VIRTUALLY REAL ANTI-LATE CAPITAL PROPOSAL
John and Belle have a blog imagines…
a world in which you didn’t have to subscribe to certain top literary studies journals. What if their contents just showed up in your in-box every day? (Spam-guards would give you warnings like: ‘this mail looks like it would be publishable in Critical Inquiry. Delete now?)Sir,
VIRTUALLY REAL ANTI-LATE CAPITAL PROPOSAL
I am erratically to be pleasuring you from behind this urgent proposal, affective immediately, irrespective of that I make entirely no argument in person or out, nor determining validity of hereafter to follow hermeneutical proposal.
Self-control and domination converge in the distinction between THREE elements: the author of the spam, the recipient who (has to) obey(s) the spam, AND the spam’s EXECUTION/EXECUTOR - the one who mass-mails the spam and in whom Lacan discerns the contours of the Sadean executioner/torturer. The problem is not the identity of the spam’s author and recipient: they effectively ARE the same, the emailed subject effectively IS autonomous in the sense of obeying his/her OWN spam.
In your already accepting of this unprecedented intervention, this “fundamental fantasy”. Is this not Deleuzian-Lacanian? The exemplary case of this sphincter-loosening is, anti-essentially, you leaping of faith into confidence in the roots of our misapprehension of all your ideological accounts eternally in time.
Kierkegaardian teleological suspension of the ethics of fiduciary-Kantian duties: only impossible returns is worth the risk! No mercy, teaches St. Paul! Together we recover this profit of Lenin’s teachings.
As Frederik Jameson has masterfully demonstrated; as Foucault interrogated, Jesus Christ crucified, Lenin attempted and Heidegger may have had some glimmer: for you to transfer largely, generously, rhizomatically, for to impersonally avoid needlessly hegemonic interpenetrations of irrelevant authorities.
Pleasure to transmit your affects and perceptions impersonally to my account, to follow imminently.
Hoping this finds you a cyborg,
Slavoj Zizek
I have a B.S. in philosophy. There was a time when I seriously considered pursuing an advanced degree in philosophy.
That pretty much sums up why I ruled against it.
You could probably make a similar transformation into the esoteric language of, say, physics or computer science, or any number of other subjects. And it'd be just as annoying. There's a difference between writing that requires intelligence to read, and that which requires knowledge of some set of secret code-words.
It is possible for people with advanced degrees in philosophy or other subjects to hold actual jargon-free conversations. The ones who go to an effort to make their communication impenetrable are just ruining the reputation of the reasonable majority.
But yes, if this is the kind of day-to-day writing that you would get in the world of academia, I can see why you'd want to avoid it.
Posted by Jimcat on November 7 2003 05:44
It's not the specialized vocabulary I have a problem with. It's that academic philosophers have fetishized impenetrable language for its own sake, and that so much of the time there's a naked emperor lurking beneath it.
Generating a system which automatically impugns the motivation, character or intelligence of anyone questioning it becomes a feature, as opposed to in the sciences, where it's generally recognized as a big danger sign that there's sloppy thinking going on.
(But of course I think that, being a straight white late-capitalist phallocentric male.)
Posted by Zed on November 7 2003 08:26