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
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>