Ron Paul is No Thoreau

There is a contradiction in a campaign that champions objectivism and yet supports a document which is inherently anti-objectivist.

A lot has been written about Ron Paul’s connection to the philosophy of Thoreau, my favorite example being this video. A Google Search returns about 58 thousand entries, equating elements of Thoreau’s philosophy with the promises of the Paul campaign. Thoreau’s individualist ideology is often thrown in with Thomas Paine’s “That government is best which governs least,” but at the heart of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience is an argument against the early strict-constituional government.

How does the Ron Paul following reconcile their individualist philosophy, which cites Thoreau extensively, with their support of returning to a strict-constructionism government, a government Thoreau rallied against and opposed vehemently?

Let’s compare the beliefs of the two men. From Paul’s website:

He continues to advocate a dramatic reduction in the size of the federal government and a return to constitutional principles.

Civil Disobedience, Thoreau’s most influential political work, is at it’s core an argument against the early US government, and indeed, the Constitution. Thoreau writes…

I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should be petitioning the Governor or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and if they should not hear my petition, what should I do then? But in this case the State has provided no way: its very Constitution is the evil. This may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconcilliatory; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it.

And an even more damning rejection of Paul’s Constitution pandering:

They who know no purer source of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage to its fountainhead.


Civil Disobedience is not an argument for the Ron Paul campaign. As long as Paul supporters continue to promote a return to strict-constructionism, Thoreau will not be by their side. Ron Paul’s pro-Constituion message will do nothing to solve the ills of the tyranny of the majority that Thoreau was arguing against.

Now, can we stop dirtying Thoreau’s name? Can we stop blindly worshiping the Constitution and seriously consider the dangerous effects of a return to strict-constructionism?

Mark Elliot Cullen

Bromatological Materialism and the Meals of Late Capitalism

In an article published today in The Times, Kim Severson claims that the “entree is dead.” From this statement, I think we can learn a lot about the ideology of late capitalism. In Tarrying with the Negative, Zizek famously argued that it was perfectly embodied by a certain kind of Spinozism: to paraphrase K-Punk, Spinoza’s rejection of deontological ethics for an ethics based around the concept of health is perfectly embodied in his reading of the myth of the Fall and the foundation of Law. Spinoza argued that because the Jews were primitive at the time, it was necessary to formulate the commandment as “Thou shalt not…,” as a performative command, yet for any reasonable person it was necessary for it to be grasped as constructive. This of course simply refers to a scientific or objective statement, such as “Thou shalt not eat from the tree of life because the apple is poisonous and will harm you.” In Zizek’s view, Spinoza’s move both deprives the grounding of Law in a sadistic act of scission (the cruel cut of castration), at the same time as it denies the ungrounded positing of agency in an act of pure volition, in which the subject assumes responsibility for everything.

The collapse of the patriarchal big Other thus deprives a signifier of attaining the position of Master Signifier or S₁. For instance, Spinoza does not posit, “Do not smoke!,” but rather, “Smoke, but…” The “but” that replaces the primitive “thou shalt not” is instead a prohibition masked as a universal objective statement. Why is this significant to late capitalism? The imaginary absence of the Nom du père (Name-of-the-Father) likewise results in the absence of the non du père (no-of-the-father). The disappearance of prohibitive castration at the symbolic level precludes the normal formation of the subject’s identity. What the subject loses with the absence of the Name-of-the-father is her or his relation to their jouissance and thereby the basis for a deontologized Kantian ethical system (see Zizek’s analysis of Lacan’s article “Kant avec Sade.”). Thus, rather than adhering to an ethics of jouissance or an “ethics of the Real” (see Alenka Zupancic), we have schizophrenic subjects who are unable to relate to their jouissance because of the hidden prohibition within Spinozism. Take for instance several fundamental aspects of Western culture under late capitalism: the obsession with fad diets, exercise and objects deprived of their malignant contents (such as decaffeinated coffee or war without casualties).

Here we can begin to see the constructive nature of our own dietary patterns that are the result of a certain kind of ideological construct. Rather than having an entree constitute the bromatological cathexis of our unfettered jouissance, operating as a kind of objective correlative to the Master-Signifier (S₁), we’re left with a multitude of dishes, none of which directly register as the objects of our desire (object-little-a):

“I think the entree has been in trouble for a long time,” said the chef Tom Colicchio. “Eating an entree is too many bites of one thing, and it’s boring.”

And of course we should make the vulgar Marxist point that the collapse of the entree as big Other is typically associated with bourgeois dining in the West. Rather than siding with multiculturalists who view it as the perfect opportunity to enjoy the Other’s food, to pathetically attempt to directly enjoy the manifestation of the Other’s schematized jouissance, we should locate the point at which the multiculturalist radically breaks with the Other’s desire: for instance, cultures wherein the consumption of certain endangered species is considered a delicacy. Moreover, we should make the obvious point that we only enjoy the Other’s cuisine qua our own preparation of it, thereby reifying our own schematization of jouissance. Thus, the multiculturalist call for the world to enjoy each other’s cuisine is actually a call for the barrier between all culture’s schematization of jouissance, a delimiting point of intersecting jouissances that designates the injunction, “This is our space and that’s yours.”

How then should the Left struggle against the manifestation of tapas-style dinners as the essence of bourgeois decadence? Not by bringing back the purely “phallogocentric” concept of the patriarchal big Other, marking a return to post-Victorian style cuisine. Instead, the Left should question the restaurant that claims to be the harbinger of our enjoyment, yet instead of allowing us to retain fidelity to our desires, the restaurant acts as the object-instrument of our desires, delimiting the meals to what is only on the menu. In that sense, the restaurant owner is the totalitarian leader whose superego injunction to “enjoy” at the beginning of every meal is actually the functioning of a sadistic tormentor who, given our current sociopolitical predicament, knows that we never can.

Bryan Klausmeyer