Zizek on 'Anti-Humanism', Theoretical and Practical

Creating a collection of writings that criticise idpol coherently is a great plan.

Seconding.

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Alright I'll focus on getting some essays and passages for that then.

Do you need some help with that?

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sister-thread:

Feel free to present your argument, bookchin-poster.

this is retarded dualism and falls into the same traps as all Cartesian logic and Physicalism. Lol the Subject watched phenomena but doesn't affect them. The subject is just a witness, a mirage. No. This is ridiculous and runs contrary to self evident truths. Thoughts and fantasy are made of the substance of the individual and the individual reshapes the mental substance of the world through imagining. The epiphenomenal explanation of subjective consciousness is impoverished. Running contrary to any and all lived experience. Lacan is the end product of a long line of increasingly secular materialist psychoanalysis. Its no wonder it ends with this cognitive dissonance

OP DA REAL Holla Forums MVP

Hi, how are you?

Care to give us some details on your criticism of the "retarded dualism?" IMO there are secular/materialist interpretations of the Cogito that do no fall under the idealist matrix. On another note: many readers of Descartes suspect him of being one of the first atheists/materialists of Western philosophy, who did not make public his position because of the current powers that operated in that era.

I have no idea what you mean here.

Well, in a sense, yes. But the Subject isn't a "witness" of the outer world – this is underscoring the very point! Subjectivity is nothing but the displacement of what innocently appears to the recipient to a relation to this appearance. Subjectivity is nothing but the latter.

Entertain us!

So here you take a double step: first, you make the individual a substance (Marx would sudoku at this sight); second, in an idealist move, you make this latter the shaper of the world at large. A sufficient critique of your position would require us to debunk the anglo-murrican notion of the "individual" itself – one I don't have time to do.
hint: marx:re: bentham

I hope I gave you an explanation that showed you that it is possible to explain the Subject without the epi~ dimension.

And thank God for that! :^)

Let me try to clarify, because I think I didn't do justice to the main point, concerning subjectivity, with the following:

Animal is the thing that suffers appearances: that thing which passively receives whatever happens around it and within it. The Animal feels hunger = it is hungry. The animal sees trees and a prey = the animal relates to these objects around it, etc.

The Human [i.e. Subject] is a different process entirely. The Human feels hunger, and it relates to it: this is the subject and nothing else: the relation (what I've termed displacement). The Human sees an environment around itself: it is not, as with the Animal, a simple relation to it, rather, the displacement of this perception to a process of reflexivity.

In other words, Subject is nothing but the displacement of the "in itself" to the "for itself," the Subject is this displacement itself, and not the end result of it.

Now with these, relating to OP.

Anti-humanism means the following: accepting that what we call Subject is but a displacement of appearances. Politically this would mean that Joe [a serf under Feudalism] is nothing more than the tantamount of these displaced appearances: his meal, his wife, his landlord, etc. – not the appearance itself, but the process of its displacement. Joe is nothing but how these things in his lives appear to him [paradoxically] under the aegis of "subjective-objective."

Anti-humanism doesn't mean the abolition of Subjectivity as such, but rather, the understanding of its nature, and extrapolation from these established factors.

Political change shouldn't derive from a so called human essence, since what makes us human is in itself unessentializable, since it's a process, not a thing. Humanism thinks of the Human as a thing, not a process.

With all due respect to Zizek and Lacan, I find Althusser's stance on this issue much more reasonable and useful.

If we stop treating other people as humans, then people will regard us as inhuman. I'd also argue that internal subjectivity is the only thing that we can really say is real. It is the only thing we know. I think therefor I am, and all.

This is nonsensical. How can you say the human is just a relation, and not the relation AND the hunger? When I say "That man is hungry" I both mean he is the sense of hunger, and he has it.

reminder that Marx himself was a humanist. I wonder when you idiots will read him

This is exactly why I agree with Althusser more on this.

And politics that treats humans as only a process will inevitably find little purchase. People don't trust other people who don't regard them as people with inherit value in politics. And what's more, humans are a thing in the sense that they are the place of displacement of objectivity and externality. Calling them not things is like trying to play a game of go without the pieces.

This is not to deny how human subjectivity is shaped by process, but humans are just as much things as they are a process.

To expand on what I say here, a human, and Humanitas, is a place. That place is just as much defined by the brick and mortar that creates its structure, its geography, as it is by what it contains.

He was also pretty racist. Marx isn't the singular authority to which we look on all things. just because Marx was this or Marx believed that doesn't mean we have to lockstep with it

I found those passages relatively simple. I picked up the Ideology And Ideological State Apparatuses, I have no problem reading Marx for the most part outside of the Capital. I don't think I have the time and patience to read Hegel though.

Early Marx, sure. After he read Stirner it made him so buttmad the humanism was forcibly ejected from his asshole.

I'm not saying he is, i'm just saying not to be dishonest or illiterate by painting him as an anti-humanist. Althusser was just wrong

kek, no, not at all.
After Marx re-read hegel, he dropped stirner completely except for some of his criticisms of Proudhon. Good riddance too because stirner is shit.

Marx's humanism is still found throughout his later works

Oh no, I don't mean marx agreed with Stirner. I only mean it made him adopt a non-humanist view point in order to effectively critique him.

And what works would you be referring to anyway?

is there any evidence for this freudian worldview?

freud was notorious for outright making shit up and forcing the mentally ill along in his own masturbation, i don't see how a more advanced lacanian version of freudianism solves this problem that is at it's root

That isn't true though, at all. Marx returned to his Hegelian language and didn't drop his humanism, it's still there even in capital.

Marx just suppressed his moral arguments because he wanted to be taken seriously as an explainer of how capitalism worked rather than a person who just didn't like it.

No need for that.

I mean… what would that be? Althusser read and commented on exhaustively on Lacan, see pdf related.

Who said anything amounting to that, ffs, comrade? The question is (paraphrasing myself) is where do we detect Humaneness as such: as an essence (or thing) or as reflexivity as such (process)?

And how is this not solipsism?

Yeah, with Descartes, for sure. Yet, there are things, such as class antagonism, that cut through all appearances, transfiguring all appearances that are available. (Invoking Badiou's transcendental regime:) how are we to talk about social existential degrees if we disregard the social itself?

Social antagonism makes itself known.
The [bourg] Media gravitates towards themselves, therefor I am a prole.

Please make it clear how this is supposedly nonsensical.

You are missing the point altogether. For a cat its hunger is another existential condition. A woman is nothing but her own reflection on said hunger. Again, she is not hunger itself, she is not this reflection on hunger, but the process of reflecting.

Let me focus on the last part: he has it.

My retort: no he hasn't. "He" is nothing but the process of reflection itself. He can not own this process. It happens to it. In fact, he is nothing but this displaced reflection.

This is objectively false. There's a difference between early and later Marx. He as many other writers/theorists evolved from their origins.

I wonder when you read his oeuvre in progression.

wut
>purchase
wut?

You don't get the main point, for crying out loud. The point is not about how you and me perceive that other guy, nor how other guy thinks about us in return. It really doesn't matter how anyone perceives anyone. The question is this process of perception itself. I can't really make this any more unequivocal. Please reread.

Again, I said nothing of sorts!

People are people. I'm trying to give the underlying substance of what a person is. Just because I give a non-essential (not-thing-like) definition it doesn't mean that I stopped viewing them as people.

>humans are a thing in the sense that they are the place of displacement of objectivity and externality
But that would deny the subjective dimension, my gott.

…is the most human-like thing one can do, ffs! Even in a relational context:
A: "B, I view you not as a thing, but a process that makes B"
B: "me too, reciprocally."
– this is just beautiful!

>Calling them not things
Now it's your turn: call them things, I dare you!

So… static?

Getting too Deleuzian for my sensibilities, tbh.

You should, nevertheless.
See .pdf chapter "Reply to John Lewis."

[8ch: too much lines]
cont.

webm related
I'M ETERNALLY BTFO

It is not. If you care to locate his humanism in his earlier works it would be: young-Hegelian/Feuerbachian. Now where is the same influence in his later work, especially, if considering his German Ideology, and his most latest works?

What do you mean by evidence? Since Freud, the psychoanalytic clinic exists. It does not claim to be a science (parallel: Marxism [apart from Orthodoxy] doesn't claim to be one either).

thx, rationalwiki!

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i mean something that would substantiate them, freud's theories were proven wrong over and over again, like in his analysis of woodrow wilson for example, or his horrible treatment of anna

don't be a kneejerk

So, let's specify: something that would specify something that has been ongoing since Freud that doesn't claim to be a science. With a parallel: democracy, as something that has been going on since the ancient greeks that doesn't claim to be a science…

OK, so what "gives it substance" is nearly a hundred years of praxis with patients. Is this praxis scientific? No. How long has been Marxism going on? ~150 years? How are you going to measure these praxises?

How about "Wissenschaft?" More than that: results of said Wissenschaft? Years of documenting these cases?

"Horrible?" No. Conflictual? Yes.

youtube.com/watch?v=Qi4dyFp2FBw

I mean in respect to his quote in the OP.

But, does not the process include both?

Sure he can own it, in the same way a plot of land can "own", in the sense of having, a playground. A displacement must still have a place, however unstable.

Purchase as in success.

This is exactly the attitude I'm worried about. It really does matter how people perceive each other in politics.

But this is exactly what I mean, people aren't going to trust people who believe in a non-essentialist definition of people, irregardless if that definition is correct or not.

Why?

You have a very reductive view of what "things" can be.

Places are not static.

something that isn't just freud using free association to make shit up. something that doesn't lead to cases like his analysis of woodrow wilson, anna o, ida bauer and all the other cases in which he was basically writing his own masturbatory fantasies and forcing them onto his patients

there not being a formula to measure theories is no free pass to make shit up and then place the burden of measurement upon others, if it is, you'd better ditch psycho-analysis for palm reading

the documenting of freud's cases doesn't work to his advantage, as exemplified by the names i mentioned above.

he took a vulnerable women and subjected her to a treatment that would get any psychiatrist fired for abuse of patients, after that, he slandered breuer to hide the fact that the lied about the treatment and it's results

ok

ok

stop arguing with the fat lesbian chink

all Viet Cong is hoochie
hoochie is literally a tumblrina

not hoochie, this is just shitposting flag

Yes, quote it! Make it clear. Quote it for us! Make it undeniably clear!
s/he will not

The process is in itself "she or he." Did you not get that part?

Yeah, again, it does matter how "people perceive each other in politics," but you disregard completely the theoretical basis for "people" as such. Keep repeating yourself, you mong!

Ok. My answer, in two words: you's wrong. When you interact with people they will invoke a certain definition of "people," and more importantly, "society!" You are to distinguish between these categories. You say that people [basically] are not capable of speaking of "non-essential people." Well, my experience differs. You can perfectly explain to them why the so called "Human" or "Person" doesn't exist.

No, I don't! You have a very disgusting view on what humans are! For you, we are essences, things that achieve or live up to certain expectations. This isn't just disgusting, but ridiculous!

Deleuze and Guattari were obnoxiously wrong.

Yeah, this is the part where you are announced as a fraud. You have no idea what you are arguing against, you have no idea what your own position is. You are, by definition, a fraud.

Literally, this is done by one person, Freud himself. Later interpretations (like Lacan's) relativize it, and so on, but still, you out yourself here as an idiot.

Ok, so we are "talking" (in quotes because you are an idiot) here about Freud's analysis of his own daughter. Analyzing your own sibling is not recommended by any psychoanalytic school. Case closed.

'ok'

Yah, you are Hoochie, the mistress of Biopolitics. The one who thinks that sedating the distressed is a service to humankind! All praise you, and may you live forever until you are forced to face the wall!

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She wouldn't be here if she was pure-tumblrina.

Did you know that Hoochie is actually working in a so called "Crazy People Center," wherein her work gets justified by assfucked individuals who have nothing bad to say about the """""""treatment"""""""" they """"""""received?"""""""

Hoochie is literally a SAINT!

This is actually true. She said on many occasions that she's glad that "at least" she can sedate innocents help people who need her.

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TL;DR: ITT: Hoochie Minh works as a nurse in a "crazy house." Her job is to sedate incoming "patients," to "help" patients suffer through ECT [i.e.: I put 240 volts through you brain therapy™] and to make them feel comfortable in their new surroundings.

Hoochie Minh is truly a saint because she learned all of this in University and they told her that sedating/torturing people are scientific.

Praise Hoochie Minh, who didn't have not for one second a spec of doubt vs. what she's doing! Hoochie Minh for president!

"feel comfortable" should be in bold too

You mean

Althusser also goes on to say:

And I'm telling you any process must by necessity of being a process be constituted of what it is transforming and the machinery that enables it to do so.

It's much easier to explain that society doesn't exist, and believe it or not, that does work in politics. It's also more accurate in most usages of the word. As for explaining that the "so called" human or person doesn't exist, sure. People can accept the theory. They can accept many things in the abstract. But they're not going to give power to a person who says people, in a humanist way, do not exist for the same reasons people fear atheists and moral relativism.

Not at all. I think people are places, highly unstable places capable of immense change. There is no essence. There is just subjectivity. I find it offensive that you wish to rob us of even that. To you, we are nothing, only subjects of history. I say, history we may be, but we are also flesh and hot emotion and reason. And indeed, it is up to each ego to see what makes up their being. When I say thing, I mean thing in its most absolute form, an existing thing. It only exists, there is no higher version. No abstract version.

{Blows Rasberry}

Also, I hope this flag triggers you a little less.

that's not hoochie

In case you're confused, and it seems you are, I am only agreeing with Althusser's position on humanism, though I also like his idea of overdeterminism. My picture of the individual is inspired from Stirner and Deleuze.

Sure, if you want to format some of your favorite criticisms for Holla Forums it will make it to easy to screencap the thread and collate the images into a anti-idpol pack.

I might post the thread later on tonight if I don't get called into work but if not I'll do it on the weekend at some point.

So far Ive got a passage from Zizek's Absolute Recoil and an essay from Franco Bernardi; I'll mainly be focusing on critiques problematizing identity itself and the effect of that on politics, similar in vein to this thread. After that I think ill focus on chopping up Fanon's 'Concerning Violence' and something from Debord.

All that should provide some decent meat to get the thread off the ground hopefully.

You should be fine I would imagine if you have somewhat of a handle on Marx and Althusser, Zizek is quite lucid when dealing with Lacan and Hegel in my opinion, some parts might go over your head but you should still easily be able to glean useful information from it even when it does.

Also could somebody please tell me what the char-limits on Holla Forums are? Is it only 2k?

Althusser's a twat. There's a direct line from Althusser to idpol.

Althusser had severe PTSD and as a result, lost his sense of agency. Like tumblrinas, he convinced himself that his trauma reactions reflected reality, and built a whole theory around it. Lacan was a narcissist who enjoyed tormenting patients and audiences.

For Lacan, everything is grounded in lack. Alienation is constitutive and unavoidable. There is no possibility of a revolution which overthrows alienation within Lacanian theory (including Zizek, Laclau and the rest).

Althusser believes there are no human beings, creative forces, or desire prior to ideology. Who we are, what we do, what we think we're doing, are all just effects of "interpellation". We are all literally just effects of the social structure - absolutely determined. Our agency is either just an illusion, or an effect of the gaps in the structure.

But if we're just effects of the structure, why do two people with similar upbringings turn out different? Why do some people deviate from social norms? Why are some people gay, in societies which recognise only straight relationships? Why are some people schizo or psychotic? Why can't the social structure make us able to levitate or walk on water, just be "interpellating" us to do it?

The second mistake here is that Althusser does not only assume that everything is socially constructed - he assumes that all social constructions can be reduced to a few big macrostructural factors. People's unconscious motives can be read-off from their observable "subject-positions". This is the root of the idpol fantasy that oppressed groups can mind-read the unconscious motives of muh privileged groups, and muh privileged people are always motivated by their interest in maintaining muh privilege. Read Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak", she is a founder of today's idpol, and she is hardcore Althusserian. Laclau, who invented the idea of positionality (his term is 'subject-position'), was an Althusserian turned Lacanian. Butler, Bhabha, all the big idpol theorists are influenced by Lacan and Althusser (along with Derrida and a half-digested Foucault). Althusser invented "check your muh privilege", except he applied it to petit-bourgeois people who wanted to be Marxists.

Interpellation is an extension of Lacan's che vuoi theory - people identify with the categories others put them in, with the call of the other (in the first instance, the parent). But Lacan clearly shows that the che vuoi structure applies only to neurotics, not to psychotics. Therefore, Deleuze's critique of Lacan, based on the schizorevolutionary power of the rhizome, blows open the Lacanian glorification of lack.

Marx believed there was a basic creative force, "labour" or "creative activity" or "productive activity", which is transpersonal and prior to alienation and ideology. Capitalism is a perversion of this basic force, and communism turns it back into an immediate force. This position aligns Marx with the likes of Deleuze, Debord, Bergson, Negri, Gulli, Holloway, Hakim Bey, and Nietzsche - and against people like Althusser, Zizek, Spivak, Laclau, Lacan and Badiou.

Zizek goes on to say that Lacan theorised the move from theoretical to practical anti-humanism i.e [to] see in this theoretical anti-humanism the absolute (negative) precondition of the (positive) knowledge of the human world itself, and of its practical transformation.

>In contrast to Althusser, Lacan accomplishes the passage from theoretical to practical anti-humanism, i.e., to an ethics that goes beyond the dimension of what Nietzsche called "human, all too human," and confront the inhuman core of humanity. This does not mean only an ethics which no longer denies, but fearlessly takes into account, the latent monstrosity of being-human, the diabolic dimension which exploded in phenomena usually covered by the concept-name "Auschwitz" - an ethics that would be still possible after Auschwitz, to paraphrase Adorno. This inhuman dimension is for Lacan at the same time the ultimate support of ethics - as we shall see in the last chapter, therein resides the ultimate wager of Lacan's "ethics of psychoanalysis.

To continue with that essay by Z

>Deleuze often varies the motif of how, in becoming post-human, we should learn to practice "a perception as it was before men (or after) /…/ released from their human coordinates" (Cinema 1, 122): those who fully endorse the Nietzschean "return of the same" are strong enough to sustain the vision of the "iridescent chaos of a world before man" (ibid., 81). Although Deleuze resorts here openly to Kant's language, talking about the direct access to "things (the way they are) in themselves," his point is precisely that one should subtract the opposition between phenomena and things-in-themselves, between the phenomenal and the nolumenal level, from its Kantian functioning, where noumena are transcendent things that forever elude our grasp. What Deleuze refers to as "things in themselves" is in a way even more phenomenal then our shared phenomenal reality: it is the impossible phenomenon, the phenomenon that is excluded from our symbolically constituted reality. The gap that separates us from noumena is thus primarily not epistemological, but practico-ethical and libidinal: there is no "true reality" behind or beneath phenomena, noumena are phenomenal things which are "too strong", too intens(iv)e, for our perceptual apparatus attuned to constituted reality - epistemological failure is a secondary effect of libidinal terror, i.e., the underlying logic is a reversal of Kant's "You can, because you must!": "You cannot (know noumena), because you must not!"

(1/?)

>>Imagine someone being forced to witness a terrifying torture: in a way, the monstrosity of what he saw would make this an experience of the noumenal impossible-real that would shatter the coordinates of our common reality. (The same holds for witnessing an intense sexual activity.) In this sense, if we were to discover films shot in a concentration camp among the Musulmannen, showing scenes from their daily life, how they are systematically mistreated and deprived of all dignity, we would have "seen too much", the prohibited, we would have entered a forbidden territory of what should have remained unseen. This is also what makes it so unbearable to witness the last moments of people who know they are shortly going to die and are in this sense already living-dead - again, imagine that we would have discovered, among the ruins of the Twin Towers, a video camera with magically survived the crash intact and is full of shots of what went on among the passengers of the plane in the minutes before it crashed into one of the Towers. In all these cases, it is that, effectively, we would have seen things as they are "in themselvers", outside human coordinates, outside our human reality - we would have seen the world with inhuman eyes. (Maybe the US authorities do possess such shots and, for understandable reasons, are keeping them secret.) The lesson is here profoundly Hegelian: the difference between the phenomenal and the noumenal has to be reflected/transposed back into the phenomenal, as the split between the gentrified normal phenomenon and the impossible phenomenon.

(2/?)

>In philosophical terms, this inhuman dimension can be defined as that of a subject subtracted from all form of human individuality or personality (which is why, in today's popular culture, one of the exemplary figures of pure subject is a non-human - alien, cyborg - who displays more fidelity to the task, dignity and freedom than its human counterparts, from the Schwarzenegger-figure in Terminator to the Rutger-Hauer-android in Blade Runner). Recall Husserl's dark dream, from his Cartesian Meditations, of how the transcendental cogito would remain unaffected by a plague that would annihilate entire humanity: it is easy, apropos this example, to score cheap points about the self-destructive background of the transcendental subjectivity, and about how Husserl misses the paradox of what Foucault, in his Les mots et les choses, called the transcendental-empirical doublet, of the link that forever attaches the transcendental ego to the empirical ego, so that the annihilation of the latter by definition leads to the disparition of the first. However, what if, fully recognizing this dependence as a fact (and nothing more than this - a stupid fact of being), one nonetheless insists on the truth of its negation, the truth of the assertion of the independence of the subject with regard to the empirical individuals qua living being? Is this independence not demonstrated in the ultimate gesture of risking one's life, on being ready to forsake one's being? Recall Mao Zedong's reaction to the atomic bomb threat from 1955:

>The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system. (The Chinese People Cannot Be Cowed by the Atom Bomb)

(3/?)

>>There evidently is an "inhuman madness" in this argument: is the fact that the destruction of the planet Earth "would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole" not a rather poor solace for the extinguished humanity?

>The argument only works if, in a Kantian way, one presupposes a pure transcendental subject non-affected by this catastrophe - a subject which, although nonexisting in reality, IS operative as a virtual point of reference. Che Guevara approached the same line of though when, in the midst of the unbearable tension of the Cuban missile crisis, he advocated a fearless approach of risking the new world war which would involve (at least) the total annihilation of the Cuban people - he praised the heroic readiness of the Cuban people to risk its disappearance. In this precise sense, Antigone herself was inhuman (in contrast to Ismene, her "human, all too human" sister). One likes to quote the chorus from Antigone about man as the most "demoniac" of all creatures, as a being of excess, a being which violates all proper measures; however, it is crucial to bear in mind the exact location of these lines: the Chorus intervenes immediately after it becomes known that somebody (it is not yet known who this was) has defied Creon's order and performed the funeral ritual on his body. It is THIS act which is perceived as a "demonic" excessive act, and not Creon's prohibition - Antigone is far from being the place-holder of moderation, of respect for proper limits, against Creon's sacrilegious hubris.

(4/4)

I'll deal with you later; I started with my reply but your post is so fundamentally garbled, full of misunderstanding, sophistry and ridiculous political presuppositions that I'll have to go over this hot mess with a fine tooth comb to show you your crossed wires.

Yo, I got a Q on Zizek on Marx.

Namely:
From Zizek's "With Hegel Beyond Hegel".

How exactly does Zizek's thought process work here? He seems to be attributing to communism a sort of invariant orthodoxy, when (Marxist) communism is itself built upon ever-evolving itself.

He saying that communism is the resolution of the 'internal contradictions' of capitalism i.e the negation of capitalism that is itself inherent with in the 'Capitalist Fantasy' and generated as its self-critique e.g we can perceive singularities beyond which it is unclear how capitalism can continue to function; Ecology for instance.

We need to preform a 'return to Marx', I believe he is alluding to Lacan's 'return to Freud', which means go back and wipe all the crap off the table; all the utopian systems that have been constructed in Marx's name and are 'to be established' need to go and instead we should focus on 'a movement that abolishes the present state of things'.

Nice ad hominems, bro.

Your idpol college tutor might pass this kind of shit-tier trolling, but I won't. Lrn2brain.

Don't worry i'm writing you a nice essay.

I'm even including a nice critique of Antonio "Dude NEETbux lmao" Negri and Hakim "Dude Weed Lmao" Bey to show you your neolib autism.

OP, you have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

In Lacanian theory, LACK IS CONSTITUTIVE. Alienation is unavoidable. Human subjectivity is an effect of the fact that the social/symbolic order (the big Other) is founded on lack. "Fantasy" or "ideology" is an imaginary framework through which people imagine that this lack is contingent and is just a lack of something in particular (the objet petit a). Fantasy/ideology functions by inventing different objets petit a, and suggesting different barriers to satisfaction - known as 'absent fullness'. But the human condition is founded on lack. So the 'absent fullness' can never be achieved. Trying to achieve the 'absent fullness' leads to pathological effects. Life just sucks, and we need to accept that.

Example: a Nazi is not enjoying life. He decides he's not enjoying life (absent fullness) because his nation is corrupt. He looks for a reason the nation is corrupt, and settles on the Jews. Remove the Jews and he'll enjoy life. But this is just a fantasy. Really, he isn't enjoying life because life sucks. Even if he succeeds in killing all the Jews, his life will still suck.

It's exactly the same with communism. A communist has a shitty life, and decides it's because of capitalism. Remove the capitalist organisation of production and life will be good - we'll enjoy the product of our own labor. But this is the same, basically, as the Nazi fantasy. Life sucks because life just naturally sucks. Get rid of the capitalists and you'll just get rid of all the good things you were trying to have, as well. We can still have the Marxist critique of capitalism because life still sucks, and capitalism still sucks, and capitalism is still contradictory. But we can't have revolution, communism, all that stuff, because that means we're denying that life just sucks.

For Zizek, the internal contradictions of capitalism are necessary for the functioning of production as such. Capitalism is not a barrier to production. The idea that communism will carry on production minus its capitalist flaws is a typical fantasy of 'absent fullness'. The internal contradictions are necessary, they are not soluble.

For Zizek, it is possible to get out of capitalism by creating a different social order with a different fundamental fantasy, but this new order would also have to be structured around lack. People would have to find some way to handle the fact that desire fundamentally lacks its object - the object cannot be achieved. The Lacanian ideal of the subject is someone who consciously circles around the absent center without denying it or trying to fill it.

A 'return to Marx' or 'return to Freud' is not a direct return to the author minus the added 'crap' - it's a repetition of the author in different conditions. This means: making Marx compatible with Lacanian pessimism. Zizek has never produces a direct, literal reading of anything in his life.

Did you misquote me? I don't see what this screed is critiquing.

Are you attempting to attack the first part of my post with this reference to Lacan? You are aware the Lacan, Althusser Zizek et. al don't deny 'the real'?

Yes any Marxist would claim that contradictions are inherent to its functioning, they will also claim that these 'fault lines' allow us to perceive a constitutive break that will need to be dealt with with a radical restructuring of society.

I don't think you understand what 'contradictions' are in any Marxist sense. Are you attempting to claim alienation is the inherent contradiction to capitalism?

This is upside down idealism; turn it on its head and you are closer to what Zizek or any materialist would claim. It is precisely 'the real' that causes the negation of capitalism, with the fundamental fantasy being produced 'post-festum' to explain our relation to the world.

Alienation wouldn't be abolished completely by Communism, yes thats a claim that Zizek et . al would make.

Your comprehension of my sentence is zero you pedant; probably because you've never actually read Marx and are just a posturing post-left dullard.

Are you aware of what part of Marx I was referencing here? Or what Marx was saying with it?

I'm quite aware that Zizek means the repetition of Marx's critique for our temporal conditions hence my reference 'a movement that abolishes the present state of things' but I was also attempting to address

could it be said that human essence then exists, it is 'process' - or human essence is more specifically a 'process of displaced appearance' ?

Is it worth getting into Fredric Jameson - a bit of a zizek in that he comes out of marx, althusser and lacan and hegel as well

nice spooks idiot

ok
(It should be noted that you don't counter their arguments but posit their theoretical outcome, say it's bad, and that's it.) With Lacan: alienation isn't the same as used by the young (hegelo-feurbachian) Marx, it is a totally different level of discussion. With Lacan as soon as you are introduced to language you lose direct contact with your body. Since your body becomes signified it is A) endlessly compartmentalized; B) you lose direct access to it. Now to "lack:" your portrayal sounds as an affirmation of "groundlessness," while in fact it is a step further: being grounded on groundlessness. You might not like these conclusions and you are invited to argue against them (with substance, hopefully), but please restrict yourself from washing things together (Marx's political economy, Lacan's psychoanalysis) and being dishonest in general.
This is just stupid, just like the rest of that paragraph.
Because there are no two identical lives?
I honestly have no idea about the conspiracy theory you are describing, but then again, I think it is already established that you came here with malicious intents.
"Glorification." Yeah, no. Just because a theorist says that something simply is in a way, it doesn't mean s/he "glorifies" it. Another sign of your ulterior motives. Anyway, D&G imagine a desire set free from the shackles of the Oedipal setting, portraying it as a kind of primordial substance, penetrating all aspects of human life. Well, this is the same error Marx makes in regards to post-capitalist society: he imagines it as finally freed from it shackles, being able to produce without hindrance, while in reality this is already what capitalism is: a process of unhindered production that puts shakes off all obstacles. Marx's post-capitalist dream, with D&G's post-Oedipal desire shares the same root: looking at a condition of possibility [capitalism; Oe.], identifying it as a hindrance instead of the very thing that is its raison d'être and imagining an alternative with the same properties that somehow don't stem from the same root. (And this is not to diss Deleuze, just saying that his Anti-Oe. is his worst work.)
Everyone is influenced by everyone. This is like accusing Aristotle of Platonism, because he was influenced by him. Again, pure malice and dishonesty.
LOL. Marx did no such thing. This would be a non-dialectical position par excellence: an "original state" that happens to be disturbed by current events.

I feel dirty even by replying.

(book page, meaning NOT .pdf page:) 126!

Here we go again… sigh
Again, we are not dealing with the same levels (economy; psyche). Good job, btw, of copying wikis and pretending that it's an actual discussion you are looking for.
wut
Yeah, stopped reading here.

Yes, definitely. I'd recommend his Postmodernism; Singular Modernity; Valences of the Dialectic; The Hegelian Variations; Badiou and Politics; Representing Capital; and the latest polemic collection: An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army.

This, exactly. Shitposter has a non-dialectical version of Marx, who attacks notions and not emerging, evolving, contradicting processes.

I don't even think that alienation in an economic sense even exists. What am I deprived (estranged, alienated) of if my economic activity is by itself executed for other's benefits, being non-reclaimable, reimburseable? How does "alienation theory" survive the service industry, or on a more fundamental level, how am I alienated from something that has no value to me, or more precisely, of something which's only value is that it is not mine?

bamp

You previously said that Zizek "saying that communism is the resolution of the 'internal contradictions' of capitalism i.e the negation of capitalism that is itself inherent with in the 'Capitalist Fantasy'" - this is not at all what Zizek says. The internal contradictions of capitalism are insoluble because they are just a local manifestation of the constitutive contradictions of subjectivity.

Nope, Marx argues (especially but not only in his early work) that contradictions are due to alienation and will end with the return of humanity to itself, i.e. with communism. Contradictions are inherent to capitalism and class societies, not to life as such. Even Zizek admits that Marx says this - that's why he talks about communism being a utopian fantasy which denies constitutive contradiction.

Contradictions in the Marxist sense, and contradictions in the Lacanian, Zizekian and Althusserian sense, are very different creatures.

The Real (in Lacanian theory) is not external reality. What we see as reality is part of the Symbolic. The Real is another name for constitutive lack.

You drinking bleach is the riddle of your life solved.

Yes, Marx says that revolution comes from the real immanent development of the working-class movement itself, not from utopian blueprints or political sects which seize power (i.e. not by the means of Owen, Fourier, Proudhon, Babeuf, Blanc, Weitling, etc). He says it in the Manifesto among other places. This is nothing like anything Zizek comes up with.

It's not Marxist, that's the important point.

Exactly. Then we fantasise about restoring the "absent fullness", form fantasies which posit empirical blockages to this, etc. The quotes you provided are very clear evidence that Zizek sees communism (in the orthodox sense) as one such fantasy.

BTW Lacan is clearly wrong about this, especially as regards states of altered consciousness.

Read "Can the Subaltern Speak". Spot the Althusserianisms. Interest, ideology, constitutive contradiction, etc. Spivak uses all these terms in the precise Althusserian sense, to ground her view that everything the "western subject" does, is motivated by an interest in keeping the west at the center of power/discourse.

Jesus!

Yeah, another aspect which idpol gets from Althusser and Zizek is the mechanistic reading-off of (conscious or unconscious) hostile desires from any disagreement with their position. My "ulterior motives" from your POV are the same as my "racism" and "transphobia" and "literal Hitlerness" for the idpols - since I'm pwning your theory, I must be working for the class/race enemy.

Also, what exactly is my supposed ulterior motive? I'm assuming it's class treachery, but feel free to elaborate.

Lacan, Althusser, Zizek et al. never provide the slightest evidence for the primacy of lack. It's an article of faith. And they maintain that revolutions, progressive changes etc come from the site of lack. Zizek celebrates "subjective destitution" as the main element of a revolutionary Act. Badiou theorises the Evental site as the place from which revolutions/Events necessarily happen - the Evental site is the void of the situation, the site of its constitutive lack.

You just proved my point: Marx is closer to Deleuze than to Zizek/Althusser. Calling this an "error" just proves your own anti-Marxism.

That's not exactly what Zizek says (he says that capitalism is hindered by an internal blockage, but the blockage is irremovable without removing production), but let's take your version for a moment. If capitalism is 'unhindered production', why does it frequently suppress things like the drug trade, raves, squatting and *productive* use of abandoned buildings, piracy/cultural bricolage, etc?

Deleuze is closer to the truth: capitalism releases forces of desiring-production, but seeks to extract value from them in fixed terms, and therefore, has to stop the flows going "too far". Schizorevolutionary deterritorialisation is a step beyond capitalist deterritorialisation.

No, this is malice and dishonesty: go fuck a goat, you fucking zoophile.

The "dialectic" stems from the fact that the ideal condition is an end-point and not an original state. The other difference from what you've said is that the immanent creative force is a creative force, not a fixed state. You can't deny that this is what Marx thought, you admitted it yourself earlier in the post: "this is the same error Marx makes in regards to post-capitalist society: he imagines it as finally freed from it shackles, being able to produce without hindrance". Having recognised that THIS IS IN FACT WHAT MARX SAID, why are you now trying to backtrack and make out it's some anti-Marxist misreading I've made up?

That's because the shit you're talking leaves a taste in your mouth. Also from the zoophilia.

Evidence?

Where is your evidence that Lacan, Althusser, or Zizek would recognise this separation of levels?

Zizek constantly talks about capitalism as if it's a psyche: capitalism is perverse or hysterical or psychotic, it has a Symbolic, Imaginary and Real, it has a fundamental fantasy and so on.

That's the Freudian/Lacanian position as far as I can make out. Enjoyment is constitutively impossible. We can "have" it only as something we lack. The goal of therapy is to replace neurotic misery with ordinary unhappiness.

Constitutive lack is a timeless, ahistorical notion.

Then you're not a Marxist.

Your life-activity is engaged in practices which are not of your own choosing (expressive activity), and not for the benefit of humanity, but which you either "have to do" out of necessity or do for extrinsic reasons such as to get rich or buy more stuff or raise your social status (instrumental activity). Well, not YOU personally because you're a basement-dwelling NEET, but that's what workers do. These activities are qualitatively different (there's nothing in common between farming and programming), but are rendered comparable through an arbitrary classification of units of labor-time. Your life, energy, and time are eaten up by processes you don't control, and humanity doesn't control. If the resultant labor benefits humanity, it does so only in a very indirect way, through the distorting mediation of capitalists' profits and investment choices.

There are different Marxist theories of service labor, including the Negrian version (such labor is directly productive of social life; value is now set by command, not exchange), the autonomist feminist version (such labor is reproductive labor which sustains the overall system by reproducing its social relations), the world-systems version (service labor creates superprofit monopolies in command-and-control centres such as world cities) and Harvey's version (service labor inflates artificial, financial capital so as to sustain apparent growth in a period when real production is stagnant or declining). There's also an interesting post-Marxist take in Baudrillard, especially his early works: capitalism is no longer expanding, it's saturated, and therefore, all its activities are now directed towards reproduction and not production. This is still an alienated system, but alienation is now "simulation" without an original referent to which the system has any contact (i.e. postmodern capitalism produces exchange/sign-values without any reference to non-circular use-values).

If there's no alienation (or alienation is unavoidable), what's the point in revolution and communism?

Marx minus alienation just provides a set of descriptive theories of capitalism similar to the classical economists, laying out a series of problems which either can be solved within capitalism or are insoluble.

Isn't this basically Schopenhauer reached in a convoluted way?

Quite possibly. I think the individual still has a substantial existence for Schopenhauer, and for existentialism in general. Lacanian theory has to twist itself in knots to reach such conclusions without a substantive "individual".

[citation needed]

You are injecting a Lacanian analysis of a decentered subject into Communist Praxis / Marxism-in-itself, which is not AT ALL Lacan's object of study.

If you want to critique anti-humanist Marxism as opposed to Anti-Humanism proper it should be directly aimed at Althusser, who did directly make claims onto Marx.

So in your opinion Marxism is a theory of alienation and Communism viz the movement is 'disalienation of man';

If communism is primarily a theory of the internal spirit of man, and an argument that History is an unfolding of spirit, where exactly is the constitutive break between the German Idealists and Marx? Where does History and 'the Real' fit within this framework of an already determined 'unfolding of spirit'.

Are you aware at all of the conceptual lineage of 'alienation' in Marx; have you gone back to read Feuerbach to see exactly what Marx means when he refers to alienation in his young works?

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its radical inversion, is Man, or Nature, or Sinnlichkeit (simultaneously sensuous materiality, receptivity and sensuous inter-subjectivity).

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t. Althusser

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Wrong, You seemingly don't even have a grasp on the objects of these people studies (hence you attempting to construct an idea of Communist Praxis from Lacan and then saying this is universal to all three authors).

It also quite hilarious that the only contradiction that you counter-posit is alienation; thus obliteration any theoretical argument to history or materiality within Marx. After all, how can we be Materialists (you know what that means right?) if it is the eternal soul of man and its teleological disalienation that is 'the real movement'.

Read Kant, Particularly the distinction between the Phenomenal / Noumenal and the Thing-in-itself.

What else can I think when you unironically throw fucking Negri and Bey at me as to be constitutive of Marxist philosophy? If you referenced Lefebvre or Dunayevskaya then I would have been able to perceive what ground you were attacking me from better. Referencing lifestylist anarchists, Late Autonomists and a Pomo mixup; what else am I supposed to think?

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Ignore the last two paragraphs here I double pasted

Is meant to replace the misquote

Lol your 'ulterior motives' are political presuppositions you child, Your "pwning" of theroy is constructing literal straw man to attack; particularly totalzing a singular concept of Lacan to attack as the entirety of 'Anti-Humanist' thought, praxis, and speculation onto Marx.

Moreover your intellectual dishonesty, sophistry and hypocritical standards are completely apparent through all of the rubbish you've been chucking.

You try to attack writers with the lineage that spawned from their works, (even when nobody raised these said derivative authors) like you have done here

and you will simultaneously try to protect your Philosophical Husbandos from the derivative rubbish that has spawned from their works like you have done here:

i.e your Husbando Foucault is only "half-digested" by these id-pol neolibs but Lacan and Althusser are fully digested and thus are directly responsible for derivative theory written after their death.

What is even more intellectually dishonest is you trying to reproach Lacan and Althu for idpol neoliberalism derivative from their works, then attempting to shelter your boys from the same standard AND THEN unironically raising the very same idpol neolibs that were derivative from their works!

Negri claims the death of the Proletarian and talks class struggle emanating totally on post-proletarian identities (read: race, gender etc.) within the opening 100 pages of Empire. Empire was simultaneously Negri's most 'Leftist' work and disintergrated completely in alter-globalization nonsense; he does nothing BUT shill for the EU and muh UBI now.

I'm not even go into Hakim Bey beyond saying he thought 'Burning Man' in the US was representative of an ontological anarchism; have a look what ontological anarchism looks like now.

Also this:

Is literal straight up sophistry and indicative of your intellectual rigor.

Lel a plea to Marxist Orthodoxy from a D&G fanboi; he is clearly referring to the earlier works of Marx and Marx's early conception of Communism (Which he inherited from Feuerbach, Marx wasn't a communist from the womb) as undialectical and idealist i.e a state of man outside of the world, a primordial 'fall' into alienation in this case, and history as the disalienation of man, this is a classic Hegelian bad infinity.

idealist in History. Feuerbach talks about Nature, but […] he does not talk about History – since Nature stands in for it. Feuerbach is not dialectical. And so on.

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Here: in response to which cited a very similar passage from Zizek.

No, ZIZEK AND ALTHUSSER are inserting a Lacanian notion of the decentred subject into Communist Praxis / Marxism.

Marx believed the unfolding is an unfolding of human creative force in the material world, whereas the German idealists (according to Marx) believed that the unfolding happens in spirit, ideas, "geist". One consequence of this is that, for Marx, disalienation is self-expression, whereas for the German idealists, disalienation is subordination to the State and morality. Feuerbach goes furthest prior to Marx (according to Marx) in bringing the driving-force back to materiality / "man", but his view of "man" is still too abstract and philosophical.

The snips are from Althusser, not Marx. The epistemological break is a myth - Althusser's attempt to read his own structuralism backwards into Marx. The account of commodity fetishism in Capital is largely unchanged from the account of alienation in the 1844 Manuscripts.

Since the creative force is transpersonal and not individual, I'm not sure Marx can be called a "humanist" either, but it's safe to say that labor is for Marx what desire is for Deleuze.

Someone cannot be 'materialist' in the Althusserian or Zizekian sense, and also 'materialist' in the Marxist sense. For Marx, materiality refers to sensuous activity in the outer world (in distinction from ideas and "spirit"). For Althusser and Zizek, materiality refers to the primacy of pre-subjective structural determination by the field of discourse or language, and the denial of any element of free activity undetermined by this structure. Marx was not a materialist in their sense.

Again: Althusser and Zizek construct a theory of communist praxis based on Lacan's theory of the subject.

So you're a Kantian? Nice change from your whining about my alleged conflation of Marx into German Idealism. Turns out YOU'RE a German Idealist.

Also, stop showing off, I know what noumenon and phenomenon are. They are not at all relevant here. Maybe Zizek says somewhere that the noumenon is the same thing as the Real. He says all kinds of nonsensical and self-contradictory things. I'll repeat your own point elsewhere: the noumenon and the Real are concepts in completely different spheres of thought with completely different objects. The Real is a category of psychic life in the individual psyche, and the noumenon is a category of epistemology regarding objects in the outer world.

Marx has more in common with Negri and Bey than with Althusser and Zizek. Of course there are also differences.

And you've no ground to stand on with this sad purism, it's not like you're an Orthodox Leninist or whatever. Your approach is not pure "Marxist philosophy" either, but a mixup of Marx, Lacan and structuralism. A lot of the things you say are very pomo - for example, your version of 'materialism' (which I doubt Spivak or Butler would object to).

Yes, and it continues to be at work in all of Marx's work, and most of the Marxist tradition. Except that it is not 'Man' which is the master-concept in Marx, but labor (productive or creative activity).

You can decide Marx was wrong if you like, but this kind of pathetic misreading so as to claim the authority of Marx while denying the content of his writings is just pitiable.

Bey, by the way, gives us some brilliant contributions to the theory of ideology and alienation - the self-invention of values from a position in altered consciousness, the use of immediacy to break down alienation and the Spectacle, a set of techniques for actually reaching disalienated experience. You realise Hegel was also a mystical pantheist, right? Hegelian philosophy was basically secularised pantheism. Except, Hegel was a politically conservative, Kaiser-loving, extreme Eurocentric mystical pantheist. Better Hakim Bey any day.

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subject. I think I can affirm that this category of a process without a subject, which must of course be torn from the grip of Hegelian teleology, undoubtedly represents the greatest theoretical debt linking Marx to Hegel[…]

t. Althusser

(3/3)

Hahaha, triggered.

Do you even know what a motive is?

1. something that causes a person to act in a certain way, do a certain thing, etc.; incentive.
2. the goal or object of a person's actions:
Her motive was revenge.

Oh, and yes, I have different political presuppositions from you. Get over it.

That's legitimate, it's called genealogy, and often it gives the meanings of concepts. Zizek is unapologetic about his use of Lacan.

Idpols and pomos do not misuse Lacan, Derrida or Althusser. They severely misread Foucault and Deleuze.

I used Spivak to prove the point that idpol is Althusserian. Nothing dishonest there.

And Zizek has done what, exactly?

Ran as a neoliberal candidate for president, supported the NATO war in Yugoslavia, praised Bush, denounced the anti-capitalist movement, portrayed sexual harassment as a feminist conspiracy, supported the bombing of Afghanistan, shilled for Trump, argued against punching Nazis… all the while spouting half-digested philosophy while out of his head on coke.

A T.A.Z., by the way, will often degenerate as it gets captured by the Spectacle, and become just another commodity. That's a central plank of Bey's theory.

I know what Althusser argues you fucktard. I just don't agree with it. There is no exegetically demonstrable epistemic break in Marx. Commodity fetishism = alienation.

You wanna argue with that? Try quoting Marx, not Althusser.

Hegel was a pantheist. The subject of history is God, who is also everything which exists (including us). By the way, we also find a "process without [individual] subject" in Deleuze (desiring-production), Derrida (textuality), Bey (chaos), Negri (the general intellect), etc.

Lmao reddit get out.

Structural adjustment: "if it works, why not try a dose of it?"
ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/zizek-the-most-dangerous-thinker-in-the-west/

Sexual harassment
lrb.co.uk/v21/n06/slavoj-zizek/you-may

Praises Bush
lacan.com/zizhooray.htm

No punching Nazis
qz.com/896463/is-it-ok-to-punch-a-nazi-philosopher-slavoj-zizek-talks-richard-spencer-nazis-and-donald-trump/

Supported Trump
news.vice.com/story/far-left-philosopher-slavoj-zizek-explains-why-he-suppored-trump-over-clinton

Supporting the bombing of Yugoslavia:
criticatac.ro/lefteast/critique-of-zizek-on-kosovo-and-the-balkans-3/
academia.edu/15072111/To_Begin_at_the_Beginning_Again_Zizek_in_Yugoslavia

Supporting the Afghanistan war; " America should learn humbly to accept its own vulnerability as part of this world, enacting the punishment of those responsible as a sad duty, not as an exhilarating retaliation"
rebels-library.org/files/zizek_welcome.pdf

I can't find the quote about summit protesters just copying world leaders, but I remember him saying it.

Do you even know what a ideology is?

Okay fam

Well first of all, He critiqued Negri directly about his idealist vision of UBI, his ridiculous ideal of the EU as some progressive Deleuzian Deterritorialization and long before we began to see the current disintegration of the EU critiqued Negri for failing to even have a modicum of understanding Lenin's basic writing on Imperialism and noted how Negri's entire worldview is actually based on a Kautskyism i.e notions of 'Ultra-Imperialism'.

I'll get this in the next post.

Communist praxis is 'What is to be done' Marxism-in-itself, is the Writing's of Marx considered 'in-itself' and outside of the history-of-theory that we call "Marxism". Lacan's analysis of the Decentered Subject has, as its object of study, the phenomenal reality of individuals; NOT communist praxis or Marxism-in-itself (note the Lacan used Marx for his own theories, he wasn't speculating directly about interpretation of Marx, it was Marx's "invention of the Symptom" that Lacan deduced and went on with).

It was Althusser that wrote about Marx's theoretical revolution; the split from the German Idealists and produced (if you had ever actually read him) a very precise reading of Marx where he elucidates EXACTLY the nature of Marx's idealism, the theoretical lineage of where that idealism came from and how exactly Marx would over come it.

[I will expand on this with quotes in a later post]

What you are attempting to is take a Singular concept from Lacan (the decentered subject, which concerns the psychic life of the individual), Construe all 'Anti-Humanism' as such and then burn that strawman.

Fuck, you're dumb.

I KNOW WHAT ALTHUSSER SAID ABOUT THE EPISTEMIC BREAK.

He is EXEGETICALLY WRONG.

You're trolling? Or you think I'm trolling?

I don't really know what to do with this word-salad, but it sounds suspiciously like you're making excuses for misreading Marx on the basis that "Marx can only be understood through Marxism as a movement" - ironic, given that you just criticised me for showing how Althusser led to idpol.

Althusser, Badiou and Zizek apply the Lacanian model of the subject to communist praxis and "Marxism-in-itself".

By the way, a Kantian in-itself is inaccessible. The level of theoretical illiteracy in your account continues to astound me.

I'm not a huge fan of Negri (he's nowhere near radical enough and his theory of alienation is weak/nonexistent), but he's a lot closer to Marx than Zizek is, and he has a lot more to offer. If we aren't going to have a revolution soon, or if we're keeping money after the revolution, then UBI is a brilliant idea.

What's your problem with UBI exactly? You have a hard-on for forced work?

It's only a strawman if it's inaccurate. Zizek believes in the Lacanian view of the subject and applies it to politics.

How else do you explain a passage like the one you cited above - that communism is a utopian fantasy because it's impossible to have production without its internal blockage? This is EXACTLY the Lacanian theory of fantasy.

Althusser's theory of class/political subjects is derived from Lacan's theory of individual subjects.

Ill respond to this in a moment; I'm extracting quotes from 1844, German Ideology, Theses on Feuerbach and Capital to answer

...

No, they use the concept to speculate what it means for communist praxis; they don't directly inject the Lacanian subject and say THATS IT! thats communist praxis: as you attempt to assert with your example here This is the hinge of your entire argument against Anti-Humanism but you don't even have the concepts in proper relations to their subject of study. As said

The in-itself is indeed inaccessible, it is a 'thing' considered divorced from, in the original Kantian sense, Space and Time (with more categories being added with later Idealists).

Marxism-in-itself thus is Marxism divorced from parameters of time and the world and our sensuous interpretation of it; 'How it Really is'.

Just because something is unreachable doesn't mean we can't think about things in themselves using the categories otherwise we fall into solipsism.

Its utopian reformism; a revolution without the revolution so to speak. I am not against it in the sense that I would actively oppose it, just that it is not of radical concern.

Your getting close to the ball park; It is fairly in vein to an ultraleft reading of Marx i.e 'Communism is the movement that abolishes the present state of things'

Communism viz 'the real movement' is a phantasm conjured by Capitalism itself i.e Capitalism as it exists in a temporal-point and the Negation of it caused by Capitalism's own inherent contradictions. The internal contradiction is the class struggle i.e the master-slave dialectic; not 'alienation'.

bump

UU
UU

Also to expand on the last point; ill paste Zizek's speculations of Communist praxis which he draws from a 'Lacanian Ethics of Practical Anti-Humanism' (as opposed to Theoretical-Anti-Humanism!) that I reproduced

Here:

Conclusion - The Politics of Terror

...

Bump for actual theory thread and crypto-analyticals getting BTFO.

You'd be sent to Goli Otok if you did anything but tow that line, you absolute faggot.

insurgentnotes.com/2013/10/yugoslav-self-management-capitalism-under-the-red-banner/

I will post an interesting article that I read the other day

>thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/

Its is about 🍀🍀🍀The CIA🍀🍀🍀 and their movements within Parisian intellectual circles and what our boys in blue thought of some of the blokes being discussed ITT.

bump

bump

Ill post a small cut from Zizek's 'Absolute Recoil' that I posted in this thread that deals with depression but also contains a criticism of Negri and I think is also relevant to this thread

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(2/4)

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(4/4)

Bump

Holy fucking shit so many goddamn WORDS words words words words in this thread

How can you fuckers stand yourselves?

I am the idiot son of a construction worker. I want to smash the capitalist state and see the means of production directed to satisfying human need and not the profits of a tiny minority.

How does any of this endless fucking talk talk talk talking about fucking anti-humanism or psychoanalysis or idle French philosophers help with that goal?

It helps us know how to smash the capitalist state and what to do afterwards.

I'd wager that if it weren't for french philosophers all revolutions would be an endless cycle of faschism too.

Oh? And what has the armchair philosophy squad decided?

Seriously, somebody please restate the main arguments in this thread in plain English. Also helpful would be a plain summary of how any of this endless fucking blithering relates to the concrete tasks of helping the working class create a revolution.

I'm not being funny here. I am seriously an idiot, I admit that, and I want to know how to fight capitalism and what kind of society we can build that remedies the constant injustices that capitalism has created.

Also,
It's been 200 fuckin' years, duder. We've had a ton of revolutionary moments and a couple revolutions, we've listened to a lot of idle middle-class shitheads, we've had a lot of authoritarian bullshit spring up and repress the working class. I'm not sure where you get off saying that they've saved us from endless cycles of fascism [if by fascism you mean the most brutal and exploitative kind of capitalism and not like literally Mussolini].

I notice how they never appeared.

Also, I notice how you keep using “I”. Don't you mean “the authorless historical process is extracting quotes which I'm misperceiving as my own agency”?

By the way, proof Marx was still a humanist/believed in agency:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past ” (18th brumaire, 1952)

“However that may be, the present rising in Paris – even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society – is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June insurrection in Paris. Compare these Parisians, storming heaven, with the slave to heaven of the German-Prussian Holy Roman Empire ” (Letter, 1871)

“Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure ”
“Since the relative form of value of a commodity – the linen, for example – expresses the value of that commodity, as being something wholly different from its substance and properties, as being, for instance, coat-like, we see that this expression itself indicates that some social relation lies at the bottom of it. ”
“There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. ” (Capital volume 1)

There is no motherfucking epistemic break except in Althusser's head.

More empty assertion on your part.

See quotes above:

It's pretty fucking obvious that this is the Lacanian subject at its purest, applied directly to communist praxis.

Nope. If we can't reach the in-itself then any categories we use to describe it are mere speculation. We don't end up at solipsism because we are still able to talk about observed phenomena or even to theorise invisible causes of observed phenomena.

Talking about a 'How it Really Is' to which we have no access and for which we have no sensory evidence is no different from Christian thinking about God.

In that case, we should also examine Lacan, Althusser and Zizek in light of the real movement of their thought. The real movement of their thought is that it spawned idpol.

Do you have any evidence that Marx believed this?

The master-slave dialectic is Hegelian, not Marxist. It rests on the representational struggle for recognition in the field of the 'superstructures' and the 'ideal'. No wonder Althusser gave birth to idpol.

You make capitalism, not labour, the main determinant force, and labour its shadow – an utterly un-Marxist and unprogressive approach, basically an inversion of autonomia.

This is idealism in its purest form – dismissing any understanding of the real circumstances so as to impose an arbitrary law from a standpoint of sovereignty. This is what Fichte believed – human liberation is the subordination of concrete reality to a universal Law – and it's how bourgeois “justice” operates – look at how it ignores the failure of the “war on drugs”, how it ruthlessly crushes whistleblowers and salafis, the 'ruthless will' to crush enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq or to punish hackers or drug dealers wherever they are in the world, how it ignores real causality such as the role of poverty in causing crime, or even things like psychological problems etc.

It is the direct opposite of the Marxist approach to justice, exemplified in the radical criminology of the 1970s, which rejects or weakens responsibility and punishment and instead focuses on solving the social causes of crime, such as poverty. Radical criminology is accountable to the real movement of historical forces; Zizek's idealist “terror” is just a means to install a new master-signifier, i.e. to reproduce the conservative structure of the psyche/reality as posited by Lacanians.

Its is about 🍀🍀🍀The CIA🍀🍀🍀 and their movements within Parisian intellectual circles and what our boys in blue thought of some of the blokes being discussed ITT.

I would not be at all surprised if they somehow bankrolled or quietly managed the rise of lack-fetishism of the kind propagated by Zizek, the rise of idpol, and the Anglo-American reception (read: political castration) of pomo/poststructuralism. I suspect, however, that all of this was actually managed through the rather less spectacular control-structures of academic patronage and Eurocommunism.

Neither, Berardi is an autonomist, he does not use the idea of interpellation. He uses something closer to a Deleuzian or Negrian model. What he actually talks about is not the big Other, but 'attentive stress' – a flow of greater quantities of information and stimulation than human bodies/minds can handle. The implications of his theory are that this form of forced work can be resisted by slowing down – perhaps in the form of drop-out communities.

The political stake here is: are we going to accept that some kind of terroristic dictatorship is necessary in any society, as a way to establish a socio-symbolic Order which gives us a sense of stability (the Zizek-Lacan-Althusser-Hobbes-Schmitt-Trump option)? Or are we aiming for a society which overcomes alienation and releases creative force, as something which does not require any such grounding (the Marx-Deleuze-Negri-Bey-Bergson-Spinoza-Nietzsche option)?

Note that this isn't a matter of tankies vs anarchists. Stalin also believed that a disalienated society was possible and desirable, but he believed that dictatorship was a necessary step to achieve it. All Marxists are on the second side of the pole. The first side is firmly conservative.

Since this Zizek-licker and I have different views of the stakes, and the content of the theories involved, we'd probably summarise their significance differently.

Simple version from my point of view:

Zizek and his side believe that human life is defined by scarcity and lack.

They also believe, we don't really have agency. We're determined by social structures. Who we think we are as a person (“subject”), and how we act, are effects of something called “interpellation”.

Interpellation is when someone calls you out and says “hey you” - and you recognise yourself in the statement. You only think you're capable of action, or that the world makes sense, because you've been interpellated in this way (starting in childhood).

The illusion that we can do without the scarcity and suffering inherent in the human condition is sometimes expressed in 'fantasies' and 'ideologies'. The idea that we can get rid of alienating forms of social control through communism is an example of such a fantasy. If we get rid of capitalism, we'll also get rid of productive force and labour.

There always has to be interpellation, otherwise we'd go mad.

Radical politics cannot be based on desire, or on existing subjectivities (i.e. who we think we are – worker, citizen, etc), because desires and identities are effects of interpellation. They necessarily reproduce the existing dominant structure.

Revolution consists in tearing down the interpellations we already have, and building up a new set, with a different master-signifier. There always has to be a social order of this kind, and there always have to be people excluded from it. People will always feel they lack something, and will always find other people to blame for this lack. So we'll always have society like it is today, but the parts can be reshuffled somewhat. For example, a socialist society might make the 'working-class' the master signifier, but it would have to really be a political elite claiming arbitrarily to represent the working-class (i.e. the anti-Stalinist image of Stalinism). The focus, though, is on self-change – going through an 'Act', subjective destitution (destruction of your sense of self), and rebirth as a new kind of person.

People who favour this kind of politics are very reticent to lay out its implications. What is clear is the following. Firstly, authoritarian power and alienation are unavoidable. They will exist in every society – even full communism. Secondly, revolution requires 'subjective destitution' – the utter destruction of your sense of who you are. For the revolutionaries, not just the counter-revolutionaries. In effect, revolution is self-help, taken in a nihilistic direction.

continued

My side of the debate:

Marx believed that we're actually incarnations of a creative force, known as “labour” or “creative activity”. In capitalism, this activity is coerced and stolen from us. In full communism, we will live by our creative activity. Socialism consists in expanding the sphere controlled by the force of creative activity, and paring back or destroying the sphere which is alienated.

The other authors I raised – Deleuze, Bergson, Bey, Negri, etc – all believe in some kind of creative vital force underpinning human life. This vital force is more fundamental than social structures. People aren't created by interpellations. People are created by flows of creative force, which form combinations with other flows of creative force. Interpellations come later – as ways of channelling or restricting creative force.

The 'madness' that arises without interpellation is a good thing. It leads to the possibility of a different kind of social connection – the rhizome. In a rhizome, people form connections with other people, things, animals etc based on vital flows, attractions and resonances.

Revolutionary politics consists in freeing creative force from its entrapment into structures of alienation and control.

Anarchist and autonomist approaches are the closest approximation to this approach: social centres, affinity groups, squatting, New Travellers, communes, polyamory, 'Queering' or unmooring desire, hacking, recreating subsistence economies, dumpster-diving, riots/insurrections, urban farming, guerrilla gardening, altered consciousness, illicit border-crossing, piracy, blockades, occupations, loose-knit networks, informal organisation, free parties, raves, skill-shares, consciousness-raising groups, self-defence classes, bushcraft, slacking-off, dropping-out, etc. Although, there is no one path – it depends on following your own desire, and joining up with others following the same or different desires. Of course, minus the idpol cancer which is killing autonomous politics today.

I mean literally mussolini, or something similar, an anti-establishment figure which makes waves then becomes the establishment again because they haven't managed to achieve substantial change.
this article really opened my eyes about how socialism necessarily needs to be more than anti-elitism
bunkermag.org/a-defense-why-we-are-pro-israel/

This. Marx was a humanist till he died. He returned to using Hegellian jargon before he died. Why is there less of in Capital? Marx wanted Capital to be read by the press, workers, and taken seriously by other economist. The answer is really that simple, but Althusser invents a fantasy around it because he's a hack. He should really admit that he's not being faithful to Marx but rather pushing his own reading of Marx as how Marx intended it to be interpreted which reminds me of a word that starts with "r". That's not to say Marx's thought did not evolve. For example, he believed in the "iron laws of wages" when he wrote the Manifesto but he actively argues against this in Capital V1. I like some of Zizek's cultural commentary but Althusser and the like never come close to Lukasc in terms of accurately reading and building on concepts like "abstract labour" and "class consciousness". The epistemological break does not exist. I think it's sad that an Anarcho-prim is able to do a better reading of Marx than a Leftcom.

Thanks for replying!

I hope I'm not oversimplifying, but it sounds an awful lot like this whole debate breaks down to the whole Socialism-From-Above/Socialism-From-Below thing in Hal Draper's 'The Two Souls of Socialism', only with way more wanky philosophy terms thrown in to obscure the middle-class paternalism.

If that's an accurate summary, then this is a pretty old argument, right? Like it dates back all the way to when Marx first said that the working class had to be the agent of its own liberation and other middle class intellectuals were all like, 'well sure, but he doesn't really mean that though' and proceeded to spend the next 200 years coming up with increasingly wordy justifications for why the workers need to be subject to someone else's interests.

Anyway you kind of lose me on your second post. Some of it sounds like woo-woo hippy stuff ('people forming connections with animals based on vital flows, attractions and resonances?).

But the main thing I don't get is the kinds of activity you propose. That stuff sounds like all the stuff silly college kids were doing in the 60's while workers were forming militant, radical unions in the car factories of Detroit and Turin.

Like, did I miss some sort of theory boat here? What happened to organising workers at the point of production, where they have the most economic power? It seems like nobody really does that anymore, and coincidentally the left is the most moribund that it ever has been. Is there something in the verbal chaff above me that explains why people are taking drugs in abandoned houses instead of aiding the formation of militant democratic unions?

I will attempt to produce a long form reply in response to this debate to put out an understandable "closed Idea" of what I am aiming towards and some idea of what it is a stake.

This debate has helped me, over the past couple of days, put together a broad schematic of of how some of the ideas and debates 'plug in' with each other.

It will take me a little while to put this all together tho

discord.gg/4hT3RVr

discord.gg/4hT3RVr

discord.gg/4hT3RVr

Holla Forums discord

Did you make the wrong link or something? I clicked on that and got shunted into some shitty anime discussion. Which frankly confirms a few suspicions I had about people who like to talk endlessly about Zizek.

Yeah, kinda.

Well, a few things happened.

One of them is that hardly any of the big radical movements in the last 70 years came from the industrial working-class. They were well and truly seduced by the system, or controlled by the reformist unions.

Another change: the focus of capitalist value-production is no longer on industry, but on "services". The proportion of workers employed in industry is at an all-time low.

The point of production is no longer the strategic site to disrupt capital. Capital relies more on circulation, consumption and services than on industry. It makes more sense to block a road, shut down a website or smash shops than it does to shut down factories which are already running at half-capacity or are already closed.

Industrial work in the old industrial centers has been run-down and outsourced to the poorest countries. The workers there are hard to organize (though they're starting to organize in China, Bangladesh etc).

Then there's "precarity" - workers have become temporary, casual or unemployed, and are in a bewildering array of different workplace situations - not at all the old homogeneous factories. A lot of industrial work is done today by migrant workers, internal migrants in countries like China, women working from home, farmers working to supplement their income, officially "self-employed" workers and so on.

There's a whole autonomist theory of workplace organising, though. Slacking off, petty sabotage, calling in sickies, wildcat strikes, base unions… check out people like Sergio Bologna and Romano Alquati, and (more recently) the Kolinko collective.

The ways Chinese and Bangladeshi workers, migrants in the Gulf and so on are organising is much more Deleuzian than Zizekian - they take sudden, dramatic actions as small leaderless groups, often protesting in the streets, blockading things and rioting. They also engage in small everyday resistances like absconding and slowing down production.

Are you even capable of plain English?

Tip: in the English language, capitals are for proper nouns and the start of sentences. Capitals for concepts - that's German. Putting the word "the" before abstract nouns/adjectives (the political, the symbolic etc) - that's French or Spanish.

I have no idea what a "closed Idea" is. A close approximation? A dogmatic idea?

I use some big fucking words as well, but at least I *try* to talk to working-class people.

I feel like a real stick-in-the-mud here, but not much of the conditions you describe there sound new.

The mythical age of the secure factory job was a blip in the history of capitalism, only really a meaningful feature of the post-war boom times. Even then it only really happened for a small subset of workers. For the rest of the last 200 years workers have been forced to organise under extremely precarious conditions: I mean if sheep shearers in the Australian outback of the late 1800's can organise, it seems a bit much to suggest that workers in gigantic call centres are less able to organise.

I take your point about the declining proportion of industrial workers, and I think that organising people in forcibly excluded from capitalism through structural unemployment using some of the tactics described in your post would be helpful, especially for developing support for workers and the oppressed in struggle. Maybe I'm a starry-eyed Red, but I could totally see urban gardeners and occupations keeping struggling workers fed and housed while they fight the bosses.

However, I still think traditional forms of working class organisation have some life in them yet. After all, while industrial production in the first world has gone down, global production and first world consumption has gone up. Stuff is still getting made, it's just that we're only employing people to ship it in and sell it. So we can't disrupt manufacturing much in the first world, but that still leaves the distribution network and consumption infrastructure.

As a matter of fact, of the last 3 pickets I visited, two were at distribution warehouses for major companies and the other was on the waterfront. Between that and the recent organising drives among fast food workers and Walmart employees over in America, I think it's fair to say that even the first world working class still has the power to stop the flow of commodities if they organise.

I mean I'm not in principle against going out to 'block a road, shut down a website or smash shops', I just think that there are workers in the warehouses, the trucks, running the websites and staffing the stores, and that the cause of socialism would be much better served bringing those workers together to force their demands on the bosses.

I worry that you describe in glowing terms the kind of actions that would be in previous decades considered desperate and disorganised. I mean chucking a sickie is just a strike for workers that don't have the organisational strength to picket, fundamentally.

It seems to me that the pattern for the Left these days is short, loud actions that don't survive past the end of the action. You see that sort of stuff in places like China and Bangladesh because they'll get shot for forming a non-yellow union and they don't have the organisational strength to resist. I feel like we can aim a little higher in the first world.

Oh no, have I become the wordy prick I complained about when I came in here? No, I've managed to avoid referring to anyone as a 'Lacanian subject', I think I'm good.

Yes, and I think if you look at forms of protest and revolt outside of that "blip", you'll find it looks quite like the range I suggested. For instance, the working-class in eighteenth-century England didn't have unions yet, but they had Luddism, riots, poaching, social banditry, etc. There's an interesting book - Clover, "Riot, Strike, Riot" - which deals with this issue.

Yes, that's often how it works - perhaps the most successful movement of the last 15 years has been in Bolivia, where worker-peasants used subsistence and everyday social forms (e.g. the aaylu) to sustain militant tactics such as roadblocks, occupations and riots. An aaylu is pretty much a workers' council, except that it already exists before the revolutionary moment, it's embedded in everyday practices of subsistence and petty resistance.

Yeah, that's pretty much how it works. Labor organizing is a lot more effective in countries like China, Bangladesh, Qatar, where there's more workers. This might change if there's massive automation though - I think it's only the super-low wages in these places which prevents automation. There's also large swathes of the global South which are cut off from the formal economy and where most people are unemployed and surviving through informal strategies - most of Africa, Haiti, Colombia, parts of India. I remember reading that no more than 10% of people are formal workers in a lot of African countries, and they're relatively well-off people. Everyone else are subsistence farmers, street traders, taxi drivers, hustlers and so on. Sometimes in big protest movements, like Occupy Nigeria, the driving force comes from the formal-sector unions, but the street power comes from the informal-sector poor. Often the unions are the ones who sell-out, as well.

Yes - a lot of the sectors which still fight are in transport and distribution - airline workers, train drivers, teamsters, taxi drivers, dockers - and their power comes from the fact that, for them, a strike is also a blockade. Some of them block roads when they strike. Other groups of workers also use strike/blockade combos - the bandh in India for example, or street protests in China.

Continued…

I think the discontinuous nature of much protest today is more complicated than you're making out. A lot of 'Third World' countries allow non-yellow unions - Bangladesh, India, most of Latin America - but it tends to be the more stable, better-off workers who unionise. China and the Gulf don't allow independent unions, but they won't shoot people for underground organizing - the Gulf just arbitrarily deport them, China has jailed a few people but often actually gives way to mass movements. Certainly the structure in China encourages temporary informal organizing and discourages big linked-up organizations, but it's quite unlikely the migrant workers would be in unions anyway - a lot of them don't even identify as working-class.

The difficulty (both North and South) is rather more that people have ephemeral, temporary relationships to their work. They don't have strong identities as 'workers', they don't have strong commitments to one workplace or sector, and as a result, they aren't drawn to forms of organizing which provide long-term, sector-specific solidarity (and which are often captured by reformists and bureaucrats anyway). They're much more drawn to sudden explosions of action which "go viral", channel all the diffuse discontent and then vanish as quickly as they emerged. If you think about it, a lot of social life is like this nowadays - consumer fads, Internet trends, memes - so it fits with the zeitgeist. I think you're right that these actions don't last very long and often, don't achieve very much. It particularly bothers me how easy it is for the state to take repressive action after the fact, because the movement has largely dissipated.

I've been bored and shitposting around leftypol for a couple of days now looking for someone who isn't completely insane, I'm glad there's at least one person. At this point I'm pretty sure we're on the same wavelength - at first I thought you were like some of the anarchists I've met irl who are way more hostile to actual organising than their ideology lets on, but you totally know your shit.

The bit about the Bolivian aaylus is very interesting, I hadn't heard about them before. I'm very interested in the formation of workers' councils like the soviets (obv), the Chilean cordones and the Iranian shoras. Especially the way that vanguard parties never seem to recognise the actual vanguard when it passes them by. It looks like I have even more reading to do!

I feel a lot of activism these days is between a rock and a hard place - it's either one of the quick, viral-style events that you describe, over before it really even needs repressing, or it ends up getting sucked in to one or another of the lumbering, old, thoroughly undemocratic unions or social democratic parties.

It's funny really, all the casual workers and migrants who, as you rightly say, don't really think of themselves as workers are exactly the people that unions need to be pushing hard to recruit if they want to get anywhere. The problem of course being that that kind of influx of membership would undermine the little fiefdoms the union bureaucracies have carved out for themselves.

It's why I get so pissed off with the woo-woo discussions of Lacanian philosophy or whatever - the tasks facing the left are so monumental, and there are so many practical tasks to be done in the real world, why is every left-winger I can see on my computer sitting around trying to put Hegel back on his feet? Surely it can't be the case that everyone else here is in the same position as me - shitposting until they can get back to a city of consequence so they can raise hell again.

That's about it, comrade. In my case, shitposting because everything around me has turned to idpol or social-democracy, and the people I'd organise with are either burnt-out or defected to idpol.

They say Gramsci only wrote his Prison Notebooks because he couldn't take part in actual organizing any more. He felt the need to write something for the future, because there was nothing left in the present. At least they didn't have Communication Management Units back then. It's scary to think that communist prisoners had more rights in fascist Italy than they do in modern America.

Okay everyone,

I have returned; as I'm sure you've all been anxiously awaiting.

Before I begin I must issue two apologies.

First.

To whom ever is reading this post or this thread we are going to disappoint you at this specific historical coordinate. We hope to make it up to you at a future point.

We have been reproached in this thread for committing a performative error; we couldn't hope to sum it up better than the particular reproachment so we will just link to this reproachment and say that we couldn't agree more:

Second.

Apologies to the person or people I interacted with in this thread, I behaved myself terribly, insults were thrown; tempers flared and so on.

To this person in particular we owe a debt of gratitude; you unironically really made us think, and from the chaos of us thinking you really shuffled some of our brain nuggets.

Let us speak to you specifically in a way that I think you may be able understand; we are deliberately making ourselves imperceptible here, you have humbled us, we used to think ourselves intelligent, more intelligent than most others. Out of some sense of habits and manners we would feign a face humbleness but it was still something we sincerely believed. From the Chaosmosis of our conversation with the dial turned toward the intensive, a new plateau burst forth within my mind, and with new plateaus; new lines of flight and so on. You have led us to a Eureka moment, you forced me to stare at the gold where before my own ignorance precluded me from seeing it, a truth of radical proportions orbits the tip of your tongue my friend.

So back to addressing any interested party.

We mentioned a Eureka moment, so what was that Eureka?

We will not spoil all of our thought to come. We will just say this: we have reconciled anti-humanism and humanism; this leads to a seeming incongruity of course but that is the claim we stake in the ground and the idea to explain.

The applications of this reconciliation are so radical that I must begin again to look at the world with an entirely new set of eyes.

We believe we can explain it to you quite easily but it will take some time. We believe we can show you how to lift your skinny fists like antennas to heaven.

We have already explained it to another. We did it with speech. A non-Communist became a Communist but of a particular kind and of a particular date. One divides into Two. The two of us have almost explained it to two more too. Two is in process of dividing into four.

Let us come back to our apology, we said we would disappoint and we meant it.

We can not post our material yet.

I am already 20 pages into a manifesto but it will take time. I have spent every waking moment since I last left this thread feverishly trying to get it all down.

We are already multiple working on the manifesto; we can get it out quick but not quick enough.

We have to depart now; we will not return to the tribe with out bringing back the goods we said were in the cave.

We will leave a working name so you have a trace to remember us by if we come to meet again.

An Attempt to Suture a Gushing Wound:
Orientations Toward Imperceptible Orders, Structures and Objects.

We depart from here now, take care friends we hope we can meet again.