A Pig Returns to the Farm, Thumbing His Snout at Orwell

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Nov 27 21:29:44 PST 2002



>Yoshie Furuhashi:
>
>> You know, Trotsky is dead, and so is Trotsyism as a political force.
>> There is no "bang" in satirizing what is dead. The object of satire
>> has to be a living and breathing social force to reckon with.
>
>Is Lenin alive?
>
>Ulhas

For the same reason as I mentioned above, there's no "bang" in satirizing Lenin and Leninism either. Actually, he's now dead enough to become a material for post-post-modern theory: V.I. Lenin, _Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917_, Edited, with a Foreword and Afterword, by Slavoj Zizek, <http://www.versobooks.com/books/klm/l-titles/lenin_rev_gates.shtml>.

I do like the following remark by Zizek on Lenin and Lacan (among other things in his work): "Lenin possessed the strength to prolong the utopian moment. Nowhere in his work is there any trace of what Lacan called the 'narcissism of the lost cause', displayed by those who cannot wait for the revolution to fail so that they might admire and bemoan it. This is what made Lenin the politician of the 20th century - the century of the passion of the real" (Slavoj Zizek. "Seize the Day: Lenin's Legacy," <http://books.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4467127,00.html>). -- Yoshie

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