Dennis Robert Redmond wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
>
>> fascist. Simultaneously, I'm in agreement with Zizek, who argues that we
>> need to think a bit more about Stalinism
>
>
> Not sure if I buy this.
How about cultural Stalinism? As everybody knows, I know next to nothing about the economy/economies (I'm not proud of it, but it would be pointless for me to talk when I should be listening). But here's an example ripped from Toronto headlines. Last week (was it last week?) Mel Lastman (mayor of Toronto) uttered the "bad taste" joke heard around the world. From one of a dozen articles, "At a bizarre news conference yesterday, Mayor Mel Lastman apologized - no fewer than 25 times - for a "joke" in which he worried his trip to Kenya with the Toronto 2008 Bid team would end with him in a boiling cauldron of water with "natives" dancing around." Organizations around Toronto are calling for his head on a platter, which is fine with me because he's a lunatic. However, there has been no mention at all about his comments the week before: "If it were up to the wives of the Bid Team then the Olympics would be held in Paris so they could all go shopping." Of course over a third of the delegates are female and etc. Is it just me or is there a border of acceptability here that makes it ok to make certain kind of offensive/silly/stupid/vile/repulsive remarks and not others? This isn't new, and I'm certain that the firestorm being stirred up isn't only about turfing Mel because of his racist "joke." I just find it curious that sexist Mel is "our kind of guy." The media barely even blinked when Mel mentioned last year that there were no homeless people living in North York.
http://members.tripod.com/harriscide/MayorMel.html
I guess my point is this, I'm intrigued (and maybe even frustrated) by Zizek's comments: "What cannot fail to strike us is the almost total absence of theoretical confrontation with Stalinism in the tradition of the Frankfurt School (with the exception of Neumann and Marcuse's Soviet Marxism ["his least passionate and arguably worst book"]... in order to avoid "losing their official mask of 'radical' Leftist critique... (Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? 2001, 92-93).This follows from his introduction, "The moment one accepts the notion of 'totalitarianism,' one is firmly located within the liberal democratic horizon. The contention of this book is thus that the notion of 'totalitarianism,' far from being an effective theoretical concepts, is a kind of stopgap: instead of enabling us to think, forcing us to acquire a new insight into the historical reality it describes, it reelives us of the duty to think, or even activley prevents us from thinking..." (3)... a kind of unwritten Denkverbot ...so... that's some thinking on that.
Anyway, I did win a new car in the lottery, in principle anyway. Only it wasn't a car but a bicycle, and it was not new but old, and I did not win it, it was stolen from me, ken