Zizek on the Book of Job and its liberating power against scapegoating mechanisms:
Contrary to the usual notion of Job, he is not a patient sufferer, enduring his ordeal with a firm faith in God – on the contrary, he complains all the time, rejecting his fate (like Oedipus at Colonus, who is also usually misperceived as a patient victim resigned to his fate). When the three theologians-friends visit him, their line of argumentation is: if you are suffering, you must by definition have done something wrong, since God is just. Like Oedipus at Colonus, Job insists on the utter meaninglessness of his suffering – as the title of Job says: “Job Maintains His Integrity. ” Job’s properly ethical dignity lies in the way he persistently rejects the notion that his suffering can have any meaning, either punishment for his past sins or the trial of his faith, against the three theologians who bombard him with possible meanings – and, surprisingly, God takes his side at the end, claiming that every word Job spoke was true, while every word the three theologians spoke was false.
(art by shaun ferguson)
To an extent this understanding of suffering proposed by Zizek echoes the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, the recognition and acceptance of which is the necessary condition for the fruitful cultivation of ethical conduct, mental clarity and composure, and wisdom-compassion—for becoming otherwise. I wonder if Zizek would appreciate this if he had given more attention to the rich and diverse teachings of Buddhism themselves, rather than fixate on the ideological imperatives circumscribing the development of ‘Western Buddhism’ and thus perpetuate decontextualised, inaccurate readings of ancient non-Western sacred understandings. To be sure, ‘Western Buddhism’ is not inherently flawed nor are Zizek’s claims entirely invalid if they are properly contextualised. But what next, one could ask, after making the sweeping conclusions he does? More precisely, what would be a responsible response to the adherents of Buddhism (a reification invented by Europeans) in other life-worlds, many of whom have so often been told by Westerners (who hold a religion/philosophy distinction not found in, but is today universalised and projected onto their tradition) that they ought to know better?
"Each time I open my mouth, I am promising something. When I speak to you, I am telling you that I promise to tell you something, to tell you the truth. Even if I lie, the condition of my lie is that I promise to tell you the truth. So the promise is not just one speech act among others; every speech act is fundamentally a promise. This universal structure of the promise, of the expectation of the future, for the coming, and the fact that this expectation of the coming has to do with justice—this is what I call the messianic structure. This messianic structure is not limited to what one calls messianism, that is, Jewish, Christian, or Islamic messianism, to these determinate figures and forms of the Messiah. As soon as you reduce the messianic structure to messianism, then you are reducing the universality and this has important political consequences."
Jacques Derrida, ‘The Villanova Roundtable,’ October 2, 1994.
Alain Badiou: a life in writing
Stuart Jeffries, guardian.co.uk‘So many people now don’t know the joy of love. They know sexual pleasure, but we all know what Lacan said about sexual pleasure’
Love, says France’s greatest living philosopher, “is not a contract between two narcissists. It’s more than that. I…
Love, for Badiou, is what follows a deranging chance eruption in one’s life. He puts it philosophically: “The absolute contingency of the encounter takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright.” Love’s work consists in conquering that fright. Badiou cites Mallarmé, who saw poetry as “chance defeated word by word”. A loving relationship is similar. “In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure,” writes Badiou.
“Drowning in Thoughts”,a Haiku
Alone in the dark
The depression floods her brain,
Drowning her with thoughts.Posted 5/16/2012
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the dignity of the feminine in islam: against zizek's orientalism
It is no coincidence that so many are affronted by Muslim women’s veils: they symbolise the last refusal of Islamic cultures to be stripped bare and consumed.
This is a response to the article by Zizek I posted a few days ago. I feel an obligation to post this because in posting Zizek’s article I had in a way, like many others, presumed to speak on behalf of the other, whom I neither really see nor hear. Again, I can’t comment on the validity of her claims about Islam but it is important, I believe, to foreground a woman’s response.
thou shall have no other god but captain america's
Yup. The scene where Captain America intervenes in the fight between Thor and Ironman annoyed me. Because nothing, no god, not even Mljnor, can make a dent in the ideological purity of the red, blue, white, and star shield, which being a ‘shield’ symbolises not aggressiveness but a duty to protect—which is of course utter bollocks, not to mention how it effaces the monotheistic power behind its juridical might.
Mindful Pleasures: At this point then we find ourselves really and truly in a...
At this point then we find ourselves really and truly in a contradictory situation. We need to hold fast to moral norms, to self-criticism, to the question of right and wrong, and at at the same time to a sense of the fallibility of the authority that has the confidence to undertake such…
This reminds me of an old post about how Derrida speaks of the affinities between his work and Adorno’s work, of being an ‘heir’ to the Frankfurt School, and of saying ‘yes’ to his debt to Adorno. See here.
with the fig, the olive tree and the pomegranate trees: thoughts on another australian belonging
I’m a migrant to Australia but I do not feel the affective resonances Ghassan Hage feels towards the place (Bourdieu’s ideas about ‘the necessities of life’ and how they shape the significance of one’s social reality goes some way towards explaining my suspended experience; Hage mentions this). However, being a displaced subject myself what he suggests about the possibility of an-other sphere of experiential life and belonging that might supersede the exclusivist territorialism of the colonial impulse, that is neither anti-colonialism nor post-colonialism, resonates with me. I believe it would be of relevance to other contexts as well and not just the Australian context. These are the concluding paragraphs:
I want to emphasise this mode of rootedness and its positive character because in it I glimpsed not just a way of being rooted but a mode of belonging that can stand in opposition to the dominant narrow territorial mode also corresponding to the narrow territorial way of being rooted I have critically referred to earlier, and which has often generated sadness and paranoia. The latter is a truly colonial mode of belonging. It inherits its territorial exclusivist mentality which operates with an either/or logic: either my roots or yours, either this land is mine or yours, either you belong here or there, either you are sovereign or I am. The experience of rootedness that I found so uplifting seems to offer a path to a different mode of belonging that, clearly, we all have within us. But this is not an anti-colonialism—which shares the either/or dualism of colonial logic. Nor is it a post-colonialism—which prematurely sees colonialism as something superseded. If anything, it is a supra-counter-colonialism—it counters colonialism from a space outside of and beyond it: certainly a space outside the usual conflict-inducing determinations in which the protagonists of colonial antagonisms are locked. Perhaps this is the space that Badiou in his early work referred to as the horlieu: the ‘outsideplace’, and which in his later writing becomes the sphere of emergence of his well-known notion of the event: that which comes from an outer plane and carries with it the potential of transforming the existing.
This is where I see the potentiality of the mode of rootedness I have described above, and let me reiterate this point to make it clear, such a mode of rootedness and belonging is not oppositional in the colonial sense. It is not opposing the belonging of the colonised to the belonging of the coloniser. Nor is it, as already mentioned, post-colonial, in the sense of positing a mode of belonging in which colonialism is superseded. Rather, it is a mode of belonging that recognises the existence of colonial relations of power and colonial modes of belonging and the importance of anti-colonial struggles, but along that and at the same time, it posits the existence of an-other sphere of experiential life and belonging where one can abstract from those relations of power. This neither means forgetting them nor mystifying them, rather it means finding a space from outside of them that might allows us to act on them differently to help supersede them. It means that there are other spaces of experience in which colonialism and, even politics more generally, do not prevail, and which offer different human potentialities that we need to explore and tap into.
