“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, August 12, 2011

Slavoj Nails It

...in this piece on Anders Breivik and antisemitism.

1 comment:

MichaelSDG said...

Zizek has a difficulty discerning between individuals and groups or collectives. Just because a person identifies with a specific belief, and Breivik identifies with and rejects many, doesn't mean they are suddenly a nazi or "politically correct" (what a strange concern). Why must the contradictions be resolved into coexisting identities, that just happen to be political institutions? It seems that the contradiction isn't between Breivik's political platforms (ideal nazism and pc liberalism), but in his relation to any general platform; for instance he both rejects nazism and exhibits apparent features of it. But this ambivalence will represent the difference between breivik and the millions who openly identify with the nazi party. To always reduce new violence to old political forms is bad psychoanalysis. But that is the problem, zizek had the chance (1500 pages of material--including pages about his family's sex life!) To work out the dialectic at a human level, with paranoia and compulsion implicit to each sentence, and he gives us weak Marxism. Also he suggests that all of the writing is justification; but do we know when Breivik decided the end would be killing? And even if we did, who is to decide what is justification, what is motive and what is fantasy?