>from Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying With The Negative: > >This antagonistic splitting opens up the field for the Khmer Rouge, Sendero >Luminoso, and other similar movements which seem to personify radical Evil" >in today's politics: if "fundamentalism" functions as a kind of negative >judgment" on liberal capitalism, as an inherent negation of the >universalist claim of liberal capitalism, then movements such as Sendero >Luminoso enact an "infinite judgment" on it. In his Philosophy of Right, >Hegel conceives of the "rabble" (Pöbel) as a necessary product of the >modern society: a nonintegrated segment in the legal order, prevented from >partaking of its benefits, and for this very reason delivered from any >responsibilities toward it -a necessary structural surplus excluded from >the closed circuit of social edifice. This epitomizes the difference between Doug and me. He cites Zizek the philosopher, whose prose is devoid of the all-important "who", "what", "where", "when" and "how". It is utterly sterile. The only approach to understanding what happened in Cambodia or Peru is one rooted in history. As I already pointed out to Angela, postmodernism's worst sin is that it subverts all attempts to put things into some kind of historical context. It depresses me to see Doug citing such overinflated, academic jargon. It would be the same thing as seeing Jeff St. Clair quoting Heidegger in order to explain deforestration in the Pacific Northwest. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
