On 7/27/06, Sandwichman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 7/27/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Libido is essential, not optional, in politics. What turns them on?
> You have to have a feel for that. Otherwise, you don't get it, even
> if you have all the facts at your disposal.
I see what you're getting at, Yoshie, but I don't think libido is the
right term for it. I would suggest, rather, that it is an eroticized
spiritual longing that is essential in politics.
Yes, that, except the term "eroticized spiritual longing" is three
words -- a little too long to catch on. Foucault called the same
dimension of life "political spirituality" -- that's two words, and
still too long.
Also, the word "spiritual" can be misleading, for it's commonly
understood to be the opposite of physical.
Do we have one word that expresses what we want to say just right?
To be more specific
about the historical antecedents, I would call attention to Arabic
chivalrous poetry of the late middle ages and it's subsequent
translation into the courtly love poetry of the Provencal troubadors.
Right. It hearkens back to the time before the private got divorced
from the public and vice versa and love became deprived of public life
and imprisoned in marriage, family, and all that.
It seems to me that a large part of the dilemma of secular liberalism
(of which socialism is an offshoot) has to do with the unstated and
probably unthought of assumption that the mysticism, along with its
martial-aristocratic spin, has been somehow wrung out of the
linguistic forms. Experience doesn't bear this out.
In my view, socialism, an heir to republicanism, used to be an
alternative to liberalism, both for better and worse.
Benjamin hints at this in his cryptic story about the chess-playing
automaton called "historical materialism". Only Benjamin claims that
the puppet "can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the
services of theology," which is absurd. The puppet cannot "enlist the
services" of the puppet master. It is the other way around.
In another part of the same essay, Benjamin says that "we have been
endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a
claim." That makes more sense, in terms of our subjective experience
of enlistment. What's changed since the times of Benjamin is that
nowadays it's historical materialism that "is wizened and has to keep
out of sight."
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
