sharing fate

I found something unpleasant about the film Horton when I first saw it. My reaction may just have been to the character of the Kangaroo who reminded me of Tigger in the Disney version of Winnie the Pooh, a translation I found very annoying.  Anyhow apart from my directly racist issues with the film I was struck by the religious content it offered.

The prime conceit of the film is that only the Who’s Mayor Ned (minute creature on a speck of dust) can hear Horton (the Elephant holding the speck of dust on a flower) and vice versa.  Both Ned and Horton are rendered ridiculous by their ability to hear each other while their peers can hear nothing.  Of course their knowledge (effectively drawing on faith in a voice that has no material body) gives them both the ability to save the other.  They are to each other God and to each other the Saviour, they share each other’s fate.

 

 

public humiliation & stocks but missing the point perhaps

The examination of Mr Buckles, head of G4S, by a House of Commons committee is currently being broadcast.  Such processes are tantamount to public humiliation, being put in the stocks, virtually of course.  When someone was, say, accused of stealing, they were held in the stocks to keep them in place, exposed to ridicule and pelted with varied fare. The problems go much further though as with Murdoch.

What is not being mentioned is that this is one of three organisations recently given the contract for accommodation and transport of asylum seekers for seven years.  They have been consistently criticised for their management of this work and for other areas in which they are involved.

It is remarkable that the company has managed to mess up to such a scale. I thought that Mr Buckles was recently on Radio 4 (a month or so ago) where he was part of a panel discussing employment contracts.  The presenter pussy-footed around him (if it was him!) on that show and Mr Buckles sounded like a liar during that programme, trying to make out that G4S had such good employment processes and not using short term contracts etc.  It would seem he is being hoist by his own petard.

Yes, here is the program, it was him, funny in retrospect.

I just hope that these events allow for the way asylum and refugee case are treated to be reviewed.  Unfortunately what is at stake is not the nature of what is done by such enterprises as G4S but whether it is done well, efficiently, on time and not the very nature of such security management.

babylonian virtues – minority report

Babylonian Virtues – Minority Report is the title of the second chapter by Gunjević in God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse.  I didn’t read directly a reference to the film Minority Report in the chapter which is, effectively, an evaluation of Negri and Hardt’s book Empire in the context of their use of Augustinian ideas to develop their idea of the multitude.  The point of reference is that the Roman Empire ended with the Augustinian announcement of the Christian Empire and that there is a lesson to be learned about how to end the capitalist Empire.

I have a copy of Empire but I’ve not read it.  I bought it because I kept finding it referenced in material I was reading and I understand it to be about well, Empire, the empire of capitalism and how to bring about its demise within the context of radical movements for social change.  I used to read bits by Negri back in 1979 to the early 1980s when I was frequenting elements of what was left of the radical Italian left (Autonomia Operaia, Lotta Continua).  I remember an ironic story related to me by a journalist at the time who had been a sympathiser of Negri’s in Padova:

When Negri started out he said that revolution lay in the hands of the workers.  When they rejected him he said that it was up to the students.  When they failed him he got sent to prison.  Now revolution is supposed to come from the prisons.

It always stuck in my mind that story and in Empire Negri has the revolution in the hands of the nomads, the deserters.  To quote Gunjević:

Hardt and Negri claim with authority that battles against Empire are won by refusal, by desertion, by deliberately embracing exodus, mobility, and nomadism.

But, asks Gunjević, is all we are doing to move on, how do we ever escape the web of relations and power that Empire maintains?  Just moving on? I might ask in reference to Zizek, what does that achieve beyond a pseudo-politicisation of the idea of personal libertarianism born of the 1960s. Hardt and Negri use, according to Gunjević, St Augustine’s writings to explore this – drawing on his central idea that it takes the whole body of the church to combat Empire, that it cannot be a movement of disparate groups but requires a large scale (catholic) united body to dislodge it.  For Hardt and Negri this the multitude.

Basically Gunjević suggests over a detailed discussion of Augustine’s City of God that the multitude lacks both the idea of virtue and a discipline of asceticism without which it is not possible to replace Empire.  As a radical anti-capitalist Gunjević takes it as a given that the immanent violence in the current system – the Empire now capitalist once Roman – needs countering but contends that transcendent values are central to this struggle. In other words Gunjević sees that only theological engagement offers the grounds for virtue, an engagement that is founded on discipline, this is the incarnational resource.

Babylon is the earthly city in this context and as such one that represents a non-contained violence, a primeval violence – one opposed to the Godly city where virtue (order/charity/helping your neighbour) and discipline (ascetic) point in the right direction. The reference to Minority Report would seem to suggest that the Babylonian earthly city is warning us from the future of the potential for a set of circumstances and we need to pay heed dear friends to the promptings of love and truth in our hearts, a reference to the opening statement of Quaker Advices and Queries.   Now that makes me chuckle but it fits!

 

apocalyptic prevarication

Far from luring us into a perverse self-destructive rapture, adopting the properly apocalyptic stance is – today more than ever – the only way to keep a cool head.

This is Zizek (should I say of course) turning an idea on its head with a hope filled lucidity.  The idea is that the apocalyptic stance is one that is about putting it off, not accepting that the end is nigh and actually that is it right there.  Rather the end is nigh may well be true, indeed is the truth but the aim is to put it off (perhaps for ever if possible).  Apocalyptic thinking is about keeping cool not encouraging self destruction or imagining its fulfillment.

This comes from a new book by Žižek which comprises an exchange of essays with Boris Gunjevic called God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse.  I’ve read the first two chapters and while it carries with it  repetition it also has new material.

Gunjevic’s introductory chapter is called The Mystagogy of Revolution.  He is aiming to start what may emerge as a conversation with Zizek about religion.  He sees it as building on the unfinished conversation of Žižek with Milibank in The Monstrosity of Christ a book, or rather, a series of chapters I found impenetrable.  I like the way Gunjevic writes, partly because he uses a Zizek style of many cultural sources brought together on a rich bed of Marxist thought and history.

He is here concerned with a need for virtue as an ordering principle for any social revolutionary movement. He draws an analogy between the value now given to archaeological fragments of pottery and the value that is to be found in fragments of past systems.  Here he is making the case for the revaluation of the thought of theologians amongst others perhaps, suggesting that the elements of their systems broken and discarded, recycled in the foundations of buildings can be read again valued as they are in the display cases of museums and galleries the world over:

What we used to think of until recently as rejects and trash can serve in building social relations and the world around us in an altogether new way.

He also uses a term in the context of theology I didn’t know

incarnational resources, incarnational tools for changing the world

rather nice ring to it.

Zizek writes about the event, the meaning of revelation, the engagement of God in the world in a carnal fashion, God putting everything at stake in total immersion in the world.  We as living in the days that follow this with the consequences of utter and annoying freedom.  The genie was let out of the bottle, fait accompli.  This is for Zizek what Christianity has to accept, that this has happened, this is what it offers the world and is its sense.

In his first chapter, Christianity Against the Sacred, Zizek considers sacrifice as a central feature of the sacred.  The section that drew my attention was when, drawing on writing by Jean-Pierre Dupuy (The Mark of the Sacred), Zizek discusses how meta-social forms emerge from inter-personal relations, how the ‘big Other’ emerges out of the interaction of individuals.  The idea is that that the ‘big Other’ is maintained by sacrifice.  The central ethical dilemma of Christianity is:

how to contain violence without sacrificial exceptions, without an external limit?

The latter died on the cross let us not forget.  Christianity still maintains the sacrificial spin but by placing the victim, not the transcendent, centre stage (Christ on the Cross, the Martyrs, the suffering).  The victim’s innocence is guaranteed by an unavoidable knowledge of contingency.

Therein resides the world-historical rupture introduced by Christianity: now we know, and can no longer pretend that we don’t.

These are properly apocalyptic times born of knowledge.

It is interesting to write up Zizek’s ideas because of course in my hands they lose their richness and reasoning no less.  They also emerge as derivative in the sense that I can only understand or at least relate to those parts that I can.  Thus the comment above about knowledge, my writing that revelation and Jesus as Father and Son on earth are God ending himself, concluding his external potential and revealing himself in the sole potential as human is vastly Judeo-Christian in its formulation.  Zizek is courted by theologians because he will talk in the same language.

I’ll read some more, now a chapter by Gunjevic, to see how, if at all, a debate, engagement, develops.

terror

Is a terrorist just someone who uses terror?  It would seem so as the three men accused of plotting to attack the EDL are being held on terrorism charges.  The IRA were criminalised by the British, not given political status but considered as common criminals.  Now it seems that even common criminals are being called terrorists.  I thought that the notion of terrorist was something to do with a plot against the state?  Is the EDL a state organ or is political activity allied with violence being lumped as terrorist?  Where will this take us?