>>>It's about what is happening between people's ears.
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>>that's pretty insulting.
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>>shag
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>How do you mean?
>OK. So explain what you meant so I'm sure I understand you.
Here's what I mean. In his short stories James Baldwin uses a lot of razor sharp images dealing with sexual mythology and psychopathology associated with historical violence against blacks. There are numerous images of castration. I remember one scene where two black men are standing over a friend who has been killed by a white mob. The man was castrated after he was dead. Baldwin has one of the men say the castration has to mean something because why would they do something like that if it didn't mean something. He concludes that it means "they hate us, but they love us too."
When I talk about what's happening between people's ears that's the kind of thing I'm referring to. I tried to tie it in with Zizek because I think concepts like jouissance and castration complex track well with Baldwin's images. It's like what Freud said about the poets saying it all before he did.
>Here's why Zizek (and I object to some of his ramblings in that
>piece -- intensely!) cannot be used to illustrate what Michaels is saying.
I do too. Like the part about you know you're not racist when you can tell racist jokes. I think that's crap. But I think there's a little Howard Stern in Zizek and he often goes too far when in Zizek the Entertainer mode.
As far as Michaels goes, I wasn't trying to use Zizek to illustrate what Michaels is saying. I just wanted to add another piece to the puzzle.
I think part of Reed's complaint about anti-racism is that those who espouse it can use it as to quell some of their own anxiety about race. It's like the teacher on South Park who told the kids drugs are bad... "Racism is bad... ummmkay?"
>Zizek is someone I'll read here 'n' there, but I have serious
>problems with his work, so raising the sign Zizek, for me, never
>induces in me some kool-aid drinking state that will make me say,
>"Oh my god! Zizek says the same thing. I was sooo wrong about Michaels."
Like I said, I didn't bring in Zizek to show Michaels is right or wrong and I wouldn't expect him to have a kool-aid effect. What I like about Zizek is he is keeping a psychoanalytical take alive in a compelling way. As he says in one article about Lacan and tv, he doesn't want to take the wrong path of applied psychoanalysis. Instead of asking what can Lacan teach us about tv, he'd rather ask what we can learn about Lacan from tv.
I'd never heard of Michaels before he came up here and going by the problems you and others have brought up, I think I can go on without him.