...and now a word from the World's Leading Communist Philosopher...
The Oxford English Dictionary gives Latin and French origins for the word "entertain", including inter (among) + tenir (to hold) as derivations, giving translations of "to hold mutually" or "to hold intertwined" and "to engage, keep occupied, the attention thoughts or time (of a person)".
Plato, "Protagoras"
I proceeded: Is not a Sophist, Hippocrates, one who deals wholesale or retail in the food of the soul? To me that appears to be his nature.
And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul?
Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or hurtful: neither do their customers know, with the exception of any trainer or physician who may happen to buy of them. In like manner those who carry about the wares of knowledge, and make the round of the cities, and sell or retail them to any customer who is in want of them, praise them all alike; though I should not wonder, O my friend, if many of them were really ignorant of their effect upon the soul; and their customers equally ignorant, unless he who buys of them happens to be a physician of the soul. If, therefore, you have understanding of what is good and evil, you may safely buy knowledge of Protagoras or of any one; but if not, then, O my friend, pause, and do not hazard your dearest interests at a game of chance. For there is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink: the one you purchase of the wholesale or retail dealer, and carry them away in other vessels, and before you receive them into the body as food, you may deposit them at home and call in any experienced friend who knows what is good to be eaten or drunken, and what not, and how much, and when; and then the danger of purchasing them is not so great. But you cannot buy the wares of knowledge and carry them away in another vessel; when you have paid for them you must receive them into the soul and go your way, either greatly harmed or greatly benefited; and therefore we should deliberate and take counsel with our elders; for we are still young—too young to determine such a matter. And now let us go, as we were intending, and hear Protagoras; and when we have heard what he has to say, we may take counsel of others; for not only is Protagoras at the house of Callias, but there is Hippias of Elis, and, if I am not mistaken, Prodicus of Ceos, and several other wise men.
38 comments:
That woman has a lot of facial hair. Just an observation. Not shaming her for it.
I see you discovered my fetish for the hirsute.
As per Wikipedia, Slavoj Žižek's ten favorite films include The Fountainhead and We the Living. Two movies based on Ayn Rand novels. According to you "That's why Ayn Rand's Objectivism and your so-called RN Rationality are both such a JOKE"... yet neither of these movies are comedies. And I'm not sure why a supposed Communist would love an anti-communist movie.
Slavoj Zizek, "A Paradox of Capital"
It is easy to ridicule Ayn Rand, but there is a grain of truth in the famous "hymn to money" from her Atlas Shrugged:
"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars. Take your choice - there is no other."
Did Marx not say something similar in his well-known formula of how, in the universe of commodities, "relations between people assume the guise of relations among things"? In the market economy, relations between people can appear as relations of mutually recognized freedom and equality: domination is no longer directly enacted and visible as such.
The liberal answer to domination is recognition - recognition, according to Jameson, thus "becomes a stake in a multicultural settlement by which the various groups peaceably and electorally divide up the spoils." The subjects of recognition are not classes (it is meaningless to demand the recognition of the proletariat as a collective subject - if anything, fascism does this, demanding the mutual recognition of classes). Subjects of recognition are those defined by race, gender and so on - the politics of recognition remains within the framework of bourgeois civil society, it is not yet class politics.
The recurrent story of the contemporary left is that of a leader or party elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a "new world" (just think of Mandela in South Africa or Lula in Brazil) - but, then, sooner or later, they confront the key dilemma: whether to dare to mess with the capitalist mechanism, or to just "play the game"? If one disturbs the mechanism, one will be very swiftly "punished" by market perturbations, economic chaos and the rest.
So although it is true that anti-capitalism cannot be the direct goal of political action - in politics, one opposes concrete political agents and their actions, not an anonymous "system" - we should apply here the Lacanian distinction between goal and aim: anti-capitalism, if not the immediate goal of emancipator politics, should be its ultimate aim, the horizon of all its activity.
Is this not the lesson of Marx's notion of the "critique of political economy"? Although the sphere of the economy appears "apolitical," it is the secret point of reference and structuring principle of political struggles.
Returning to Rand, what is problematic is her underlying premise: that the only choice is between direct and indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian. However, as I've already said, we should nonetheless recognize the moment of truth in Rand's otherwise ridiculously ideological claim: the great lesson of state socialism was indeed that an immediate abolition of private property and market-regulated exchange, in the absence of concrete forms of social regulation of the process of production, necessarily resuscitates direct relations of servitude and domination.
"Slavoj Zizek, The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie"
The notion of surplus wage also throws new light on the continuing ‘anti-capitalist’ protests. In times of crisis, the obvious candidates for ‘belt-tightening’ are the lower levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: political protest is their only recourse if they are to avoid joining the proletariat. Although their protests are nominally directed against the brutal logic of the market, they are in effect protesting about the gradual erosion of their (politically) privileged economic place. Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shrugged of striking ‘creative’ capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realisation in today’s strikes, most of which are held by a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their surplus wage. These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent job is itself a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry etc, but those privileged workers who have guaranteed jobs (teachers, public transport workers, police). This also accounts for the wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus wage in later life.
"Trump Created a Crack in the Liberal Centrist Hegemony"
For Žižek, social democracy is insufficient, but it is perilous to prescribe a fixed alternative. “We have to reject whatever remains in Marxism of historic teleology… Socialist revolution produces its own mess, it goes wrong. I’m globally a pessimist but what gives me hope is precisely this catastrophic situation. Because in such catastrophic situations you have to be creative, you have to improvise. That’s why I don’t trust leftists who have these simple solutions.”
I ask if he is attracted by the notion of “luxury communism”: an automated economy in which humans are sustained by a state-funded universal basic income. “Don’t underestimate envy,” Žižek says. “Ayn Rand saw one thing very clearly: if you abolish money, it’s very difficult not to restore direct, interpersonal relations of domination. We saw this through the Soviet Union – they had money under Stalin but it wasn’t crucial; what was crucial were the perks you got as a writer, access to luxury homes and so on.
“How will relations among us be regulated? Who will have power? Don’t give me this stupid shit about self-organisation of the people, I don’t believe in it.” (Žižek last year delivered a lecture entitled “a plea for bureaucratic socialism”.)
Slavoj Zizek, "Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism"
Let us take an unlikely example: Ayn Rand's first novel written in English, "We the Living", set in Petrograd between 1922 and 1925. Kira Argounova, the young daughter of a bourgeois family and a strong-willed independent spirit, manages to enroll in the Technological Institute where she aspires to fulfill her dream of becoming an engineer. At the Institute Kira meets Andrei Taganov, an idealistic communist and high ranking officer in the GPU (the secret police); the two share a mutual respect and admiration for each other in spite of their differing political beliefs. Kira finds Andrei to be the one person she can trust, and with whom she can discuss her most intimate thoughts and views. Not even her passionate lover, Leo Kovalensky- a handsome member of the nobility with a free spirit to match Kira's own- can fulfill this role for her. When Leo contracts tuberculosis and cannot get State help for his stay at the sanatorium, Kira feigns love for Andrei and agrees to become his mistress in order to secure his help in getting medical treatment for Leo. Months later, after Leo has been cured, he gets involved in black market speculation. Andrei is tipped off about this venture and, unaware of Kira's love for Leo, arrests him for crimes against the State. Eventually he finds out about Kira's relationship with Leo, and the ensuing confrontation between Andrei and Kira is the most poignant scene in the story. When Kira tells Andrei that she has faked her love for him just to get support for Leo, her true love, his reaction is not the expected one of rage and vengeance, but one of regret at the suffering he has unknowingly caused Kira, and understanding the depth of her love for Leo, for whom she was sacrificing herself. In order to redress the situation, Andrei promises to bring Leo back to her; after Leo's release from prison, Andrei loses his position in the Party and commits suicide.
Although staunchly anti-communist, the novel remains ambiguous: what is surprising is not only the highly ethical reaction of the Bolshevik hero Andrei when he learns that Kira does not love him; even more surprising is the fact that this ethical reaction seems to be part of the communist persona. What is evil here is not simply the Bolshevik revolution as such, but its betrayal, which culminates in the pact between the revolutionaries who have betrayed their vocation and the old corrupt bourgeoisie. It is as if, although the revolution was flawed in its very essence and its corruption was unavoidable, the only path to truth leads through revolution: it is Andrei, a communist (and even a GPU officer) who, confronted with a tribunal, gives the original version of the staple Randian speech praising the individual spirit and rejecting collectivism, a speech whose later versions are Howard Roark's in front of the jury in "Fountainhead" and John Galt's long radio speech in "Atlas Shrugged". Andrei is thus a kind of vanishing mediator: the proto-figure of the Randian hero whose communist roots, still visible here, disappear in her late "mature" anti-communism. The first step in an effective critique of ideology is to render such vanishing mediators visible again- in the case of Rand, to show how even an extreme anti-communist stance was secretly based upon communist premises. (At a different level, the same holds for "The Fountainhead": is not the architecture of Howard Roark, the novel's hero modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright, also uncannily similar to the Soviet modernism of the 1920's?)
(cont from above)
Not the least irony of such retroactive de-legitimization of communism in Rand's work is that the same procedure was widely practiced by the target of her criticism, Stalinism itself. This is why, in contrast to Leninism, Stalisnism had no use for the category of the renegade: for Lenin, Kautsky was a "renegade," which meant that he was once one of us, but the betrayed the Cause; in Stalinism, however, there are no renegades, only traitors. When Stalin moved against Trotsky in the mid-1920s, it did not mean that he considered Trotsky a "renegade," someone who had served the revolution in the past but then lost his way- on the contrary, Trotsky became a "vanishing mediator" of the revolutionary process, and the Stalinists claimed that he had sabotaged the revolutionary struggle from the very beginning, totally ignoring his role in organizing the Red Army.
This is why Hegelian dialectics is not a vulgar evolutionism according to which a phenomenon may be justified in its own time, but deserves to disappear when its time passes: the "eternity" of dialectics means that the de-legitimization is always retroactive, what disappears "in itself" always deserved to disappear. This brings us to the crux of the matter, the crux which is, as expected, the subject itself. The Hegelian-Lacanian subject is the ultimate vanishing mediator: it is never present here-and-now, in every present constellation it already vanishes in its symbolic representation. In other words, the "subject" is an X which always already vanishes in its representations, and this is what makes this concept an eminently dialectical one.
- Slavoj Zizek, "Absolute Recoil"
In Udi Alone's documentary "Art/Violence", a tribute to Juliano MerKhamis, the founder of the Jenin Freedom Theatre, a young Palestinian actress describes what Juliano meant to her and her colleagues: he gave them their freedom, he made them aware of what they could do, he opened up a new possibility for them, homeless kids from a refugee camp. This is the role of an authentic Master: when we are afraid of something (and fear of death is the ultimate fear that makes us slaves), a true friend will say something like: "Don't be afraid, look, I'll do it for free - not because I have to, but out of my love for you; I'm not afraid!" In doing so he sets us free, demonstrating in actu that it can be done, and that we can do it too, that we aren't slaves. Let us recall, from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead", the description of the impact Howard Roark makes on the audience in the courtroom where he stands on trial:
Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind. But Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd - and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible for him. For the flash of an instant, they grasped the manner of his consciousness. Each asked himself: do I need anyone's approval? - does it matter? - am I tied? - And for that instant, each man was free - free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room. It was only a moment; the moment of silence when Roark was about to speak.
This is the way Christ brings freedom: confronting Him, we become aware of our own freedom. Such a Master is not a subject supposed to know, but also not simply a subject supposed to be free - in short, he is not a subject of transference, which is why it is also wrong to see his position as equivalent to that of an analyst in the analytical social link. The obvious question to be raised here is: why does a subject need a Master to assume his or her freedom? Does not such an assumption amount to a kind of pragmatic paradox wherein the very form (a Master gives me freedom) undermines the content (my freedom)? Should we not follow the well-known motto of all emancipatory movements: freedom cannot be handed down to us by a benevolent master but has to be won through hard struggle?
The truth in fiction... Zizek obviously found some in Rand's.
...and he's right about money. Without it you go right back to a system of domination. reciprocal altruism
And Zizek LOVES Antigone. It's how he views himself.
:P
Get your social distance!
"Trump Created a Crack in the Liberal Centrist Hegemony".
I suppose that's one way of looking at it. It's forcing Joe Biden to the Left to fix the bigly damage Dotard wrought via his extreme incompetence and corruption. I say we "thank" him by charging, arresting and imprisoning him.
LOL! Biden's in charge of the liberal centrist hegemony!
According to Dotard he's a communist. Communism is centrist? Who knew?
Zizek is a Communist. And according to Zizek, Biden is a Centrist. :)
I don't believe him.
Because you're one too. No real Bernie Bro sucks *Biden's dick like you do.
I was never a "Bernie bro". I've told you this multiple times. However, LIKE BERNIE SANDERS, I realized that Dotard had to be defeated. Bernie Bros suck. When it came time to actually listen to Bernie and do the logical thing he told them to (support the Democratic candidate in order to get rid of the horrible Dotard) they turned on him (useful idiot Jimmy Dore referring to him as a "cuck"). Also, nobody sucked (and continues to suck) tRump dick like you do.
That Zizek ever supported Dotard is proof of his stupidity. When I said I don't believe him, I meant in regards to EVERYTHING. Not just his assessment of Joe Biden. Biden was a centrist. But he realized that the bigliness of the pandemic and it's economic impact (made much worse by Dotard's bigly incompetence) required a bigly Democratic Socialist government response to avert bigly disaster.
lol! You're not even a Leftist... you're just a pathetic global corporatist Uniparty centrist c*ck sucker pretending that you'd support a real Leftist.
I'm strongly opposed to global corporatism. btw, I don't like mind readers like you who claim to know what other people are thinking.
lol! Like hell you are.
Like hell YOU are.
DJT isn't a salaried bourgeoisie manager. He OWNS his companies.
His creditors own them. They will be taking possession soon.
lol! Good luck with that. He already knows how to come back from that. :)
By borrowing more money. Except no financial institution will extend credit to him any longer. Because they know they will likely never be repaid. Maybe money sent by magamoron dupes will keep him afloat? Dotard's legal expenses are about to significantly increase. I think you know I'm rooting for him to be financially ruined. It's way past time karma catches up to this evil a-hole.
Whatever catches up to him won't be karma. It'll be the work of democracy hating bad-faith Democrats.
No.
lol!
I'll laugh after Dotard gets what's coming to him.
Another billion in Trump licenses? You can laugh again next week. lol!
Prison and financial ruin. That will likely occur sometime after next week. btw, Licenses? Who wants to do business with a disgraced loser?
Trumpists don't want to live in Trump Towers? Who knew?
They can't afford to live there.
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