We can get carried away with metaphors, but... I'm reminded as well of the metaphor used by (the now ex-historical materialist) Gerald Cohen, that the relationship of most humans to society is like that of a rabbit to its woods. Of course, it's not just a question of the rabbit vis-a-vis predators, it's also a matter of its relationship to other like individuals and subsistence, inter alia. In other words, even when dealing with the most deterministic situations, "materialism" is still complicated --- it concerns the whole of the social environment, not just the "economic".
----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Saturday, April 05, 2003 3:28 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] "Mechanical marxists"
> At 12:54 PM +0800 4/5/03, Grant Lee wrote:
> >Hey, where can I get one of these things? Can they be programmed to
> >automatically take out individual elements of capital, or do they
> >have to be guided to their targets?
>
> ***** _Blade Runner_...gives a double twist to the commonsense
> distinction between human and android. Man is a replicant who does
> not know it. Yet if this were all, the film would involve a
> simplistic reductionist notion that our self-experience _qua_ free
> 'human' agents is an illusion founded upon our ignorance of the
> causal nexus that regulates our lives. For that reason, one should
> supplement the former statement: it is only when, at the level of the
> enunciated content, I assume my replicant status, that, at the level
> of enunciation, I become a truly human subject. 'I am a replicant'
> is the statement of the subject in its purest....In short, the
> implicit thesis of _Blade Runner_ is that replicants are pure
> subjects precisely in so far as they experience the fact that every
> positive, substantial content, inclusive of the most intimate
> fantasies, is not 'their own' but already implanted.
>
> (Slavoj Zizek, "'The Thing That Thinks': The Kantian Background of
> the Noir Subject," _Shades of Noir: A Reader_, ed. Joan Copjec,
> London; New York: Verso, 1993) *****
> --
> Yoshie
>
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