I start this study with about a 3rd or 4th reading of Zizek’s The Plague of Fantasies. And I’m thinking about following it with his The Fragile Absolute in hopes of covering some of the implications for true dissent I see in the story of Christ and the potential it implies in Christianity.
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As we all know, there is something about the distance of the internet (or these message boards) that allow us to succumb to impulses we would not in real world encounters. For all the noble efforts of administrators and moderators, we find it hard to resist the impulse to be a little more assertive about our positions than we normally would be. For myself, while I stand by my positions, I’m often amazed at how much of an asshole I can be about it –to the point of being willing to offend others that I otherwise respect or even love. And as Deleuze and Guattarri teach me: we must seek out and undermine the pockets of fascism that can emerge everywhere, even, and most importantly, within us. But as Zizek points out (on pg. XII) in the preface, what the Marxists seem to have on all of us is seeing history as a struggle for dictatorship –even democracy as we experience it under producer/consumer Capitalism. As he points out, no matter how much effort I put into my criticism of Capitalism, I am always working within the context of ideology itself.
Still, I hope that those I have offended along the way will see this as a sort of apology and reconciliation.
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Zizek, in his attempt to describe tyrannical social systems, starts the preface by describing the story of the Austrian criminal Josef Fritzl who basically kidnapped his own children by forcing them to live in their own basement and using his daughter as a stand-in wife by forcing her to serve ALL the duties a normal wife does. And, when he got caught, he justified his behavior through an assertion of it being his right as the natural paternal figure. He was basically arguing towards the cliché of the father as paternal protector of his children from the difficulties and dangers of the world. And it was this argument that he used after getting busted for imprisoning his children along with expressing agitation for being taken from his little basement utopia.
Zizek then goes on (in pg X) to how Nicolea Ceausescu, dictator of Romania, justified his ban on travel outside of the country through a paternal impulse to protect his people –his children. And much as Fritzl stayed true his own pleasure, Ceausescu did as much by visiting Thai brothels.
The question is: isn’t this same dynamic at work in the Republican Party in America? Doesn’t it seem to take on the same paternal extreme of trying to save us from ourselves, even if it means destroying us –as both Fritzl and Ceausescu seemed to believe?
And this is where my confession comes in: I’m clearly taking on the same paternal position in assuming that I’m trying to save others from themselves and their addiction to producer/consumer Capitalism. Still, isn’t there the possibility that that failure on my part only serves the tyranny we are under by negating any argument I might make based on socially programmed responses to socially programmed clues concerning tyranny and the responses to it. It’s like the Cassandra complex in which it is automatically assumed that because the mainstream resists an idea, it must automatically be true. The republicans try to pass my argument off as mainstream through a supposed Liberal Hollywood conspiracy when it is conservative values that pretty much dominate reality TV: Dog the Bounty Hunter, Cops, Jerry Springer and Mauri Kovich, etc…
For instance: the Republicans consider themselves the only true rebels in this country. But what does their platform amount to but conformity to producer/consumer Capitalism?