READING NOTES #9
A round-up.
You are not guilty for wanting to continue to think, you are not guilty for realizing you cannot make it without Heidegger or for being a philosopher, and you are not afraid to move against consensus—you are free.—Catherine Malabou, The Heidegger Change
On Twitter Inc. Benjamin Bratton describes the events on the Capitol (‘1/6’) as a ‘fascist insurrection’, and in an interview released on the same day claims that ‘the philosophy of technology lost a century wasting time with Heidegger’.
In another tweet Bratton says:
What is ‘whatever this is’?
John Pilger says:
Two supercuts of violence incitation hypocrisy, here and here.
This from 2017:
Something I deleted from my essay ‘A Portrait of Donald Trump’:
Are ‘the left’, if we can still call them that, deeply envious of a triumph they still refuse to read, so difficult would it be to wash out its consequences from their system in a single generation without changing that system itself, and its ‘sides’? Are ‘the left’—to whom we presumably belong—envious because they unread or unreading because they are envious? And who would read their/our envy, in that case, before the end? Since no one person can be so singularly responsible for the history and the fate of the United States and the world beyond it, perhaps including China, then this name, ‘Donald Trump’, must be rigged up to some greater need and at an intensity and pitch that is increasingly impossible to read (more and more unreadable). What if, in fact, this name and the need it expressed has never been read at all? What if nobody knows anything about the person, the meta-phenomenon, called ‘Donald Trump’? What if, without knowing what it is, it has only just begun?
Those who decide what reading should do, and what attention should be, before the objects of reading and attention have even been provided (as unsealed depositions), would not know how to even recognize these questions as anything other than signs of racism and bigotry.
As for the coverage of the siege—or whatever names we choose to give it (explosion, carnival, false flag, celebration, anarchy?)—the MSM consensus-logic is exemplified in an opinion piece in The Washington Post, which asserts that ‘Republicans must unambiguously admit that Trump’s lies threaten more violence’. There are two parts to this logic:
What’s important here is the unflinching acknowledgment of two things: First, the claim by Trump and his enablers that he won is a deranged lie and anyone telling it is an enemy of U.S. constitutional democracy. Second, this lie is what incited the violent siege of the Capitol.
It is the lie that incites, and the incitation that depends on the lie, and this is what Republicans must admit. This double logic was tested out on Jim Jordan who went through a ‘struggle session’ in the House Rules Committee when he was asked repeatedly to say ‘five words that would be helpful for you to tweet or say, this election was not stolen’.
Since Biden will be president, whether the election was stolen or not, why is it so important that these five words be repeated? Envy-contagion?
The opinion piece in The Washington Post also says:
Republicans’ calls for ‘unity’ are conditional: Unity can only be premised on a blanket agreement not to acknowledge the truth about who and what are actually to blame for violently tearing the country in half. Until Republicans tell the truth about all of this, their professed hopes for unity are empty nonsense, to be treated with derisive contempt.
In the press more widely, the replicating logics of consensus produce strange grammatical crinkles. For example, when journalists write that Trump believes his words did not incite violence, it seems impossible for them to leave it at that. Instead, what tends to be written is something like, Trump refuses to accept he incited the violence he incited. The assumption assumes its own assumption.
In an article in The Guardian about climate change published yesterday we find this moment:
‘Environmental deterioration is infinitely more threatening to civilisation than Trumpism or Covid-19’, [Paul] Ehrlich told the Guardian.
Here’s what Girard said about envy in an interview:
Today envy is the emotion which plays the greatest role in our society, where everything is directed towards money. Therefore you envy the people who have more than you have. You cannot talk about your envy. I think the reason we talk so much about sex is that we don’t dare talk about envy. The real repression is the repression of envy.
And also:
And of course, envy is mimetic.