[lbo-talk] "Cheer the Fuck Up"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>[lbo-talk] Purging Black Votes: 2000 and 2004
>Eubulides paraconsistent at comcast.net, Sat May 1 18:03:16 PDT 2004
<snip>
>>Cheer the fuck up.
>>Doug
<snip>
>The creeps who tortured the Iraqis are cynics.

The American men and women who had themselves photographed while 
torturing Iraqis look to be . . . a very cheerful bunch, in a 
mythical All-American sort of way, with big grins and thumbs up.  I 
can imagine them telling the tortured Iraqis to "cheer the fuck up," 
in a military version of the totalitarian command "enjoy!"

"The superficial opposition between pleasure and duty is overcome in 
two different ways. Totalitarian power goes even further than 
traditional authoritarian power. What it says, in effect, is not, 'Do 
your duty, I don't care whether you like it or not,' but: 'You must 
do your duty, and you must enjoy doing it.' (This is how totalitarian 
democracy works: it is not enough for the people to follow their 
leader, they must love him.) Duty becomes pleasure. Second, there is 
the obverse paradox of pleasure becoming duty in a 'permissive' 
society. Subjects experience the need to 'have a good time', to enjoy 
themselves, as a kind of duty, and, consequently, feel guilty for 
failing to be happy. The superego controls the zone in which these 
two opposites overlap - in which the command to enjoy doing your duty 
coincides with the duty to enjoy yourself." -- Slavoj Zizek, "'You 
May!'" _London Review of Books_ 21.6 (March 18, 1999), 
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n06/zize01_.html>
-- 
Yoshie

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