Deftly, admiral, cast your fly

Into the slow deep hover,

Till the wise old trout mistake and die;

Salt are the deeps that cover

The glittering fleets you led,

White is your head.

Read on, ambassador, engrossed

In your favourite Stendhal;

The Outer Provinces are lost,

Unshaven horsemen swill

The great wines of the Chateaux

Where you danced long ago.

Do not turn, do not lift your eyes

Toward the still pair standing

On the bridge between your properties,

Indifferent to your minding:

In its glory, in its power,

This is their hour.

Nothing your strength, your skill, could do

Can alter their embrace

Or dispersuade the Furies who

At the appointed place

With claw and dreadful brow

Wait for them now.

WH Auden 1948

Samuel Butler -Self Portrait

Always eat grapes downwards–that is, always eat the best grape first; in this way there will be none better left on the bunch, and each grape will seem good down to the last. If you eat the other way, you will not have a good grape in the lot. Besides, you will be tempting Providence to kill you before you come to the best.

This is why autumn seems better than spring: in the autumn we are eating our days downwards, in the spring each day still seems ‘very bad.’ People should live on this principle more than they do, but they do live on it a good deal; from the age of, say, fifty we eat our days downwards.

Samuel Butler (1832-1902)

Adam Curtis Films here:

Adam Curtis, The Trap, The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self and others….

(You might need to scroll down a little to find them)

All on Rewtube.

you can see his new film It felt like a kiss on his blog, here.

Adam Curtis

Break through in grey lair

Instead of tripping and beating a philosophy for its supposed faults only to end up with the same range of mediocre biases with which we began, we ought to find a more vigorous means of engagement with philosophers. The method I propose is to replace the piously overvalued ‘critical thinking’ with a seldom-used hyperbolic thinking. For me at least, it is only books of the most stunning weakness that draw attention to non sequiturs and other logical fallacies. The books that stir us most are not those containing the fewest errors, but those that throw most light on unknown portions of the map. In the case of any author who interests us, we should not ask ‘where are the mistakes here?’, as if we hoped for nothing more than to avoid being fooled. We should ask instead: ‘what if this book, this thinker, were the most important of the century? How would things need to change? And in what ways would we feel both liberated and imprisoned?’ Such questions restore the proper scale of evaluation for intellectual work: demoting the pushy careerist sandbagger who remains within the bounds of the currently plausible and prudent, and promoting the gambler who uncovers new worlds. Nietzsche makes far more ‘mistakes’ than an average peer-reviewed journal article, but this does not stop intelligent adults from reading him all night long, while tossing the article aside for a day that never comes. Graham, Prince Of Networks

This is one of the most stirring passages in Prince Of Networks, and it’s particularly worth citing just now, when the topic of grey vampires has come up again.

More here at: k-punk.

What Matters

Walter Benn Michaels Reviewing Who Cares about the White Working Class? edited by Kjartan Páll Sveinsson

In the US, there is (or was) an organisation called Love Makes a Family. It was founded in 1999 to support the right of gay couples to adopt children and it played a central role in supporting civil unions. A few months ago, its director, Ann Stanback, announced that, having ‘achieved its goals’, Love Makes a Family would be ceasing operations at the end of this year, and that she would be stepping down to spend more time with her wife, Charlotte. Our ‘core purpose’, she said, has been ‘accomplished’.

It’s possible of course that this declaration of mission accomplished will prove to be as ill-advised as some others have been in the last decade. Gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, where Love Makes a Family is based, but it’s certainly not legal everywhere in the US. No one, however, would deny that the fight for gay rights has made extraordinary strides in the 40 years since Stonewall. And progress in combating homophobia has been accompanied by comparable progress in combating racism and sexism. Although the occasional claim that the election of President Obama has ushered us into a post-racial society is obviously wrong, it’s fairly clear that the country that’s just elected a black president (and that produced so many votes for the presidential candidacy of a woman) is a lot less racist and sexist than it used to be.

But it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist and homophobic society, it is a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years ago. No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going home. In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might think. White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those are in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them any good; it hasn’t even been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.

An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we’ve made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won’t be cured by – they aren’t even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism.

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing.

More: via LRB · Walter Benn Michaels: What Matters.

The Palestinian Question

Ideological Mystification

 

 

mieux vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre

 

The Couple Symptom / FetishIslamo-Fascism,

Christo-Fascism, Zionism

 

Slavoj Zizek

 

There are two different modes of ideological mystification which should in no way be confused: the liberal-democratic one and the Fascist one. The first one concerns false universality: the subject advocates freedom/equality, not being aware of implicit qualifications which, in their very form, constrain its scope (privileging certain social strata: rich, male, belonging to a certain race or culture). The second one concerns the false identification of the antagonism and the enemy: class struggle is displaced onto the struggle against the Jews, so that the popular rage at being exploited is redirected from capitalist relations as such to the “Jewish plot.” So, to put it in naively-hermeneutic terms, in the first case, “when the subject says ‘freedom and equality,’ he really means ‘freedom of trade, equality in front of the law’ etc.,” and, in the second case, “when the subject says ‘Jews are the cause of our misery,’ he really means ‘big capital is the cause of our misery’.” The asymmetry is clear – to put it again in naïve terms, in the first case, the “good” explicit content (freedom/equality) covers up the “bad” implicit content (class and other privileges and exclusions), while in the second case, the “bad” explicit content (anti-Semitism) covers the “good” implicit content (class struggle, hatred of exploitation).

For anyone versed in psychoanalytic theory, the inner structure of the two ideological mystifications is that of the couple symptom/fetish: the implicit limitations are the symptoms of liberal egalitarianism (singular returns of the repressed truth), while “Jew” is the fetish of anti-Semitic Fascists (the “last thing the subject sees” before confronting class struggle). This asymmetry has crucial consequences for the critico-ideological process of demystification: apropos liberal egalitarianism, it is not enough to make the old Marxist point about the gap between the ideological appearance of the universal legal form and the particular interests that effectively sustain it – as is so common amongst politically-correct critics on the Left. The counter-argument that the form is never a “mere form,” but involves a dynamic of its own which leaves traces in the materiality of social life, made by theoreticians such as Claude Lefort [1] and Jacques Rancière,[2] is fully valid – it was the bourgeois “formal freedom” which set in motion the process of altogether “material” political demands and practices, from trade unions to feminism. One should resist the cynical temptation of reducing it to a mere illusion that conceals a different actuality. That would be to fall into the trap of the old Stalinist hypocrisy which mocked “merely formal” bourgeois freedom: if it was so merely formal and didn’t disturb the true relations of power, why, then, didn’t the Stalinist regime allow it? Why was it so afraid of it?

Continues here.

  

 

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Map shows shrinking area of Palestinian land (in green) since 1946

Hannah Arendt

I’m trying to write my book about Arendt. My general line is that its natality, the capacity for humans to begin something new, that is the important concept in her work; anyway, its the one I’m interested in. I’m working on a chapter on The Origins of Totalitarianism. It’s an odd work, and its original title for the British edition The Burden of Our Time seems to me to point more directly to its intent. The book is anything but a cold war  ‘political science’ attack on Stalin and Hitler as somehow equivalent. In fact, like much of her work,  it is an attack on bourgeois, liberal modernity, with its emphasis on private life and personal advancement at the expense of the general good, of the res publica.

Arendt in the 1930s

It narrates and analyses for us a possible modernity – one in which the Enlightenment promise is replaced by the destruction of public, political life and which ends in the moral, civic, political and physical death of millions. As such it is itself a quest for meaning in very dark times. Arendt believed in being objective, but not impartial and her account includes a long running, utterly devastating critique of the class Arendt held responsible for the debasement of modern politics: the bourgeoisie. Two thirds of the book are concerned with the racism and imperialism of bourgeois Europe: they emerge from it as the main culprits, if we can imagine that a whole class can be a culpable.

Since this class is very much still with us, so Arendt’s critique remains relevant. The book shows us why we need to return to the question and practice of politics; if more of her critics would  read her carefully on this she’d be seen more widely for what she is – a critic of liberal bourgeois modernity, not its defender.

Images of Arendt:

Hannah when young

On Knowledge Without Wisdom

By Namit Arora

The Greeks understood ‘philosophy’ as the love of wisdom. They valued theoretical knowledge to the extent it contributed to practical wisdom. Socrates taught that the unexamined life is not worth living. Plato’s Academy contained a grove of olive trees dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom. But philosophy today, at least as pursued by much of the Anglo-American academy, is markedly different. For the most part, its concerns have shrunk to sub-disciplines in epistemology, paving the way for the acquisition of theoretical knowledge as an end in itself. The pursuit of wisdom seems to have left the academy and alighted on the stormy shores of self-help aisles.

More at 3quarksdaily.

Communism, the Word

Jean-Luc Nancy

Notes for the London Conference
Birbeck College

Not the word before the notion, but the word as notion and as historical agent.

“Communism” is a word with a strange story. It is very difficult to rigorously trace its origin. Nevertheless, it is sure that the word “communist” existed already in the XIVth century, with the meaning of “people having in common a property belonging to the category of main morte – that is, not being submitted to the law of heritage”: a monastery belongs to the community of the Monks, which is, as community, independent from the individuals. It seems that at the same time and even before, from the XIIth century, the same word designated some aspects of communal law and was linked to the communal movement which expanded as the beginning of a bourgeoisie.

Later, namely in the XVIIIe century, the word appears in a text written by Victor d’Hupay de Fuveau in 1785 – four years before the French revolution. It designates the project or the dream to found a community of life – which precisely is supposed to replace that of the Monks.

More here

Charles Taylor. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press. September 2007.

Books on atheism have been selling like—well, like spiritual self-help books. The unexpected publishing success of Dawkins and Dennett, Hitchens and Harris has left some of us, at least on the more religious side of the Atlantic, fantasizing that we might be at the dawn of a secular New Age. Suddenly it no longer seems the most natural thing in the world that public figures should be compelled to flaunt their faith on pain of political suicide or that matters of war and peace should be routinely referred to the putative wishes of supreme beings armed with super powers. Cracks have appeared in the mandatory public piousness. One can perhaps glimpse a day, not too far from now, when we will wonder how we ever came to play by the rules of that game.

For the moment, however, the game goes on. And there are reasons, of course, for not simply demanding a halt to it. As reviewers have very properly noted, the faithful lend their time and energy to some laudable causes, and they tend to be disproportionately poor and socially marginal. Respect for the person may not entail respect for the ideas the person holds, yet in practice the two are hard to disentangle, and there is a more or less well-founded fear of the political consequences of respect withheld. In the US, the perceived importance of so-called “values” voters in the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 plunged the secular left into a crisis of self-scrutiny. (Demands for accommodation with Christian fundamentalism were thankfully more muted in 2008.)

Read more here: Disenchanted | n+1.

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