The Ambiguous Legacy of ‘68
A new article by Slavoj Zizek in In These Times. For those that have kept up with Zizek’s recent editorials or have read In Defense of Lost Causes, the majority of this is excerpts and summary.
This advertisement featuring Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson serves as a great example as to how ecology functions as the perfect ideological supplement to post-political administrative society:
Green Porno
What is Green Porno? A series of eight short films written, co-directed and starring Isabella Rossellini cast as various insects performing their bizarre sexual practices. The one on snails is particularly disturbing.
Beyond “the Moral Instinct”
Posted at 11:34 PMAfter reading an eight-page tract on “morality” in today’s Times, I feel as if much of the recent scientific literature on subject matter typically associated with the humanities is not only incredibly predictable, but also attempting to hide its preference for closet essentialisms. Now we have “God genes” and “love genes” to explain socially-constructed concepts—a return to phrenology.
Steven Pinker:
The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos.
We see right away that this initial derivation already contains all the typical characteristics of the idiosyncrasies of English psychologists—we have “usefulness,” “forgetting,” “habit,” and finally “error,” all as the foundation for an evaluation in which the higher man up to this time has taken pride, as if it were a sort of privilege of men generally. This pride should be humbled, this evaluation of worth emptied of value. Has that been achieved?
Now, first of all, it’s obvious to me that from this theory the origin of the idea “good” has been sought for and established in the wrong place: the judgment “good” did not move here from those to whom “goodness” was shown! It is much more that case that the “good people” themselves, that is, the noble, powerful, higher-ranking, and higher-thinking people felt and set themselves and their actions up as good, that is to say, of the first rank, in contrast to everything low, low-minded, common, and vulgar. From this pathos of distance they first arrogated to themselves the right to create values, to stamp out the names for values. What did they care about usefulness!
It is amazing to think that after over one-hundred years of thought, mankind still lives in the wake of the rebellion against institutionalized Christianity. Rationality, for all of its merits, has produced little to instill hope in civilization. The coming ecological crisis will be its ultimate test. If the pursuit of “reason” fails us, what will emerge in its wake? Will there be something to emerge, pre-supposing our own survival as a species? If post-modernism constitutes such a manifestation, how can it offer itself to an imminent critique of reason that, following Marx, allows us to actually pursue a progressive, pragmatic alternative?
But what am I talking about here? Enough, enough! At this stage there’s only one thing appropriate for me to do: keep quiet. Otherwise, I’ll make the mistake of arrogating to myself something which only someone younger is free to do, someone “with a greater future,” someone more powerful than I—something which only Zarathustra is free to do, Zarathustra the Godless…
These are the goals of a new “superman.”