I’m also closing down comments and adding a contact form (see top of sidebar) for those who want to reach me. Most of the comments I get are either spam or from people who want to get in touch. So a contact form makes more sense.

Thanks to all who got in touch with me.

Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?

The answer (here) remains relevant given that these same liberals are now apologists for President Obama’s seamless continuation of his predecessor’s policies.

Why Obama will not release the torture photos: Because, as Andrew Sullivan succinctly puts it, he “now realizes he cannot prosecute Bush’s wars with Bush’s military while exposing Bush’s war crimes.”

Which means, as Chalmers Johnston explains in this interview, he’s likely to end up as another Lyndon B. Johnson, albeit much better mannered.

… the obsessional neurotic  … is frantically active in order to prevent the real thing from happening. Say, in a group situation in which some tension threatens to explode, the obsessional talks all the time in order to prevent the awkward moment of silence which would compel the participants to openly confront the underlying tension. In psychoanalytic treatment, obsessional neurotics talk constantly, overflowing the analyst with anecdotes, dreams, insights: their incessant activity is sustained by the underlying fear that, if they stop talking for a moment, the analyst will ask them the question that truly matters—in other words, they talk in order to keep the analyst immobile.

Even in much of today’s progressive politics, the danger is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to be active and to participate. People intervene all the time, attempting to “do something,” academics participate in meaningless debates; the truly difficult thing is to step back and to withdraw from it. Those in power often prefer even a critical participation to silence—just to engage us in a dialogue, to make it sure that our ominous passivity is broken. Against such an interpassive mode in which we are active all the time to make sure that nothing will really change, the first truly critical step is to withdraw into passivity and to refuse to participate. This first step clears the ground for a true activity, for an act that will effectively change the coordinates of the constellation.

Slavoj Zizek

The proper Deleuzian paradox is that somethinmg truly New can ONLY emerge through repetition. What repetition repeats is not the way the past “effectively was,” but the virtuality inherent to the past and betrayed by its past actualization. In this precise sense, the emergence of the New changes the past itself, that is, it retroactively changes (not the actual past—we are not in science fiction—but) the balance between actuality and virtuality in the past. Recall the old example provided by Walter Benjamin: the October Revolution repeated the French Revolution, redeeming its failure, unearthing and repeating the same impulse. Already for Kierkegaard, repetition is “inverted memory,” a movement forward, the production of the New, and not the reproduction of the Old. “There is nothing new under the sun” is the strongest contrast to the movement of repetition. So, it is not only that repetition is (one of the modes of) the emergence of the New—the New can ONLY emerge through repetition.

Slavoj Zizek

Jean-Luc Nancy’s contribution, “Communism, the Word” merits close reading. Nancy is interested in both the etymology of the word and the sense that exceeds its meaning: “Actually, [the] historical data [about the use made of the word] are unable to give us the origin and the meaning—or, even better, the sense—of “communism”. No history, no etymology either, can produce anything like sense. ” For Nancy, communism is “the ontological truth of the common, that is the relation—which ultimately is nothing else than sense.”

Communism, therefore, means the common condition of all the singularities of subjects, that is of all the exceptions, all the uncommon points whose network makes a world (a possibility of sense). It does not belong to the political. It comes before any politics. It is what gives to politics an absolute requirement: the requirement to open the common space to the common itself— that is neither to the private nor to the collective, neither to separation nor to totality—but without permitting any political achievement of the common itself, any kind of making a substance of it. Communism is a principle of activation and limitation of politics.

In that sense, the “spectre” of communism haunts not capitalism specifically but the very notion of  “common” sense.

What do we see in this moment of truth about the financial crisis we are in? That it is worthless; that money is like shit! Here is the real which unsettles all discourses. One calls that, politely, “the toxic assets”…

On November 7, three days after Election Day, Alain Badiou gave a lecture at New York University on theater and philosophy. The discussion afterward, conducted in a mixture of French and English, quickly turned to the president elect. “Obama?” Badiou replied. “As actor or as politician?” When the audience laughed, he explained that he did not mean the distinction negatively. While it was too soon to judge Obama as politician, Badiou stipulated, we could already judge him as actor, one who had broken with modern modes of self presentation by returning to a classical style: sober, thoughtful, deliberate.

Dylan spends most of the afternoon of April 9th at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I am not allowed to come along. But later he recaps to me what crossed his mind, like who his favorite artists are. “Well, of course, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko are good as far as Americans go, and I guess George Bellows and Thomas Hart Benton are OK,” he says. “But this guy here, from this town, Rembrandt, is one of my two favorite painters. I like his work because it’s rough, crude and beautiful. Caravaggio’s the other one. I’d probably go a hundred miles for a chance to see a Caravaggio painting or a Bernini sculpture. You know who I like a lot is [J.M.W.] Turner, the English painter. Art is artillery. And those guys, especially Caravaggio and Rembrandt, used it in its most effective manner. After seeing their work, I’m not even so sure how I feel about Picasso, to tell you the truth.”

“Why’s that?” I ask.

“Lots of reasons,” he says. “He was a renegade painter. He just painted what he wanted. He didn’t have anybody over him. I don’t think he was ever pushed to the degree that those other guys were. I don’t feel Picasso’s paintings like I feel the other work I just mentioned. I like Jacques- Louis David a lot, too, although he was a propagandist painter. David’s the artist who did the emblematic painting of ‘Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass’ and ‘The Death of Marat.” As for Andy Warhol, Dylan glares at me for bringing his name into the heavyweight mix. “Only as a cultural figure,” he says. “Not as an artist.”

Above all, the flu that has changed the life (and death) of our country is a cry to the world to denounce the systematic and merciless pillage that we, millions of Mexicans, have suffered over the last 27 years—years that today have turned us into the source of infection for all of humanity. What happened was the logical, catastrophic consequence of the irresponsible policies that day-by-day pushed into poverty one hundred million of us, leaving the hungry majority with no other option than migration or narco-trafficking.

Jaime Avilés

Arnold Boecklin, Island of the Dead, 1883

Health scares are like terrorist ones. Someone somewhere has an interest in it. Simon Jenkins