Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 13:38:46 -0800 (PST) From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com> 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 __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what you’re looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
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