1 may 2013

Argentine Losses

most people don’t write

at a distance, they don’t exist

plants don’t write

my cat, never

Slavoj Žižek [Verso Books]

from Slavoj Žižek’s “You May” in London Review of Books:

In our post-political liberal-permissive society, human rights can be seen as expressing the right to violate the Ten Commandments. The right to privacy is, in effect, the right to commit adultery, in secret, without being observed or investigated. The right to pursue happiness and to possess private property is, in effect, the right to steal (to exploit others). Freedom of the press and of expression – the right to lie. The right of free citizens to possess weapons – the right to kill. Freedom of religious belief – the right to celebrate false gods. Human rights do not, of course, directly condone the violation of the Commandments, but they preserve a marginal ‘grey zone’ which is out of the reach of religious or secular power. In this shady zone, I can violate the Commandments, and if the Power catches me with my pants down and tries to prevent my violation, I can cry: ‘Assault on my basic human rights!’ It is impossible for the Power to prevent a ‘misuse’ of human rights without at the same time impinging on their proper application. Lacan draws attention to a resistance to the use of lie-detectors in crime investigations – as if such a direct ‘objective’ verification somehow infringes the subject’s right to the privacy of his thoughts.

A similar tension between rights and prohibitions determines heterosexual seduction in our politically correct times. Or, to put it differently, there is no seduction which cannot at some point be construed as intrusion or harassment because there will always be a point when one has to expose oneself and ‘make a pass’. But, of course, seduction doesn’t involve incorrect harassment throughout. When you make a pass, you expose yourself to the Other (the potential partner), and her reaction will determine whether what you just did was harassment or a successful act of seduction. There is no way to tell in advance what her response will be (which is why assertive women often despise ‘weak’ men, who fear to take the necessary risk). This holds even more in our pc times: the pc prohibitions are rules which, in one way or another, are to be violated in the seduction process. Isn’t the seducer’s art to accomplish the violation in such a way that, afterwards, by its acceptance, any suggestion of harassment has disappeared?

Judith Butler [word pond]

from Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender:

There are advantages to remaining less than intelligible, if intelligibility is understood as that which is produced as a consequence of recognition according to prevailing social norms. Indeed, if my options are loathsome, if I have no desire to be recognized within a certain set of norms, then it follows that my sense of survival depends upon escaping the clutch of those norms by which recognition is conferred. It may well be that my sense of social belonging is impaired by the distance I take, but surely that estrangement is preferable to gaining a sense of intelligibility by virtue of norms that will only do me in from another direction. Indeed, the capacity to develop a critical relation to these norms presupposes a distance from them, an ability to suspend or defer the need for them, even as there is a desire for norms that might let one live. . . . If I am someone who cannot be without doing . . . If I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility. . . .

I may feel that without some recognizability I cannot live. But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable. . . .

The very attribution of femininity to female bodies as if it were a natural or necessary property takes place within a normative framework in which the assignment of femininity to femaleness is one mechanism for the production of gender itself. . . .

There are those who rightly [sic] argue that sexual difference is no more primary than racial or ethnic difference and that one cannot apprehend sexual difference outside of the racial and ethnic frames by which it is articulated. . . .

what if sexuality is the means by which I am dispossessed? . . .

one mourns when one accepts the fact that the loss one undergoes will be the one that changes you, changes you possibly forever, and that mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation the full result of which you cannot know in advance. . . .

Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation, but I think it exposes the constitutive sociality of the self . . .

those of us who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether it is in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage. In a sense, the predicament is to understand what kind of community is composed of those who are beside themselves. . . .

passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, and implicate us in lives that are not our own, sometimes fatally, irreversibly.