July 29th 2010 Earlier this week, The Daily Telegraph reported that a 51-year-old man exploded with rage after enduring hours of listening to vuvuzelas being blown in the Coco Bamboo bar in the quiet little village of Pievebelvicino near Vicenza, in north-eastern Italy. He first grabbed a rifle and fired shots into the air, but the warning had no effect on those in the bar and the noise continued. So he then jumped into his car and rammed it at least three times through the windows of the bar, sending the unsuspecting drinkers inside scattering in panic. Miraculously, no one was hurt. The man fled the scene but later checked himself into a local hospital. There, he was arrested by police and will undergo treatment in a psychiatric unit. The next time people might listen.
July 26th 2010 There is a flourishing gay scene within the Holy See in Rome. According to an undercover reporter for Panorama (monthly news magazine in Rome), there are gay parties and brief encounters featuring openly gay priests, named in the report together with photographs. The reporter was invited to a party in the Testaccio area of Rome, by a friend of a French priest, Fr Paul, whom the friend claims he first met in a sauna. Fr Paul is shown dancing semi-naked on stage and photographed in his boxers in the friend’s bedroom the morning after. Another encounter is filmed between two Rome based priests, Carlo and Luca. After sex, Fr Luca proudly showed off his clerical vestments, walking around the bedroom half-naked. It is common knowledge in the gay scene in Rome that priests frequent gay venues. (Report, The Irish Times 24th July)
July 22nd 2010 What Hitchens saw at first hand as a foreign correspondent was decent into lawlessness. In Russia, theft of property was universal and ‘accepted a normal’. As a small example, for instance, when it rained in Moscow, the traffic would come to a standstill, while every driver stopped to fit the windscreen wipers to their holders. Any wipers left in place while the car was parked were stolen as a matter of course. He contrasts this, ‘coarse and mannerless world’ with the warmth of the Russian kitchen, with ‘close friends gathered over smoked fish, black bread and vodka to talk long into the night’. But it was in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, that Hitchens found degradation coming into its own. He was there in 1992; he had volunteered for a brief assignment. Mogadishu was no longer a functioning capital. It had no commercial airport, no law, no street-lights, no electricity, no embassies. A body-guard was essential, or ‘you’ll be naked and dead by morning’, he was told. There is famine and children are dying. There are no trees, no shop fronts, but dozens of pick-up trucks with heavy machine guns belonging to the competing militias leaving town because the US Marine have arrived. Once back home, Hitchens sees pictures of Mogadishu taken just a few years before with its Italian style pavement cafes, well dressed prosperous people, modern shops and hotels. The overall effect on Hitchens of Russia and Somalia convinced him about the essential vulnerability of civilisation. Back in Britain after 5 years, he noted with concern, ‘the rapid vanishing of Christianity from public consciousness and life, as the last fully Christian generation ages and disappears’.(p66)
July 19th 2010 The title of Peter Hitchens’ last book, The Rage Against God, is ambiguous. He intends it to be a discussion (and indeed it is) about how the West has turned against its Judeo-Christian heritage. However, he would acknowledge that he himself had his own personal rage against God, symbolised by the burning of his bible on the playing fields of his Cambridge boarding school in 1967 when he was 15. However, a key moment in his return to religion was seeing Rogier van der Weyden’s fifteenth-century “The Last Judgement” in Beaune, near Dijon in E. France. What struck Hitchens in this work were, ‘the naked figures fleeing towards the pit of Hell...These people did not appear remote or from the ancient past; they were my own generation...They were me and people I knew’.(75) He stresses that this was not a religious or a mystical experience as such, but, ‘a sudden strong sense of religion being a thing of the present day’.
July 15th 2010 For Peter Hitchens, violence comes from utopian materialist revolutionary movements, not from religions, at least contemporary Christian religions. He asks, ‘where now do we find Christian churches or factions persecuting each other as they did in the Reformation or Counter- Reformation? Nowhere’. Whereas each revolutionary generation repeats the former savagery. The Bolsheviks repeated the French revolutionary terror. The Chinese communists, the Khmer rouge, even Castro resorted swiftly to torture and now of course some on the revolutionary Left back Islamist terror. What makes the difference for Hitchens is whether or not we submit to an earthly authority or an eternal one. For a moral code to the affective, he believes, it must come from a non-human source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it. However, against Hitchens, we must argue that this “non-human source” has been and continues to be the Symbolic register’s inhuman violence and which can operate without mercy. However, Hitchens seems to come closer to his ethical concerns after witnessing an execution in Dallas, a few years ago. With time to spare before his flight, he visits the City’s Museum of Art. He is struck by Thomas Hart Benton’s painting of the Prodigal Son (1939), who, unlike the son in the New Testament story (Luke 15) returning home exhausted materially and morally to be greeted with love and welcome, Benton’s Prodigal Son has arrived too late. Nobody has seen him from afar and no one has run to greet and anoint him. There is no forgiveness, no music or dancing. Instead, he is gaping with his hand to his mouth, at the ruin of his family home outlined ominously against the cold sky. Instead of the fatted calf, there is an animal skeleton, on unkempt grass with a dead tree at his feet. The landscape is dead. To complete the triad, consider the fate of the rebellious son in the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 21:19: ‘If a father has a rebellious son. . . then shall his father and mother lay hold on him and bring him unto the elders of the city, and they shall say unto the elders of his city, “Our son is rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard”. And all the men of the city shall stone the son until he die’. Thus the Christian Prodigal son, situated somewhere between the archaic and modern, is nothing less than a singularity, exemplary of Paul’s dictum: Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound (Romans 5:20).
July 12th 2010 His and Hers. Ken Wardrop. “A man loves his girlfriend the most, his wife the best and his mother the longest”. This film documents the many stages of a woman’s life and the women in question are unknown women from the Irish Midlands. The film begins with a baby on her back on a mattress and ends with a woman in an old-persons’ home. In between, experiences are recounted with men who are more present because we never see them. First, dads and granddads, secondly boyfriends, then husbands and sons, finally women on their own and the emptiness that you have no choice but to bear; as many as 40 women participate, but they are not acting. There is no ideological “message”, no deeper feminist meaning to be elucidated, no palpable design on us. Instead, the film is pure appearance, pure illusion in the Baudrillardian sense. Each shot, each banality stands: the old dog waiting outside; the words talked; the farmer’s wife called to watch a gap in the hedge; the woman starting up a tractor; the milk on the windowsill. Each stands without explanation or representation. There is nothing to find behind any remark or image; each is already other.
July 10th 2010 ‘Attempts to rebuild a proper civil society have failed. There are many reasons for its failure...the prevalence of organised crime, drunken disorder, universal dishonesty, cultural decay, devastated family life and corruption. But one of the most important [reasons for failure] must be the absence of conscience and self-restraint among even its educated people, and the vacuum where the rule of law ought to be’. Not Ireland in 2010, but Russia after 70 years of Communism, as reported by Peter Hitchens in Rage Against God (Continuum 2010), p157. This is what happens in a Godless society, with ‘its submission to an earthly authority instead of an eternal authority’.(115)
July7th 2010 The manifest innocence of those demanding civil partnership rights under the signifier “inclusivity” was fought vigorously by journalist David Quinn (RTE Frontline) who challenged the notion of “we want only what is best for our children”, by asking the oldest metaphysical, least progressive question, you could possibly ask: does not a child have a right to be brought up by a mother and a father? Oh no, comes the inclusive answer, just loving parents. Under their breaths they are shouting: get rid of the traditional family; get rid of the bourgeois family! The latter has always stood in the way of the hegemonic integral State. It has always been regarded on the Left as a thorn in the side of progress, a private domain of resistance to be eliminated. The strategy of de-differentiation, of homogenisation, moves on inexorably. There will be no difference between a man and a woman, a mother and a father, a parent and a child. There will be no difference!
July 4th 2010 Baudrillard’s formula that, whatever is abolished in the real reappears in the hyperreal, or, as he says, ‘all that has disappeared is artificially restored’, imagines a global silent destruction of reality (The Perfect Crime) during the modern period, which “returns” in the wholly artificial simulated world of the mediatised post-modern. This puts us in mind of Freud’s notion of verwerfung – foreclosure or repudiation. As Freud specifies, ‘the ego rejects the incompatible idea [incompatible with reality] together with its affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all’.(SE 3:59) This is not repression as such, but expulsion from the psyche: ‘what was abolished internally returns from without’. (SE12:71). And it returns via hallucination or delusion. For Freud, reality or part of reality is decathected; reality is lost. For Lacan and his concept of foreclosure, what is foreclosed in the Symbolic, abolished from ordinary human reality, reappears in the Real as hallucination. This is the defense mechanism specific to psychosis, ‘the reappearance in the Real of what the subject has refused’. Baudrillard, Freud and Lacan are pointing similarly to a refusal, negation, abolition or rupture of reality in favour of a false real. Meaning has become radically destabilised; the moral compass has been lost. Welcome to the desert of the Real (Matrix). Welcome to the void.
July 1st 2010 Charles Taylor regards Girard’s work as significant. Girard like Freud asserts that what Paul calls, “Powers and Principalities”, obey the scapegoat rule. They are ‘state structures based on the founding murder’.(Battling to the End, pxiv) ‘Foundation is never a solitary action; it is always done with others. This is the rule of unanimity, and this unanimity is violent’.(23) For Freud the Law itself was founded on the murder of the Father. For Žižek, every source of political power has a hidden disavowed violent underside. As Girard says, ‘violence is never lost on violence’, violence is all, original sin is vengeance, never ending vengeance: ‘we have to imagine that for these very reasons the first human groups self-destructed’.(19) Girard’s interlocutor, Benoît Chantre, asks the key question: ‘Is there some way out of the crisis at a time when according to you, the mimetic mechanism is spiralling out of control at the global level and there can be no sacrificial resolution? Unless the sacrificial resolution coincides with the disappearance of humanity itself’.(20) Girard has no answers except to say that Christianity has exposed the truth of violent sacrifice. And with Nietzsche this realisation is made absolutely explicit. Not only, God is dead, God remains dead and we have killed him. What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? (Aphorism 125 in The Gay Science)
June 29th 2010 Older man to young boy: what does your father do? Young boy: he’s a magician. Older man: is he now, what sort of tricks does he do? Young boy: he saws men and women in half on stage. Older man: does he now, that’s a clever trick. Do you have any brother or sisters? Young boy: I only have a half brother and a half sister.
June 26th 2010 Girard agrees with Pope Benedict XVI about the “pathology of rationalism” in post-modernity. In three ways rationalism has been split off and isolated from faith, and thereby become toxic. Firstly, it has been reduced to practical empirical reason. Secondly, it has lent itself to pure operationalism and instrumentalism leading to the domination of our world by scientism. Thirdly, it has become de-Hellenised, in favour of a too simplistic return to the literalism of the Texts. The key point is, as Girard says, it is because ‘we have wanted to distance ourselves from religion that it is now returning with such force and in a retrograde, violent form. The rationalism...was not a real distancing, but a dike that is in the process of giving way. In this, it will perhaps have been our last mythology. We “believed” in reason as people used to believe in gods’.(119) The Pope returns to both the Greek and Jewish origins of the rational and monotheistic origins of Christianity - Faith and Reason together. As the Pope says, ‘pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it’.(Quoted on 206) Girard continues, ‘The Pope is alerting us to the fact that Greek reason is disappearing, and that its disappearance will leave the way open to rampant irrationality’.(207) Once more the escalation to extremes, the mimetic contagion of a rationality become hyper-rational versus hyper-religion, preached “by the sword”.
June 22nd 2010 Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre (Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture) by Rene Girard. The book focuses on Prussian general and military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), the Napoleon-obsessed author of On War. Clausewitz speculated about total war and Girard is delighted to find that Clausewitz, independently, confirms his thesis of mimetic contagion. Girard theorises that human desire is not so much a desire for recognition (Hegel), but a desire for what the other has, the other’s possession. This inevitably involves an escalation to violent extremes where both sides become alike in their warlike behaviour. This theory points to the ubiquity of violence in human affairs - indeed, battling to the end. It is an apocalyptic theory. In primitive religions apocalyptic violence was ended via the selection of a scapegoat who was blamed and sacrificed, enabling both sides to cease hostilities by blaming and sacrificing the third. Christianity puts an end to that mythology - Jesus was innocent. However, by revealing the real innocence of the scapegoat, Christianity plunged us back into sacrificial crisis and retaliatory violence - unless, that is, we heed the Christian truth, which is our only alternative to violent apocalypse. Christianity is the only religion that exposes the innocence of the victim. But it is not clear how Christianity can make a difference. He states repeatedly (and psychoanalysis agrees) that violence is always essentially violence against truth and that the truth itself causes violence; Christianity being a religion that brings division. Yet, he emphasises, if one side in the conflict renounces violence this paradoxically increases the violence of the other side, and, one way or another, violence today is indeed increasing across the world. Western rationalism and secularism cannot see this. Girard says, ‘Western rationalism operates like a myth: we always work harder to avoid seeing the catastrophe’.(213) Yet, apparently, the Spirit increases in a hidden ways too, ‘We should not underestimate the insertion of the spirit into history, nor exceptional individuals, nor the opening of groups to the universal’.(119) ‘Pascal called the order of the spirit, the necessary passage towards the order of charity. It is absolutely powerless to change the course of events, even though it makes it possible to understand them’.(132) As for Hölderlin, who withdrew to a tower for 40years in Tűbingen, he says, ‘We have to rise to the nobility of this silence’.(121) It is only from this perspective of truth that we can see as Girard suggests, ‘the West is going to exhaust itself in its fight against Islamic terrorism, which Western arrogance has undeniably kindled’.(209-210)
June 19th 2010 Baudrillard's triad - Illusion, Reality, Simulacrum - is beautifully illustrated by, for instance, the perfume industry. It began way back with the fragrantillusion, the discovery of the smells and scents emanating from various plant species. Eventually, the desire to realise these fragrances gave rise to the search for the objective real of these substances, which, in turn led to the various techniques for the distillation, concentration, separation and extraction of the pure fragrances. This perhaps was the high point of the perfume industry, during the 18th and 19th centuries, with appearance and reality joining forces in the beauty and variety of exotic bottles and labels to contain these precious extracts. However, since the 'seventies, it has been possible to trap the perfumes from a flower in the field and separate the perfume's molecular constituents by gas chromatography. From there chemical analysis will reveal the molecular structures thus isolated, making it possible to synthesise the relevant molecules artificially. They can be altered at will to manipulate or augment the aromas, in other words, to beat the plants at their own game. This is the Simulacrum stage, the hyper-real, where the product is severed from its referent - the plant species itself, which becomes simply unnecessary. The irony is that this stage has a renewed magical-illusory effect, not least because it wipes out the former evolutionary stages. There is no longer any need for the plants themselves and we are left feeling a huge nostalgia for the real which has gone. This final stage is a total real-isation of the elemental "functional groups" (at the molecular level) of fragrance without mystery, largely devoid of pleasure and enchantment, with cool functional names like Boss and Fahrenheit.
June 16th 2010 John Lonergan, the outgoing prison governor, of the aptly named Mountjoy in Dublin, articulated a simple truth some time ago, in the form of a question: ‘Have you ever seen a smiling or a happy addict’? However, such a simple observation about chronic drug addiction, by a compassionate governor no less, can bring a scorn of opposition in some quarters. Who is he, this arrogant man, to dare to suggest that he knows what constitutes the truth of another's enjoyment? Implication: each of us has a right to our own death drive. This brings to mind another question from the well respected John O'Shea of the humanitarian NGO, Goal, about the abuse of foreign aid: ‘Have you ever seen a thin or hungry soldier’? Again, the critical response might be: who is he to imply a poor country shouldn't feed the death drive in its own way if it wants to? As Freud stated, ‘everything living dies for internal reasons – becomes inorganic once again – then we shall be compelled to say that “the aim of all life is death”... (SE.18:38) Intervening to prevent this death drive process is seen by some as unwarranted interference.
June 8th 2010 Writing yesterday in the Guardian (CIF), Nick Cohen puts his finger on the most pressing problem in geopolitics today: ‘the behaviour of European liberals seems more reprehensible than ever. Instead of confronting or even arguing with the anti-liberal forces that are terrorising much of the Middle East and Asia, they appease them and offer them Israel as a placatory gesture, when Israel is not theirs to give away’. In other words, Israel will become the scapegoat in the true Girardian sense. Israel will be offered as a sacrifice to prevent the escalation to extremes of uncontrolled violence. All blame is heaped on this small but symbolic country, from both sides. It diverts criticism from corrupt Arab governments. It lessens the legacy of European guilt over the Holocaust if we can describe Israel or Zionism as the embodiment of Nazism or Apartheid, as is commonplace now. ‘Zionism, the criminal DNA of humanity’ (Parisian protestors shout in July 2006 against the war in Lebanon). Pilger says that Israel is not a rogue state but a criminal state. Israel is also accused of inventing the myth of the Holocaust, of being responsible for the 9/11 attacks, of having created the AIDS virus (to eliminate the black race or humanity itself), of having created the tsunami in December 2004 via a nuclear device, of creating Avian flu to weaken Africa and Asia, of having arranged for the Muhammad cartoons published in Denmark to foment conflict between Christians and Muslims, of stealing the organs of Palestinian children and offering them for sale, and so on. Beyond all this however is the fact that we only really take seriously our own (Western) aggression; this is the only aggression we can “see”. Again and again one hears commentators ignoring or minimising Islamist aggression, a classic case of disavowal: yes we know about it, but we (try to) ignore it. The other is really just too bad to contemplate.
June 5th 2010 A post on the human rights website, Harry’s Place: ‘Living in Jerusalem, I walk through the Armenian quarter on a regular basis, and I always see the posters calling out for the world to recognize the Armenian genocide carried out by the Turks in 1915. I was recently at the ceremony dedicated to recalling the genocide and listened to the extremely polite appeals from speakers for governments to address the issue, knowing full well that these calls will be disregarded as they have been for decades. I can’t help comparing: the Turks have demanded and obtained international condemnation and commitments to investigations within 24 hours in regard to Israel [and the storming of Mavi Marmara]. The Armenians have requested this regarding the Turks for 95 years and are still waiting’. Kevin Myers perceptibly notes the passengers on the Turkish vessel chanted: “Remember Khairbar, Khaibar, O Jews. The Army of Mohammed will return”. This was a reference to the prophet's seizure of a Jewish-held oasis, the last Jewish settlement in Arabia. Most of the Jews were slaughtered and their leader, Kinana bin al-Rabi, was captured, burnt and beheaded. His wife was then forcibly “married” to Mohammed. Myers continues, ‘For western Europeans to take sides with these forces against Israel constitutes a form of cultural suicide, the equivalent of a peace-convoy to aid the oppressed Germans of the Sudetenland in 1938’. Nick Cohen, at the end of a long review of, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, by Pascal Bruckner Princeton University Press, takes a step beyond Bruckner: ‘I have looked into the eyes of editors who have refused to run cartoons or news stories attacking Islamism and academics who have refused to confront student Islamic societies that are producing terrorists. I don't always see remorse there but a simple fear that they or their staff will be attacked if they make a stand. Liberal guilt is a minor emotion at these moments’.
June 2nd 2010 Psychoanalysis investigates “the other” - the other that is other to oneself or one’s identity - better known as the repressed unconscious. The psychoanalytic encounter has an ethical dimension, beyond the usual “ethics code” for consumers of a service. The first ethical concern is for the other of the Imaginary, the specular double, the rival, (con)fused with oneself. Secondarily, the other of the Symbolic – the other as unconscious. This is as far as psychoanalysis goes. Finally, and controversially, there is the naked face of the other (Levinas), unmediated in the Real. This ‘ethics as first philosophy’, haunts the Imaginary and Symbolic.
May 30th 2010 Clearly, the way one subjectively experiences post-modern culture is against a background of loneliness and this has become increasingly so in the younger half of the population. Across all ages, one in ten people in the UK reports often feeling lonely, the Mental Health Foundation has found - a state which can impact upon one's physical as well as mental health. The charity highlights the decline of community and a growing focus on work. Nearly 60% of those aged between 18 to 34 questioned spoke of feeling lonely often or sometimes, compared to 35% of those aged over 55. The young people we work with tell us that talking to hundreds of people on social networks is not like having a real relationship and when they are using these sites they are often alone in their bedrooms. The changing nature of the family, with fewer children who themselves often move away, has increased the prospect of elderly isolation. This has also become more likely as a result of longer life expectancies, the report noted. But neighbourhoods have also changed, with the local services such as post offices that tended to form the heart of old communities on the decline. The report also found gender differences, with more women than men reporting loneliness, and more likely to feel depressed as a result. It highlighted the fact that the proportion of people living alone, both male and female, had doubled between 1972 and 2008. According to Age UK, "Living in isolation and loneliness is a stark reality for thousands of older people today. People over 65 are twice as likely as other age groups to spend over 21 hours of every day alone. Nearly a third of young people questioned for the report said they spent too much time communicating with friends and families online when they should see them in person. Social networking sites, at one level, have enabled people to make connections they might not otherwise have made, and virtual friendships can evolve into real-life relationships. The report cites the example of the parenting website Netmums, which says that because of contacts made online 10,000 women meet face-to-face every month, reducing the sometimes intense sense of isolation new mothers can experience. But there are also concerns that technology is being used as a replacement for genuine human interaction. Sarah Brennan, head of the charity YoungMinds, said: ‘The young people we work with tell us that talking to hundreds of people on social networks is not like having a real relationship and when they are using these sites they are often alone in their bedrooms’. Manhattan in New York has 50% lone households, more than anywhere else in the United States, yet its “urban village” model sustains social networks because people habitually use alternative meeting places, including cafes and public spaces. The loneliness results from disconnectedness and disengagement which is structural to the system and covered by the “twittering” ephemerality in every virtual network - a frenzied mass connectedness (unbridled immanence) which violently and triumphantly negates the void in the social. There must be an inverse relationship between social networking (largely in the Imaginary) and the real bonds that tie people together (Symbolic and Real). It is precisely this “tying” that people want to be free from. No one wants to be tied down. This is a content-less revolution, part and parcel of the economic revolution from which it is indistinguishable. Both aim at acceleration and complexity. Both take no responsibility for the symbolic consequences.
May 28th 2010 Vincent Browne does a program (May 25th) from the flats complex (Dolphin House) in Dublin’s South Inner City where he explores the lamentable state of the accommodation that tenants there have to live in: the lung damaging molds, the blocked drains, the rising sewage, the acrid smells even inside the flats, the leaking ceilings, and so on. Each tenant interviewed reports that they have complained to the authorities repeatedly and nothing more than token repairs have been carried out in spite of evidence being provided by health experts that living in such conditions represents a considerable health hazard. Many people have already moved out of the complexes which weakens the social solidarity which has been so strong in these otherwise impoverished communities. One other observation is worthy of comment. All the tenants interviewed and speaking to camera were women. There were no men heading up these selected households, or at least no men prepared to speak to camera – no fathers around apparently, and no comment on the no fathers. The only men to appear in this program, apart from Browne himself, were in the audience at the conference called to discuss this intolerable situation.
May 25th 2010 A South African cartoonist, Jonathan Shapiro, has depicted the Prophet Muhammad lying on a psychotherapist’s couch complaining bitterly about why he, unlike other prophets, doesn’t seem to have any followers who laugh! Next to him is a newspaper with the headline, “Everybody draw Muhammad day”, which refers to a Facebook page which recently encouraged people to post images of the prophet, causing outrage in Pakistan. Fundamentalists have no sense of humour, because humour belongs to the Symbolic and fundamentalism belongs to the Real - the real of objective literal knowledge, with no gaps, no questions, no humour. The title of one of Roustang’s books is How to Make a Paranoid Laugh (1996). 'With paranoia one has all the worst, whereas with laughter at oneself one has all the best: proximity as opposed to distance; the tolerance that comes through realism; finitude without despair; humanity...as opposed to horror'. In another humourless vein, Swedish feminists and the Lutheran church have joined forces to oppose Crown Princess Victoria’s wish to be “given away” by her father, King Carl Gustaf, at her marriage next month.
May 23rd 2010 Chief Constable Peter Fahy of Greater Manchester Police, gives a brief social history of Britain’s recent drinking culture. Below cost selling of alcohol in supermarkets, with bulk reductions and double club card point incentives, have led to increases in consumption and the crime and violence associated with alcohol. What we do not see, Fahy explains, is the great increase in people drinking at home, drinking too much and getting involved in domestic violence. The ambulance service are rushed off their feet. The supermarkets have subverted the market with their cheap alcohol, they have put out of business the local clubs and pubs, the working men’s club, the social clubs, where until relatively recently people drank together and young people learned to drink in the company of adults, guided by relatives and other people in the community. The licensee is also responsible for the way people drink. Greater Manchester is littered with pubs that are boarded up and young people are now drinking in the park or going into large city centre pubs where there are not the same controls exerted on their drinking behaviour. Pubs, to meet the competition from the supermarkets, go down-market to attract more customers and these pubs end up being closed by the police. This is another instance of the undoing of the social.
May 19th 2010 Ben Judah, a journalist for Standpoint, reports on his travels in the Caucasus, Central Asian republics and former States in the USSR. These so-called “liberated” countries are suffering with their economies contracting by as much as half since 1985, causing a steady decline in living standards and education with a rise in illiteracy. He says, you see towns without schools but with new mosques. These States are no longer part of the large modernist project. They have gone back to pre-revolutionary times retreating into authoritarianism. The drugs trade is increasing. In Kyrgyzstan, for instance, he witnessed young men just smashing shop windows and attacking schools, bus stations and so on – anarchy and a frenzy born of despair. At night, blacked-out SUVs drive around with music blaring when most people are far too poor to even own a car – ‘Oh, they are the President friends’, is the common view on the street. Judah points out that British drug takers should take note of the suffering involved in the procurement of their recreation. Judah refers to the period since the collapse of Communism as “the Cold Peace” with Russia and America still challenging one another. In this post-ideological and post-modern period, Russia no longer has to take responsibility for these poor States; they can just use the cheap labour when they need it. A large US. base ferries 40,000 troops through Kyrgyzstan each month en route for Afganistan. A journey through central Asia will turn up some faded old images and relics of the dead gods, Stalin and Lenin, in some shops and still on occasional plinths. However, after 80years of Russian domination some re-naming has been going on with the Russians gradually being replaced by the names of national heroes, national historians and others.
May 16th 2010 Mikkel Borsh-Jacobsen suggests that psychoanalysis is a “zero theory” because it seems to accommodate all criticism and adapt to radically changing conditions with new theoretical formulations. For instance, upholders of Ego Psychology amend the doctrine to make it compatible with developmental psychology and the generally perceived need to adapt and have a strong integrated ego in the modern world. Object Relations theorists reject the solipsism and biologism of Freud’s drive theory in favour of ‘two-persons psychology’. Fairbairn’s dictum held that the infant stops crying at the sight of the breast rather than with the satisfaction of the drive. Kohut’s Self Psychology suspends analytic distance in favour of empathic understanding of the patient. Narrativists no longer concern themselves with the historical truth of what is said on the couch. Lacanians upend the dynamic theory in the radically new terms of language and the signifier. Kleinians think in terms of envy and containment. And so on. Borsh-Jacobsen’s mistake, however, is to think analysts believe that these changes constitute progress; no such claim is or should be made. ‘What’s the use of trying to criticise such a “zero theory”? It is everywhere only because it is anything’, responds Chris Oakley. ‘It is “everywhere” because people who are suffering have always turned to others for solace. Psychoanalysis is merely a chapter in folk psychology, underpinned by highly specific cultural and historical conditions’. Psychoanalysis defies definition which angers its critics, but Oakley concludes, ‘Folk psychology can't progress any more than rock 'n' roll’. However, “folk” should at least talk to one another and psychoanalysts are not very folksy in that way and nor are their over-complex and competing theories. There are currently no less than four Lacanian groups in Dublin, for example. And is not psychoanalysis with its multiple variants precisely post-modern? What else should we expect when a similar process of multiple differentiation with no centre is occurring everywhere? It is the essence of the Market and Capitalism.
May 13th 2010 Revanche: Götz Spielmann’s meditation on revenge and remorse. Moving from under-world Vienna to a beautiful but isolated stretch of Austrian countryside, Alex (Johannes Krisch), a small-time ex-con seeks a better life with his Eastern European prostitute girlfriend Tamara (Irina Potapenko), who has been sex-trafficked to a Viennese brothel, where she is trapped by the pimp who has also taken a fancy to her. Alex plans to rob a bank in his grandfather’s small town, where a young policeman’s happy marriage has its problems. Alex and Tamara make their risky escape, but Alex is clearly out of depth and his plans go horribly wrong and we live with the painful consequences and ethical compromises that have to be made. The film stays in the memory because of its simple tragic effect entirely without embellishment.
May 10th 2010 Juliet Mitchell gives a daylong seminar in Dublin on “sibling trauma”, what she believes is the neglected “horizontal” relationship between siblings. The psychoanalytic preference, she alleges, has always been for the vertical, that is, the Oedipal dynamics to do with the supposedly fateful effects of the parents on child development. Mitchell exposes what everyone, not just analysts, understands to be true when they give it some thought, namely, that there is a secret often violent, or latently violent, relationship between siblings that goes unrecognised because of our sentimental attachment to you-have-a-lovely-new-perfect-little-baby-brother/sister syndrome. Instead, the new arrival should be eliminated because his arrival means my displacement, or what Mitchell terms, “dethronement”. Mitchell emphasises, ‘the accompanying feelings of pain and rage at the loss of that crown can be quite intense and, as most parents can testify, the corresponding behaviour can be equally dramatic. It usually emerges either as aggressive acts – nipping, pinching, biting, trying to prise the new baby out of its mother’s arms – or regressive responses, such as bedwetting, thumb-sucking and clinging’. The displaced child’s conflict is that: ‘the ecstasy of loving one who is like oneself is experienced at the same time as the trauma of being annihilated by one who stands in one’s place’. What’s more, she argues, the trauma never completely goes away as it “transfers” itself onto other relationships, with our peers later taking the place of our siblings. That old jealousy may rear its head in sexual relationships, for example, with the woman who is always expecting her husband to have affairs. ‘Essentially, you’re cast adrift’, she says, ‘someone else is “the baby” now, and you’re not where or who you thought you were. Violence is never far away, love and hate turn on a pinhead: the hug for the new baby can easily turn to a throttle’. She lays stress on the term “trauma”, as the psyche of the infantile ego becomes overwhelmed from without and within, which can fail to be adequately “processed” during the course of development. Consider Silvia Plaith: ‘A baby. I hated babies. I who for two-and-a-half years had been the centre of a tender universe felt the axis wrench and the polar chill immobilise my bones. I would be a bystander’. Useful as Mitchell’s emphasis is and everyone has an interesting story to tell, in practice it is impossible and even misleading to separate the vertical and the horizontal relationships. The fight between siblings is about the sharing of the “tender universe”. The birth of a sibling leaves the existing child (traumatically) bereft of the love that it once enjoyed: firstly, there were two; now there are three. The fight now involves the fight over the desire of the (m)other – we both now want the same thing that we have lost and we are prepared to kill for it. The dethronement is the dethronement from love – not just self-love but the love and desire of the other who calls us into being. The source of this love is parental and so the vertical is necessarily brought into play and one cannot think about siblings without thinking about parents at the same time. What is primary is the provision of love and the vicissitudes of the “polar chill” that blows when the former fails.
May 9th 2010 Girard is unnecessarily critical of psychoanalysis when much of his theorising amplifies both what Freud emphasised about the ubiquity of the death drive and Lacan’s Hegelian-Kojévian theory of desire. Violence is a social phenomenon, not biologically rooted. It is the fight for what the other possesses, because he posseses it, that creates the potential for catastrophic escalation, like, as Girard says, an infection or a pollution, or the spilling of blood everywhere. Girard sounds Lacanian: ‘The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess. The subject thus looks to that other person to inform him for what he should desire in order to acquire that being’.(Violence and the Sacred, p155) Evil and the violent measures to combat evil become essentially the same, sowing chaos and destruction. This is the so-called “bad” violence to be countered by the “good” violence of a sacrifice, that will end the chain reactions of violent reprisals. As if taking his cue from Matte Blanco, Girard demonstrates again and again how violence becomes symmetrical, reciprocal, eliminating difference, as the combatants become mirror images of each other, “monstrous doubles”, with their tit-for-tat killings, spreading throughout the community. For instance, Oedipus, Creon, Laius, Tiresias, taking their cue from the oracle, seek each other’s downfall. Each becomes similarly violent. Yet Oedipus is selected as the sacrificial victim, because he alone is guilty of patricide and incest. He is therefore the monstrous exception. Oedipus becomes the repository of all the community’s ills. He is the quintessential scapegoat. Where differences are lacking or blurred mimetic violence threatens. Therefore, twins are regarded as impure, a warrior steeped in blood, an incestuous couple, menstruating women, and so on. Sexuality and violence are linked because each tends to eliminate difference. This recalls Laplanche’s “sexual death drive” theory. As Girard says, 'naked or pure sexuality is directly connected to violence. It is the final veil shielding violence from sight’.(p122) Violence once started creates an orgy of self-destruction. All difference is eliminated: between god and non-god; between man and woman; parent and child; biological and natural – ‘a hallucinatory state that is not a synthesis of elements, but a formless and grotesque mixture of things that are normally separate’.(p169) Girard’s formula: ‘at the point where two or three, or hundreds of symmetrical and inverted accusations meet, one [sacrificial victim] alone makes itself heard and the others fall silent. The old pattern of each against the other gives way to the unified antagonism of all against one...united in its hatred for one alone of its number...the surrogate victim’. (p82-84) Girard refers to this mechanism as “violent unanimity”. And therefore, the process of finding a surrogate victim constitutes a major means by which the many dispel from consciousness the truth about their violent nature. ‘For the anathema to deploy its full force it must slip from sight and from conscious memory’. (p89) The victim is an ambiguous figure. Oedipus at Colonus, for instance, appears as a redeemer, once he has been scapegoated and exiled when he was Oedipus Rex. Pharmakon, the sacrificial victim, is both poison and the antidote, both sickness and cure. For Gerard, ‘the modus operandi of violence - sometimes reciprocal and pernicious sometimes unanimous and beneficial - is then taken as a model for the entire universe’.(p101) In other words, good and evil are simply two aspects of the same reality and the purpose of the sacrificial rite is to consolidate this difference for the sake of the social fabric, after the terrible violence of all against all. Only the religious delusion as such, stands between the community and its violent dissolution. As Girard says, ‘religion protects man as long as its ultimate foundations are not revealed...to remove men’s ignorance is only to risk exposing them to an even greater peril’.(p144) Hinting at the independence of the drive, Girard says, ‘Violence is the divine force that everyone tries to use for his own purposes and that ends up by using everyone for its own’.(p153). He quotes Heraclitus: violence is the father and king of all. Thus the “monster” becomes an alien to himself. He seems possessed by the other (death drive), some presence seems to be acting from him, bellowing like Dionysius the bull. The use of masks mixes man and beast, erasing difference. Masks stand at the frontier between the human and divine and the masks disappear when the monsters once again assume the human form’. (p178). The sacrificial victim is designated firstly as the cause of all the violence and then revered as sacred - the bringer of peace and prosperity. Girard will later call this paradox, the “double transference”. Such a being becomes a special person, a sacred person – elevated to the level of a god. Only the Bible and Christianity, this is Girard's key claim, unveils the victim mechanism, exposing the scapegoating myth and siding with the victim. Take, for instance, the story of Cain and Abel. Because Cain murders his brother, God makes him a wanderer on the earth. God puts a mark on him to protect him, no less, from the suffering that he inflicted on Abel. Cain builds the first city and this is the beginning of civilisation.
May 6th 2010 Life during Wartime, Todd Solondz revisits his masterpiece, Happiness (1998) but with the characters played by different actors. The three Jordan sisters are still around, part of a dysfunctional and narcissistic East Coast Jewish family. Shirley Henderson is the shy, diminutive, alternative Joy, while Ally Sheedy is writer Helen, now at the peak of her success and dating a certain off-screen ‘Keanu’. Trish (Allison Janney) has taken the children and moved to Florida; there she's met a new man Harvey (Michael Lerner), whom she falls for because he's “so normal”. Trish's younger son Billy (Dylan Riley Snyder) is trying to understand the world in time for his bar mitzvah. He asks his mother, ‘What exactly does a man do to a boy when he’s raping him’? Trish’s estranged husband Bill (Ciaran Hinds) has been released from prison and is a disturbing brooding presence through the whole narrative. In the opening scene Joy and her husband Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams) attempt to patch up their troubled relationship over a restaurant meal. He urgently insists he's overcome drugs, etc. Andy, a former lover, who committed suicide because of Joy, is played by Paul (Pee Wee Herman) Reubens, who, in reality in 1991, was arrested for indecent exposure. She receives visitations from his ghost as he tries to get her to reconsider her opinion of him. As Bill tries to track down his former family, he briefly encounters Charlotte Rampling, a predatory old woman, who dismisses her own children as ‘just a pack of wolves. Because I am a monster’. Bill eventually finds his older son Billy (Chris Marquette), now at university. This mirrors the harrowing scene in Happiness where Billy confronts his father after he discovers that he’s been sexually abusing his sleepover friends, but now the issue has moved on from just ‘trying to understand’ to the question of forgiving. Bill tells Billy in a rare moment of truth, how tender he felt just holding him as a baby. To forgive and forget is the ethical dilemma posed in this film. Is it possible to forgive and forget – paedophiles, terrorists, bombers, etc. – or maybe just forget, without forgiving? Or maybe, it is neither being able to forgive or forget. This is now post 9/11 and the family identify with Israel. America is at war.
May 4th A solder of the Black Watch regiment recounts (Radio Scotland) a fragment of his experience in Afghanistan. He is boarding a Chinook helicopter, crouching low to avoid the rotor blades, then flying through sporadic small arms and RPG fire. ‘Immediately, a strange sensation of smell, a beautiful strange smell, the opposite of sheep dung, not the normal smell of Afghanistan; no, it was the scent of lavender, growing in the gullies in the horseshoe of a mountain, its scent had been blown in from the hot air of the jets and downdraft of the rotors, and here we were about to take firing position amongst her’.
May 2nd 2010 The Ghost Writer by Robert Harris, directed by Roman Polanski. Tony Blair is satirized as Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) the retired British PM who hires a ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) to rewrite his memoirs, after the first ghost writer has been found drowned near Lang’s heavily fortified Cape Cod retreat. The new writer becomes caught up in unravelling the cause of death of his predecessor which in turn is tied up with Lang’s summons to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. McGregor is trapped on the island, finding himself distracted by the PM’s wife (Olivia Williams), who is Cherie. The film rides on the easy surge of anti-Blair, anti-US sentiment following the Iraq War. This is now accepted without question.
April 29th 2010 “Bigoted” has become the preferred term to be banded around quite freely by the elite or administrative class when characterising even quite ordinary people, critical of the administration’s progressive assumptions. Like, for instance, long-term labour supporter, Gillian Duffy, in Rochdale yesterday, to whom Brown was sweet and pleasant in person on camera, only to lapse into his real feelings in what he thought was a private conversation later in his car. When told of his “gaffe”, his first reaction was to blame his staff for providing such a woman and then to blame the (Right-wing) media for exposing him and endlessly replaying his slip. Members of the same administrative class have today come out tentatively supporting Brown pointing out that he needn’t have apologised – don’t we all make mistakes and maybe the woman was not such a nice woman after all for expressing objectionable (racist) views that decent people like us surely do not share? How sad, says Pat Kenny, some Labour supporters may now be turning to the BNP in this election. So once again the latent rage of the (Old Labour) white working class (amply illustrated by a Newsnight report from wider Rochdale) is just dismissed as pathological.
April 28th 2010 Apropos Girard, Patrick Kavanagh’s little poem comes to mind: ‘Who killed James Joyce? / I, said the commentator, / I killed James Joyce / For my graduation. // What weapon was used / To slay mighty Ulysses? / The weapon that was used / Was a Harvard thesis. In other words, the university discourse is the violent power that sacrifices the original work and must continue to do so for the maintenance of the integrity of the discourse. In the Lacanian algebra (Seminar 17) formulating the university discourse, what is in the place of “production” is the “barred subject”, namely, in this instance, the sacrificed Joycean text, which becomes barred, i.e. sacrificed.
April 26th 2010 Violence and the Sacred. René Girard (1988). Trans. Patrick Gregory. London, Continuum. 2005. In this key text, Girard underlines the ubiquity of violence in primitive societies. This so-called ‘mimetic violence’ will be controlled by sacred rituals involving the killing of a scapegoat, a relatively unimportant third party who can “safely” be sacrificed to defuse the crisis tearing the social fabric. The scapegoat must be foreign, an enemy or “other” in some way, sufficiently different so that his death does not lead to more killings within the society. The sacrifice is a sacred duty, the sacredness of which acts a cover for the violence of the act, the logic of which must never be disclosed to the participants. The list of potential sacrificial victims is varied: prisoners of war, slaves, adolescents, children, handicapped, from Pharmakós to King. Although the need for the scapegoat mechanism ceased with the invention of the Law, something of it remains as the basis of every power structure even today. Wherever there is power there are unseen disposable sacrificial victims that the adherents to the power structure largely disavow. As Girard says, ‘the judicial system and the institution of sacrifice share the same function, but the judicial system has been infinitely more effective. However it can only exist in conjunction with a firmly established political power’. (p23) This power exerts an extra-judicial function in the form of an obscene superego supplement.
April 24th 2010 The British Foreign Office has had to rush to apologise after a leaked document suggested the Pope's visit to Britain should be marked by the launch of, Benedict brand condoms. The junior civil servant responsible was said to have been transferred to "other duties". The document also suggested the Pope should be invited to open an abortion clinic and bless a gay marriage during his September's visit. Foreign Secretary, David Miliband was said to be "appalled" and other officials have been doing lots of hand-wringing. This is a classic lapsus by the Protestant-Anglican-Atheist-Secularist orientation, that for once stands up to, or at least ridicules the might of an authoritarian system – albeit only by a slip from the unconscious that is immediately denied.
April 21st 2010 Considering the psychoanalytic clinic we should be mindful of two incompatible but necessary approaches. Firstly, the well known epigenetic, developmental view which provides meaningful connections between present and past. Here the subject’s history is pieced together, the unconscious is “translated” (remember repression is a failure of translation), via dreams, jokes, parapraxies, and so on. This approach is forensically objective and hierarchical and it still informs the rational basis for “believing” that psychoanalysis is a valid and truthful activity. It is ethically justified, evermore so in these postmodern times where subjective experience and the enigma of one’s history is progressively discounted by “scientific” theories of personality, and not least of course by the subject himself, who often denies the psychical validity of his very own history, demanding relief from drugs, CBT or a “subject-supposed-to-know” (the analyst as expert). It is this approach, however, that leads to generalisations and categorisations and ultimately an objectification of the subject. The second approach, intimated to a degree by Lacan, asserts the ineffability of the subject. The subject is a unique instance, inexchangeable, ungeneralisable, without translation. Here one should proceed via seduction (Baudrillard), whereby free association leads not to latent contents and hidden meanings, but to more seduction and more freedom. The analyst will be lead astray by the unique events and thoughts described without any attempt at establishing connections, without any fantasy of an unconscious, deliberately eschewing meanings and interpretations. Each event, each phrase uttered, each experience told, is a singularity, immanent to itself alone, a stark real without any precedent or sequel. These are effects without causes, pure appearances, emerging and returning to oblivion. Each is perfection itself alone, without recourse to exchangeability or comparison. One is engaged with an individual destiny, not any general destination such as happiness or health, but something much more interesting. What should be obvious is that such a radical phenomenology has nothing to do with narcissism, where one takes oneself as ultimately meaningful and unique in a false comparative way, checking in the mirror all the time. Instead there is a secret order of being, a singular route, a unique narrative, outside the order of meaning and reason (however much the subject, addicted to meanings, imposes a rationale retrospectively). Memories are, childhood was, old age is; each itself alone; each is exceptional and mysterious and should remain so, being prevented from being de-intensified by entering the comfort-zone world of meaning. This is a critical-psychoanalytic mode even by Lacanian standards, which for all its enigmas and aporias, still aims at “speaking truth” and a divided subject. The shock here is that there is no truth and no subject; there is nothing beyond the event. In the inexorably operational world of science and economic exchange there is no subject; this includes the psychiatric and CBT clinic. In the broadly psychoanalytic world there is the fading or divided subject of passion and desire. In the phenomenological world, the subject has paradoxically both disappeared and fleetingly appears in a much intensified form without being grasped as such because it has no equivalent – no mirror, no double, no representation - anywhere. In practice, this second (Zen-like) orientation, what Baudrillard suggest we “find” when we come up against the “Impossible-Exchange-Barrier”, is immediately dominated by a return to reflexive consciousness and a quantum of narcissism. We still understand the subject as unique and beyond psychoanalytic reductionism, more than an unconscious, but now returned as part of a narrative structure to be libidinised, held to and valued, especially given that its illusory substance will slip through the fingers like water.
April 19th 2010 It looks as if Richard Dawkins has become his own God delusion or indeed his very own ‘greatest show on earth’, when you read this violent tract against the Church, published in The Washington Post, no less. Responding to his own question as to whether or not the Pope should resign over the child sex abuse scandal, he refers to the Pope as, ‘a leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds...a man whose preaching of scientific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa; a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal...he is perfectly positioned to accelerate the downfall of the evil, corrupt organization whose character he fits like a glove, and of which he is the absolute and historically appropriate monarch.... He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice - the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution - while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears’. Dawkins’ conversion must be complete; he is now working for the Church.
April 15th 2010 Referring to the marble statue of Moses, by Michelangelo in the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, Freud says, ‘no piece of statuary has ever made a stronger impression on me than this. How often have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the deserted church stands’. Freud ponders upon the uncomfortable thought that he himself fears, ‘the angry storm of the hero’s glance’, and that he even feels as if, ‘I myself belonged to the mob upon which his eye is turned – the mob which can hold fast to no conviction, which has neither faith nor patience and which rejoices when it has regained its illusory idols’.(SE 13:213) As Freud says, ‘Michelangelo has chosen this last moment of hesitation, of calm before the storm, for his representation. In the next instant Moses will spring to his feet – his left foot is already raised from the ground – dash the Tables [with the Decalogue] to the earth and let loose his rage upon his faithless people’.(p216) What impresses Freud here is Moses’ moment of self control. Instead of letting go his rage upon the mob he restrains himself. Therefore what Michelangelo has created, ‘is not an historical figure, but a character-type, embodying the inexhaustible inner force which tames the recalcitrant world’ (p221). This is what Freud refers to as, ‘the highest mental achievement that is possible in a man, that of struggling successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he has devoted himself’. (p233). This “struggle” for sublimation rather than brute (fundamentalist) force and violence is the main theme that Edmundson illustrates in his recent book, reviewed here. For Freud, the secular Jew, Moses is the “tremendous father imago” and represents for Freud his ego ideal. However, Freud has at least one moment of doubt and conflict: he is ‘passionate for the sake of his cause’, on the one hand, but on the other, the cause itself might liberate the “faithless mob” who turn out to have no conviction and no patience. Maybe Freud himself (he fears) is no more than a faithless Pagan.
April 13th 2010 The exemplary moral inversion: Ireland’s taxpayers may pay €25bn to rescue Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society, according to the Economic and Social Research Institute (ERSI). The government will pump €22bn, equivalent to 65 percent of last year’s tax revenue, into Anglo Irish, once the country’s third-biggest lender, the Dublin-based institute said in a report yesterday. Irish Nationwide needs €2.6bn. This is at a time when unemployment is forecast to rise to 14%, viable businesses cannot get necessary finance and are forced to close and when public services are being cut back. Apparently, the Japanese taxpayer is still paying back the debt incurred in the late 1980s with their property bubble. Increasingly people are saying that Anglo and Irish Nationwide should be let go bust. There is an economic logic to this according to some expects, but more importantly the moral inversion whereby the greediest people get bailed out and rewarded would be to some important degree rectified.
April 9th 2010 In psychoanalysis, triads abound: Id, Ego, Superego (Freud); neurosis, psychosis, perversion (clinically); Real, Symbolic, Imaginary (Lacan). Just “outside” psychoanalysis: Illusion, Real, Simulation (Baudrillard). Illusion represents the appearance of the world (pre-modern) before man attempts to real-ise the world with meaning, production and objectivity (modernity). The increasing transparency and analysis of the world, its progressive disenchantment and dis-illusionment, leads to the world of simulations, with the progressive loss of the real and use-value, which are replaced by the virtual and exchange-value. As the world becomes increasingly realised it, the real itself progressively disappears, becoming increasingly synthesised into a virtual world of pure simulation and special effects, with the ironic return of illusionment and pure appearance. The real objective universe is a fragile entity, linked to subjectivity, forever in danger from the principle of “reversibility”, which could flip the real into radical meaninglessness again. The motor for reversibility is variously termed symbolic exchange, seduction, emergence, all of which dissolve identity and tend to return the world to illusion, via ‘an irreducible antagonistic power’, an evil that transpires within the real. So even as science advances towards the total realisation of the world and its universal operationality, a world totally disenchanted by the operation and triumph of technology and the digital, an entropic process intervenes, which has been present all along – a death drive outside the operations of Eros. This is not a dialectical process of flux and reconciliation which produces meaning, but a dual process of antagonism, not unlike the parallax described by Žižek, where the Real and Illusion can change places without ever being resolved or integrated in any fashion.
April 6th 2010 The logic of being non-judgemental translates in Ireland into, as Kevin Myers puts it, ‘Not being regarded as a gobshite, and letting an easy-come, easy-go philosophy prevail - these were the marks of a true gentleman, whether as a police officer or as a bank inspector’. Myers pinpoints the essential moral problem of recent decades: ‘The first duty of a state is to impose its order on its citizens. This is a primary obligation this [Irish] State declined to do from 1970 to the final IRA ceasefire in 1996. Throughout this period, the IRA army council members in the Republic usually slept in their own beds. If a state conspicuously failed to establish itself as the sole source of authorised violence within its boundaries, then was it surprising that it failed to impose its authority in other less visible areas’? The State was always a little equivocal about the “physical force tradition” as illustrated by the famous photo from 1972, showing a garda laughing and joking with armed IRA men in a farmhouse near the Border. This moral equivocation has taken more than three decades to pacify with the loss of over 3,000 lives. For much of that time there was the Law and the Outlaw vying for control, each with its own articulated ethical claim and justification. The Law won out with its democratically authorised violence and the Outlaw has spread its toxins into criminality and anarchy within our cities.
April 4th 2010 ‘If Gerry Adams were a bishop Patsy McGarry and Mary Raftery would be apoplectic’, writes a blogger in response to Fintan O’Toole’s recent article in the Irish Times critical of Adams’ denial of his membership of the IRA. In it he states that, ‘so long as Gerry Adams remains as the leader of a major Irish political party, no one can demand accountability for anything’, because, he continues, ‘Adams is exempt from the standards that apply to everyone else in public life in Ireland’. Adams also happens to be head of a one-time fascist organisation with a capacity to intimidate and threaten on a local as well as a national level. The fact that Adams became a major player in the Peace (pacification) Process, acts as a kind of (im)moral blackmail shielding him from having to admit responsibility for, for instance, the abduction and death of Jean McConville and the Bloody Friday bombings in Belfast, in which nine people died. And if Adams can get away with it, so can other lesser figures in Public life here. However, what is important is just how widespread is the non-judgemental logic that informs Irish life in general. Think most recently of the O’Donoghue expenses scandal, Pádraig Flynn and his daughter Beverley, further back Haughey and Blaney and the ‘70s Arms Trial, and so on. While this forgiving logic remains in place, multiple injustices pile up and the failure of accountability becomes massive. However, Adams cannot be used as an excuse to disavow the larger malaise. He is just the clearest example of a more generalised evasion. The whole point is that the so-called, ‘standards that apply to everyone else in public life’, have not applied or worked in the way they should in recent times, creating the two major current crises: within the Church and the Financial System.
April 2nd 2010 The universal drive for transparency and the demand for truth is symbolised by the Oedipal myth. In addition to the psychoanalytic preoccupation with the incest taboo, Oedipus represents the secular relentless striving for truth of origins. And what transpires in this endless uncovering is his own criminal origin. What he stumbles upon is his own crime. This formula applies at the individual, group or institutional level. Beyond the veil of illusion lies the negativity secreted by it, maintained by repression. It is this investigative or interrogative process with which psychoanalytic clinic is involved, except that the analyst positions herself as “neutral” when it comes to the “crime”. This so-called non-judgemental approach while necessary to enable speaking and revelation to occur, is nevertheless something of a deceit and disavowal, part of the analyst’s veil of neutrality. Recognition of the crime, of criminal intent, in Kleinian terms, is the “depressive position”.
March 29th 2010 One must think in addition to the Catholic Church’s role in the cover-up of child abuse, that there is the parallel even overlapping problem of the privacy of the confessional, where a crime can be confessed to, but the priest must not report this to the civil authorities. Three years ago, journalist Cathal O'Shannon reported on the role of the Catholic Church in finding safe houses and safe passage to Ireland of Nazi war criminals. He commented, ‘the [Catholic] Irish State seemed to give a greater welcome to former Nazis and their collaborators than they did to returning war veterans’. One commentator suggested that the role of the Catholic Church during the Nazi period was analogous to a cat walking across a table full of crockery without knocking anything over. As Kevin Myers has asserted recently, ‘the Catholic Church operated in a democracy. Its abuses were done with the connivance of generations of politicians, garda officers and judges and, ultimately, the Irish people’. Thus much of the anger vented recently in the media specifically towards the Church (not towards State institutions that were equally complicit in sex abuse cover-up), is presumably self-hate and self-loathing, generated by the overwhelming authoritarianism of the Irish Church, turned outwards at last. The victims have spoken and now finally, with safety in numbers, everyone can join in behind them.
March 25th 2010 This was the oath of secrecy the child victims of paedophile priest Brendan Smyth were told to sign during their meetings with Cardinal Sean Brady 35 years ago. ‘I will never directly or indirectly, by means of a nod, or of a word, by writing, or in any other way, and under whatever type of pretext, even for the most urgent and most serious cause (even) for the purpose of a greater good, commit anything against this fidelity to the secret, unless a...dispensation has been expressly given to me by the Supreme Pontiff’. Smyth's victims were thus three-times wronged: 1) by the abuse itself by the priest; 2) by having to go though the intimate details of the abuse verbally to another person; 3) by knowing that a terrible wrong has been done, but being sworn to total secrecy by the authority of the Supreme Pontiff no less - God's representative on earth. The last wrong is probably the worst, because the whole chilling objectifying authority of this supreme institution weighs upon, in this case, children. The same children will have been told that the loving mother Church will protect them from Evil. What better example could you find to illustrate the psychoanalytic thesis that institutions of power are founded in violence, that the Law originates in violence, always of course, ‘for the purpose of a greater good’ which “legitimates” repression. Repression is always, ‘for the purpose of the greater good’. The disappointment with the Church is based partly on the wishful fantasy that it should be the one institution that is not duplicitous; it should be the exception.
March 23rd 2010 ‘If you adopt the opposite of all the laws of the Decalogue, you will end up with the coherent exposition of something which in the last instance may be articulated as follows: “Let us take as the universal maxim of our conduct the right to enjoy any other person whatsoever as the instrument of our pleasure”…everyone is invited to pursue to the limit the demands of his lust, and to realise them’. (Lacan’s Ethics Seminar VII). This universal maxim of secularism, the iconic Lacanian statement of our ultimate right to enjoyment without limit, is now manifest across many institutions that are characterised by unlimited greed and excess. But does it not also summarise the paedophile orientation perfectly? It is the horrific reality of this squalid anti-ethics, that the Church now has to set about facing.
March 21st 2010 Surely the huge success of the social networking sites proves the point about negative transcendence: that behind all the exchanges there resides precisely nothing. It can only be nothing that circulates the globe at such speeds in and such vast quantities, weightless material with no value to slow it down! Secular and nihilist efforts are bearing fruit as negative equity expands on all fronts with a global reach. Think of political slogans: change you can trust; a future fair for all; working for a better X, and so on. These slogans are so empty they risk exposing the nothing that should remain hidden in the “beyond”, risking a massive political crisis to add to the financial one where the recent speculative nothing came close to creating a banking meltdown. Currently, we live in constant fear of the nothing being revealed via some literal catastrophe that would act like the black hole that some feared would be created in the Large Hadron Collider (September 2008). In the meantime, we can proceed as no one can see the emperor has no clothes.
March 19th 2010 We are definitely in a phase of negative transcendence. The two young victims of the most notorious paedophile priest Brandan Smyth were interviewed in 1975 and made to detail in precise terms the abuse they suffered at the hands of the antichrist, most famous for his jeering laugh from the police van as he is carried off. After this ordeal, the children were sworn to secrecy by the then priest and teacher Father Sean Brady, who felt he could do nothing more to help his young victims, beyond pass his findings up the chain of command within the Church. The Church’s reputation was thus protected and Smyth went on to abuse children over a further two decades. In the earlier phase of positive transcendence, when we could differentiate right from wrong, we believed, ‘whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea’.(Matthew 18:6).
March 17th 2010 A Single Man, Tom Ford's very stylish adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel. The film follows a single day in the life of a grieving man, George Falconer, played by Colin Firth, an Englishman in Los Angeles, a college professor teaching English literature. It is 1962 and the Cuban missile crisis has left America in a state of nervous anticipation, but Falconer’s partner of 16 years, Jim (Matthew Goode), has just died in a car accident and George will not be asked to the funeral. Charley (Julianne Moore) is perhaps George’s only close friend and confidante. There are flashbacks which heighten the sense of isolation and loss and add to Firth’s wonderful portrayal of quiet inner heroism, including moments of irony and spontaneity, as well as self-deprecation.
March 15th 2010 Is it not quite shocking and amazing to witness how the world turns against the small Jewish state, occupying a tiny fraction of Arab land, and how large numbers of ordinary quite decent people would be quite content to see Israel "wiped off the map" as has been publicly urged by Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah and others. Apart from the generalised re-emergence of anti-semitism in the West, clearly Israel is being used as a scapegoat to deflect Arab hostility from the West in general. What must it mean to individual Jews to have so many people indifferent to your extermination, for the second time within a century? 'You tell people that a new great era will begin if you abolish the ruling class or the bourgeoise, if you rationalise the means of production, if you use euthanasia on the incurables. To minds so prepared you then propose that the Jews be destroyed. And they make a substantial start. They kill more than half the European Jews...There's no telling which corner it will come from next'. (Saul Bellow).
March 11th 2010 Dylan Evans, author of An Introductory Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, talks to a small invited audience in Dublin last evening, about his “journey” through Lacanian analysis in Argentina, his subsequent work in London as an analyst, and his turn against Lacan to Anglo-American philosophy and evidence based science. It seems quite amazing that Evans has written a dictionary of Lacanian terms and emerges now more or less completely unmarked and unscathed by his analytic initiation. He is not so much a lapsed-Lacanian (forever marked by Lacanianism) as a non-Lacanian. He speaks about Lacan now as someone who has no real sympathy with this radical philosophy, as one who has never been moved by it in any real way. He can criticise Lacan for his obscurity, showmanship, total vagueness, whereby many concepts can have multiply meanings allowing adherents to muse forever. He can criticise Lacanians for never submitting their work to any evidence base. All this and more is true and valid. But, Lacan leaves no residue for Evans. Nothing. There is something chilling about this closure, the return to the surface as if nothing has been disturbed.
March 9th 2010 Baudrillard was reporting from Australia, where he experienced what he called a 'radical anthropological shock'. He realised that the aborigines have 'a kind of visceral, profound rejection of what we represent...there is something irremediable, irreducible in this'. We can offer them every help, understanding, support, but to no avail. He goes on to suggest that at the same time as the universal was invented, the other was discovered. The gulf between the other that refuses the universal and those within the West is growing inexorably. 'I have the impression that the gulf is hardening and deepening between a culture of the universal and those singularities [e.g. Taliban, Islamists, Jihadists, Al Qaeda, etc.] that remain. These people cannot allow themselves offensive passions; they don't have the means for them. But contempt is still available to them'. (ibid, p143). Beyond, 'we-only-have-our-bodies', the means to strike out effectively are becoming available to make mass radical vengeance a possibility. This is not a new version of the the old class hatreds which happened within the enlightenment tradition. Neither is it an anti-colonial struggle, where there were clear objectives to be achieved through force. These insurgents are not part of a grand historical process, a dialectic, Fukuyama was right about the so-called End of History, but for the wrong reasons. They want to end history by blind objective force - 'We choose death, while you choose life'. Some may be won over to the enlightenment side in Afghanistan, for instance, but the singularity that refuses - the other - will persist.
March 6th 2010 'Against all modern superstitions of "liberation", it must be said that forms are not free, figures are not free. They are on the contrary bound: the only way to liberate them is to chain them together, in other words to find their links, the ties that create and bind them, that chain them gently together. Moreover, they connect and engender themselves...'. (Baudrillard, J. The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e) 2005, p127). Liberation leads to atomisation. The modernist "superstition" (we thought we were getting away from superstition once and for all), was that liberation was an undiluted good. Baudrillard cites Omar Khayyam: 'It is better for you to have enslaved one free man with kindness that to have freed a thousand slaves'. Liberation leads to evaporation and diffusion. The heroic days of liberation, the dissident days, are always in the beginning, during the phase of breaking free from bondage. With the bonds loosened, there is suddenly nothing! Hence, the need to find new victims in chains, new discriminations, to re-live the old days, the old battles, before everyone became freely the same - without links.
March 4th 2010 Alan Dershowitz: 'The current “Israel Apartheid Week” on universities around the world, by focusing only on the imperfections of the Middle East’s sole democracy, is carefully designed to cover up far more serious problems of real apartheid in Arab and Muslim nations. The question is why do so many students identify with regimes that denigrate women, gays, non-Muslims, dissenters, environmentalists and human rights advocates, while demonizing a democratic regime that grants equal rights to women (the chief justice and speaker of the Parliament of Israel are women), gays (there are openly gay generals in the Israeli Army), non-Jews (Muslims and Christians serve in high positions in Israel) and dissenters, (virtually all Israelis dissent about something). Israel has the best environmental record in the Middle East, it exports more life saving medical technology than any country in the region and it has sacrificed more for peace than any country in the Middle East. Yet on many college campuses democratic, egalitarian Israel is a pariah, while sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, terrorist Hamas is a champion. There is something very wrong with this picture'. Antisemitism is inexorably rising being the racism of choice of so-called anti-racists; the racism that decent people can safely avow. According to Anthony Julius, talking about his new book, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England. Oxford University Press, British Jews are wondering whether or not now is the time to leave. The desire to deligitimise Israel and destroy the Jewish state has to do with the unacknowledged total fear engendered by 9/11 and the thought that killing 3000 was, as Blair suggested at Chilcot, only the start. They wanted to kill 30,000 or 300,000. The cold logic is: if destroying Israel will appease them, lets do it.
March 1st 2010 A recent report for the British Home Office warns that the images we consume and the way we consume them are lending credence to the idea that women are there to be used and that men are there to use them, encouraging boys to become fixated on being macho and dominant, while girls in turn presented themselves as sexually available and permissive. One outcome had been the rise of sexual bullying in which girls felt compelled to post topless or naked pictures on social networks. The evidence gathered in the review suggests a clear link between consumption of sexualised images, tendency to view women as objects and the acceptance of aggressive attitudes and behaviour as the norm. So instead of a transgendered convergence and loss of stereotyping, all the work of liberation has created a counter-reaction. Who could have imagined that after half a century of second wave feminism that young women in such large numbers would willingly enslave themselves to the other with airbrushing, cosmetic surgery, depilation, ultra-conformism, and so on? The removal of the old constraints and rituals between the sexes was bound to lead to increasing violence of all kinds as sexuality becomes pure exchange value. And the shape of the violence is quite predictable: for women against themselves (anorexia, bulimia, etc); for men, violence against women, "scoring", "riding", etc.
February 26th 2010 It is clearly not sufficient to have a culture that is only implicitly nihilistic; a secular progressivist regime that only aspires to be nihilistic is not enough. At some point the nothingness must materialise itself in various ways. We expect nihilism to bear fruit. All this work should produce some results. Within the small psychoanalytic field, there is Lacan, who is exemplary. Within the wider social, we should expect the immanence of nihilism through numerous disappearances, perhaps multiple disappearances. However, the disappearance of the real occurs at precicely the same rate as our incapacity to register its disappearance, therefore, it will go unnoticed! Creeping indifference affects our judgement as well. One generalised product of nihilism is the creation of "shell institutions" (Giddens). These are institutions that retain their name, but which have been hollowed out from within; they have had any substantial reality taken from them. Similarly, images no longer reflect the solid real, but point to its absence (Baudrillard). Images now refer to themselves or other images. To paraphrase Lacan, there are many things - not just the big Other, the woman and the sexual relation - that do not exist.
February 24th 2010 Jalo. Elias Khoury (2002). Trans. Humphrey Davies. London, MacLehose Press. 2009. Daniel Habeel Abyad is under interrogation and torture. He is a young man of Assyrian Christian background, who is accused of a number of crimes, raping women and robbing their lovers in a pine forest above Beirut at the back of a house, the Villa Gardenia, where he is employed as an armed guard. But it is his alter ego, Jalo, who tries to engage with his interrogator and give him what he wants. He writes and re-writes the story of his life as he tries to situate himself in the aftermath of the brutal Lebanese civil war in which many young men like Yalo were caught up and where on the Green line in Beirut when the shooting started Jalo experienced real fear and shat himself. Jalo was brought up by his mother, Gaby, after his father was sent away by his grandfather, when Gaby was 7 months pregnant. She had been having an affair with the tailor she worked for who was 20 years older than her. For Yalo, his grandfather replaced his father and Gaby was called his sister. Under interrogation, 'He discovered that he did not know this man called Daniel, whom they nicknamed Jalo'.(p2). Shireen was in the interrogation room too. She had been with a grey haired man as Jalo in his long black coat had approached their car in the dark in the forest with his torch and his Kalashnikov. He'd tap on the window with the barrel of the rifle. The man had driven off in terror and Jalo had taken Shireen with him back to his hut. He developed an obsessive love for her, 'from his spine' ('the love that shatters one's back'), and from the smell of incense that arose from her wrists, in spite of her being engaged to be married. He was seduced by his employer's wife, Mme Randa, and the intense sex they had together, he termed it 'randarising'. 'Her love brought me back to life, but it opened a well in my heart that nothing could fill. When I stood in the garden and smelled the scent of the pines, I was in turmoil. Believe me, sir, I became part of nature and nature doesn't recognise the boundaries between things'.(p239). However, it made him feel very guilty because his employer had recued Jalo in Paris, after he had been dumped by his friend Tony who had fled with the barracks money they had both stolen back in Beirut. Jalo, alone in his cell, is told to write his story. 'He has to release ink onto the sheets of paper. He is like the squid. All he possesses to squirt and mislead the fishermen and escape death is the weapon of ink, but alas if the sea creature should fall into the fisherman's net, for then they will cook it in its ink. It occurred to Jalo that he would be cooked in the ink he was writing with, that the black ink that flowed across the sheets of paper would kill him, and that he was incapable of misleading the fishermen...'. (p98). The interrogator's torture increases. 'Yalo, the tall man who wore a black coat and descended on lovers in their cars, Yalo who laughed while he fought and killed, no longer exists...I've become another person'.(p236). But what does the Other want. While the Other seems to want or desire something from him, a minimum of meaning and narrative coherence still seems just possible. And Yalo clings to this forlorn hope as he writes and rewrites his life - a kind of positive transference towards the interrogator which amounts to a pleading for his life. He plumbs even the tragic complex origins of his grandfather before the inevitable end.
February 23rd 2010 Aside from the massive crowd of protesters that said in relation to Iraq, "we-went-to-war-on-a-lie", there is another largely silent crowd - the silent masses - that will complain that, "we-went-to-peace-on-a-lie". Consider, for instance, the re-heating of the left-overs of the Cold War with the reassertion of Russian military strength; consider the wholesale rejection of the Obama out-stretched hand gesture of the last year; consider the Religion of Peace (see below); consider the CIRA and RIRA; consider the Revolutionary Guards. No. The silent masses are shouting - PEACE, not in my name.
February 20th 2010 The general knee-jerk assumption has been that it was Mossad who used stolen British passport identities for the hit-squad which assassinated senior Hamas operative Mahmoud al Mabhouh. However, according to Middle-East analyst Tom Gross, 'Many governments wanted Mabhouh out of the way, not only Israel. Sources confirm to me that the missiles Mabhouh was procuring from the Iranians had the capability of hitting central Tel Aviv, and were Hamas to use such missiles later this year, the Israeli response might lead to a region-wide conflagration, which many Western and Arab governments want to avoid'. He continues, 'Sources tell me that this was a particularly significant trip by Mabhouh (to Dubai, the regional arms hub, from his home in Damascus), in which he was en route to procure weapons of particular significance. His present activity was viewed as a turning point in the type of weaponry being smuggled, and it was considered very important to intervene at an early stage. Some Arab media have reported that the operation against Mabhouh may have been carried out by a rival Palestinian group and the photographed individuals have nothing to do with it'. In the post-Real world almost any version of the hyper-real is possible. 1) It was indeed Mossad, in spite of the bungling "total visibility" of the attack. 2) It was a Palestinian group hoping to weaken Hamas and incriminate Israel at the same time. 3) It was Mossad, but disguising itself by looking unusually careless with its image trail. 4) It was Hamas hitting itself to incriminate Israel. 5) It was agents of other Arab State(s) hoping to hit the Iran-Hamas link, knowing that Mossad will be blamed.
February 17th 2010 Nicholas Krystof in the New York Times writes that the civil war in Congo has claimed almost seven million lives over the last dozen years. It has also created a whole new vocabulary to describe the other horrific abuses it has generated – such as ‘autocannibalism,’ which is when militiamen cut flesh from living victims and force the victims to eat it, or ‘re-rape,’ which applies to women and girls who are raped anew every time militiamen visit their town. Yet the world rarely hears about Congo, because groups such as Amnesty and HRW (Human Rights Watch) have left, or report only infrequently. Therefore, by implication, it is preferably Western nations, and in particular, Israel and the US that commit human rights violations. "The Religion of Peace" website lists all the atrocities committed in the name of the religion of peace on a daily basis, the vast majority of killings against fellow Muslims. But the sustained belief that only Western nations can really commit human rights violotaion bolsters the more comforting liberal illusion that Evil is implicitly rational.
February 13th 2010 'It's an act of prestidigitation by which you pull away the tablecloth leaving the objects on the table, because there is always a material presence of objects, from which, however, the meaning has been removed'. (from a discussion between Baudrillard and Noailles in Exiles from Dialogue, Polity 2007, p7). What should we derive from this old trick, of the sudden removal of the cloth? The cloth has something in common with the Lacanian point-de-capiton, and the question of psychosis. For the discussants, it involves their passion for the Real (attempting being exiles from dialogue) and the question of being present before meaning intervenes, 'to arrive even before the objects had entered the order of reference'. This is what Baudrillard hoped to do when taking a photograph, to catch the form before it has context. Alternatively, generalising to the whole culture, such sleight-of-hand, could represent the end product of the modernising process itself involving the catastrophic loss of all moral orientation.
February 9th 2010 What do you think about global warming? We'd love to hear your views and observations. Apparently, the IPCC relies for its conclusions about AGW not just on the bedrock of peer-reviewed scientific findings, but also, the urgency of the problem facing us demands that we include claims about global warming from newspaper reports and environmental NGOs, according to an interview with a spokeman for the IPCC on Newsnight (February 2nd). So the glaciers in the Himalayas will be gone in 25 years, the Amazon rainforests are being depleted, there are more severe storms - none of this based on accurate scienctific investigations, but rather the opinions of interested parties. But the urgency of the problem facing us. Remember? It justifies anything we might do by way of falsifying existing data, or making up new data. So tell us what you think. Remember what you think in important to us. We are waiting to hear from you. Make that call, especially if you are a friend of the earth.
February 6th 2010 The recent psychoanalytic film festival in Dublin showed Ai no corrida, In the Realm of the Senses, literally 'Bullfight (Spanish: Corrida) of Love', a 1976 film directed by Nagisa Oshima. It tells the true story of Sada Abe a prostitute in pre-war Japan who came to work as a maid in a hotel and who begins an affair with the owner which becomes more and more intense and obsessive, escalating to the point where the man becomes excited by being strangled during sex. He is eventually killed in this fashion. Abe then severs his penis so that the couple 'will be the two of us forever', which she writes in blood on his chest. The so-called, "unsimulated sex" caused a problem initially for the censors in many countries. "Polymorphously perverse", it has minimal narrative content and therefore the scene of seduction for the viewer is largely absent. One is left with the endless ecstasy of orgiastic mechanics, the pulsion of the drives and ultimately the death drive itself. In Baudrillard's terms, this is the ob-scene of "cool seduction", seduction by "the System" itself. One feels nothing for the protagonists as they are no more than instruments of pure pleasure. Ironically, this is an anti-sexual film, as what we call sexuality depends for it seductive effects on repression. In a situation of total disenchantment and unsimulation, with everything stripped bare, naked, there is an absence of any erotic effect, like bodies on a nudist beach. Enchantment, seduction, beauty depend on the veil and the minimal illusion it creates. Rip that away and all that is there is flesh, meat.
February 3rd 2010 The true question is not the much talked about opposition between science and religion, but the creeping religiosity of science itself. We have seen in the recent past the faith that one has to have in science, not so much as a process of investigation per se, but faith in the specific "findings" of science: you must believe, or risk being called a "denier". And the list of beliefs is getting longer. In the '60s and '70s it was the coming ice age; we were told it could come with alarming rapidity. In the '80s, salmonella and eggs; in the '90s, it was BSE/CJD, and maybe 100,000 deaths of young people from this deadly brain disease. Then came the millennium bug and the so-called link between the MMR vaccine and autism. In this century Bird flu, then Swine flu and most of all Global Warming by human activity (AGW). In each of these cases, there is no knowing whether or not the Real will spring up and avenge the impostors of theory and faith. The record has not been kind to the people of scientific faith and their preachings. And their response has been to become even more evangelical. The World generally is becoming more religious and science is getting in on the act. All this belongs in the context of the promiscuity of the post-modern, where opposites interact and diffuse. Religion over the centuries has ceded its authority to science and now science cedes its authority to a new pagan religion. Consider, for instance, the religious science of the Dark Greens and their eco-sophy, beyond mere anthropocentric environmentalism.
February 1st 2010 What should we make of the Andy Murray "scream", as he wins in the semi-final of the Australian Open and again when he loses to Federer in the final? At one point the camera lingers on this gesture of intensity for too long and the gesture becomes obscene in its persistence. We are seeing too far into Murray's interior. One commentator referred to Murray's 'blazing hunger' to win with his Munch-like scream and another refers to it a 'unlovable'. But you can see right into his mouth, his vast gaping orifice, his primordial yearning exposed to the world! He has moved beyond the symbolic excited "sporting" gesture of winning/losing, passed over the border towards the Real of obscenity. What shocks us in the nullity of the void itself as well as the in-human dimension of the modern competitive process, the machine-like quality demanded of the athlete, and those who drive them.
January 27th 2010 Žižek says of himself and his incredible output of writing and speaking that maybe he performs so much because behind it he is nothing. If he doesn't speak and write, there is nothing there. He says, 'I am very much against this notion which is current today that, as people say, "I am a professional this or that, I do this or that, but behind it I am really a very nice guy, a warm human person, who has feelings and needs just like other people, I like good food and music, and so on, and just like you, I am also anxious, I eat too much, etc"'. Žižek states that this is part of our spiritual hedonistic ideology today, part of our deep belief that underneath it all, we are warm human beings beyond the false surface appearances of everyday life. He turns this around, suggesting that when the mask slips, when the cracks appear, there is nothing running underneath.
January 24th 2010 Baudrillard could have been speaking for psychoanalysts when he wrote, 'No one fundamentally believes in reality or in the evidence of his or her real life. That would be too sad'. Sadness belongs to the "depressive position", and it suggests that beyond all the hype and self promotion, there is loss and depression. People, as they say, don't want to know! They are saying in effect to Baudrillard, 'you are not going to discredit reality in the eyes of those who already have so much trouble living'. And he goes on to extend this contemporary critique of negativity by what he calls the 'good apostles', who tell him, 'you are not going to discredit abundance in the eyes of those who are dying of hunger. Or: you are not going to discredit class struggle for people who have not had their bourgeois revolution. Or: you are not going to discredit feminist and egalitarian protests for all the women who have never even heard of women's rights...If you don't like reality don't ruin it for everyone else'! ("Radical Thought", in The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e), 2005, p163, emphasis added). That is what psychoanalysts do, they ruin things for people, by reclaiming 'the rugged reality of things' (Rimbaud). The good apostles continue: You're not going to undermine the ego for those who have hardly formed one. Or: discredit the Power of Now, for the unempowered. Or: undermine the beauty of love for those who have never even been loved. If you're too sad to do positive living, keep it to yourself, don't ruin it for everyone else.
January 23rd 2010 Jesus was a feminist as this extract from the Gospel of St. Thomas testifies: 'Simon Peter said to them, "Make Mary leave us, for females are not worthy of life". Jesus said, "Look, I shall guide her to make her male. So that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven"'. (TLS. January 1st 2010, p12)
January 19th 2010 Why does Žižek call his short film, The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, rather than the consumer's guide, or some other name, for instance? Žižek's use of the term "pervert" may be entirely precise. Firstly, because within psychoanalysis it no longer has a pejorative sense. Secondly, the term refers to the subject who enjoys, who enjoys an enjoyment that goes all the way to excess or horror. In Lacan's little formula for perversion, the agent is situated at little "a", this strange attractor that is the cause, the originator, of desire. The divided subject is displaced to the position of the other. In other words, enjoyment takes preference over all else. This is the opposite to the discourse of the Master, where enjoyment is situated under the bar and is properly kept within the Law and what we term civil society. Žižek sees the film, on the other hand, as arousing our desire while simultaneously 'keeping it at a safe distance, domesticating it, rendering it palpable'! This so-called "safe distance" is neither safe nor distant, as the void of Real returns and threatens the coordinates of our constructed reality.
January 14th 2010 The conservative commentator Melanie Phillips writes: 'Sexual restraint and the monogamy which enshrined and protected it were once considered a hallmark of civilisation and progress. It was primitive societies for which sex was merely a carnal and entirely non-judgmental procedure devoid of any spiritual, moral or socially progressive dimension. That is a key reason why such societies were very often marked by the oppression of women, cruelty and savagery and remained backward or even died out altogether'. Here, Phillips is remarkably like Freud, when he suggests, in Civilisation and its Discontents, that character formation and sublimation are essential for civilisation. 'Sublimation of instinct [sex and aggression] is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological', and thirdly, 'most important of all, it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilisation is built upon the renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts. This "cultural frustration" dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings. As we already know, it is the cause of hostility against which all civilisations have to struggle'. (SE. 21:97). Freud acknowledges that civilisation imposes 'an intolerable burden' leading to neurosis, guilt and discontent generally, and he recognises that what he describes as, 'races at a low level of civilisation, and among the lower strata of civilised races, the sexuality of children seems to be given free rein. This probably provides a powerful protection against the subsequent development of neuroses in the individual. But does it not at the same time involve an extraordinary loss of the aptitude for cultural achievement'? (SE 20:217).
January 13th 2010 Much has been made of the "plasticity" of the brain, but for a long time now it seems as if the brain itself has become post-modern. The modernist notion of the self as central controlling agency in psychic functioning has been replaced by its post-modern counterpart, the self-emergence via autopoiesis. Here multiple competing "agents" and proto-agents struggle and communicate with each other for self-maintenance and self-evolution. An autopoietic unit is a system that makes itself, through a network of interactions that take place within its own well-defined boundaries. According to Maturana and Varela, 'The living organization is a circular organization which secures the production or maintenance of the components that specify it in such a manner that the product of their functioning is the very same organization that produces them'. This is in effect a retroactive self-completing and self-organising, coupled with the world. There is no "inner self" directing operations; rather, a "self" that arises after the fact, a latecomer who claims authorisation. The so-called paradigm shift is thus apparent: the modernist bureaucratic top-down control yields to the post-modern horizontal networking fluid cybernetic control, essentially self-authorised and intensely interactive. There is other, but there is no "Other of the other". There is no ultimate value-system to which one can appeal, as such a system will have to take its place along with every other idea in the vast total mix. It can no longer claim any "meta" status. However, it will be clear, this holistic analysis marginalises self-consciousness in any strong sense of the term, a strategy wholly suited to our late capitalist discourse, which thrives on chaos and complexity and our passive lostness within it. As Baudrillard says, no one tries to understand or analyse the post-modern, one just uses it. It also misses the "ontological crack" which is the Lacanian barred subject, the subject of conflict and antagonism. Through this crack comes death - death to this self-ing, self-centring, self-correcting smugness! Autopoiesis is Eros in action, gathering together the One that goes on living in spite of the deaths of individual entities. Language on the other hand introduces death, conflict, strife, which Lacan linked with the death drive. With self-consciousness, we introduce a pathological imbalance; we can think of tearing or destroying the world!
January 10th 2010 In terms of the three Lacanian registers, Brian Lenihan's dividedness relates to the Real in that his illness is quite beyond his control, while Gerry Adams's relates to the Symbolic and is an ethical issue, while for the Robinsons it is the Imaginary, or more a question of "optics" to use the current phrase. The Martin Turner cartoon in The Irish Times catches the hypocrisy of the leaders of Sinn Fein saying to Peter Robinson, 'We are worried that you might be bringing our coalition into disrepute', as Gerry Adams stands with his foot pushing back a door which is bursting open with a whole lot of skeletons about to tumble out. As Lacan says, the Master's truth is hidden from him; the 'discourse of synthesis' comes apart. In the place of "production" in the so-called "discourse of the Master", is the little "a" object, i.e. enjoyment. And we know that our political masters have been revealed not to lack in that production in any way.
January 8th 2010 If you follow the Lacanian algebra that 'the truth of the Master is that he is really a divided subject', three leading Masters in Ireland have been revealed as (tragically) divided subjects in recent weeks: Brian Lenihan, at the level of the body, has been diagnosed with cancer; Gerry Adams has revealed that his father sexually abused his children and that his brother Liam, in his 50s, has been accused by his daughter Aine Tyrell, 36, of sexually abusing her from the age of four; Peter Robinson has been undermined by his wife mental illness, her affair with a 19 year old and possible financial irregularities arising therefrom. In the background to these high profile Masters are all those Bishops who have has to defend themselves. However, the three Masters are treated very differently. Brian Lenihan has received much deserved sympathy and has grown in stature. Gerry Adams, who has kept quiet about his brother's abuse for over twenty years, has not been challenged over this cover-up like the Catholic Bishops. Peter Robinson, on the other hand, because he comes from the loathed Protestant class, may be chased from office. So it seems that some Masters are destined to be more castrated than others.
January 5th 2010 The card that arrived after Christmas was an Amnesty International USA one. On the front in large letters: Peace; Hope (with a ribbon tied around a globe); Love. Inside: 'Wishing you peace and happiness at this wonderful time of year'. A holistic message in line with the spiritual hedonism of the age. Here, in the West, we demand our freedom from Christianity. The story is told of a small boy, walking with his grandparent past a church in a small town in the former GDR, ‘What’s that strange building? What’s it for?’ he asked. There in the East, it took some time to destroy Christianity, against the wishes of the people.
January 3rd 2010 Here is Žižek on nothing, which, paradoxically, is close to everything. 'There is nothing, basically. There is nothing, quite literally. But how do things emerge? Here, I feel a spontaneous affinity with Quantum Physics, where the universe is a void, but a kind of positively charged void. Then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. It is not just nothing; things are out there, but something went terribly wrong. What we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, a cosmic catastrophe - things exist by mistake! And I am ready to go to the end and say that the only way to counter the mistake is to go to the end and we have a name for this, and it is called love. Love is this cosmic imbalance. This is why I was always disgusted with this notion of universal love - I love the world! I don't love the world. I am somewhere between, I hate the world or I am indifferent towards it. Reality is just itself; it is out there, it's stupid, I don't care about it. Love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not, I love you ALL. Instead love is, I pick out something, even if this something is just a small detail, a fragile individual person, for instance, I say I love you more than anything else. In this quite formal sense, love is evil. You see perfection in imperfection'. The small youtube clips from Žižek demonstrate his radical Christianity, his love of contradiction and antagonism, the love of nothing for its creative potential. This is his theological materialism.
