Comrades, Welcome to the desert of the real. For the time being, my writing on here will be entirely free. If you have the means, and believe in paying for good writing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. No, I never fasten – and for a simple reason. I am a workaholic and I do not want to spend time worrying about my eating habits. I do not fasten not because I like eating but because I don’t care about it – it’s an unpleasant duty to be done as quickly and painlessly as possible. This is why my favoured places for eating are small fast food corners in provincial gas stations in Island where defrozen pizzas or hamburgers are the top offer.
Possibly the most extreme form of self-denying, self-negating self-deprivation is the Jain practice of Sallekhana. This ritualistic process of gradually withdrawing forms of nutrition from the practitioner's diet until he or she finally expires is an activity that involves the entire Jain community and can take a number of months to fully complete.
Jains insist that Sallekhana is a practice of religious Enlightenment and that it is *not* a form of suicide.
For Jains, Sallekhana is a central part of their soteriological traditions. They stress that the essential salvific aspects emanate beyond the individual undergoing the ritual and are transmitted throughout both the entire Jain community and beyond this into the social world of which the Jains are a part. This salvific effect distinguishes the Sallekhana form of intense corporeal self-negation from acts of suicide. Suicide is illegal in India as is, for the moment., Jainist Sallekhana despite their efforts to fight this criminalization.
"It is argued that it is suicide since there is voluntary severance of life etc. No, it is not suicide, as there is no passion. Without attachment etc, there is no passion in this undertaking. A person who kills himself by means of poison, weapon, etc, swayed by attachment, aversion or infatuation, commits suicide. But he who practices holy death is free from desire, anger, and delusion. Hence it is not suicide"
Did Simone Weil commit suicide? When Weil insisted that it was only ethical to eat as much as the average calorie allotment of the typical French adult during WWII even as her doctors told her that she would thereby fatally injure her health, how are we to understand her final days?
Though Weil experienced several intense mystical states in the course of her life, she was never comfortable converting to the official Catholic Church. Weil's mystical experiences were often associated with intense pain - migraines - and/or exhaustion - factory work. In her final days of ill health and self-imposed malnutrition, what final insights and visions did Weil hope to attain?
Most, possibly all, religions and philosophies with strong elements of world-denialism contain the (possibly almost self-refuting) paradox that they cannot become truly universal.
If Jainism or quietist Zen Buddhism or even milder forms of world-withdrawal such as Epicureanism were to be adopted by everybody, then there would no longer be the world-building and world-maintaining majority of people who would make the world that is the necessary object of world-denialism. In other words, world-denialist doctrines must maintain a deeply pessimistic world-view.
The Jains are probably the strongest of the world-denialist groups. Buddhists shave their heads. Jains *pluck* every hair from their bodies individually. At first, initiates have this hair-plucking done for them. They later do it to themselves. The pain and self-inflicting of excruciations is the preferred path to corporeal self-negation, self-transcendence.
The social place of groups like the Jain devotees, their monks and nuns, is to act as exemplars to their communities. Their role is possibly comparable to the suffering of the Christian passion except that it is not a once-only christological Event. They enact Enlightenment, serve as living (and dying) morality tales of self-negation, whilst the outside world continues along its usual paths of sin and error.
If you ever come to Mexico City sometime, i will invite you to a pizzeria or something that is totally not mexican. Otherwise, i will confess that everytime that my family organizes a party, dinner or something, i always make sure to put music that nobody likes, something like psychedelic rock, krautrock, blues, etc. Just to provoke people and spoil their party.
Extreme deprivation is, of course, not only a physical condition but can equally be an axiological, mental and moral state of abyssal Evil. Of Hell manifested upon our Earth. In accordance with Platonism, the Good is primary. Evil is a state in which the Good is absent, in which we subsist in a state of moral deprivation.
Currently, a number of the power-elites of the national capitals located within the core zones of the capitalist world-system are working overtime to assure their citizens that the conduct of state-policy through the means of the most brutal, sadistic and genocidal types of warfare known to military history is a completely acceptable, efficient and normative method of conduct.
Washington, Berlin, London, Canberra, Ottawa, Tel Aviv have crossed a world-historical threshold by their reinvention of a number of prior states of extreme Terror and of belligerent violence in order to usher in a paradigmatically novel form of Evil for the 21st century. 21st century Genocidal siege warfare as a means of conducting state-policy.
Note that the USA and Israel always make a massive song and dance about Israel's "right to self-defense" when making a mockery of International Law and of the United Nations in the nihilistic manner that these two warlike states always conduct themselves. As "self-defense" is an entirely natural aspect of any state's security, why insist on what should be entirely tautologous unless there is a bloody sleight of hand at play? The International Court of Justice in its ruling against the West Bank wall has already ruled that when Israel inflicts lethal violence against the Palestinians that this violence is against an *internal* population and hence is a matter of (apartheid) policing and therefore *cannot* be considered "self-defense".
Tel Aviv was accustomed to engage in its typically self-congratulatory wank by telling all and sundry how carefully calibrated was the calorie count that they in their altruistic majesty calculated would be sufficient for each of the Gazan population that they had imprisoned under a military blockade.
In their concentration camp guard's self-delusion, they then assured themselves that the imprisoned Untermenschen were perfectly content to live in a "prison-camp" as David Cameron (!!) described the Gaza Blockade in 2010.
David Cameron: Israeli blockade has turned Gaza Strip into a 'prison camp'
In other words, 7th October was not a failure of intelligence. All the relevant intelligence was available not only to Israel but also to Egypt but was summarily dismissed. It was a failure of basic human *empathy* and of the most rudimentary morality.
October 7th was a damning indictment of the abyssal Evil which is the mass-homicidal norm in the belligerent death-world of perpetual necropolitical violence that is the rogue-nuclear apartheid state of Israel and its occupied territories of Palestine.
It hardly needs saying that whilst moral self-reflection leading to moral self-improvement is the path of the Enlightened that this path of the Moral Good is the violent anti-thesis to that chosen by the military-colonial whipmasters in Washington and Tel Aviv.
‘Human Animals’: The Sordid Language behind Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
The shocking parallels between Israel's dehumanizing rhetoric and historical genocides are now translating into real-life horrors in Gaza.
The biopower of carefully calibrated calorie counts can quickly and easily become the violent necropolitics of absolute deprivation.
“It’s really rare for war criminals to just openly announce their actions,” said John Cox, professor of global studies and history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who also directs the Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies. That’s what’s “unique about Israel’s bombing in Gaza.”
Cox noted that this month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the U.N.’s Genocide Convention. “[The war in Gaza] literally does take on genocidal proportions and potential, along with daily humiliations and affronts to human rights that Israel has been engaging in for 75 years,” Cox said.
(...)
“A December 8 video from Gaza’s Shejaiya neighborhood shows Israeli soldiers setting fire to a truck with food and water in it, fitting Israel’s October 9 declaration of a “complete siege” of Gaza, in which Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant said that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed into Gaza. This is an unambiguous violation of the second article of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, which includes “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members” of a particular group, as well as the deliberate “inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Tactics once thought a relic of the past such as the militarization of plague are now within the mentally and morally depraved orbit of Israelis committed to Genocide.
"In an Op-Ed titled "Let’s Not be Intimidated by the World," Israeli ret. Major General Giora Eiland argues that all Palestinians in Gaza are legitimate targets and that a “severe epidemic" in Gaza will "bring victory closer.”"
So to finally return to Zizek's wonderfully provocative piece above, I am currently fasting in a manner that might be compared to Simone Weil's final days. Whilst I lack the celebrity to stage a hunger strike outside the White House such as Cynthia Nixon did, I am curious at the very least what if any enlightenment or edification may be gained by fasting in solidarity with the victims of the War on Gaza.
This is not from a sense of "guilt" as I am not guilty. It is from a sense of the sheer obscenity that afflicts those who from sheer, dumb luck are blissfully unaffected. Rather as Norbet Elias describes the fasting habits of Medieval monks, I will deprive myself of food and water because I am in the luxurious position of being able to do so. What enlightenment may I gain besides the realization that I already possess of the utter futility of those imprisoned in a condition in which there are ZERO avenues of effective political praxis?
But faced with the new forms obscene Evil which confront us today, what else can be done?
Zizek and I should remember to be grateful that we are currently in the privileged position of being able to *choose* to fast if we elect to do so . There may well come a day in the very near future when we will look back to these days with fond nostalgia as conditions of starvation are *forced* upon us. Already we dwell within the mental and moral famine and axiological graveyard of a Kali Yuga Age of Chaos and Evil.
We are past the tipping-point of the Seneca Cliff.
All of the vital trajectories of contemporary human and terrestrial history are headed towards the end-state conditions of a series of viciously morbid systemic and structural asymptotic fault lines and processes – ecocidal climate change; oligarchical capitalist class warfare; the continuing historical phenomena of military conflict without the existence of counteractive pacifist and peacemaking historical processes to act as a counterweight - that are ineluctably leading the human species into an extended period of great suffering in hell on earth.
Rough translation: Is there, who over his French ragout, or Spanish stew that would make a pig pause, or fricassee that would make the pig puke in perfect disgust, looks down with sneering scornful view on such a dinner? (as haggis, but it could equally apply to half-warm beans and sausages from a can)
Your opinions on food, like many of yours on politics, disgust me. This is why I am a subscriber.
I've printed out your picture and after eating a cold can of pork and beans I shall cover it with my vomitus.
Possibly the most extreme form of self-denying, self-negating self-deprivation is the Jain practice of Sallekhana. This ritualistic process of gradually withdrawing forms of nutrition from the practitioner's diet until he or she finally expires is an activity that involves the entire Jain community and can take a number of months to fully complete.
https://bigthink.com/thinking/extreme-asceticism-the-jains-who-starve-themselves-to-death/
Jains insist that Sallekhana is a practice of religious Enlightenment and that it is *not* a form of suicide.
For Jains, Sallekhana is a central part of their soteriological traditions. They stress that the essential salvific aspects emanate beyond the individual undergoing the ritual and are transmitted throughout both the entire Jain community and beyond this into the social world of which the Jains are a part. This salvific effect distinguishes the Sallekhana form of intense corporeal self-negation from acts of suicide. Suicide is illegal in India as is, for the moment., Jainist Sallekhana despite their efforts to fight this criminalization.
"It is argued that it is suicide since there is voluntary severance of life etc. No, it is not suicide, as there is no passion. Without attachment etc, there is no passion in this undertaking. A person who kills himself by means of poison, weapon, etc, swayed by attachment, aversion or infatuation, commits suicide. But he who practices holy death is free from desire, anger, and delusion. Hence it is not suicide"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallekhana#Legality_and_comparison_with_suicide
Did Simone Weil commit suicide? When Weil insisted that it was only ethical to eat as much as the average calorie allotment of the typical French adult during WWII even as her doctors told her that she would thereby fatally injure her health, how are we to understand her final days?
Though Weil experienced several intense mystical states in the course of her life, she was never comfortable converting to the official Catholic Church. Weil's mystical experiences were often associated with intense pain - migraines - and/or exhaustion - factory work. In her final days of ill health and self-imposed malnutrition, what final insights and visions did Weil hope to attain?
When a religious practice looks indistinguishable from an eating disorder, I'm conflicted :/
Most, possibly all, religions and philosophies with strong elements of world-denialism contain the (possibly almost self-refuting) paradox that they cannot become truly universal.
If Jainism or quietist Zen Buddhism or even milder forms of world-withdrawal such as Epicureanism were to be adopted by everybody, then there would no longer be the world-building and world-maintaining majority of people who would make the world that is the necessary object of world-denialism. In other words, world-denialist doctrines must maintain a deeply pessimistic world-view.
The Jains are probably the strongest of the world-denialist groups. Buddhists shave their heads. Jains *pluck* every hair from their bodies individually. At first, initiates have this hair-plucking done for them. They later do it to themselves. The pain and self-inflicting of excruciations is the preferred path to corporeal self-negation, self-transcendence.
The social place of groups like the Jain devotees, their monks and nuns, is to act as exemplars to their communities. Their role is possibly comparable to the suffering of the Christian passion except that it is not a once-only christological Event. They enact Enlightenment, serve as living (and dying) morality tales of self-negation, whilst the outside world continues along its usual paths of sin and error.
I vomited in a casserole, my dear Zizek, you really looked like a hedonist to me, I have removed one ruby from your crown for this article.
Never write about your sex life.
Similarly MES when asked what would his superpower be - it would be no need to eat food.. https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/may/21/mark-e-smith-interview
Is this chat gpt writing as žižek?
His misspelling of fast and wine is proof that he's human
Slavoj! You should try letting rules violate you!
I am in love with you.
I'll come with you to Paris and let you choose the wine if you're the one paying :)
If you ever come to Mexico City sometime, i will invite you to a pizzeria or something that is totally not mexican. Otherwise, i will confess that everytime that my family organizes a party, dinner or something, i always make sure to put music that nobody likes, something like psychedelic rock, krautrock, blues, etc. Just to provoke people and spoil their party.
Extreme deprivation is, of course, not only a physical condition but can equally be an axiological, mental and moral state of abyssal Evil. Of Hell manifested upon our Earth. In accordance with Platonism, the Good is primary. Evil is a state in which the Good is absent, in which we subsist in a state of moral deprivation.
Currently, a number of the power-elites of the national capitals located within the core zones of the capitalist world-system are working overtime to assure their citizens that the conduct of state-policy through the means of the most brutal, sadistic and genocidal types of warfare known to military history is a completely acceptable, efficient and normative method of conduct.
Washington, Berlin, London, Canberra, Ottawa, Tel Aviv have crossed a world-historical threshold by their reinvention of a number of prior states of extreme Terror and of belligerent violence in order to usher in a paradigmatically novel form of Evil for the 21st century. 21st century Genocidal siege warfare as a means of conducting state-policy.
Note that the USA and Israel always make a massive song and dance about Israel's "right to self-defense" when making a mockery of International Law and of the United Nations in the nihilistic manner that these two warlike states always conduct themselves. As "self-defense" is an entirely natural aspect of any state's security, why insist on what should be entirely tautologous unless there is a bloody sleight of hand at play? The International Court of Justice in its ruling against the West Bank wall has already ruled that when Israel inflicts lethal violence against the Palestinians that this violence is against an *internal* population and hence is a matter of (apartheid) policing and therefore *cannot* be considered "self-defense".
Tel Aviv was accustomed to engage in its typically self-congratulatory wank by telling all and sundry how carefully calibrated was the calorie count that they in their altruistic majesty calculated would be sufficient for each of the Gazan population that they had imprisoned under a military blockade.
In their concentration camp guard's self-delusion, they then assured themselves that the imprisoned Untermenschen were perfectly content to live in a "prison-camp" as David Cameron (!!) described the Gaza Blockade in 2010.
David Cameron: Israeli blockade has turned Gaza Strip into a 'prison camp'
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/jul/27/david-cameron-gaza-prison-camp
In other words, 7th October was not a failure of intelligence. All the relevant intelligence was available not only to Israel but also to Egypt but was summarily dismissed. It was a failure of basic human *empathy* and of the most rudimentary morality.
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/inside-story/2023/12/2/can-israel-learn-from-the-intelligence-failure-that-led-to-hamas-attack
October 7th was a damning indictment of the abyssal Evil which is the mass-homicidal norm in the belligerent death-world of perpetual necropolitical violence that is the rogue-nuclear apartheid state of Israel and its occupied territories of Palestine.
It hardly needs saying that whilst moral self-reflection leading to moral self-improvement is the path of the Enlightened that this path of the Moral Good is the violent anti-thesis to that chosen by the military-colonial whipmasters in Washington and Tel Aviv.
‘Human Animals’: The Sordid Language behind Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
The shocking parallels between Israel's dehumanizing rhetoric and historical genocides are now translating into real-life horrors in Gaza.
https://english.ahram.org.eg/News/511144.aspx
The biopower of carefully calibrated calorie counts can quickly and easily become the violent necropolitics of absolute deprivation.
“It’s really rare for war criminals to just openly announce their actions,” said John Cox, professor of global studies and history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who also directs the Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies. That’s what’s “unique about Israel’s bombing in Gaza.”
Cox noted that this month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the U.N.’s Genocide Convention. “[The war in Gaza] literally does take on genocidal proportions and potential, along with daily humiliations and affronts to human rights that Israel has been engaging in for 75 years,” Cox said.
(...)
“A December 8 video from Gaza’s Shejaiya neighborhood shows Israeli soldiers setting fire to a truck with food and water in it, fitting Israel’s October 9 declaration of a “complete siege” of Gaza, in which Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant said that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed into Gaza. This is an unambiguous violation of the second article of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, which includes “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members” of a particular group, as well as the deliberate “inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/177749/bibi-netanyahu-war-crimes-palestine
Tactics once thought a relic of the past such as the militarization of plague are now within the mentally and morally depraved orbit of Israelis committed to Genocide.
"In an Op-Ed titled "Let’s Not be Intimidated by the World," Israeli ret. Major General Giora Eiland argues that all Palestinians in Gaza are legitimate targets and that a “severe epidemic" in Gaza will "bring victory closer.”"
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/influential-israeli-national-security-leader-makes-the-case-for-genocide-in-gaza/
So to finally return to Zizek's wonderfully provocative piece above, I am currently fasting in a manner that might be compared to Simone Weil's final days. Whilst I lack the celebrity to stage a hunger strike outside the White House such as Cynthia Nixon did, I am curious at the very least what if any enlightenment or edification may be gained by fasting in solidarity with the victims of the War on Gaza.
This is not from a sense of "guilt" as I am not guilty. It is from a sense of the sheer obscenity that afflicts those who from sheer, dumb luck are blissfully unaffected. Rather as Norbet Elias describes the fasting habits of Medieval monks, I will deprive myself of food and water because I am in the luxurious position of being able to do so. What enlightenment may I gain besides the realization that I already possess of the utter futility of those imprisoned in a condition in which there are ZERO avenues of effective political praxis?
But faced with the new forms obscene Evil which confront us today, what else can be done?
100 days of "what is the fault of this child?"
https://twitter.com/Timesofgaza/status/1746577923937636533
Zizek and I should remember to be grateful that we are currently in the privileged position of being able to *choose* to fast if we elect to do so . There may well come a day in the very near future when we will look back to these days with fond nostalgia as conditions of starvation are *forced* upon us. Already we dwell within the mental and moral famine and axiological graveyard of a Kali Yuga Age of Chaos and Evil.
We are past the tipping-point of the Seneca Cliff.
All of the vital trajectories of contemporary human and terrestrial history are headed towards the end-state conditions of a series of viciously morbid systemic and structural asymptotic fault lines and processes – ecocidal climate change; oligarchical capitalist class warfare; the continuing historical phenomena of military conflict without the existence of counteractive pacifist and peacemaking historical processes to act as a counterweight - that are ineluctably leading the human species into an extended period of great suffering in hell on earth.
eating alone is masturbation in public.. maybe like writing alone in public..but both 3 maybe necesary solutions..
anyway.. public masturbation is a good icebreaker to find new friends.. i btw. eat like i fuck too..
humus looks like the universel mixed meal of all kinds - and it is tasty..
but butts making unversal filled sausages too.. hmm?..
i eat like a poor pig too but i do not eat pig but am poor like a pig.. damn poor pigs getting eaten by one which is just eating like a poor pig..
omlette allá universalism:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1joe5
coldly informing frenchies are very racist with their language..
same in germany or look at those english spelling bees.. language making racists in its ideological believes..
I like food as well, the mostrous paste could be skipped though but everyone has there own toung thanks for your stuff
Did he mean crows? I'm not aware of cows chewing food for their young. If i'm mistaken please let me know.
"Is there that owre his French ragout,
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad mak her spew
Wi’ perfect sconner,
Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view
On sic a dinner?"
(Burns)
Rough translation: Is there, who over his French ragout, or Spanish stew that would make a pig pause, or fricassee that would make the pig puke in perfect disgust, looks down with sneering scornful view on such a dinner? (as haggis, but it could equally apply to half-warm beans and sausages from a can)
Sure, I’ll eat with you. I think eating’s a chore too....