One of the questions that aha and I wanted to pose for class discussion tomorrow is one that I posed briefly in my 'third world bare life' response to mftc's "oh wow" post: namely, to what extent does Agamben support a 'politicization' of bare life, and what would such a politicization look like?

Something I'd like us to talk about in class today is whether Butler, who really does seem committed to finding (to crib capt. haddock) 'escape mechanisms' from this process of subordination and subjectivation, ever gives a convincing account of how those escape mechanisms would work. Haddock pointed to one escape mechanism on p.28, this notion of alterity, i.e.

Butler's theory of psychic formation plays on the trope of 'the turn' throughout numerous writers' works on identity, power, conscience, interpellation, etc., and the general idea seems to be that interiority always requires a turning-in-on or turning-back-on or a turning-back-of-power of/from a 'self' that actually isn't one before the convolutions of these turns.

I found Zizek's discussion on democracy from 146-9 interesting. If Leader-Party social categories are mutually constitutive, if the People are the People only because they aren't the Leader or if the Leader is the Leader only because he draws on the People or if anyone non-constitutive of the Leader is by definition excluded from the purview of the People, and if all these relations are fascistic, then what constitutes democracy?

Zizek writes at p.195 that 'going-through the fantasy' involves recognizing any objects of desire as embodiments of a fundamental lack (in the self, in the Other, in the symbolic order), as sociofantastic makeshifts constructed over the lack to conceal the lack. He also writes at 230-1 that

Hey, I found this online, and I thought it was a lot cleaner and clearer of a representation of the Lacanian Real (and all the concomitant desiring lacking identification processes) than the 'evolving paperclip' diagrams in Zizek, so I thought I'd share it:

http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/2537/dd3b5e8b2ff1429df4b9290ke4.gif

--Guattari Hero

Bulgarian crowd theorist Elias Canetti also writes about Judge Schreber in 'Crowds and Power,' so I thought I would share a little for those who were tantalized by the sunbeam-ass segment in D+G:

I'm surprised that no one has posted yet about D+G's segments on rhizomic consciousness. The key slogan ('Write with slogans!') is at 15 in TP: 'Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree.'

When D+G write that long-term memory '(family, race, society, or civilization [TP, 16])' is an arborescent tracing-over of the rhizome of short-term memory relations, and suggest that we 'forget' these 'artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities' (AO, 34), I find myself wondering whether this rhizomic, 'subversive' forgetfulness is a reformulation of 'the death of history.' (For what it's worth, I also find myself wondering this when D+G call for Nomadology, 'the opposite of history' [TP, 23].) There have been a lot of heart-boners on the blog for the 'life-affirming' message or 'so

Since Baudrillard consistently describes representative absorption of simulacra in resuscitatory terms ('a sympathetic nervous system' [Baudrillard, 13]; 'a sort of hormonal treatment through negativity and crisis--to escape--real death throes' [Baudrillard, 19]; 'a stimulant--to a dying system--fresh blood--revive it through the negative' [24]), are we then to understand simulacral 'envelopings of the whole edifice of representation' as in some sense euthenasic, delivering 'mortal blows' [Baudrillard, 27], however successfully, to ideology and power?