On Sat, 1 May 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Oh for christ's sake. Are you just driven by the sheer urge to be contrary?
>
> "Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even
> though the thing one is fighting is abominable." - Foucault
On Sat, 1 May 2004, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> 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