With or Without Passion

[Kire]

This is a truly excellent analysis of the Abu Ghraib situation, once you get past the obscure first paragraph. I'll snip it here:

With or Without Passion
by Slavoj Zizek

{snip}

One of the strategies of dissidence in the last years of Socialism was therefore precisely to take the ruling ideology more seriously/literally than it took itself by way of ignoring its virtual unwritten shadow: "You want us to practice socialist democracy? OK, here you have it!" And when one got back from the Party apparatchiks desperate hints of how this is not the way things function, one simply had to ignore these hints... This is what happens with the proclamation of the Decalogue: its revolutionary novelty resides not in its content, but in the absence of the accompanying virtual texture of the Law's obscene supplement. This is what acheronta movebo ("moving the underground") as a practice of the critique of ideology means: not directly changing the explicit text of the Law, but, rather, intervening into its obscene virtual supplement. Recall the relationsnip towards homosexuality in a soldiers' community, which operates at two clearly distinct levels: the explicit homosexuality is brutally attacked, those identified as gays are ostracized, beaten up every night, etc.; however, this explicit homophobia is accompanied by an excessive set of implicit web of homosexual innuendos, inner jokes, obscene practices, etc. The truly radical intervention in to military homophobia should therefore not focus primarily on the explicit repression of homosexuality; it should rather "move the underground," disturb the implicit homosexual practices which SUSTAIN the explicit homophobia.

It is in this obscene underground which enables us to approach in a new way the Abu Ghraib phenomenon. Does anyone still remember the unfortunate Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Saddam's information minister who, in his daily press conferences, heroically denied even the most evident facts and stuck to the Iraqi line - when the US tanks were only hundreds of yards from his office, he continued to claim that the US TV shots of the tanks on the Baghdad streets are just Hollywood special effects? Once, however, he did struck a strange truth - when, confronted with the claims that the US army is already in control of parts of Baghdad, he snapped back: "They are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" When the scandalous news broke out about the weird things going on in the Abu Ghraib Prison in Baqhdad, we got a glimpse of this very dimension that Americans do not control in themselves.

In his reaction to the photos showing Iraqi prisoners tortured and humiliated by the US soldiers, rendered public at the end of April 2004, George Bush, as expected, emphasized how the deeds of the soldiers were isolated crimes which do not reflect what America stands and fights for, the values of democracy, freedom and personal dignity. And, effectively, the very fact that the case turned into a public scandal which put the US administration in defensive position was in itself a positive sign - in a really "totalitarian" regime, the case would simply be hushed up. (In the same way, let us not forget that the very fact that the US forces did not find weapons of mass destruction is a positive sign: a truly "totalitarian" power would have done what cops usually do plant drugs and then "discover" the evidence of crime...)

However, a number of disturbing features complicate the simple picture.

More: http://www.lacan.com/zizpassion.htm

This is actually Part I in a two part series called "What's wrong with Fundamentalism?"

Check out part II here: http://www.lacan.com/zizunder.htm

Editor's note: I actually got the titles mixed up when I posted this, apologies all around.

[bonito]

1. Thanks, bookmarked

[buzzsaw_23]

2. Thanks

printed for a read

[Kire]

3. edited to add a link to part II

http://www.lacan.com/zizunder.htm

I got the titles mixed up, too. Sorry.

[buzzsaw_23]

4. Copied both- This paragraph

spoke well to our times/culture.

This apparently absurd logic renders perfectly the functioning of the symbolic order, in which the symbolic mask-mandate matters more than the direct reality of the individual who wears this mask and/or assumes this mandate. This functioning involves the structure of fetishist disavowal: "I know very well that things are the way I see them /that this person is a corrupt weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him". So, in a way, I effectively believe his words, not my eyes, i.e. I believe in Another Space (the domain of pure symbolic authority) which matters more than the reality of its spokesmen. The cynical reduction to reality thus falls short: when a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of the Institution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of judge - if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. This paradox is what Lacan aims at with his les non-dupes errent: those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most.

http://www.lacan.com/zizpassion.htm

[Kire]

5. technically, I'm not sure which one is part I or II?

The guy's a great conceptualist, but he sure has a lot of typos, including the fact that it says Part I on the top part of the page, and Part II at the beginning of the body of the text. Vice versa for the other one.

I love when he talks about Evil:

The standard metaphysical-religious notion of Evil is that of doubling, gaining a distance, abandoning the reference to the big Other, our Origin and Goal, turning away from the original divine One, getting caught into the self-referential egotistic loop, thus introducing a gap into the global balance and harmony of the One-All. The easy, all too slick, postmodern solution to this is to retort that the way out of this self-incurred impasse consists in abandoning the very presupposition of the primordial One from which one turned away, i.e., to accept that our primordial situation is that of finding oneself in a complex situation, one within a multitude of foreign elements-only the theologico-metaphysical presupposition of the original One compels us to perceive the alien as the outcome of (our) alienation. From this perspective, the Evil is not the redoubling of the primordial One, turning away from it, but the very imposition of an all-encompassing One onto the primordial dispersal. However, what if the true task of thought is to think the self-division of the One, to think the One itself as split within itself, as involving an inherent gap?
Alain Badiou's classic, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, is a classic for our time. I can't recommend it highly enough. Badiou is also frequently published on Lacan.com.

[Kire]

6. and you know what else?

this is the one called "Move the Underground!"

not only are "Part I" and "Part II" mixed up, but the titles of the pieces are.

Lacan.com won't change it, they are notoriously low tech

This pisses me off because "Move the Underground!" is a much better thread title than "With or Without Passion".

[Kire]

10. the links are mixed up, too

the one in the blockquotes does not point to the source of the quoted text

This is what happens, Lacan.com, when you fuck a stranger...I mean, when you mix up the titles of your articles.

[Dogmudgeon]

7. Thanks! Those articles sure gave me some *Joissance*!

--p!

[Kire]

8. ewwwwww

keep that to yourself

[Dogmudgeon]

9. It's my object relations, isn't it?

It's so difficult to condescend to pleasure these days. I never get it right.

I need a new Unbesetzlich Zeitgeist bad.

:evilgrin:

--p!

[Kire]

11. In March 2003, Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing.

In March 2003, none other than Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term, the "unknown knowns," things we don't know that we know - which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the "knowledge which doesn't know itself," as Lacan used to say. If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq are the "unknown unknowns," the threats from Saddam about which we do not even suspect what they may be, the Abu Ghralh scandal shows where the main dangers are: in the "unknown knowns," the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, although they form the background of our public values. Which is why the assurance of the US Army command that no "direct orders" were issued to humiliate and torture the prisoners is ridiculous: of course they were not, since, as everyone who knows army life is aware of, this is not how such things are done. There are no formal orders, nothing is written, just unofficial pressure, hints and directives delivered in private, the way one shares a dirty secret...

[Kire]

12. Lacan's definition: "Love is giving something one doesn't have..."

what one often forgets is to add the other half which completes the sentence: "... to someone who doesn't want it."