>Also. when he says that humans can theoretically exist in happy
>isolation, it's fair to ask if he isn't setting the bar too low.
That's what Voltaire was trying to tell Rousseau, I think.
>And of course on the slavery question, Rousseau was the first to assert
>that it was possible for mutual dependence, freedom and equality all to be
>rendered compatible through the mediation of the general will. And that,
>given that mutual dependence was an inseparable part of society, and that
>there was no going backwards once we'd formed it, this was the only way we
>would have any kind of freedom and equality ever again.
>
>Except for girls, of course. They were needed at home.
The obsession with "sexual difference" in psychoanalysis -- which Zizek, following Lacan, renders hyperbolically -- reminds me of Rousseau's sexism.
***** No Sex, Please! We're Post-Human
Jan. 22, 2000 by Slavoj Zizek, special to Britannica.com
...What if sexual difference is not simply a biological fact, but "the Real" of an antagonism that defines humanity, so that if sexual difference were abolished, a human being would effectively become indistinguishable from a machine? (The Real is Lacan's term for that which resists being incorporated symbolically into our universe of meaning. The Real is thus not raw reality, which we encounter at its purest in phenomena like disgust, but, rather, the stuff of traumatic encounters: experiences of violence or excessively intense pleasure. Whether fantasized or part of reality, they are "too much" for our cognitive apparatus.)... *****
Yoshie