Myself

« We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable. They even make it accessible, like a house. They structure time, furnish it. . .

Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways. . .

[T]oday, many forms of repetition, such as learning by heart, are scorned on account of the supposed stifling of creativity and innovation they involve. The expression ‘to learn something by heart’, like the French apprendre par cœur, tells us that apparently only repetition reaches the heart. In the face of increasing rates of attention deficit disorder, the introduction of ‘ritual studies’ as a school subject has recently been advocated as a means of reviving the exercise of ritual repetition as a cultural technique. Repetition stabilizes and deepens attention. Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity. »

— Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals

Mark Fisher's interview with Burial, December 2012

There is, however, an asymmetry here that is obfuscated by this straightforward solution: the political struggle is not one among other struggles (in a series alongside artistic, economic, religious, etc., struggles); it is the purely formal principle of antagonistic struggle as such. That is to say, there is no proper content of politics; all political struggles and decisions concern other specific spheres of social life (taxation, the regulation of sexual mores and procreation, the health service, and so on and so forth)—"politics" is merely a formal mode of dealing with these topics, Insofar as they emerge as topics of public struggle and decision.

This is why "everything is (or, rather, can become) political" —Insofar as it becomes a stake in political struggle. The "economy," on the other hand, is not just one of the spheres of political struggle, but the "cause" of the mutual contamination-expression of struggles.

To put it succinctly, Left-Right is the Master-Signifier "contaminated" by the series of other oppositions, while the economy is the objet a, the elusive object that sustains this contamination (and when that contamination is directly economic, the economy encounters Itself in its oppositional determination). Politics is thus a name for the distance of the "economy" from itself.

Its space is opened up by the gap that separates the economic as the absent Cause from the economy in its "oppositional determination," as one of the elements of the social totality: there is politics because the economy is "non-all," because the economic is an "impotent" impassive pseudo cause. The economic is thus here doubly Inscribed in the precise sense which defines the Lacanian Real: it is simultaneously the hard core expressed" in other struggles through displacements and other forms of distortion, and the very structuring principle of these distortions.

In Defense of Lost Causes S. Zizek

Where is it coming from, this echo, this huge No that surrounds you, silent as the folds of the yellow  curtains

Margaret Atwood, from “Up”, Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995 (via known-stranger)

'nina simone live at montreux' cd packaging, printed 2011.

The actual consideration of what fascism is is rather something of general import. A number of folks here have deferred to Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism, and while I wouldn't discourage it, it is a text from the perspective of semiotics; that is to say, from the perspective of what signifies fascism, not what it is per se. Hence also why Eco emphasizes that none of the fourteen ways he describes are strictly necessary or sufficient for fascism, just that fascism as it has emerges coalesces around such signifiers. The aesthetics and rhetoric of fascists is rather succinctly summed up in Ur-Fascism, but what fascism is in a more direct, structural sense is a somewhat different consideration.

The governing structure of fascist Italy, as an example, retained many of the facets of the liberal democratic system from which it emerged, with a legislature, a judiciary, and an executive. Mussolini was legally the prime minister- though he adopted the title of Duce, literally "leader"- and was appointed by a legislative council- though a new one created by the fascist party called the Grand Council of Fascism that by and large excluded the previous legislature- and the prime minister could legally be dismissed by the head of state, the king, after a sustained vote of no confidence similar to the UK's formulation. Fascist Italy also redoubled- rather than invented- Italian colonial policy, promoting the settlement of Italians into Libya and other African colonial projects and the genocide of local populations. The domestic economic policy of fascist Italy was also much more explicitly in the interests of private business: in 1939, the whole of Italy was explicitly proposed to be legally divided into 22 corporations which appointed members to parliament; labour organization outside of the appointed corporate structures and striking as a practice were banned. The interests of fascist Italy's ruling bodies was very overtly bourgeois, and their economic policy is often referred to as specifically corporatist.

Nazi Germany was similar in structure, though while the German parliament- called the Reichstag- was maintained, a series of laws were passed which enabled the Chancellor- Hitler, who was appointed such by President Hindenburg- and the cabinet to implement laws without parliamentary or presidential approval. The Hitler cabinet is generally considered to have been the defacto ruling body of Nazi Germany, though members of the Reichstag obviously still convened and drafted laws and ran elections and generally supported Nazi rule and the judiciary remained a distinct body. The Nazis also wanted to redouble their colonial policy in specifically Africa- a theatre in which they were snubbed compared to other European powers- but were by and large unable to secure resources there for continued expansion due to the British opposing them in protecting its own colonial projects. A rather infamous and demonstrative guiding principle of Nazi economic policy, Lebensraum- literally "living space"- sought specifically to appropriate land and other productive capital to give to Germans that they might be made petite bourgeois and small artisans; de-proletarianized and bourgeoisified, at the same time that the people such capital is expropriated from were made slaves to fuel further expansion or killed outright. This was imposed both within and, once the resources of social underclasses at home ran dry, without. The interests too of Germany's ruling bodies was very overtly bourgeois.

What all of this is to say is primarily that fascism as a governmental system is a legal permutation of liberal democracy, rather than a strict departure from it. The overriding interests of fascist states are also commensurately the interests of the bourgeoisie of those nations. It's an entirely logical progression of liberalism, to be frank, and a rather stark example of why liberal states should be opposed. The most violent fascist policy at home is often simply what liberal states have as their explicit foreign policy, for instance. As for whether this or the other politician in a liberal democracy is a fascist, I'd ask first and foremost that it be known that the Nazi policy of expansion was based first on the US policy of expansion; the cart isn't pulling the horse, as it were.

[...]I suppose you want to see my rags’, she said. Gripping the table with both hands, I turned to face her. Still sitting, she lifted one leg high and wide above her head, and to open her gash still further, used the fingers of both hands to draw the folds of skin apart. Thus, Madame Edwarda’s ‘rags’ looked at me, hairy and pink, and as full of life as some revolting squid. I stammered softly: ‘Why are you doing that?’ ‘You can see,’ she said, ‘I am GOD’. ‘I’m going crazy.’ ‘Oh no you’re not, you’ve got to see: look!’ Her harsh voice sweetened, becoming almost childlike as she said with such weariness, with the infinite smile of abandon: ‘Darling, the fun I’ve had . . .’ Holding her provocative position, her leg still raised in the air, she spoke to me with an air of command: ‘Kiss me!’ ‘But . . . ,’ I protested, ‘in front of all these people?’ ‘Of course!’ I trembled. I stared at her, motionless, and she smiled back so sweetly that I trembled again. At last, staggering forward, I got down on my knees and pressed my lips to that living wound. Her naked thigh caressed my ear and I thought I heard the sound of a sea swell, the same sound you hear when you put your ear to a large conch shell. In the absurdity and confusion of the brothel (I felt I was choking, flushed and sweating with the heat) I remained strangely suspended, as if Madame Edwarda and I were losing ourselves on a night of wind, alone together at the edge of the ocean. [...] Madame Edwarda went ahead of me . . . rising into the clouds. The room’s noisy indifference to her happiness, to the measured gravity of her step, was both a royal consecration and a flowering festival: death itself was present at the feast in the guise of what is called, in the nakedness of the brothel, ‘the butcher’s cut’. . . Madame Edwarda, Georges Bataille *Madame Edwarda: a figure which, in Hegel’s words, ‘attains its truth only when it finds itself in absolute laceration’, when the life of the spirit ‘contemplates the negativity of death face to face and dwells with it’. _Illustrations for Madame Edwarda by René magritte, 1946

IX — Oh to be idle loving idleness!

Like a fierce beast self-penned in a bait-lair, My will to act binds with excess my action, Not-acting coils the thought with raged despair, And acting rage doth paint despair distraction. Like someone sinking in a treacherous sand, Each gesture to deliver sinks the more; The struggle avails not, and to raise no hand, Though hut more slowly useless, we’ve no power. Hence live I the dead life each day doth bring, Repurposed for next day’s repurposing. Fernando Pessoa

O Lord, the stars of Your sky have set, the eyes of Your creation have closed to rest, and kings have locked their gates, Yet, Your gate is always open to those who ask.

— Imam al-Sajjad (ع)