destabilizing
Hegel’s refined dialectical paradox This is my message in India, in strict correlation to their class status. The very loss of something creates the lost dimension. We don’t have pre-colonial india then brutal colonization which makes them aware of what they lost and then they struggle to get it back. NO! This new dimension that they are craving for, new modern democratic India, the very program of decolonization is engendered by colonialism itself.
Malcolm X and Buthelezi in South Africa, fake multiculturalism
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin: an important thinker in the development of German Idealism, particularly his early association with and philosophical influence on his seminary roommates Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Mandel: No we should beat whites at their own game BY BEING MORE UNIVERSAL THAN THEY ARE.
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Hegel universal particular Strella Panos Koutras

June 2013 article by Žižek in IJZS Where Ž first mentions Strella.
Guardian Blog on Strella and family values

This is the missing chapter really, of Butler’s Antigone’s Claim

Žižek quotes from Marx

a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labor-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each.

Strella takes perversion to its ridiculously sublime end. Early in the film, Yiorgos traumatically discovers and accepts that the woman he desires is a transvestite. Strella simply tells Yiorgos: “I am a tranny. Do you have a problem with that?”, and they go on kissing. What follows is Yiorgos’s truly traumatic discovery that Strella knowingly seduced his father. His reaction is the same as when Fergus sees Dil’s penis in The Crying Game: disgust, escape in panic, wandering the city unable to cope with what he has discovered. Similarly to The Crying Game, A Woman’s Way depicts trauma being overcome through love; a happy family with a small son emerges.

However, the hero’s discovery that his transvestite lover is his son is not the actualisation of some unconscious fantasy; his disgust is only because he is surprised by an external event. We should resist the temptation to interpret the story as father-son incest.

There is nothing to interpret: the film ends with a completely normal and genuine happiness for the family. As such, it serves as a test for the advocates of Christian family values: embrace this authentic family of Yiorgos, Strella and the adopted child, or shut up about Christianity.

A proper sacred family emerges at the end of the film, a family something like God the father living with Christ – the ultimate gay marriage and parental incest.

The only way to redeem Christian family values is to redefine or reframe the idea of a family to include situations like the one at the end of Strella. In short, Strella is an Ernst Lubitsch film for today, for the “trouble in paradise” when you discover that your gay lover is your son. Even if the family violates all divine prohibitions, they will always find “a small room vacant in the annex” of heaven, as the good-humoured devil says to the hero of Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait.

Žižek december 2011 Berlin

Slavoj Žižek: “The Animal Doesn’t Exist” (respondent: Lorenzo Chiesa) The Human Animal in Politics, Science, and Psychoanalysis
Organised by: Lorenzo Chiesa (Reader in Modern European Thought, University of Kent) and Mladen Dolar (Professor of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Advising Researcher, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht) KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 16 — 17 December 2011

Part 2

New Guinea Tribe
Rejection of binary logic is a cover-up of a central antagonism Retroactive totalization, a violent cut, a violent impostition of a totality, there is a truth in it. What emerges through the animal, it is only through this minimal distance of speech that retroactively we can formulate not an eternal essence of animality but the deadlock of animality. Redefine the notion of essence, do not reject it.

UNIVERSAL and PARTICULAR: the first antagonism is not between particularities, but universality and particular are deal with this antagonism.
Corporate capitalism, liberal capitalism, capitalism with Asian values. There are only different capitalism, but they all try to obfuscate control a central deadlock.

Big Rule of Hegelian Dialectics
In each Hegelian totality or concrete universality, universality is one of its own species, it encounters itself as one of its own species. RABBLE, sticks out the only point of universality. In Rabble human as a social being exists, as an outcast universality comes to exist as such. A species which relates to itself as a universal being. What if this animal as such does exist and this is we humans. and this is the HORROR animals see in us. We are the ANIMAL for other animals.
Animals are immediately caught in their environment, speechless instinct NO! this is wrong. This is retroactive projection … I think that the true mystification in this standard opposition between human-animal, what effectively disappears here, what we miss is the most radical dimension of what WE humans are.
Becoming — Being. We are already constituted reason, speech and then measure animals. WHat this can’t think is HUMAN IN ITS BECOMING, it can’t think human from animal standpoint.

Psychoanalysis: Zupancic Freudian DRIVE which is NOT YET CULTURE BUT NO LONGER ANIMAL INSTINCT.
Not animal life but not yet human culture. Meillassoux After Finitude. Alenka elaborated a nice Lacanian answer to Meillassoux. NON-ALL Meillassoux reads in the masculine logic. You get a more provocative result if you read contingency along the FEMININE LOGIC OF SEXUATION. Contingency is non-all, precisely because you can’t totalize it through exception.

Fossils: Transcendental Kantian legacy can’t provide clear answer to status of FOSSILS. If you take this ontologically seriously, it refers before transcendental horizon. Meillassoux demonstrates transcendental tricks don’t work here. If we want to isolate the dimension Darwin didn’t see, I would like to rehabilitate, who said regarding fossils, that God planted those fossils. And Ž wants to dialectically incorporate this story
The true problem brings us to object (a). The true problem is not the fossil out there, was there life on earth before human beings, the true fossil are human beings, we are UNABLE TO SEE OURSELVES IN BECOMING. The problem is we cannot see ourselves as in-itself as it were. Its easy to claim tha we Christians can’t read pagan religions we reduce them to our perspective, you miss what Judaism is … what we miss even more what was Christ before he became a Christian, are we aware what a MONSTROSITY JESUS CHRIST WAS FOR THE JEWS. We have to see the past in its BECOMING. What was Christ before he became a Christian.

Part 2

The whole of Christianity as an instution is not a fight against paganism but its own excess, the struggle of being human is not fight against animal nature, but fight against EXCESS that marks our break with NATURE. There is a wonderful text in Kant about education and humans, to control their excess. Man is an ANIMAL WHO NEEDS A MASTER. Only humans have a certain WILD UNRULINESS.
The BRUTALITY IS THE FREUDIAN DRIVE, not animal nature. We are not fighting animal nature, we are fighting the Freudian Drive.

The excess that needs to be explained is the OTHER SIDE of what we humans are in ourselves, what was lost the moment we got caught in our ideological self-perception.
I diagree with vulgar Darwinians when they look for solution in what human mind can do its complexities, talk, infinitesimal mathametics. No begin with Badiou, what defines a WORLD, are not its positive features, but the way a structure of a world relates to its OWN INHERENT POINT OF IMPOSSIBILITY. the true changes in world, are changes in the status of this impossibility.

Square root of minus one, before it was dismissed as nonsense. Even Marx said this, dismisses this. But revolution of math, even if square root of minus one, even if nonsensical you can integrate it and it functions. What is great about democracy, it takes traumatic impossibility, my God throne is EMPTY …Leader dies, VOID must be filled immediately, Democracy integrates it, and makes it the instrument of its relative stability. Capitalism, the impossibility of stability, makes it the very mode of its functioning. WHAT IF WE SHOULD LOOK for what makes us Humans, at this level, not at what we can do, but a changed status of what we can’t do, the changed status of impossibility.

How is it we humans obsessively care again and again about something with NO ADAPTIVE VALUE?

Objective reality is ontologically not-all I’m totally materialist. Quantum physics, reality in-itself is not fully ontologically constituted, there are gaps in reality. I would like to supplement Alain Badiou, his quote is problematic, his english theoretical writings. Where does Event come from if all there is is the order of Being?

An event is nothing but the part of a given situation, a fragment of Being. If an event is nothing but a fragment of Being, why asks Ž can we not describe it as such. Here is Badiou’s Kantianism. We are only free from our finitude, Kant tries to imagine what would happen to us if we gained full access to thing-in-itself. We would turn into puppets. So our freedom and ethical activity only emerges from standpoint of our finitude. That’s Kant. If event is nothing but fragment of being, why can’t we then reduce it to Being. Badiou says because of our finitude. Z says no, its because Being in incomplete, you must introduce the non-all of BEING.

Žižek love as political category may 2013 colonialism India

Žižek in Croatia at Subversive Festival, 16 May 2013.

EROS: Postmodern economy dissuades against stable love, quotes from Badiou In Praise of Love, you “fall” in love. It is a Platonic experience.
Passionate fall in love, the entire balance of your life is lost. It is a violent experience. All the advisors we have today are trying to DOMESTICATE or erase this EXCESS of love. How to find yourself in love without falling love.

AGAPE functions in a holy different way. WHich political regimes in the 20th century consolidated their power by invoking ‘love’ of their leader. North Korea.

Buddhism discipline sacrifice. Suzuki in the 1960s supported in his youth Japanese military expansion. The attitude of total immersion into selfless now. Anonymous impassive observer of life, you simply observe your knife hitting the body of another. Even the most radical spirituality is no guarantee that we won’t be doing awful things in our daily life.

Praise of Christian Love Buddhism all encompassing passion is one of indifference, quenching all passion which strive to install differences, while the Christian love, intolerant violent love, privilege one object above others.

Violent accept of LOVE. Get ride of Platonic Love of EROS, love of form, love of supreme good … THis is not true love, true love is going for a single person, the highest ethical act, not forsake all terrestial things for eternity, love is I know you are a miserable human being but I’m ready to forsake eternity for this

It is the of Christianity, a sword which separates and sets free, God rejoices in separation of universe into difference

Love your Neighbour Jesus says, I did not bring peace but a sword, he who loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his mother and sisters and yes even himself … I have come to cause conflicts on earth, father against son, son against father.

How are we to read these statements? Pagan: global balance ying-yang, cosmic balance. An individual is good when they act in accordance with social edifice, respect for his superiors, cares for his children etc. Evil is defined when individual is no longer satisfied with their place. This ethics is re-emerging in New Age Wisdom, Holistic approach.

Christianity does absolutely the opposite. Each individual has immediate access to universality, universality of human rights, freedoms, I can particpate in this universal dimension directly irrespective of my place in global social order. When God says if you do not hate your mother/father you can’t be my follower, father/mother here condense the entire hierarch socal order, the network of domination, the hatred Christ mentions is the hatred of established social hierarchical order.

Core of Christian Insight: Neither men nor woman, neither Jew nor Greeks, Christ dies God dies, all that survives is Holy Spirit which is a radically egalitarian society that opposes social hierarchy and social inequality

Che Guevara Revolutionaries as killing machines, hatred is a element of struggle. What you need is to love with hatred. Toughen yourself, harden yourself without losing tenderness. What makes love angelic, elevates it over pathetic sentimentality is cruelness itself.

Agape as political love (Eagleton) unconditional egalitarian love for the NEIGHBOUR can serve as foundation for a new social order. Form of appearance of love is communism, the urge to realize an egalitarian social order of solidarity, love is the force of this universal link, which in an emanicpatory collective links bypassing particularistic determinations.

Reply to terrorists: you shirk from authentic terror of the work of love.

Charity is a form of NON-LOVE today. Starbucks … don’t think, just act buy a coffee contribute money, you can continue your ignorant pleasurable life and feel good you contributed in struggle against suffering, you feel good, see I’m helping all the children starving ….

Authentic Violent Love: If Europe is in gradual decay what is replacing its hegemony?
Capitalism with Asian Values, the clear and present tendency of capitalism to restrain democracy. What is the hidden price of progress. This very success engenders antagonisms, keep in view its dark underside.

Universality Yes every universality can be false, it is always overdetermined by some particular content, Human Rights yes, but it secretly privileges white property male.
But this historicist relativism, beware universality is false universality, Marx is saying something, we are not only less universal than we think, we are also much MORE universal than we think we are. As agents on a market, we as individuals occupy a universal position, we relate to ourselves as universal subjects, we are no longer identify ourselves, I relate to myself as engineer, today, I lose my job, I become an taxi driver etc. Universality is a way of life, it is a mode of our immediate experience.

Capitalism force of capitalism to dissolve all particular modes of life. I want to rehabilitate 2 texts of Marx usually dismissed as case of Marx’s racism and Eurocentrism. British Rule in India and future results of British rule in India Žižek begins his defense of Marx All Marx claims is that British Colonisation of India unintended created conditions for double liberation of India. British knew if caste system collapsed that would create revolutionary conditions, so they put hard work into re-establishing and resusitating old ideological religious systems, so as to keep it stable and inert so it would remain ripe for exploitation. Respect for local cultures was a crucial component of process of colonialization, British rule wanted India to remain with local religious cultural conditions, Yes we bring progress to India, false respect for the Other is crucial to colonization, if you remove this you lose colonialism itself. Radical ambiguity of colonization, the very power of social disintegration unleashed by colonization, which at the same time opens up the space for liberation and ANTI-COLONIAL liberation

Žižek pulls out his India story about English blah blah But this is his most formal presentation of this story, he even has a quote. Brahmin intellectuals yelled out Žižek is a colonizer, the lower Dallics Untouchables immediately accepted my message. Message: It’s true when a foreign language is imposed, you feel deprived of the very core of your identity, but that which you feel deprived of is a specter engendered by this very colonialist imposition of a foreign language. The very loss of something creates the lost dimension.

We don’t have a pre-colonial India and then brutal colonization which makes the people aware of what they lost and then in anti-colonial struggle they are trying to regain what they lost. NO! The pre-colonial India was something totally different, its irredemiably lost. In so far as it is not lost, it precisely serves colonizers. This ‘new’ dimension that you are craving for, A New Modern Democratic India, the very program of de-colonialization is something engendered by colonialization itself as a reaction to it.

Malcolm X Not let’s return to those roots. We don’t have any genuine tradition to rely on, we have to collectively re-invent our identity as condition of our freedom. He found the new universalist frame in Islam. He had no dreams of returning to origins.
The greatness of ANC rejected the bullshit of returning to African roots, the one who wanted to return to roots was King Buthelzi who was in cohoots and supported by the brutal Apartheid state. MANDELA we should be white people at own game, by being more universal than they are.

Decolonization: India has a chance of achieving a more egalitarian democratic society. Western conservative are aware of this. WE shouldn’t be too glad about primacy of English language, it is no longer the english of true British people, but spoken by Mumbai and bankers in Bombay. I don’t believe in anti-colonial resistance in name of LOST ROOTS, if anything advocate a FURTHER LOSS OF OUR ROOTS.
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WHERE THE DANGER IS GROWS ALSO WHAT CAN SAVE US Friedrich Holderlin
This point of extreme loss is opportunity for REVERSAL. The whole eschatology of Marx, capitalism is utter alienation, workers are deprived of all substantial objective conditions of their work but this VERY DEPRIVATION LIBERATES THEM FROM ALL PARTICULAR roots and creates them as universal subjects who may re-approapriate universal SUBSTANCE.

We had a revolution, for Hegel it was French revolution, for us it was the commie revolutions, and things went terribly wrong. The whole problem of HEgel, is how in these conditions of failure, commie how we experienced in 20th century was a fiasco, how to remain faithful to commie idea, there is a big unease with modernity, strange bedfellows: conservatives up to Eva Morales who said capitalism killed Mother Nature NO! when we are faced with horrors of global capitalism we must remain faithful to Marxist insight that modernization is an ambiguous process, the only way out is to bring modernization to its end.

The crude Mary Magdalen joke
Beware of the people too intent on healing other people’s wounds. People found themselves in actual pre-colonial reality, they would scream as Mary M. There is no way back, we have to play the game of modernist project. I am totally against imperialism, but anti-imperialism is a misused word. When Japanese and Germans were fighting they used the words anit-imperialism, so I am no ready to sacrifice Eurpean modernity, AGAPE, universal love, not the wisdom of keeping a distance, fully following into love, full engagement, losing oneself without reserve. I don’t agree with that so-called Wisdom which says: Don’t attach yourself to worldly objects, NO, I say, Attach yourself to the end with worldly object with all the risks this involves.

Joke about Tiger Woods

Questions and Answer Session
In matters of love, miracles do happen, LOVE WHICH LUSTS FOR LIFE. André Gorz wrote book, he fell passionately in love, for 58 years they were absolutely in love, in the end when she was dying of cancer, he killed himself with her together. The mass media propoganda, everything is changing you have to experience life, no when I meet the right person I don’t want to experience too much of life … A certain dismissal of ‘ordinary’ people. I found nothing dismissive or cheap in the fact that an ordinary person wants his peaceful life. I’m not ready to betray this as some form of alienation. The only changes which truly count are those at the everyday level, these are the hardest to change. Maybe we no longer live in an ideological in a big sense, projects to die for, ideology is in the everyday sense. What is happening in Greece is not just political change, but a change in everyday ethics.

Erotic love passionate love, and political passion, the latter is limited, temporary, the former,EROTIC LOVE is not. Even if it doesn’t last, when you engage it should be withing the prospect of eternity. IT must be the prospect of eternity.

It’s a very dangerous game to engage in cultural thinking, this is western thinking, Yugoslave commies, Russia is slavic barbarian, so revolution happened in stupid despotic Asiatic country etc. What surprised me in Russia, some conservative told me opposite, Russia was good, all the evil came from western modernizers Peter the Great up to Stalin. Communism was a western brutal imposition. In China, you can’t call Mao a great Christian. The Great Leap Forward of late 1950s which is brutal event beyond imagination, over 50 millions died from 1958 – 1961.

The point of my negative reference to Buddhism, I reject that Christianity is totalitarian and Buddhism is peaceful. NO. UNIVERSAL LOVE: an authentic commie perspective is NOT Love for Humanity. No. All Men are Brothers. No thanks there are people I don’t want to love or be my brother etc. IT is always something wrong in proclaiming Universal love in all-encompassing love, I love you all, I love you all so much that I’m ready to kill who undermine this universal welfare, the ultimate example of this kind of Universal Love in East Germany the last session of commie party, boss of Stazi when people shouted to shout at him, he looked surprised, But I Love You All. Terror is for me always grounded in a false Universal Love. Authentic Love the majority of people are stupid, but I love you, and you. Agape. Love as a category of Political Struggle. Let’s establish solidarity. The only UNIVERSALITY is the UNIVERSALITY OF STRUGGLE. WE have problems here, there they have problems, is there a common front in each of our coutnries fighting against enemy. love as universal struggle.

And of course Žižek now standard explanation of his infamous claim that “Hitler wasn’t violent enough” He killed millions because he was afraid of making social change, it was a reactive violence. Stalin: The violence was enactment of utter failure of how to include farmers in socialism. Brutal direct violence is sign of impotence.

An important philosophical point on nature of Truth Jews are seducing our German girls, exploiting German workers. The moment you accept the debate at this point you are lost. Where, in what do you see the solution, neo-Keynsian solution? Varvougis REPLIES: We need a Keynsian stablization, it buys us breathing space to dream about the good society.

Question on the film The Lives of Others

Bertolt Brecht: Humans are by natures evil, you can’t change humans, you can only change conditions to take away opportunity to do evil. We have maybe a certainty propensity for violence for acting out, which can be put to different uses. I don’t see a problem here. I’m totally the most brutal realist you can imagine. I didn’t use the word ideal, I used the word miracle. Life is shit, but miracles happen. Some people are just waling around being consumers working, boring and all of a sudden they same, ENOUGH. I cannot go on with this anymore. and risk his life to change something. I believe in miracles, life is generally shit, miracles happen, once here and there we find Andre Gorz.

Žžek thanks his translators and is very funny story about Haiti

Last question I don’t believe in intimate self-experience, vulnerable fragile person, the lie he invented for himself so he could do the horrors he did. I’m sure he played with kids and served cookies, the more brutal they are the more they need a private fetish, big bank managers who destroy lives of millions, the same role with private charities, let me give 2% of my wealth to them to Somalia. We lie to ourselves. We need a private myth. Maybe the fundamental form of ideology today, is I’m not just embodiment of economic or ideological categories I”m also a warm fragile person. That’s the lie. Brecht precisely reduces capitalist to their social roles, don’t give me the bs that you are a warm caring person. This isn’t just commie, this is the great legacy of Jewish ethics. The total EXTERNALIZATION, the truth is how you INTERACT WITH OTHERS. Not how does it mean to your spiritual growth, inner spiritual growth, authentic self-experience is b.s. I believe in total externality.

A black lady in South Africa running away from a policeman, her heel breaks on her shoe and falls off. The policeman stops picks up her show and gives it to her. They both look at each other and feel foolish, should she put the shoe back on and they continue chasing each other, the policeman give her the shoe, bids her a good day and turns around and leaves. Now this is the morality I believe in. The policeman probably inside was an incredible racist, but it was what he did on the outside, how he treats other people. Superficial manners can do miracles. Do this 10 times and you might change. Huck Finn help a runaway black slave … their inner bad feeling is what is non-authentic. I believe in surfaces in good manners. what they did externally was right, on the outside on the surface … they did a good thing.

We should hate them, we should just learn to pretend to act like we like them. and to maintain a proper distance. Respectful distance, we should know the other, how can we know the other when we don’t know ourselves, and neither does the other, I believe in superficial manners.

Terror – Anxiety

Žižek the VOIDED SUBJECT always has something, I don’t believe in this pure existentialist bull shit, I am just a void. Object and subject small a, doesn’t

Is there a place in Badiou’s ediface for DRIVE in the Freudian sense. Badiou says death drive is decadent, wish for death etc. Oops. Hegel on Madness. Hegel has this idea of how the possibility of madness, radical negativity of madness is constitutive of being mad. It doesn’t mean we all have to be mad, but the only way to account for terror is a reaction against the threat of madness. Death drive, radical negativity, for something to emerge.

Negativity has to emerge from time to time to remind us of our pure subjectivity to prevent it from falling into social order complacency.

In order to have anxiety and terror there must be at least a perspective of the event. Anxiety and terror is the shadow of how an event affects animal life. NO!

Where, what do we mean by subject?

Badiou promises to do in Logics of Worlds, to elaborate how multiplicity of being structures itself into multiplicity of worlds. No passage from pure mathematized infinity into different worlds. How can something like a world emerge within the multiplicity of multiplicity of Being.

Badiou’s ontology, multiplicity of multiplicities is TOO FLAT there is no inherent antagonism, tension.

Multiplicity of multiplicity of multiplicity … ontology is the discourse of the VOID, but why then isnt an event simply the order of BEING, why is it an exception.

Secretly he introduces another order of Being. The EVENT IS AN EXCEPTION but not with regard to order of BEING as such. Here he cheats.

when he speaks about EXCEPTION, there are only language and bodies with the exception of EVENTS. Not far enough There is something which is NOT. There are only bodies and languages BUT there are occurences which break with this logic.

The true problem with Alain, his ontology relies too much on the opposition between presence and representation. Anti-statist As if we have some AUTHENTIC presentation: mass movement, and then you have some form of state, Here I am for REPRESENTATION.

Žižek Derrida 4 christian universality

Žižek, Slavoj. “A Plea for a Return to Différance (with a Minor Pro Domo Sua)” Critical Inquiry. 32.2 (2006): 226-249. PDF download

This is how one should answer the standard critique of Christian universalism:what this all-inclusive attitude

(recall St.Paul’s famous statement, “Where there is neither Greek nor Jew” [Col. 3:11])

involves is a thorough exclusion of thosewho do not accept Christianity. In other “particularistic” religions (and even in Islam, in spite of its global expansionism), there is a place for others, they are tolerated, even if they are condescendingly looked upon.

The Christian motto, All Men Are Brothers, however, means also that those who are not my brothers are not (even) men. Christians usually praise themselves for overcoming the Jewish exclusivist notion of the ChosenPeople and encompassing the entirety of humanity—the catch here is that, in their very insistence that they are the Chosen People with the privileged direct link to God, Jews accept the humanity of the other people who celebrate their false gods, while Christian universalism tendentiously excludes nonbelievers from the very universality of humankind.

Thus Christian universality is not the all-encompassing global medium where there is a place for all and everyone. It is rather the struggling universality, the site of a constant battle.

Which battle, which division? To follow Paul: not the division between Law and sin, but between, on the one side, the totality of Law and sin as its supplement and, on the other side, the way of Love.

Christian universality emerges at the symptomal point of those who are “part of no-part” of the global order. This is where the reproach of exclusion gets it wrong: Christian universality, far from excluding some subjects, is formulated from the position of those excluded, of those for whom there is no specific place within the existing order, although they belong to it; universality is strictly codependent with this lack of specific place/determination.

Or, to put it in a different way, the reproach to Paul’s universalism misses the true site of universality. The universal dimension he opened up is not the “neither Greeks nor Jews but all Christians,” which implicitly excludes non-Christians; it is rather the difference Christians/non-Christians itself which, as a difference, is universal; that is, it cuts across the entire social body, splitting, dividing from within every kind of ethnic identity: Greeks are cut into Christians and non-Christians, as well as Jews.

The standard reproach thus in a way knocks on an open door. The whole point of the Paulinian notion of struggling universality is that true universality and partiality do not exclude each other and also that universal Truth is only accessible from a partial, engaged, subjective position. 242