In These Times

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• • 22 Oct 05
  • 4:23 pm

  I wish to cite another psychoanalytic anecdote, for reasons of personal edification, but also because I think it may shed some light on the highly problematic claim on which Zizek balances his entire argument. Had all the disorder “factually” happened, Zizek writes, even so, the news reporting would have come out biased. This claim incurred all manner of grumbling and browbeating on this board, and perhaps with good reason. But if we attend, briefly, to the Lacanian story that foregrounds the claim, we may well be on our way to seeing why, exactly, even one-to-one correspondence between reportage and fact would …

  Posted to The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape

• • 28 Oct 05
  • 12:05 pm

  It amazes me, really does, that proofs of the persistence of structural racist projects are still required. We could, certainly, rely on an impressive corpus produced, in the past three decades, by critical race scholars; we could offer arguments and counterarguments, stacking them up like the logs of Uncle Tom's cabin; we could spread anecdotal evidence in layers, thick and delicious, like Aunt Jemima's pancakes; we could turn an eye to those grotesque silhouettes--the Jesse Jacksons, the Bill Cosbys, the Chris Rocks--haunting our front lawns like Sambo figurines. But what's the use? Black folk just can't be taken for real in …

  Posted to The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape

• • 28 Oct 05
  • 12:32 pm

  Separately: Jaymajor, if s/he is still inclined to continue on a psychoanalytic thread without disturbing the rest of the correspondents on this board, will find me ready to ramble at barashfp@uchicago.edu. And the point is well taken: we seem to have disregarded, for a while, the thrust of Zizek's argument. So, in an attempt to turn back to the text, I want to talk specifically aobut the rhetoric of otherness, that is, the ways in which the term itself is useful and the ways in which it is limited. In the first place, I feel I ought to remind the board …

  Posted to The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape