Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 13:38:46 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: [postanarchism] The Agreement of Zizek and Katsiafiacas on Multiculturalism (2)


I don't know why the bottom half of my responses
disappeared, here are shortened versions of them...I
will use ~~~ instead...



Perhaps "so-called fundamentalism" is a "passion for
the real," but, honestly, so what? Are we going to 
celebrate every act of rupture, however misdirected
or ill-considered?... But then there is the
inescapable waste involved in the act, an expenditure
that opens no new spaces we would want to enter, and
one which none of us can make without stepping over
lines i suspect most anarchists feel the need to hold
onto. 

~~~~~well just to be very clear, when it comes to the
question of political violence, personally I am
somewhere between pacificism, the black bloc and the
zapatistas, in fact i dont even support armed vangaurd
groups like the raf, as many anarchists do, much less
those that are even more extreme in their privileging
of being militant over being radical, such as
'terrorists'. yet i think zizek, much like virilio, in
his conception of popular defense, has some ideas
worth paying attention to, such as in his celebration
of the passion for the real - for instance, we might
ask, how much more extensive violence becomes possible
once we have taken control of the global technological
apparatus of spy satelite systems, icbms, total
information awareness, etc., as compared to the
earlier days of face to face combat, in which huge
percentages of soldiers deliberately shot over the
heads of the 'enemy' or at the ground in order not to
kill? by the same token we might ask whether there is
any realistic possibility that virtual technology
could even become a viable place of resistance, when
the entire apparatus is increasingly controlled by
military and corporate power? sure we should use it to
the greatest extent possible, but we should not
fetishize it as though it were the 'solution' or
something, as the sits said, 'real life is elsewhere'
#~~~



But the question of what happened in Yugoslavia is
not one that can be answered by recourse to categories
like "Jew," "Christian," or "Muslim," or by simple
recourse to greater or lesser degrees of
"tolerance."...That doesn't change the fact that a
recourse to dogmatic, "fundamental" beliefs seems to
have eased to the road to human catastrophe.

~~~~~But that is not what we were looking at, we were
looking at whether Islamic fundamentalism is really as
intolerant as it is claimed, and Zizek, like
Katsiaficas, showed that actually it has historically
been far more tolerant of Jews than Christian
societies.~~~#

There is, i think, some value in noting 
that there are in the world: 

1) Real fundamentalists, who rely for key elements 
of there direction in life on what they believe are
divinely inspired, inerrant doctrines or text. These
may put forth principles that inspire tolerance 
towards others, or they may inspire holy war. What
they clearly don't inspire is radical nonconformity.
Coexistence with these real fundamentalists may be
possible and desirable, for currently existing 
political formations or for anarchist societies. 
That won't be determined by fundamentalism per se,
but by the content of the fundamentals. 

~~~~sure, but in my vision of an anarchist society,
which as I have said, is essentially the 'panarchy'
celebrated by anarchist historian max nettlau, part of
being *truly* free includes the freedom precisely
*not* to be what others consider to be 'free', in
other words, to define my preferred mode of existence
for myself, even if that means 'Islamic
fundamentalism' or following the word of holy
scriptures literally - badiou's conception of 'truth'
may be useful here... ~~~# 



2) Folks identified as "fundamentalist" because they
have beliefs that appear outside the range of 
possibility in our own cultures. To the extent that
these people do not actually espouse a recourse to
fundamentals, we would certainly be doing a good 
thing by correcting and clarifying the mistaken
perception of them as "fundamentalists."

~~~ sure, no disagreement there, whats the point? #~~~


Jason

===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the 
        mania
     Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and
         one way."

- Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799

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