[b]Simon Critchley
My favourite writer is Beckett and I keep going back to wallow in his work like a deep pool of dark humour or like an oxygen tank when you can’t breath in a world consumed by piety, hypocrisy and self-satisfaction.[/b]
My guess: You may not agree.
In the US, what passes for Christianity - and it is, to say the least, a highly perverse, possessive individualist and capitalist version of what I would see as Christ’s messianic ethical communism, to say the least - is a new civil religion, a civil religion of freedom.
Your guess: I may not agree.
With the second part.
Melancholia for Freud is the relationship that the subject takes up with respect to itself from the position of what he calls conscience or what he later calls the super-ego. And that can be lacerated - if you think of the anorexic who sees themselves from the perspective of the image they have, of the image they have of themselves in the mirror which is false - that would be the super-ego. Super-ego is what generates depression and it is what has to be dealt with in psychoanalysis.
Next up: Melancholia for the rest of us.
Philosophy for me is essentially atheistic. Now that’s an anxious atheism. It’s an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were resolved religiously in the pre-modern period.
Let’s at least try to make sense of this.
Obama dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism that constitutes political life. Against such a position one might assert that justice is always an agon, a conflict, and to refuse this assertion is to consign human beings to wallow in some emotional, fusional balm.
Mr. Bilderberg? I mean give me a break!
Here we observe the basic obsessive fantasy of Žižek’s position: do nothing, sit still, prefer not to, like Melville’s Bartleby, and silently dream of a ruthless violence, a consolidation of state power into one man’s hands, an act of brutal physical force of which you are the object or the subject or both at once.
What can I say…intellectuals.