Cantastoriedimorte - Cantastoriedimortie

I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1

[...]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

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)

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

what is good about automation? people will come up and spew the most rotted empire shit but then add “healthcare and basic rights” and everyone rejoices. humans are incalculable, automation is never good especially if the governing bodies are fascist and racist be default. imagine automated policing, and discrimination. there is a naiveté in the politics around automation, it has this very childish idea that if an AI took over we will all just enjoy. where in our modern history has this ever happened?

first the holocaust was turned into the project of a sole madman who had an entire country under a spell, which suddenly vanished at the stroke of a pen when peace was signed, rather than being a continuation of centuries of scapegoating and antisemitism, enabled by western capital, direct funding to the Nazi party in some cases like the British aristocracy's, with the purpose of creating a massive slave workforce and to boost the German economy via looting, expropiation and a reduction in the worker population, an economy that had been reeling since WWI and propped up by directing all jobless people to work in the arms industry.

then, the (incomplete) victory over european fascism (don't look at Spain and Portugal and Greece) was methodically distanced from the true victors, the soviet people. They suffered an invasion and destruction of the majority of their industrial base, save for the industry relocated to the east, more than 20 million dead soviet workers who pushed the fascists from Moscow to Berlin, ending in an artillery barrage the magnitudes of which had never been seen, the symbolic raising of the red banner over the Reichstag and an enveloping of the city that forced many nazi officials to commit suicide. It was also forgotten how the Yugoslavs liberated themselves, managing to keep fascist forces constantly tied up during the war, how the Italian partisans captured Mussolini and hung him in public, the many uprisings throughout Europe and the concentration camps before the frontline reached them, the exiled brigadiers and republicans who first fought fascism in Spain and was later forced to fight fascism again, unable to return to their homes and under threat of being imprisoned. The indigenous resistance against colonialism in east and north Africa and southwest Asia, and the tens of millions Chinese, Vietnamese, Lao, Cambodian, Malaysians, Indonesians, Papuans, Thais, Bengalese, Indians, Filipinos, etc, who suffered both Japanese and western occupation. All of these struggles forgotten and erased, reduced to the USamerican, British, and sometimes French armies. Armies who advanced to witness a fraction of the suffering enabled and financed by their own states barely a decade prior. Even minor members of the western allies, such as Brazil, are often forgotten.

After the Holocaust was reduced to an unexpected and unprecedented event with no connection to reality, and after the struggle against fascism was reduced to the involvement of two or three countries, barely any fascists were punished. Anyone who wasn't a top official could claim to be simply following orders, even someone as important like Speer used this defence, he was allowed to live free and publish an autobiography in which he paints himself as the good Nazi, the mere architect caught up in a madman's rise. As if he ignored the plans for a future Berlin would be built by slave labor from the concentration camps, as if the minister of armaments from 1942 to the end did not know about the reliance companies like Krupp or Volkswagen had on slave labor. As if he didn't listen to Goebbels' speeches about total war and extermination and did not understand his armaments would be used. Some fascists were even integrated into the scientific and military spheres of the western allies, others given citizenship and a cushy home in places like Canada. Japanese fascists who had experimented on and tortured countless Chinese and Korean civilians and POWs to research chemical warfare were offered amnesty in exchange for the knowledge they gained doing these experiments. After German reunification, more eastern queer people were imprisoned than fascists were incarcerated or executed at the Nürnberg trials.

After fascists were exonerated and shamelessly integrated into the western states, and after some time passed, the war was turned into a cultural product. Countless war movies were produced, almost always showing usamerican soldiers in the European or Pacific front fighting a mindless horde with hakenkrauzs on their armbands all lead by a single man, or group of men, ontologically evil. It was too complex to examine the actual reasons for the war. Hitler was simply a charismatic devil who had duped Germany into following him (crucially, he was only charismatic for germans. No true American patriot fell for his tricks). Gradually, the figure of Hitler was transformed into a devil in human form who had appeared in München in 1932 to cause evil and fight freedom.

As a result, German fascism and the Holocaust are nothing more but a historical fact you look at with morbid curiosity, to feel disgust, maybe anger, and sigh in relief that it would never happen again. There is no reflection on how it was allowed to happen, how antisemitism was used, like it had commonly been used throughout history, to blame for economic downturn and how the expropriation of jewish property, the enslavement of other minorities alongside them (Slavs, non-jewish poles, homosexuals, roma, communists...) and the rapid stimulation of a military industry was used to save an recessing economy. No examination of how the Nazi party appealed to the German petit-bourgeoisie and monopolies like the aforementioned Krupp, Volkswagen, or IG Farben, by attacking communists and trade unionists, who were beginning to organize at a bigger scale and actually threaten german capitalists. Instead, some even try to paint the nazis as communists or as similar to them, through terms like totalitarianism, which was popularized by Hannah Arendt, a fascist sympathiser who also saw fit to label decolonial struggles as totalitarian.

Even more insidious than this is how Hitler has been mutated into a shorthand for evil, an entity beyond a single man who personifies the collective hatred of minorities by Europeans, a condensation of centuries of hatred and exploitation into an angry man between 1932 and 1945. By doing this we can rest easy knowing there will never be another Hitler because we are so civil now. It was Hitler's speeches that guided every SS member's hand to execute tens of thousands. It was Goebbels' propaganda that clouded the judgment of the millions of Wehrmacht soldiers who looted and massacred their way through Europe. It was Himmler's threat that coerced countless germans to spy and tattle on their neighbors. It was Göring who convinced the Luftwaffe pilots to bomb and terrorize civilians. It was Dönitz who made the Kriegsmarine target civilian ships and ruthlessly pursue trade convoys. And it was ultimately Hitler who controlled these men, and no German had free will or political conviction between 1932 and 1945.

The peak of this attitude I see most in the internet: Do you want to learn about Hitler's Bunker? Hitler's enormous artillery pieces? Hitler's train? Hitler's plans? Hitler's wife? Hitler's army? Hitler's rise through the party? Hitler's veganism? Hitler's dog? Hitler's car? Hitler's Germania? Hitler's camps? Hitler's possible escape? Hitler's military career? Hitler's architecture? Hitler's political maneuvering in the interwar? Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. Nobody wants to deal with the fact that Hitler was not omnipotent or omnipresent. He and his party was supported by German and western capital to oppose worker organization and to give an outlet to social tension around the inflating currency and failing economy. Just like in Italy and just like in Spain. Hitler is a cultural product sold to liberals so they can be reassured that they would never become evil. No liberal democracy has ever put an entire minority into concentration camps, no liberal democracy has ever used Zyklon B on dispossessed people, no liberal democracy has ever looted a conquered nation, no liberal democracy has ever killed workers for unionizing, no liberal democracy has ever used nationalism and supremacism to rally popular support, and a long etcetera.

Hölderlin.

City of the Broken Dolls, a photo book by Romaine scolombe, 1993-1996