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4.13.2004

the inevitable bush speech post 

while it is true that there are better things i could be doing right now, i just read this article on the NYtimes website a moment ago, assessing the president's speech tonight. conferences of this sort are always most interesting in their awkward moments, and it is unfortunate to see the level to which the times glossed over a big one. here's the quote from the article:

"I don't want to sound like I've made no mistakes; I'm confident I have," he said, but added, "Maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."

to read the article, one would assume that this quote is a response to a question about the president's handling of iraq. it's not. he's responding to one of the more interesting questions of the night-- a follow-up question to one he was asked on the campaign trail prior to his election. the question was, in essence, "what do you see as your greatest mistake??" the reporter even mentioned that bush's original (lighthearted) answer was "trading sammy sosa." with 9/11 in the background, he had no answer this time. and the scene was rather squirmy.

personally, to put my cards on the table, i'm less concerned with "what could have been done" in regards to 9/11-- or bush's hand in it, even-- than i am with accuracy and manipulation in reporting. so i thought it was worth pointing out. to my audience of, like, 5 or whatever. hahaha.

the ethics of the real, alenka zupancic 

alenka zupancic's ethics of the real is a good example of what i like about theory/philosophy-- namely the frustrating, illuminating momentum i feel while deep in the throes of partial understanding. upon finishing this book about a week back, i felt confused and provoked and perplexed and engaged. none of which lends itself to much other than "word salad," which is all i can promise is about to follow...

the book is concentrated, more or less, on a big idea--namely the grounds of ethics itself. it strikes me as an unfashionable subject (regardless of zupancic's involvement with often similarly-minded hegalian/lacanian slavoj zizek). i find that people who read authors like zupancic or zizek, or any number of "post..." texts in general (be they post-marxism... modernism... structuralism, or even "posthuman") often shy away from the idea of "ethics," in favor of affect or pleasure or difference or what have you. i certainly fear the term myself. there's a kind of oppressive ring to "ethics," but that doesn't make them any less inevitable.

zupancic's project in this book is to bring together the seemingly strange bedfellows of kant and lacan. to be more specific, she attempts to work through the more peculiar kernels of kantian ethics, in an attempt to align them (somewhat) with lacan's notion of the real. zupancic follows lacan's comparison of kant to sade, which exposed the sinister ends to which kantian ethics could theoretically be applied. kant is both stubborn and extreme in his insistence that ethics aren't grounded in the "pathological" motivations of everyday life, and if you follow his logic far enough in a certain direction, a sadean gesture could be as ethical as a saintly one. in his attempt to rid the ethical of all residue of worldy desire, a dimension emerges in which the accepted conventions of "good behavior" come into question as well.

zupancic devotes considerable time to the example of dangerous liasons. even i know the story, having never read the book nor seen the most famous film version. it concerns a pact between two libertines to destroy the moral character of a "decent" woman through seduction. zupancic contends that the only truly "ethical" character in the book/film/films is the malicious marquise de merteuil (i.e. glenn close or buffy the vampire slayer), because valmont (malkovich/legally blonde's hubby)-- by internalizing his love for madame de tourvel-- abandons his diabolically ethical project, and submits to "pathological" desire. zupancic-- like kant, i would argue-- is concerned with "extremes" here-- the icy extreme of living in accordance to a coda with the potential to do away with the dimension of desire completely.

as someone having no problem with the dimension of desire in question (as well as a festering contempt for any notion of purity, frankly), it was here that i had my "why am i reading this??" moment. and in attempting to answer that question, the book became more interesting. in the first place, zupancic is fairly down to earth in all of this. she utilizes enlightening examples (and with less lightning speed than zizek), and seems less hostile to "the pathological" than simply indifferent to it (when indifference is needed, at least-- all of this gets very complicated by the book's end). secondly-- and more interestingly-- if one conceives of this dimension of ethics in the political realm, it opens up the perhaps useful possibility of an action occurring outside of the realm of political persuasion, and maybe even ideology itself.

zupancic is careful not to flesh things out too prematurely, and the result is less of a manifesto than you might guess going into it. particularly towards the end, when she moves into the lacanian "real" in greater detail, the difficulty of such a phenomenon comes to the forefront. through a long, well thought out analysis of sygne de coufontaigne, a character from claudel's the hostage, she distinguishes between a classical concept of ethics (i.e. that of kant, which she aligns with fear quite persuasively), and what may be a more radical dimension whereby the finite grounds of the absolute condition (i.e. "the one thing which one cannot give away") produces an excess in its expression which gives rise to the dimension of the infinite itself.

**sidenote: talking to my friend justin about the book, we were both wondering if an ethic of the real could be a conscious act at all, and that perhaps it must be something that escapes from the unconscious to forever change the ethical stakes of action in its wake.**

all of this is linked to lacan's concept of drive as something seperate from desire. and though the questioning of desire became more and more enlightening as i made my way through the book, i still find something unsatisfying in the drive/desire (or, to use kant, the pathological/categorical) dichotomy. i'm still thinking this through, but i find that this split doesn't properly account for a poetic dimension, perhaps. it seems to me that there is a dimension of poetic enjoyment that is of a different nature than that of lacanian "drive" (a mouth that enjoys the act of eating in and of itself, etc.), while at the same time avoiding the closure of lacanian "desire." put more succinctly, i think there is a dimension to metonymy-- a kind of spiraling dimension-- that is indifferent to attaining an ultimate (non-exisitent) object. perhaps i'm simply imagining a hybrid of the two poles-- and i'm sure there's plenty of lacan that i haven't read to address this-- but i find the book lacks a rich enough concept of enjoyment at points.

still, it's very thought-provoking stuff. and it's good to hear the lacanian logic from a voice other than zizek's. zizek is at times such a performer that you can get caught up in the seduction of his writing style as opposed to the content (not that that's neccessarily bad). zupancic's writing is a bit fleshier in a sense.

**sidenote: prior to the release of kill bill: vol.2, i must say that this book helped figure out what struck me as bizarre and engaging about volume one. isn't uma thurman's singular, quasi-robotic sadism an appropriate expression of "kant with sade"?? the thing i liked about kill bill most was its chilly plotless-ness. its strangely formal sadism is extremely rare in american movies (although, perhaps, not so much in japanese samurai movies-- but that's another can of worms). in zupancic's realm, the gory extremes of thurman's hacking and chopping and socking remain frightfully ethical (save about thirty seconds worth of familiar, genre-specific context). perhaps an expressive image of an "ethic of the real" would be that of newly conscious uma thurman, slamming a man's head into a doorway over and over again exclaiming "where's bill??? where's bill!!!" at the top of her lungs. there's something powerfully focused about that movie, for better or worse. i hope tarantino doesn't fuck up the second one by resorting to a bunch of macho mumbo jumbo about women protecting their children or whatever. can't wait to see it...**


4.11.2004

happy easter 

i promise some real posts soon. in the meantime...


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