Dugin’s ontological relativism of nations (“national destiny”, “national spirituality” and going back to esoteric Nazi motif of the “original” people, which is now reproduced by some “indigenous rights” movements) is arguably a contrived, arbitrary distinction in the history of human relations. It anchors itself absolutely in the contemporaneous political identity while implicitly denying or devaluing, without argument, the significance of the fact that all humans share common ancestors who walked the earth before nations existed, thus denying the common roots of spirituality, consciousness, meaning, therefore of Reality: ‘the world as we know it’.
Regarding the subject-object distinction, I argue that it can not be consistently interpreted at the individual level. The subject and its object (which are not identical, by the law of identity) are relational features of the Multiplicity. I mean this in the strongest sense: the subject is multiple not only because it is internally divided, not fully integrated (which is a question of moral ontology) but is essentially ‘multiple’, a member of a type that constitutes a reflexive multiplicity and cannot exist without relating to other subjects in a reflexive way. The subject is nevertheless mediated by the object, which is something held in common (common sense, common reality) by multiple subjects. Reflexive consciousness identifies the constant of its narrative continuity (the subject) as an object that is phenomenologically identifiable only in relation to other objects of the same kind.
I liked your notion of a national narrative being derived from the contemporaneous political identity (or order). The "Nationalness" in this sense (being a majority in a strong state today is sufficient and necessary proof of historical nationalness of a group) is in turn used to justify this very political identity - the national state. Also - ethnic groups that were historically not able to implement a strong statehood (Kurds, Ukrainians, Palestinians) have been denied the quality of "nationalness" - they are degraded to non-ethnicities, and for that reason denied the right (entitlement) to statehood. Catch 22.
Similar metaphysics of superior Nations was regularly utilised to justify wars, military dominance and ethnic cleansing - a criteria that was surprisingly often recognised by civilised, postnational societies of the West.
I am not suggesting that ethnic minorities are entitled to statehood based on ethnicity; i am suggesting rather that no ethnicity is entitled to statehood/nationhood based on ethnicity, or culture. You nevertheless make an interesting point. Nationalism is a bit like the game of Monopoly: the big guys take all, but the bank gets their interest payments no matter who wins.
There is no inherent value or normative significance in ethnicity, culture or tradition, apart from their irrationality. The only objective organising principle is the principle of sense, the laws of sense, and Mr Dugin falls short in engaging with this principle to justify his normative assertions. On the other hand, it is true that most humans are still irredeemably irrational, incapable of existing without the shackles of tradition and obedience to culture, so it would be futile to expect the world to spontaneously unite under the principle of sense. This nevertheless does not mean that we ought to endorse the more primitive forms of irrationality. All social irrationality will inescapably resolve itself either through violence or self destruction, but we should emphasise the fundamental normative principle, the truth, not mislead people about fundamental values just because we deem them not ready to be simply rational, moral beings.
I call Mr Dugin’s position ethno-nationalism. If you simply disagree with the name/terminology then this is an irrelevant objection to a principled argument. 4th political theory is logically inconsistent irrespective of what you prefer to call its primary value.
You are presenting a stupid straw-man that betrays the fact that you know nothing about Dugin's actual views.
We completely reject the modern conception of the "Nation" as an abomination of modernity. We have many disputes with "ethno-nationalists" which you can read about here:
I am not referring to the “modern concept of the nation”, but to ‘narod’, the ethno-cultural society based on centuries old tradition and common environmental/geographic affinity. If you think that I still misunderstand then please summarise in one paragraph the fundamental value or principle that 4th political theory is based on.
Very nicely done, though a bit of a laundry list toward the end, and unclear whether we got back to Heidegger's, or Dugin's ontology . Ah, should mention I'm an American, born in Germany, from an academic, military, and philosophical problem. The Heidegger Problem, as it were, is part of my upbringing.
This is, more or less, a restatement of Hegel’s problem of how to mediate the universal and the particular. The gap that Zizek speaks of is between the two conflicting human tendencies: to closure, and to openness. This is the gap that Gillian Rose grapples with through the notion of the broken middle. Zizek is right to say that this cannot be, once and for all, mended: it is an intrinsic difficulty that has to be continually recognised, faced and worked through. Zizek is also right to say that this requires understanding the limitations of the modern, bourgeois self, and its self-overcoming. Much of the left leans towards some form of Stalinism because it has no conception of this, and so its universalism is abstract (see Nigel Tubbs, ‘Retrieving the universalism of Critical Sociology - Adorno, Hegel, Rose’, https://www.bjct.de/files/Issues of the BJCT/BJCT_3-2022.pdf). The problem is that capitalism is totally inimical to any self-transformation, and so although the mass of humanity can lean towards openness (the universal), it is difficult for it to become agents for a new kind of society. This suggests that something closer to a religious, rather than a purely political, process is required to generate the necessary preconditions.
Also, the idea that the concept of vocation might act as some bridge between the particular and the universal is misconceived. The example Zizek gives of the nursing profession is not that common because it is by its nature universal: not that many vocations are, and not everyone can have such a committed vocation. Better is the notion of being a citizen, not of a country, but of the world, which is equally universal and equally committed.
But, of course, as it stands, there is no proper conception of citizenship at work even in relation to nationality. The key problem is how to go from the prevalent thin identity of nationalism that has an ideological grip on many, to the fully fledged conception on of world citizenship required for a different kind of society.
Do you ever read/refer to any philosophy other than just Europeans? Like any Eastern or even North and South? You are a brilliant man - time to expand your horizons!
Ever since Peter Handke won the Nobel Prize in 2019, I have been hoping that Zizek might write on Handke's work beyond the remarks that he made to the press at the time. Anyone foolhardy enough to read my paltry attempts here will see why my pedestrian efforts are of far less value than the types of readings that Zizek is known for.
Why one or at most two prizes per year? There can only be one winner of the Football World Cup but what has this do with Literature? As the population of the human species grows, so most likely will grow larger the number of writers worthy of recognition. Why not as many authors as are worthy? Including, in historical years that are either creatively barren or possibly as a result of years that are materially Paradisal, the number Zero? The prize must be granted to a living author, that can likely only be read in translation by the Nobel Committee's members. The Neustadt Prize was set up with an aim to avoid this limitation but that prize is granted to one writer every two years.
Why and how did Philosophy get shoe-horned into the Literature category?
Handke’s oeuvre should be examined and assessed for what Adorno called the artwork’s “truth content” which is attained through the processes of aesthetic mimesis. Art is valuable for its *accuracy* and fidelity to the realities of the world which the artwork brought to light. A fallen world of many horrors. As Adorno put it, “Art is the cry of wounded nature”.
Flawed and compromised art and artists, precisely because of that which is damnable about them may thus sometimes paint a truer picture of that which is damnable in the world.
Though our preferences will always be for good or for great art that condemns the damnable, the artistic and literary canon is a not a canon of saints. Literary criticism and the formation of literary tastes is not idolatrous hagiography. What is the point of either art or of criticism if neither grants to us revelations of the truths of the world?
To write Poetry after Gaza is barbaric.
But this poetry is an urgently *necessary" barbarism.
Does the Serbian nationalist stance that Handke has adopted with such obstinacy belie, or is it a natural outgrowth of, the admirable qualities in his writings and art? What is the connection between Handke’s art and life and his stance on the Balkans conflicts and his Serbian nationalism? What is the precise nature of Handke’s crime? Handke’s case differs from Celine, Hamsun, Ezra Pound as these writers embraced fascism in full knowledge of the nature of fascist regimes and their actions and thus a clear connection can be drawn between fascist ideology and their lives and their art. There is a perhaps a hair’s breadth of difference between Ernst Junger’s “national conservatism” and Nazism. This didn’t stop Francois Mitterrand from being an admirer of Junger’s work.
In contrast to the above figures, in Handke’s case the phenomena is that of political and ideological *fantasizing* – what is variously described as his denialism or his apologetics - without which his stance would be unpalatable to him. At the ICC, the Serb military leaders fully embraced their war criminal ideology and actions. They were unrepentant and remained military nationalists. They maintained pride in their chosen methods of inflicting of atrocities and ethnic cleansing in order to achieve their political ends. Handke can’t be a Serb nationalist without reality-warping or reality-blocking political fantasizing. It is as a case study of a political fantasist that Handke may be of interest and in this manner his life and art may retain value and repay study. Is it possible for any political or religious ideology to exist, on paper and in the real world, without a significant aspect of political and/or religious fantasizing? Slavoj Zizek doesn’t seem to think so and the number of historical and contemporary examples that can be pointed to are legion.
There are three aspects of Handke’s life and art which may be identified as leading him to his fantastical Serb nationalism.
1/Handke’s persona as an enfant terrible which become his reputation since his speech to the Gruppe47.
2/Handke’s Carinthian Slovene mother’s suicide which he wrote about in his memoir “A Sorrow Beyond Dreams”.
3/Handke’s early and middle period writings have as one of their central themes the problematic relation between language (both spoken and written) and meaning leading to many instances of miscommunication, meaninglessness and absurdity. Stylistically, this is reflected in Handke’s famous use of the many question marks which litter his descriptive prose and dialogues.
The relation between 2/ and 3/ is described by Karl-Erik Tallmo:
“"Slow homecoming" is the first novel where Handke addresses his main characters, he even sometimes turns to the narrative itself: "Oh story, /.../ grant us grace." Sometimes Handke's style is archaic, his intonation adopts to that of the fairy tale. This tendency is even more apparent in his next novel, "Die Abwesenheit", 1987 ("Absence", transl. Ralph Manheim, New York, 1990). Handke looks upon himself as a reteller. Maybe this could explain his urge towards pastiche.
Finally: The more glimpses you get from Handke's own biography, the more you understand of the apparently empty and formalistic experiments in his early plays and poems. Maybe they depict the child’s lack of a functioning language within an aggressive adult world that is permeated by ambiguous messages and humiliation. If you read for instance "Publikumsbeschimpfung" as a family drama, where the grown-ups command the children in the same way as the actors try to control even how the audience is breathing, then almost every line becomes unbearably ambiguous and upsetting.”
*Before* the outbreak of the wars in the Balkans, Handke was groping toward an answer to 3/ by turning toward nationalistic concepts of homeland, homecoming and the Heimloss-driven need for a mother tongue in which meaning may finally be found. In “Repetition” (1986) Handke tells the story of an Austrian of mixed German and Slovenian descent, who goes to communist Yugoslavia in a search for identity.
Handke’s criminal political fantasizing is too personally powerful for him to relinquish this fantasy even when faced with the horrifying bloodbaths of ethnic cleansing and the criminal-against-humanity methods of inflicting atrocities as a military means towards attaining political ends. But isn’t Handke’s stance characteristic of many notable political fantasies which are clung to for dear life, as can be observed in both the political fantasies of power-elite entities and in the fantasies of the general populace, historically and in the contemporary world?
So, it seems Žižek has changed his mind about the Russian farmer joke & now thinks letting the Mongol's balls get dusty while he violated his wife, rather than "cutting them off," was the right call? Now, that's what I would call a "morbid symptom"!
Mr Trawny made a career as the watchdog over the West Germany's perception of Heidegger - his agenda was to orthogonalise Heidegger's work agains his involvement in NSDAP and sanitise so Heidegger's books for safe use in the German public discourse (instead of encapsulating them in an official taboo/ban).
While such safety procedures are integral part of BRDs "Erinnerungskultur" (Culture of Remembrance) and can be either criticised (as a sort of state-funded cancel culture) or praised for successful ethical beautification of the society, the key question was never asked: Why are we so afraid of works produced by good writers with suspicious political choices?
How comes that a philosopher whose fame is supported by one, half-finished and hard-to-read book (published quasi 100 years ago) can represent a danger for our today's political order? Are we actually afraid that after reading Heidegger we as well would fall in love with fascism? Sure! And if we indeed do - what exactly is wrong with us?
.
Such anxiety is not limited to German discourse: there is an outrage if a literary prize is given to a writer with connection with dictators (Handke), performers of classical music are cancelled for same reasons (preventively - we might like the music, and so smear our hands with blood!), and in his recent book about the Adriatic US journalist-historian-political analyst Robert Kaplan closed his argument critical of fascist political activism of Ezra Pound with the ultimate proof: and he was a mediocre poet anyway.
If history is a constant loop of the same errors of humanity, that means that end and begining are guaranteed and if history has ended, then the begining is unfolding before our eyes in this very moment. The future is the past and the past is the future.
I tried to escape to to this deluge of words, ideas and thoughts of all those guys who thought about about thought. It only lasted a short time and my mind (I use the term loosely) came back to the reality of the genocide we are all living through. But thanks for the moments of escape!
Very well written. It’s more than evident that the “end” already happened and the fundamental question is who will set forth the new “prologue” of our historical now. I just found the “critique” of Heidegger quite shallow, as I think that it’s precisely his ontology of being that can destroy Russian edifice in its base. It’s undoubtedly true that mode of existence of Dasein is fundamentally different in its careness in Russia and West, but the fundamental existential of Dasein is Mitsein and that is what we can solve together. Maybe I just don’t get the right point of the first section.
Dugin’s ontological relativism of nations (“national destiny”, “national spirituality” and going back to esoteric Nazi motif of the “original” people, which is now reproduced by some “indigenous rights” movements) is arguably a contrived, arbitrary distinction in the history of human relations. It anchors itself absolutely in the contemporaneous political identity while implicitly denying or devaluing, without argument, the significance of the fact that all humans share common ancestors who walked the earth before nations existed, thus denying the common roots of spirituality, consciousness, meaning, therefore of Reality: ‘the world as we know it’.
Regarding the subject-object distinction, I argue that it can not be consistently interpreted at the individual level. The subject and its object (which are not identical, by the law of identity) are relational features of the Multiplicity. I mean this in the strongest sense: the subject is multiple not only because it is internally divided, not fully integrated (which is a question of moral ontology) but is essentially ‘multiple’, a member of a type that constitutes a reflexive multiplicity and cannot exist without relating to other subjects in a reflexive way. The subject is nevertheless mediated by the object, which is something held in common (common sense, common reality) by multiple subjects. Reflexive consciousness identifies the constant of its narrative continuity (the subject) as an object that is phenomenologically identifiable only in relation to other objects of the same kind.
I liked your notion of a national narrative being derived from the contemporaneous political identity (or order). The "Nationalness" in this sense (being a majority in a strong state today is sufficient and necessary proof of historical nationalness of a group) is in turn used to justify this very political identity - the national state. Also - ethnic groups that were historically not able to implement a strong statehood (Kurds, Ukrainians, Palestinians) have been denied the quality of "nationalness" - they are degraded to non-ethnicities, and for that reason denied the right (entitlement) to statehood. Catch 22.
Similar metaphysics of superior Nations was regularly utilised to justify wars, military dominance and ethnic cleansing - a criteria that was surprisingly often recognised by civilised, postnational societies of the West.
I am not suggesting that ethnic minorities are entitled to statehood based on ethnicity; i am suggesting rather that no ethnicity is entitled to statehood/nationhood based on ethnicity, or culture. You nevertheless make an interesting point. Nationalism is a bit like the game of Monopoly: the big guys take all, but the bank gets their interest payments no matter who wins.
You don't understand Dugin's concept of the "people" at all.
Read "Ethnos and Society"
There is no inherent value or normative significance in ethnicity, culture or tradition, apart from their irrationality. The only objective organising principle is the principle of sense, the laws of sense, and Mr Dugin falls short in engaging with this principle to justify his normative assertions. On the other hand, it is true that most humans are still irredeemably irrational, incapable of existing without the shackles of tradition and obedience to culture, so it would be futile to expect the world to spontaneously unite under the principle of sense. This nevertheless does not mean that we ought to endorse the more primitive forms of irrationality. All social irrationality will inescapably resolve itself either through violence or self destruction, but we should emphasise the fundamental normative principle, the truth, not mislead people about fundamental values just because we deem them not ready to be simply rational, moral beings.
Find out what Alexander Dugin actually believes instead of the dumb misunderstanding that he is a "Nationalist"
Dugin on Ethnosociology
https://hybridwar.substack.com/p/dugin-on-ethnosociology
I promise you will find plenty to be offended by, but it will be more interesting!
I call Mr Dugin’s position ethno-nationalism. If you simply disagree with the name/terminology then this is an irrelevant objection to a principled argument. 4th political theory is logically inconsistent irrespective of what you prefer to call its primary value.
You are presenting a stupid straw-man that betrays the fact that you know nothing about Dugin's actual views.
We completely reject the modern conception of the "Nation" as an abomination of modernity. We have many disputes with "ethno-nationalists" which you can read about here:
The Eurasianist Polemic in the Opposition
https://eurasianist-archive.com/2017/07/26/the-eurasianist-polemic-in-the-opposition/
I am not referring to the “modern concept of the nation”, but to ‘narod’, the ethno-cultural society based on centuries old tradition and common environmental/geographic affinity. If you think that I still misunderstand then please summarise in one paragraph the fundamental value or principle that 4th political theory is based on.
Strongest text I’ve read from him in a long time; it reminds me of his work: “Das Unbehagen im Subjekt.”
Very nicely done, though a bit of a laundry list toward the end, and unclear whether we got back to Heidegger's, or Dugin's ontology . Ah, should mention I'm an American, born in Germany, from an academic, military, and philosophical problem. The Heidegger Problem, as it were, is part of my upbringing.
This is, more or less, a restatement of Hegel’s problem of how to mediate the universal and the particular. The gap that Zizek speaks of is between the two conflicting human tendencies: to closure, and to openness. This is the gap that Gillian Rose grapples with through the notion of the broken middle. Zizek is right to say that this cannot be, once and for all, mended: it is an intrinsic difficulty that has to be continually recognised, faced and worked through. Zizek is also right to say that this requires understanding the limitations of the modern, bourgeois self, and its self-overcoming. Much of the left leans towards some form of Stalinism because it has no conception of this, and so its universalism is abstract (see Nigel Tubbs, ‘Retrieving the universalism of Critical Sociology - Adorno, Hegel, Rose’, https://www.bjct.de/files/Issues of the BJCT/BJCT_3-2022.pdf). The problem is that capitalism is totally inimical to any self-transformation, and so although the mass of humanity can lean towards openness (the universal), it is difficult for it to become agents for a new kind of society. This suggests that something closer to a religious, rather than a purely political, process is required to generate the necessary preconditions.
Also, the idea that the concept of vocation might act as some bridge between the particular and the universal is misconceived. The example Zizek gives of the nursing profession is not that common because it is by its nature universal: not that many vocations are, and not everyone can have such a committed vocation. Better is the notion of being a citizen, not of a country, but of the world, which is equally universal and equally committed.
But, of course, as it stands, there is no proper conception of citizenship at work even in relation to nationality. The key problem is how to go from the prevalent thin identity of nationalism that has an ideological grip on many, to the fully fledged conception on of world citizenship required for a different kind of society.
Do you ever read/refer to any philosophy other than just Europeans? Like any Eastern or even North and South? You are a brilliant man - time to expand your horizons!
To write Poetry after Gaza is barbaric.
But this Poetry is an urgently *necessary" barbarism.
Ever since Peter Handke won the Nobel Prize in 2019, I have been hoping that Zizek might write on Handke's work beyond the remarks that he made to the press at the time. Anyone foolhardy enough to read my paltry attempts here will see why my pedestrian efforts are of far less value than the types of readings that Zizek is known for.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/10/troubling-choice-authors-criticise-peter-handke-controversial-nobel-win
I don't disagree that Handke should not have won the Nobel. And concur with most of the critics of the Nobel Prize Committee's crippling limitations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Literature
Why one or at most two prizes per year? There can only be one winner of the Football World Cup but what has this do with Literature? As the population of the human species grows, so most likely will grow larger the number of writers worthy of recognition. Why not as many authors as are worthy? Including, in historical years that are either creatively barren or possibly as a result of years that are materially Paradisal, the number Zero? The prize must be granted to a living author, that can likely only be read in translation by the Nobel Committee's members. The Neustadt Prize was set up with an aim to avoid this limitation but that prize is granted to one writer every two years.
Why and how did Philosophy get shoe-horned into the Literature category?
Handke’s oeuvre should be examined and assessed for what Adorno called the artwork’s “truth content” which is attained through the processes of aesthetic mimesis. Art is valuable for its *accuracy* and fidelity to the realities of the world which the artwork brought to light. A fallen world of many horrors. As Adorno put it, “Art is the cry of wounded nature”.
Flawed and compromised art and artists, precisely because of that which is damnable about them may thus sometimes paint a truer picture of that which is damnable in the world.
Though our preferences will always be for good or for great art that condemns the damnable, the artistic and literary canon is a not a canon of saints. Literary criticism and the formation of literary tastes is not idolatrous hagiography. What is the point of either art or of criticism if neither grants to us revelations of the truths of the world?
To write Poetry after Gaza is barbaric.
But this poetry is an urgently *necessary" barbarism.
Does the Serbian nationalist stance that Handke has adopted with such obstinacy belie, or is it a natural outgrowth of, the admirable qualities in his writings and art? What is the connection between Handke’s art and life and his stance on the Balkans conflicts and his Serbian nationalism? What is the precise nature of Handke’s crime? Handke’s case differs from Celine, Hamsun, Ezra Pound as these writers embraced fascism in full knowledge of the nature of fascist regimes and their actions and thus a clear connection can be drawn between fascist ideology and their lives and their art. There is a perhaps a hair’s breadth of difference between Ernst Junger’s “national conservatism” and Nazism. This didn’t stop Francois Mitterrand from being an admirer of Junger’s work.
In contrast to the above figures, in Handke’s case the phenomena is that of political and ideological *fantasizing* – what is variously described as his denialism or his apologetics - without which his stance would be unpalatable to him. At the ICC, the Serb military leaders fully embraced their war criminal ideology and actions. They were unrepentant and remained military nationalists. They maintained pride in their chosen methods of inflicting of atrocities and ethnic cleansing in order to achieve their political ends. Handke can’t be a Serb nationalist without reality-warping or reality-blocking political fantasizing. It is as a case study of a political fantasist that Handke may be of interest and in this manner his life and art may retain value and repay study. Is it possible for any political or religious ideology to exist, on paper and in the real world, without a significant aspect of political and/or religious fantasizing? Slavoj Zizek doesn’t seem to think so and the number of historical and contemporary examples that can be pointed to are legion.
There are three aspects of Handke’s life and art which may be identified as leading him to his fantastical Serb nationalism.
1/Handke’s persona as an enfant terrible which become his reputation since his speech to the Gruppe47.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/21/handke-nobel-trolling-balkans-serbia/
2/Handke’s Carinthian Slovene mother’s suicide which he wrote about in his memoir “A Sorrow Beyond Dreams”.
3/Handke’s early and middle period writings have as one of their central themes the problematic relation between language (both spoken and written) and meaning leading to many instances of miscommunication, meaninglessness and absurdity. Stylistically, this is reflected in Handke’s famous use of the many question marks which litter his descriptive prose and dialogues.
The relation between 2/ and 3/ is described by Karl-Erik Tallmo:
“"Slow homecoming" is the first novel where Handke addresses his main characters, he even sometimes turns to the narrative itself: "Oh story, /.../ grant us grace." Sometimes Handke's style is archaic, his intonation adopts to that of the fairy tale. This tendency is even more apparent in his next novel, "Die Abwesenheit", 1987 ("Absence", transl. Ralph Manheim, New York, 1990). Handke looks upon himself as a reteller. Maybe this could explain his urge towards pastiche.
Finally: The more glimpses you get from Handke's own biography, the more you understand of the apparently empty and formalistic experiments in his early plays and poems. Maybe they depict the child’s lack of a functioning language within an aggressive adult world that is permeated by ambiguous messages and humiliation. If you read for instance "Publikumsbeschimpfung" as a family drama, where the grown-ups command the children in the same way as the actors try to control even how the audience is breathing, then almost every line becomes unbearably ambiguous and upsetting.”
https://art-bin.com/art/ahandkee.html
*Before* the outbreak of the wars in the Balkans, Handke was groping toward an answer to 3/ by turning toward nationalistic concepts of homeland, homecoming and the Heimloss-driven need for a mother tongue in which meaning may finally be found. In “Repetition” (1986) Handke tells the story of an Austrian of mixed German and Slovenian descent, who goes to communist Yugoslavia in a search for identity.
http://thelastbooks.org/pdfs/sebald-across.pdf
Handke’s criminal political fantasizing is too personally powerful for him to relinquish this fantasy even when faced with the horrifying bloodbaths of ethnic cleansing and the criminal-against-humanity methods of inflicting atrocities as a military means towards attaining political ends. But isn’t Handke’s stance characteristic of many notable political fantasies which are clung to for dear life, as can be observed in both the political fantasies of power-elite entities and in the fantasies of the general populace, historically and in the contemporary world?
Yes. https://christophermeestoerato.substack.com/p/from-alpha-to-omega?r=12utpl
So, it seems Žižek has changed his mind about the Russian farmer joke & now thinks letting the Mongol's balls get dusty while he violated his wife, rather than "cutting them off," was the right call? Now, that's what I would call a "morbid symptom"!
The only solution is to fail until you get to zero and rebuild the self. Leave the object illusion.
Interesting, strong article. Thank you.
That fear of words!
.
Mr Trawny made a career as the watchdog over the West Germany's perception of Heidegger - his agenda was to orthogonalise Heidegger's work agains his involvement in NSDAP and sanitise so Heidegger's books for safe use in the German public discourse (instead of encapsulating them in an official taboo/ban).
While such safety procedures are integral part of BRDs "Erinnerungskultur" (Culture of Remembrance) and can be either criticised (as a sort of state-funded cancel culture) or praised for successful ethical beautification of the society, the key question was never asked: Why are we so afraid of works produced by good writers with suspicious political choices?
How comes that a philosopher whose fame is supported by one, half-finished and hard-to-read book (published quasi 100 years ago) can represent a danger for our today's political order? Are we actually afraid that after reading Heidegger we as well would fall in love with fascism? Sure! And if we indeed do - what exactly is wrong with us?
.
Such anxiety is not limited to German discourse: there is an outrage if a literary prize is given to a writer with connection with dictators (Handke), performers of classical music are cancelled for same reasons (preventively - we might like the music, and so smear our hands with blood!), and in his recent book about the Adriatic US journalist-historian-political analyst Robert Kaplan closed his argument critical of fascist political activism of Ezra Pound with the ultimate proof: and he was a mediocre poet anyway.
If history is a constant loop of the same errors of humanity, that means that end and begining are guaranteed and if history has ended, then the begining is unfolding before our eyes in this very moment. The future is the past and the past is the future.
I tried to escape to to this deluge of words, ideas and thoughts of all those guys who thought about about thought. It only lasted a short time and my mind (I use the term loosely) came back to the reality of the genocide we are all living through. But thanks for the moments of escape!
Very well written. It’s more than evident that the “end” already happened and the fundamental question is who will set forth the new “prologue” of our historical now. I just found the “critique” of Heidegger quite shallow, as I think that it’s precisely his ontology of being that can destroy Russian edifice in its base. It’s undoubtedly true that mode of existence of Dasein is fundamentally different in its careness in Russia and West, but the fundamental existential of Dasein is Mitsein and that is what we can solve together. Maybe I just don’t get the right point of the first section.