And , of course, it was not a ghost that shot Kennedy and the several other civil rights leaders , Black radical leaders in that era, but the very earthly "secret" police forces , the repressive apparatus of the U.S. state, headed in a way by that vile dictator, J. Edgar Hoover, whose shadow (not ghost) transcended 7 or 8 presidents.
It is Zizek's theory of conspiracy theories that, of course, is not to be accepted as fact, but as a bizarre intellectual convulusion diverting Left intellectuals from playing a role to elucidate for the working class the ruthlessness and Machiavellian maneuvers of the bourgeoisie and their murderous minions in the repressive apparatus. Zizek's mumblings about paranoia are distorted by the sand he has in his mouth from burying his head in it like an ostrich in the face of real danger.
Since, Kant and Lacan are dead, I am not sure why we are interested in what they have to say. But anyway, Kant was superceded so long ago, first by Hegel and then even further by Marx and Engels that one wonders where Zizek "has been" to espouse such outdated philosophy, stale as a fart from the 1700's. WWII, nuclear weapons and Stalin and Truman are a lot more relevant to what is to be done today than Kant's tired old ass. As to who is "mad" , Lacan's babble sort of speaks for itself, and that thing-in-itself is not at all unknowable to anybody with half a wit.
Zizek ought to apply for some payment from the CIA under a quantum meruit contract theory.
CB and the big SAME
>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 12/16/99 12:01PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
>And was it a lone gunman who killed King, B. Kennedy , et al. too ?
>I don' t think so.
From Slavoj Zizek's essay on "The Matrix":
>The theory of risk society and its global reflexivization is right in
>its emphasis one how, today, we are at the opposite end if the
>classical Enlightenment universalist ideology which presupposed that,
>in the long run, the fundamental questions can be resolved by way of
>the reference to the "objective knowledge" of the experts: when we are
>confronted with the conflicting opinions about the environmental
>consequences of a certain new product (say, of genetically modified
>vegetables), we search in vain for the ultimate expert opinion. And the
>point is not simply that the real issues are blurred because science is
>corrupted through financial dependence on large corporations and state
>agencies - even in themselves, sciences cannot provide the answer.
>Ecologists predicted 15 years ago the death of our forrests - the
>problem is now a too large increasee of wood... Where this theory of
>risk society is too short is in emphasizing the irrational predicament
>into which this puts us, common subjects: we are again and again
>compelled to decide, although we are well aware that we are in no
>position to decide, that our decision will be arbitrary. Ulrich Beck
>and his followers refer here to the democratic discussion of all
>options and consensus-building; however, this does not resolve the
>immobilizing dilemma: why should the democratic discussion in which the
>majority participates lead to better result, when, cognitively, the
>ignorance of the majority remains. The political frustration of the
>majority is thus understandable: they are called to decide, while, at
>the same time, receiving the message that they are in no position
>effectively to decide, i.e. to objectively weigh the pros and cons. The
>recourse to "conspiracy theories" is a desperate way out of this
>deadlock, an attempt to regain a minimum of what Fred Jameson calls
>"cognitive mapping."
>
>Jodi Dean(3) drew attention to a curious phenomenon clearly observable
>in the "dialogue of the mutes" between the official ("serious,"
>academically institutionalized) science and the vast domain of
>so-called pseudo-sciences, from ufology to those who want to decipher
>the secrets of the pyramids: one cannot but be struck by how it is the
>oficial scientists who proceed in a dogmatic dismissive way, while the
>pseudo-scientists refer to facts and argumentation deprived of the
>common prejudices. Of course, the answer will be here that established
>scientists speak with the authority of the big Other of the scientific
>Institution; but the problem is that, precisely, this scientific big
>Other is again and again revealed as a consensual symbolic fiction. So
>when we are confronted with conspiracy theories, we should proceed in a
>strict homology to the proper reading of Henry James' The Turn of the
>Screw: we should neither accept the existence of ghosts as part of the
>(narrative) reality nor reduce them, in a pseudo-Freudian way, to the
>"projection" of the heroine's hysterical sexual frustrations.
>Conspiracy theories, of course, are not to be accepted as "fact" -
>however, one should also not reduce them to the phenomenon of modern
>mass hysteria. Such a notion still relies on the "big Other," on the
>model of "normal" perception of shared social reality, and thus does
>not take into account how it is precisely this notion of reality that
>is undermined today. The problem is not that ufologists and conspiracy
>theorists regress to a paranoiac attitude unable to accept (social)
>reality; the problem is that this reality itself is becoming paranoiac.
>Contemporary experience again and again confronts us with situations in
>which we are compelled to take note of how our sense of reality and
>normal attitude towards it is grounded in a symbolic fiction, i.e. how
>the "big Other" that determines what counts as normal and accepted
>truth, what is the horizon of meaning in a given society, is in no way
>directly grounded in "facts" as rendered by the scientific "knowledge
>in the real." Let us take a traditional society in which modern science
>is not yet elevated into the Master-discourse: if, in its symbolic
>space, an individual advocates propositions of modern science, he will
>be dismissed as "madman" - and the key point is that it is not enough
>to say that he is not "really mad," that it is merely the narrow
>ignorant society which puts him in this position - in a certain way,
>being treated as a madman, being excluded from the social big Other,
>effectively EQUALS being mad. "Madness" is not the designation which
>can be grounded in a direct reference to "facts" (in the sense that a
>madman is unable to perceive things the way they really are, since he
>is caught in his hallucinatory projections), but only with regard to
>the way an individual relates to the "big Other." Lacan usually
>emphasizes the opposite aspect of this paradox: "the madman is not only
>a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a
>king," i.e. madness designates the collapse of the distance between the
>Symbolic and the Real, an immediate identification with the symbolic
>mandate; or, to take his other exemplary statement, when a husband is
>pathologically jealous, obsessed by the idea that his wife sleeps with
>other men, his obsession remains a pathological feature even if it is
>proven that he is right and that his wife effectively sleeps with other
>men. The lesson of such paradoxes is clear: pathological jealously is
>not a matters of getting the facts false, but of the way these facts
>are integrated into the subject's libidinal economy. However, what one
>should assert here is that the same paradox should also be performed as
>it were in the opposite direction: the society (its socio-symbolic
>field, the big Other) is "sane" and "normal" even when it is proven
>factually wrong. (Maybe, it was in this sense that the late Lacan
>designated himself as "psychotic": he effectively was psychotic insofar
>as it was not possible to integrate his discourse into the field of the
>big Other.)
>
>One is tempted to claim, in the Kantian mode, that the mistake of the
>conspiracy theory is somehow homologous to the "paralogism of the pure
>reason," to the confusion between the two levels: the suspicion (of the
>received scientific, social, etc. common sense) as the formal
>methodological stance, and the positivation of this suspicion in
>another all-explaining global para-theory.