We need some songs of encouragement
Chomolungmous Shit Mountains Within
(from Three Word Phrase, by Ryan Pequin)
Following, as I often do, a link from Ned Resnikoff to a blog that’s new to me – “An und fuer sich” with the most excellent URL “itself.wordpress.com” – I ran into a post written from a professor’s perspective on the difficulties of bringing the likes of Lacan to undergraduates:
We have come to that segment of the humanities capstone course that treats of “theory” — that body of dense, allusive work that has dominated the intellectual culture of the academic humanities for the last several decades. This body of work is, famously, “difficult.” It is written in a style that is uncommon in the English-speaking world, and the fact that it is translated can often represent a special obstacle. It also has a tendency to refer to a lot of things that an undergraduate has not yet had a chance to read in any detail.
The blogger, Adam Kotsko, goes on to recollect his own experience of hoping or expecting, once upon a time, that, through diligent reading, eventually in the original languages, of source materials, much that seemed unintelligible in “theory” would at last become clear. He then discovered, inevitably, that looking for origins and absolute clarities typically entails a plunging into ever greater complexities and new inscrutabilities, in never-ending confrontation with the lack, famously (not quite-)observed by Derrida of any origin at the (non-)origin.
Hegel’s (non-)answer – not only Hegel’s, of course, but in Hegel clearly stated and one might say most lovingly embraced as the answering non-answer it is, then is some more – was to deny the existence (or the truth) of “truth” except as a system of truth, as its own system. Continue reading
Smooth Operators
Damn Sad Damn
Posted in Music, Saddam and Babaganoush
9 Comments
Note on Religious vs Ethno-National Identity (or, Beck = Atzmon)
Reflecting on the call by Palestinian Solidarity activists to reject Gilad Atzmon, Ned Resnikoff necessarily ends up asking “essential” questions about religion and nationality, Judaism and Zionism, and, in effect, about the nature of identity, as mode of “being,” itself:
“If the experiment of being French and Jewish is over, what does that say for the experiment of being American and Jewish? English and Jewish? Brazilian and Jewish? Are these all doomed to failure, or are they already pretty much over as well?”
The questions cannot be answered, if ever, until you have carefully defined the key terms, especially since the main question returns to “what does it mean to be Jewish?” which in turn reduces to “what does it mean to be?” and “what does it mean to mean?”
If you don’t know what you mean by “Jewish” or “American,” how can you know whether or not it is or ever was or might someday be possible to be both American and Jewish (or both Brazilian and Jewish, and so on)? Another layer of confusion is added if you consider that “being American” isn’t quite the same thing as “being English” either. Put differently, if I could “be” English in the same way that I could “be” American, then there wouldn’t “be” any “essential” difference between being English and being American: They would not be two different modes of “being” at all. They would be utterly, definitionally meaningless distinctions – like vestigial organs or random mutations.
Instead, people live and die for those differences, and attribute meaning to their lives and deaths according to them. The element of paradox and self-contradiction arises when you consider the underlying trans-nationalist aspirations of monotheism and its heir, the non-religious religion of Secular Modernism. It is, in a sense, impossible to be “fully” Jewish (or Muslim, or Christian, or for that matter Buddhist) and also to be fully English or Brazilian, because the “eternal” is for all peoples. The Jews according to messianic Judaism (possibly a redundancy) are the keepers of a transnational message and promise – but the same is true for ideological Americanism as well as Christianity and Islam especially. They may even be the same transnational message, with contemporary Christian Zionism being the bonsai version of something actually quite essential about the historical and philosophical commonalities and deeper coherence of messianic Judaism and its daughter faiths.
It is therefore quite natural for Resnikoff to turn to the question of Philo-Semitic Christianity/Christian Zionism, and appropriate for him to close with a link to a post on Christian-Zionist Mormon Glenn Beck. Atzmon and Beck actually have a lot in common: They break the surface of conventional discourse and stumble into the gaps between it and its subtext, releasing some of the energy whose suppression was the original purpose, by now at least half forgotten, of the conventions they violate.
Posted in History, Philosophy, Religion
Tagged Christian Zionism, Gilad Atzmon, Glenn Beck, Judaism, Ned Resnikoff, Zionism
7 Comments
Nine thoughts for discussion with a pacifist-universalist
1. Authentically thinking beyond what has been thought before and found inadequate would ential thinking that to-be-superseded-thinking through, not merely bypassing it on the almost always false assumption that one has leapt to something new or more essential. Such authentically-thought-thinking pre-supposes a willingness to follow the thought where it needs to go instead of pre-empting or short-circuiting it in favor of what you want to assert or see asserted, or presume you ought to want – for instance and perhaps most crucially that the will to peace and the will to the good are always and inherently the same thing.
2. “Visualizing world peace” would be a vain and possibly self-contradictory act if allowed to become a diversion from or substitute for acting on behalf of peace. As a conspicuous public act, presuming to speak on behalf of peace might harm the cause or at some point even become its greatest obstacle - first if the visualizers become an embarrassment to their cause, whether through the evident hypocrisy of the beneficiaries of a militarized state pretending to defy it merely through a few good works or words; second and especially where, perhaps driven by consciousness of their own inextricable complicity, perhaps by represssion of that awareness, they express, even quietly, an annihilating contempt for the unconvinced that is indistinguishable on its own terms from murderous hatred. Since every great war is fought in the name of peace, those who imagine themselves to be enemies of war often and easily become its abettors – just as those most ardently attracted to pacifism have often become nihilists or annihilists, leading to the suspicion that it is their own ardency, far more than peace, that transfixes them.
Posted in Philosophy, Religion
16 Comments
Unheard in Open Discussion (re Iranian nukes)
In a post whose main point was to praise Up With Chris Hayes, Freddie deBoer offers one criticism.
I didn’t hear, and haven’t heard, a statement of equitable political principles that explains why it is somehow more legitimate for Israel to have nuclear technology than Iran.
The answer is embedded in his definition. There is no reason in the abstract why Israel “should” possess nuclear technology (I’m assuming he’s referring to nuclear weapons technology), while Iran “should not,” but nation-states aren’t merely abstract, and “legitimacy” isn’t the same as ideal moral justice. Iran is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and withdrawal or being judged in breach would entail costs and complications for Iran, but a prospective decision to acquire nuclear weapons or actual acquisition of them is not in itself, taken strictly on its own terms, a matter of legitimacy.
In other words, even from the pespective of the NPT regime, and taking adherence to its provisions as a standard of legitimacy, Iran could legitimately become a nuclear-armed state, but the possible legitimacy of its withdrawal from the NPT would not prevent it from becoming at that point a pariah state, even if in this regard a lawfully acting one. In addition to Israel, both India and Pakistan are also non-signatories to the NPT, and North Korea is the only state to have withdrawn. It is neither inherently legitimate nor inherently illegitimate for them to be nuclear states – and the same goes for the states that already possessed nuclear weapons when the NPT was originally drafted – but it is presumed to be a matter of interest to other states, and arguably to the entire world, a perspective in fact legitimated by worldwide, though not universal, recognition of the NPT.
Posted in International Relations, Politics, War
Tagged Freddie deBoer, Iran, Israel, Non-Proliferation Treaty, nuclear weapons
8 Comments
