The radical Left seems to have shaken itself free of any residual gravitational pull. It welcomes the pure life of the death drive fully unleashed that might finally cleanse several centuries of white guilt. Will this not be matched, according to an almost Newtonian principle, by an equal and opposite unleashing on the Right?
One by one they come knocking at your door. They cry out, they beg you for help and you say: get them away from me … these people who come with these ridiculous stories … I’ve alwaysloved people who enjoy good meals, who look forward to watching good performances … I’ve struggled hard to get what I have, but my struggle has always been against others. In fact I have been struggling against the ones who are poor … I’m not on their side, and that too is a choice I am making. What will be home? My own bed, my night table, then on the table, what? Then on the table, what? Blood, death, a fragment of bone, a piece of a human brain, a severed hand. Let everything filthy, everything vile, sit by my bed, where once I had my lamp and clock, books, letters, presents for my birthday, left-over bright coloured ribbons.
Forgive me. Forgive me. I know you’ll forgive me. I’m still falling. I am still falling (Shaun 1996).
Italian Marxist Franco Beredi who was at the Labour fringe in September 2018:
Five centuries of colonialism, capitalism and nationalism have turned Europeans into the enemy of human kind. May they be cursed forever! May Europeans be swept away by the storm they have generated, by the weapons they are building, by the fire they have ignited, by the hatred they have cultivated[5]
There is no longer any objective judgement, no final accounting for the rightness or wrongness of our acts; psychoanalytically, politically, it is a question of radical desire. There is no big Other to guarantee or judge. There is no covenant or possibility of ratifying things. Your only duty is, or your orders are, to follow the orientation of your desire. Collateral damage is the price to pay.
And Zizek’s most recent response? The Courage of Hopelessness (Žižek 2017), or as somebody quipped: Don’t just sit there; do nothing.
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[1] MCMXIV Philip Larkin.
[2] This is a title by blues singer, Seasick Steve
[3] http://www.congressoamp2016.com/bibliofalante/Bibliofalante/assets/common/downloads/page0241.pdf
[4] http://iclo-nls.org/wp-content/uploads/Pdf/Turin.pdf
[5] http://hurryupharry.org/2018/09/14/momentum-speaker-franco-berardi-and-the-new-nazis/