Senator Michele Bachmann, Gays, and the Christian Gene

Senator Michele Bachmann is running for the Republican nomination to make a bid for the US presidency. Michele Bachmann and her husband's clinic(Bachmann & Associates) tries to "rehabilitate" gays into straightness. Brian Ross from ABC News reports:

A former patient who sought help from the Christian counseling clinic owned by GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann and her husband, Marcus, told ABC News he was advised that prayer could rid him of his homosexual urges and he could eventually be "re-oriented."

"[One counselor's] path for my therapy would be to read the Bible, pray to God that I would no longer be gay," said Andrew Ramirez, who was 17-years-old at the time he sought help from Bachmann & Associates in suburban Minneapolis in 2004. "And God would forgive me if I were straight."

Senator Michele Bachmann has personally stated:

It isn’t that some gay will get some rights. It’s that everyone else in our state will lose rights. For instance, parents will lose the right to protect and direct the upbringing of their children. Because our K-12 public school system, of which ninety per cent of all youth are in the public school system, they will be required to learn that homosexuality is normal, equal and perhaps you should try it. And that will occur immediately, that all schools will begin teaching homosexuality.” -- Senator Michele Bachmann, appearing as guest on radio program “Prophetic Views Behind The News”, hosted by Jan Markell, KKMS 980-AM, March 6, 2004.

The evidence shows that she wants a theocracy that does not tolerate lifestyle values that conflict with hers.

In honor of such people and their views I'm posting a humorous news parody. It pokes fun at fundamentalist Christians such as Senator Bachmann and her husband. I want to clarify that I'm aware that many Christians do not judge homosexuals and some even allow them as members of their congregations. On the topic of gays and Christianity I recommend the book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) by the historian John Boswell. To my surprise, this book revealed a lot of unexpected information on this subject. Enjoy the clip.

Infighting about Trotsky

It was amusing to read (at Lenin's Tomb) of some recent infighting occasioned by a damning scholarly review of Robert Service's Trotsky: A Life (Harvard, 2009), involving a pair of fellows from the same nook of the anticommunism industry, the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution, and Peace.  While Service's book has been criticized by several leftist reviewers, it had generally been well-received in academic circles. This changes with Bertrand M. Patenaude, who writes, in The American Historical Review (see here):

In his eagerness to cut Trotsky down, Service commits numerous distortions of the historical record and outright errors of fact to the point that the intellectual integrity of the whole enterprise is open to question. 

By the end, he concludes (but read the whole review, it's worth it):

Harvard University Press has placed its imprimatur upon a book that fails to meet the basic standards of historical scholarship. 

At Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee puts the review in context and requests comments from the author, the review's author, and Harvard. Service's response is to accuse Patenaude of being a 'Trotsky romantic.' From Harvard, McLemee gets no response.

The Trouble with Titles

I'm not very good at giving my work good, let alone catchy, titles. Take, for instance, the title of my book on Schelling: long ago in the dissertation proposal process, I had a series of clumsy titles that ended with my advisor crossing out whatever I have proposed, and writing underneath, "Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art." As we all know, the name stuck.

For my tentative project on Rancière, I've struggled as well--what would capture the unity of the various chapters, ranging from discussions of Descartes, Marx, Schiller, and many others (one must allow for a few surprises...)? At the moment, I think this does it: Political Aesthetics: Reading Philosophy after Jacques Rancière. This is, of course, subject to change.

Julian Assange, Slavoj Žižek, and Amy Goodman: What is Truth?

I hate to overly saturate my blogs with Žižek, but I swear he is always around the places I want to refer. If we take the Socratic question, "Is he popular because he is insightful, or is he "insightful" because he is popular?" I argue that he is popular because he is insightful. It is not that I always agree with him or understand him, but his ideas are often outside the box. When I say "box" I mean the Leftist one. He was a fitting complement to a presentation with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. After watching this, the truth of the matter became much more clear; the issue is the Truth. For Žižek the Truth does not exist as a real asset until it is contextualized: Assange and WikiLeaks wielded by a revolutionary philosopher. This approach to knowledge is the difference between Žižek and Noam Chomsky. To know is of little value unless one understands.

No! No! No! We Need the Elite!

Peter Gratton has found an exemplary specimen of reactionary republicanism. Today's Der Spiegel has an article by Herfried Münkler entitled "Democratization Can't Save Europe." Münkler argues that:

In light of this failure of the elites, it is hardly surprising that we are hearing renewed calls for the democratization of Europe. Suddenly, the people are expected to fix what the elites have botched. Since they are already being asked to pay for the problems caused by the elites, many believe that the people should have more say in how and by whom Europe is controlled.

As reasonable as this might sound, by no means does it make as much sense as it seems at first glance. Even after the democratization of Europe, the elites in Brussels and Strasbourg will still be in charge. The only option available to the European people, to the extent that they can be referred to as such, would be to react to obvious failure by voting their leaders out of office -- and to vote an opposing elite to take their place. Whether this would fundamentally change anything is open to question. [...]

Pushing for the democratization of Europe is akin to playing a reckless game that can quickly lead to European disintegration. Those who see democratization as a logical reaction to the crisis may not even be aware of this risk. They see democratization as an automatic reflex in response to the crisis. But democracy needs the kinds of conditions that do not exist in Europe today.

Not convinced? Me neither. Peter points out that Münkler has recycled all the usual arguments as to why democracy won't work outside of the Western world, and turned them toward Europe itself. But these claims aren't the only howlers. Without any irony, Münkler points out that Europe has always been run by elites (which is why, apparently, it can't ever change...):

Europe was a project of the elites from the very beginning, but with the proviso that democratization would happen at the next available opportunity.

Of course, all promises of democracy have really been a "proviso" (read "noble lie") to legitimate the European project in the eyes of the people. And yet he concludes with the same promise he's just deflated:

The key step is a political reconstitution of Europe, a reconstitution in which democratization would be a real option and would not pose the threat of decline and disintegration.

This is the world of austerity: the elites fail but don't really fail, finance capital crashes but people's benefits, mortgaged homes, collective bargaining, decent wages and job security are blamed and attacked.

Zizek's Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle

My first publication, in 2005, was a book review of Zizek's Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (Verso, 2004), entitled "The Step Outside: The Act, Democracy, and Its Discontents." It was published in Critical Sense (a graduate student journal at UC Berkeley that seems to have been discontinued), Volume 8, number 1. I've decided to try something new and post the PDF directly to this blog HERE.

Like any first publication, perhaps, this one has a story. I don't know why exactly I chose to review a book by Zizek first, although its topicality was probably the impetus. I started writing it in summer 2004, which is around the same time I moved to Ottawa. This move ended up interrupting the review in more than one way; somehow I managed to save the file incorrectly (or it was corrupted at some point), meaning I had to rewrite the entire thing. After some searching, I found a printed draft, which I could use to recover about 70% of the document, but the printed draft ended up in my book bag next to a container of Indian food that leaked, producing a review curry (which, for some reason, I stored in the refrigerator in case I absolutely had to reference it--otherwise, it just sat in there on one of the shelves). I ended up rewriting the entire thing...in the end producing about two and a half reviews (there's also an original ending that is much more strident, but it wouldn't work for a review).

The reader will see a few things of note. It starts with a bang. The first few sentences read:

Zizek’s Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle picks up the thread from his previous book focused on the war on terror, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, somewhere between the months leading up to the war in Iraq and the exposure of torture at Abu Ghraib.  So, while we miss an encounter between Zizek and the torture scandal—which unfortunately, in the minds of many Americans, is just another scandal—he has nonetheless been constant in criticizing all “musings” about whether torture should be used in the war on terror as a soft step to its legitimation.  And who knew— legitimate torture and you too could become Attorney General!

The reader will also note that I don't stray far from Lacanian reference points. At the time, I was trying to work out a kind of account of those who I called 'event theorists,' Zizek, Badiou, and others, and it shows. Today, of course, I'm doing something very different.

Another Schelling Reference: Flaubert

Bouvard and Pécuchet decide to become writers, but inevitably they run into trouble and hit the books:

They labored to relate these vague concepts to things provided by memory, removed, added. Pécuchet was interested in feelings and ideas, Bouvard in images and colors. And they began to argue, each on amazed at how obtuse the other could be.

Perhaps the science called aesthetics could help them through their differences. A friend of Dumouchel, a philosophy professor, sent them a list of works on the subject. They worked separately, communicating their reflections to each other.

First of all, what is beauty?

For Schelling, it is the infinite expressed by the finite; for Reid, an occult quality; for Jouffroy, an integral fact; for de Maistre, something that pleases virtue; for Father André, what suits reason....

Given that I've suggested before that Schelling's contemporaries, near and far, understood his philosophy of art to be, as he once said, the "keystone" to the system, it's always pleasing to find references to his work along these lines.

(I am reading the Dalkey Archive's translation, which can be found here.)

The Weekend in Reviews

Sure, it's a long weekend in the US and Canada. But don't let that get in the way of checking out a few notable book reviews. 

First, here's Hasana Sharp, author of the forthcoming Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (see here) reviewing Michael Mack's Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (Continuum, 2010). One of the highlights:

As a Spinoza scholar, I was most interested in Mack’s interpretation of Spinoza’s principle of conatus, the striving by which each being aims to preserve and enhance its life.  He suggests that the conatus gets taken up by later thinkers not only as a doctrine of self-preservation, or as the ultimate source of all human (and nonhuman) motivation, but also as a critique of how self-preservation can be narrowly construed so as to yield self-destruction (and, in his concluding discussion of Freud, a “loss of reality”).  Mack reads Spinoza’s conatus as a principle of self-sustainability that can only be actualised by virtue of a contribution to the well-being of the other forces with which one is intertwined (Chapter 2).

And the verdict:

Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity highlights a number of fertile connections to Spinoza and adumbrates modern thought and culture in new ways.  It suggests several avenues for future research and goes some way toward correcting the false portrait of Spinoza as an uncompromising rationalist who has little appreciation of the imaginative fabric of cultural life.

Then, at Marx and Philosophy, Mirko Hall reviews Uwe Steiner's Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Work and Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2010):

There are many critical introductions – e.g., from Cambridge, Polity, Routledge, and Totem – available on Benjamin. What makes this book particularly valuable is the discussion of people, texts, and contexts that are sometimes relegated to the periphery of Benjamin Studies. Steiner does not fetishize later canonical writings (such as the artwork essay, the notes on the Parisian Arcades or the theses on the philosophy of history). He also explores lesser texts that involve Benjamin’s earliest investigations into the essence of language and the practice of literary translation and criticism. These fields are extremely important, because they allowed him to recognize the continued afterlife of cultural artifacts. Steiner also emphasizes the importance of occasionally marginalized thinkers, who are invaluable for understanding Benjamin’s intellectual outlook: Germanist Norbert von Hellingrath, essayist Carl Gustav Jochmann, art historian Alois Riegl or author Paul Scheerbart. There is a strong interest in Scheerbart, who provided Benjamin with significant political impetuses for his techno-utopian visions.

And don't forget my review of Rancière's The Politics of Literature here.

Every Time the Left Sins God Sends Another Working-Class American to the Tea Party

The Left in the US must blame itself for its weakness and inability to draw in lager numbers of working-class Americans into its fold. Walter Benjamin wrote that, "behind every fascism is a failed revolution." The growing popularity of the Tea Party movement in the US is the resulting failure of Leftists to address righteous popular anger over corrupt politics. I think there are several reasons for this.

Many Leftists articulate American working-class needs by using overly intellectual rhetoric. The Left does not need to dumb down information, just break it down. Many Leftists use other countries' revolutionaries and revolutions as symbols of liberation and outright ignore American equivalents. What about heroes of struggle such as Thomas Paine,John Brown, and Mary Harris "Mother" Jones? What about celebrating movements such as the BOSTON TEA PARTY? What is so amusing about the right-wing using the Boston Tea party, as a symbol of their movement, is that its very history undermines much of their political positions. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 sabotaged commerce, destroyed private property, and broke the rule of law, for the greater moral value of actual justice, opposed to legal injustice. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 fits more into the tradition of progressives than so-called conservatives. On a more extreme level,one could argue that the Boston Tea Party has more similarities with the Earth Liberation Front than it does with the Republican Party or the twenty-first century Tea Party.

I argue that the Tea Party is not truly conservative anyway. Two of the most popular politicians in the Tea Party movement are Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Both are women. Women being involved in politics and having the right to vote is not a conservative value, if "conservative" means going back to the proverbial good ol' days. The Founding Fathers, limited in their wisdom, would have told them to stay home, make babies, and cook for their husbands. It was liberal women and radical women that fought the law to get the right for women to become active members of politics. Liberals and leftists are accused of breaking with tradition: for picking and choosing ethics opportunistically. That is exactly what the right-wing does. When there was prayer in public schools there was legalized racial segregation and children working in sweat-shops: most right-wingers do not openly claim to want all of those things, hence they are not truly conservative, they are right-wing liberals.

A large portion of the Tea Party's constituency rightly are disgusted with the bank bailouts that Bush started and Obama continued. Somehow the Tea Party has convinced working Americans that this is socialism. Big finance manipulates the government to save capitalism at the American public's expense and this is socialism? No my fellow Americans, this is the natural outgrowth of Capitalism. The saddest naivety is the belief that big business is a better alternative to big government. The world is not marching into global one-world-order-socialism, it is crashing into disaster neo-liberal capitalism. Why is Republican Congressman Ron Paul viewed as a fringe politician and not fully endorsed by the financial sector? Because he has faith in the "free-market." Big capitalists do not want a free-market, they want Government to intervene on their behalf: in favor of capitalists and against the working-class or any other obstacle. Big business favors its international agenda at the expense of America or any other country, NAFTA is a good example. These are some of the points the Left in America should be exposing to the public at large. This great country is falling apart, is being ripped apart, and the actual creators of this destruction need to be stopped.

I picked two music videos. One is an official Tea Party Video and the other appears to be an average American musician. The lyrics in their songs demonstrate much of what this blog discussed.

Politics of Literature Review

My review of Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Literature, which I wrote during our sojourn in Paris, is now available at the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books here.