On Wed, 11 Oct 2000 16:23:16 EDT LeoCasey at aol.com wrote:
> [BTW, this pre-Foucaultian conception of power is completely compatible with
> anti-democratic Leninist notions of power.] It fails to grasp the ways in
> which power is productive, the ways in which power adds, the ways in which
> power evokes new memories and fashions new histories, creating new identities
> and new subjectivities.
This is extraordinarily important. I've tried to emphasize, on occassion [insert psychobabble] the importance of fantasy in the creation and production of power (Castoriadis is particularly good on this point). In this sense, it would be more appropriate to say that power *creates* memories as well as evoking "new [repressed] memories." In a very important sense, these memories may or may not be historical ["real"]. I usually trot out my Lost Highway experience here. When I saw the movie, I hated it, but after reading Zizek's thoughts on it, I loved it. My experience (memory) of the movie changed, retroactively. I'm also reminded of Marcuse's notion of psychic thermidor... and of course there is Bataille...
> ... the real political import of memory and history it is to be found in the
process of remembering, in the dialectical combination of loss and presence.
Yes, but also in the creation of loss through the transformation of something that had yet to be named. We experience loss only after we come to believe that something is missing. In psychobabble, this is the movement from trauma to loss: "It is only after I realized that I should be happy that I remembered that I was at one time happy" (I owe this example to Jonathan Lear).
> Contrary to the position proposed by Yoshie, and leaving aside here for the
> moment her essentialist conception of "Americans," oppressors are not men
> without memories and men deprived of histories. To the contrary, they hold
> onto particular memories and particular historical narratives with great
> ferocity, as if their very existence depended upon it.
Yes, absolutely. The psychobabble around the notion of fetish carefully examines this (I'm thinking of Henry Krips book Fetish) - the way in which "we" or "I" will hand over *everything* for something. I'm always reminded of the 7 people killed in North America in the early 1990s by vending machines falling over on them - for whatever reason, their entire existence came to depend, in that one moment, on that can of soda or plastic wrapped treat...
> It is wrong to dismiss this as simply "false consciousness," as simply
> "invented history."
Again, I completely agree. The notion of "false consciousness" is often deployed in the most deplorable way - in other words - in a completely undialectical fashion. In psychobabble, the truth is a lie that knows itself to be a lie. Marx's thoughts on religion are telling here. Religion is false consciousness, but not in the narrow onedimensional sense - religion contains a kernel of truth - about the existing conditions under which human beings suffer. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature... religion tells us about material existence - it is a record of accusations and suffering. I've always thought that Feuerbach doesn't get enough attention on this point.
> How, indeed, do we integrate and re-make ourselves whole in the face of such
> human depravity? [Was it not Adorno who said something to the effect that,
> after the Holocaust, how could there be poetry?]
Yes, he "took it back" in Negative Dialectics, when we said something to the effect, "but we need poetry for those who have no hope."
> just as the woman of Morrison's story who slew her own child, rather than
allow her to be taken back into enslavement, did.
Zizek has a chapter on this in his latest "The Fragile Absolute" ... which he compares to Freud's critique of Judaism in Moses and Monotheism... which is actually pretty close to his definition of an ethical act - killing that which is your very life (if memory serves...).
> For a whole host of reasons, I think that Hegel is not the best source
> material for a political philosophy, at least not for one which has
> aspirations to be radically democratic and fully pluralist.
"This point is not simply to interpret Hegel, rather, to change him."
> But he is not without insight, and he should not be read selectively. The
section of the Phenomenology which critiques the Reign of Terror which
consumed the French Revolution is of particular interest, and it fits this
politics to a tee...
One could also mention Joachim Ritter's Hegel and the French Revolution... and also Adorno's Hegel: three studies...
Thanks for your thoughts. They were appreciated.
sic, ken