From: "Lydia Perovich" <fauxprophete-AT-hotmail.com> Subject: [Zizek on Singer, over and out] Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2003 10:03:26 -0400 Since we're at Zizek, here's one citation just for Steve -- and as a conclusion to the Singer episode (there's not much more to be said of Singer, Steve-o). In his and Mladen Dolar's lovely book on opera *Opera's Second Death* (Routledge, 2002), Zizek has a few pages on Singer. He first calls him a likely "today's equivalent of de Sade", goes on to describe some of his utilitarian ethics and for some unclear reason considers him a person who happily follows what Zizek calls the "contemporary posmodern ethics" to their absurd end. (This line of argument is really mangled, in the worst possible Zizekian mode.) But soon enough Zizek's Dr. Jekyll face comes out in the concluding passages of this segment: "One of the divisions in the chapter on *Vernunft* in Hegel's *Phaenomenologie des Geistes* speaks about "das geistige Tierreich": the social world that lacks any spiritual substance so that individuals effectively interact as intelligent animals within it. They use reason but only to assert their individual interests, to manipulate others into serving their own pleasures. Is not a world in which the highest rights are human rights precisely such a "spiritual animal kingdom"? There is, however, a price to be paid for such liberation -- in such a universe, human rights ultimately function as *animal* rights. This, then, is the ultimate truth of Singer, but the obvious counterargument to this is, so what, why should we not reduce humankind to its proper place, that of one of the animal species?" "What gets lost in this reduction? The thing, something to which we are unconditionally attached regardless of its positive qualities. In Singer's universe, there is a place for mad cows but no place for an Indial sacred cow. Singer's universe is the positive universe of qualities in which there is no place for what Kant would have called the eruption of the noumenal dimension in the order of phenomenal reality, no place for the dimension beyond the pleasure principle, no place for *love* in the radical sense of the term." (pp. 143-144) L _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/photos&pgmarket=en-ca&RU=http%3a%2f%2fjoin.msn.com%2f%3fpage%3dmisc%2fspecialoffers%26pgmarket%3den-ca
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