> G'day Ken,
B'day Rob.
> >I truly enjoy people getting worried about the jouissance of others, its just
so fucking puritan.
> One author's jouissance is another reader's poison, I reckon. I identify
as a Sokolowskist on this one. Enjoy me all you want.
I just don't understand why so many people are interested in burning as many bridges as they can on their way out of theory. In this I find someone like Martin J. Beck Matustik an exemplar of solidarity. His book Specters of Liberation is inspiration, because he's willing and interested in human liberation, despite theoretical disagreements - and he's looking to find as many synthetic connections as possible between divergent theories: placing Habermas, Marcuse, West, Outlaw, Cornell, Chomsky, Young, Derrida, Said and so on beside one another... in a sympathetic relation (ie. less worried about purity and more worried about the silencing of 'great refusals.' Intellectuals and activists seem to mirror the brutality of capitalism at each and every turn, with the excuse of Brecht, "We wouldn't be so rude if the condition weren't so bad" ("we wouldn't be so oppressive if the competition wasn't so tough"). I just find it annoying and kind of pathetic. Who cares what Derrida is reading / writing about? If you don't like it, move the fuck on. If you can work with it, great, so much the better. I can't help but think that the critique of ideology is moving to be a critique for the sake of itself... a simple minded and destructive tendency. And I'm not interested in warm fuzzies, some sort of new age holistic medicine that will make the world go-go around. Yes, critique is never "mere criticism" but I think a bit more prudence needs to be exercised in picking targets to fire flaming arrows at. The core of Zizek's work is an examination of culture, with the express purpose of highlighting the ways in which people derive jouissance from violence. Through this his foremost concern is human suffering. And he's appropriated Kant for a model of universality, Hegel for contingency, and Lacan for diagnostics. So if there is disagreement to be had with this, it should be productive, unless you're simply and sadistically not interested in suffering or human subjectivization. Castoriadis has a nice take on this: the unfinished project of autonomy.
emphatically yours, ken