Miguel Afonso Caetano on Wed, 14 Jan 2015 17:44:45 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Crisis 2.0 - the political turn (some comments) |
2015-01-14 8:07 GMT+00:00 Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>: Hello, Brian. On an opposite end of the spectrum, I encourage you to read the interview with Luz, the cartoonist of Charlie Hebdo, which Patrice Riemens sent to this list. Some of the things this man says are just astonishing to me. He claims that the group of caricaturists at Charlie did not want to deal with grand symbolic figures but with very specific things, images that make sense and are funny in France. But on what planet does this guy live? How can he see caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad as anything else but a symbol, a charged cliche, a hot-button item, a waving red cloak in a vast international bull ring? I am sorry to criticize someone whose loss has been so great, but it's pure narcissism, this idea of a cherished France that could be held in your hand and protected from the world into which it nonetheless sends its armies and its oil majors. The sacrosanct caricature of Charlie, brandished in the air as a fetish of liberty, is exactly the reification of the self that O'Connor describes. I don't know what will come of these events, and I don't want to prejudge what French society will make of them, but I can see the potential for the very facile patriotic and chauvinist defence of a supposedly secular freedom of expression which would justify the complete absence of any reflection on the griefs that push people to the insanity of terrorism. I have seen this worst case happen in the US, with the results that we have before our eyes. What we need is not just reflection but action to change the way that the world economy functions. Otherwise its necropolitical character will inevitably poison whatever fine lands we imagine ourselves to live in. Personally, I think this kind of reasoning can lead to very dangerous "dead-ends". Do you just need to speak of "colonialism" to take away all individual responsabilities of human beings in their actions towards others? In the politically correct/postmodern left, it just seems so. Moreover. it seems that this feeling of collective "guilt" automatically legitimizes any curtailment of freedom of speech... "You can't say or express what you think because of your government's actions" doesn't seem like my kind of politics... This seems to be the same think that Zizek tried to say in an article for New Statesman:Â "Such thinking has nothing whatsoever to do with the cheap relativisation of the crime (the mantra of "who are we in the West, perpetrators of terrible massacres in the Third World, to condemn such acts"). It has even less to do with the pathological fear of many Western liberal Leftists to be guilty of Islamophobia. For these false Leftists, any critique of Islam is denounced as an expression of Western Islamophobia; Salman Rushdie was denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and thus (partially, at least) responsible for the fatwa condemning him to death, etc. The result of such stance is what one can expect in such cases: the more the Western liberal Leftists probe into their guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of Islam. This constellation perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be . . ." http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/01/slavoj-i-ek-charlie-hebdo-massacre-are-worst-really-full-passionate-intensity Best regards from Portugal -- Miguel Caetano http://twitter.com/remixtures http://iscte-iul.academia.edu/MiguelCaetano/
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