Geist
05-31-2006, 12:54 PM
We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.
“The Means of Correct Training”. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Rabinow, Paul. Random House, U.S.A. 1984. p 205
In his essay on the state of European affairs Aime Cesaire noted that ‘Europe is indefensible.’ I agree, but for entirely different reasons, our concept of Europe is far different than his. His is one in which the problem of hypocrisy leads to a dehumanizing effect, ours is a hypocrisy about our motives. The Europe we aim for is morally, and spiritually indefensible. It rests on assumptions that are transcendental, metaphysical; ultimately essentialist ideas that have no grounding in reality.
Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over the self-evidence; it blocks out access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand…
Heidegger, Martin trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson Being and Time Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1962.
Let us at last stop the charade, stop pretending we believe in the Enlightenment, that we value rights, that tradition is anything other than a useful tool. That tradition is powerful because it is false. Our racialism is dependant on a desire not to live near other races, to feel safer on the streets, to satisfy our desire to protect our women or men from race-mixing, to admit the causes are primal and not noble. That hatred is not noble, but that hatred is powerful. To finally admit that the only people who benefited from colonization were the powerful elites who gained the spoils.
To admit the common man of old Empires suffered as much as the common man of the colonized country. To take off the rose tinted glasses of a glorious past and look at it in all its vulgar glory. To throw away such utterly delirious ideas of superiority when we know that superiority existed solely for an elite, as it does today, that superiority is economic and that culture follows money.
That in our past the inquisition and the crusades were nothing more than the folly of a deluded sense of grandeur. That European men fucked Indian women in the Raj, that British women often found the black man attractive, that this is as much a reason for our hatred as any noble cause. That what we see as primitive in the black man is what we see as primitive in ourselves.
That our concept of human rights is fanciful, that it extends only to some and that some are an elite. That most of our ancestors were probably serfs and mocked by the same people you all praise. That our claims to enlightened humanism is enlightened self interest. To admit that we have the potential to be barbarians as much as they do. That young white working class men cause most of the crime in most of our cities, that there has always been no go areas for police officers in Europe.
There is too much bullshit, too many lurid fascinations with the Jews, with the savagery of other races, too much failure to see the economic side of the ghettoes in riots and crime, too much smugness, too much talk of outdated modes of thinking, too much harking back to a perceived glorious past, too much propaganda, smokescreens and too much cosmetic essentialist interpretations of vast swathes of people.
Let us reclaim our greatest right wing thinker, Nietzsche, let us grip him back from the left and understand that it is power which is at work everywhere. Let us re-read Foucault and use the power of discourse in a positive sense. Let us stop avoiding the modern tendencies and start attacking them rather than ignoring them.
Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over the self-evidence; it blocks out access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand…
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. U.S.A.: Penguin, 1976. p92.
This has been a Geist rant.
“The Means of Correct Training”. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Rabinow, Paul. Random House, U.S.A. 1984. p 205
In his essay on the state of European affairs Aime Cesaire noted that ‘Europe is indefensible.’ I agree, but for entirely different reasons, our concept of Europe is far different than his. His is one in which the problem of hypocrisy leads to a dehumanizing effect, ours is a hypocrisy about our motives. The Europe we aim for is morally, and spiritually indefensible. It rests on assumptions that are transcendental, metaphysical; ultimately essentialist ideas that have no grounding in reality.
Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over the self-evidence; it blocks out access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand…
Heidegger, Martin trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson Being and Time Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1962.
Let us at last stop the charade, stop pretending we believe in the Enlightenment, that we value rights, that tradition is anything other than a useful tool. That tradition is powerful because it is false. Our racialism is dependant on a desire not to live near other races, to feel safer on the streets, to satisfy our desire to protect our women or men from race-mixing, to admit the causes are primal and not noble. That hatred is not noble, but that hatred is powerful. To finally admit that the only people who benefited from colonization were the powerful elites who gained the spoils.
To admit the common man of old Empires suffered as much as the common man of the colonized country. To take off the rose tinted glasses of a glorious past and look at it in all its vulgar glory. To throw away such utterly delirious ideas of superiority when we know that superiority existed solely for an elite, as it does today, that superiority is economic and that culture follows money.
That in our past the inquisition and the crusades were nothing more than the folly of a deluded sense of grandeur. That European men fucked Indian women in the Raj, that British women often found the black man attractive, that this is as much a reason for our hatred as any noble cause. That what we see as primitive in the black man is what we see as primitive in ourselves.
That our concept of human rights is fanciful, that it extends only to some and that some are an elite. That most of our ancestors were probably serfs and mocked by the same people you all praise. That our claims to enlightened humanism is enlightened self interest. To admit that we have the potential to be barbarians as much as they do. That young white working class men cause most of the crime in most of our cities, that there has always been no go areas for police officers in Europe.
There is too much bullshit, too many lurid fascinations with the Jews, with the savagery of other races, too much failure to see the economic side of the ghettoes in riots and crime, too much smugness, too much talk of outdated modes of thinking, too much harking back to a perceived glorious past, too much propaganda, smokescreens and too much cosmetic essentialist interpretations of vast swathes of people.
Let us reclaim our greatest right wing thinker, Nietzsche, let us grip him back from the left and understand that it is power which is at work everywhere. Let us re-read Foucault and use the power of discourse in a positive sense. Let us stop avoiding the modern tendencies and start attacking them rather than ignoring them.
Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over the self-evidence; it blocks out access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand…
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. U.S.A.: Penguin, 1976. p92.
This has been a Geist rant.