Fragmenti

[Otto Katz]

btw, super je onaj fragmen o rostislavu. postoji li neki wiki ili tekst na engleskom?

Jok, jedva par crtica i na češkom webu.

[kim_philby]

Jok, jedva par crtica i na češkom webu.

drats. sve je tu: i bahtin i dijalektika i sve.

[kim_philby]

Darian Leader: 'You can never define madness in terms of an external, visible manifestation' – video

[kim_philby]

The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live NowBy George LevineReviewed by Terry Eagleton - 22 June 2011Misunderstanding what it means to be secular.Who needs Darwin?The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live NowEdited by George LevinePrinceton University Press, 272pp, £24.95Societies become truly secular not when they dispense with religion but when they are no longer greatly agitated by it. It is when religious faith ceases to be a vital part of the public sphere, not just when church attendance drops or Roman Catholics mysteriously become childless, that secularisation proper sets in. Like art and sexuality, religion is taken out of public ownership and gradually privatised. It dwindles to a kind of personal pastime, like breeding gerbils or collecting porcelain. As the cynic remarked, it is when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it is time to give it up. In this respect, it has a curious affinity with alcohol: it, too, can drive you mad.Most recent defences of secularism, not least those produced by "Ditchkins" (Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens), have been irate, polemical affairs, powered by a crude species of off-the-peg, reach-me-down Enlightenment. It is scarcely a caricature of Dawkins's work to suggest we are all getting nicer and nicer and that if it wasn't for religious illusion, we would collectively outdo Kenneth Clark in sheer civility. (I refer to the deceased patrician art critic, not the living, beer-bellied politician.) One might call it the view from north Oxford.This present collection of essays, by contrast, is a much less fiercely contentious affair. Here, there is no callow and triumphalist rationalism, which in any case is simply the flip side of evangelical fervour. Indeed, the blandness of some of the book's contributions could benefit from a judicious dose of Hitchens-like was­pishness. In customary American style, the editor, George Levine, couches his acknowledgements in a language soggy with superlatives and sentimental clichés. One can already hear the sound of the Hitch sharpening his darkly satirical daggers.Not many of the contributors seem aware of the copious body of literature about secularisation, which ponders, among other things, the question of whether it actually happened.After all, eroding the distinction between sacred and secular can be traced back to the Christian gospel. Salvation is a matter of feeding the hungry and caring for the sick, not in the first place a question of cult and ritual. There will be no temple in the New Jerusalem, we are told, as all that religious paraphernalia is finally washed up and superannuated.Adam Phillips, a superb writer whose outlook on the world is that of Islington Man, quotes Paul Éluard's remark that "there is another world, but it is in this one". He fails to note that this could easily be a translation of the biblical claim that "the kingdom of God is among you". The new world must indeed be inherent in the old if it is to transfigure it, which is how Marx conceived of the relations between socialism and capitalism. Christianity is certainly other-worldly, and so is any reasonably sensitive soul who has been reading the newspapers. The Christian gospel looks to a future transformation of the appalling mess we see around us into a community of justice and friendship, a change so deep-seated and indescribable as to make Lenin look like a Lib Dem.“This [world] is our home," Levine comments. If he really feels at home in this crucifying set-up, one might humbly suggest that he shouldn't. Christians and political radicals certainly don't. By "world", of course, Levine means the material world around us, whereas when St John's Gospel uses the word it sometimes means the oppressive power structure under which we live. John is being political, Levine is not.Like some other contributors to the book, he suspects that Christian faith is other-worldly in the sense of despising material things. Material reality, in his view, is what art celebrates but religion does not. This is to forget that Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit. It is also to misunderstand the doctrine of Creation, which, whatever Richard Dawkins may suppose, has nothing to do with how the world got off the ground. It relates, among other things, to its unique preciousness.The 13th-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas taught that material things were good in themselves. It is good that there are cobras and garbage cans around the place. This, to be sure, is a hard doctrine to swallow when you come to the existence of Donald Rumsfeld. In fact, one of the most persuasive of all cases against religion is that if God does exist, he must be madly in love with Rumsfeld. Who needs to appeal to Darwin, or to the problem of evil, for a more knock-down refutation of the idea?There are some predictable misunderstandings in these essays. No theologian worth his or her salt would see God as an "entity" as Philip Kitcher does. Several contributors confuse the terms "transcendent" and "transcendental". Adam Phillips writes suggestively of human helplessness as opposed to the sense of protectedness that religious faith supposedly brings us, without noticing that the signifier of God for the New Testament is the tortured and executed corpse of a suspected political criminal. Those who fail to realise that this is where the claims of love and justice are likely to get you are known, among other things, as liberal secularists. The finest piece in the book, Bruce Robbins's sensitive literary-critical reading of Max Weber on the so-called disenchantment of the modern world, is by a radical secularist, not a liberal one.None of these writers points out that if Christianity is true, then it is all up with us. We would then have to face the deeply disagreeable truth that the only authentic life is one that springs from a self-dispossession so extreme that it is probably beyond our power. Instead, the volume chatters away about spirits and Darwinian earthworms, animal empathy and the sources of morality.Kitcher asks himself why people should need to be united by a belief in some "transcendental entity" (his use of both terms is inaccurate) rather than by their mutual sympathies. "What exactly," he enquires, "does the invocation of some supernatural being add?" A Christian might reply that it adds the obligations to give up everything one has, including one's life, if necessary, for the sake of others. And this, to say the least, is highly inconvenient. Anyone, even a mildly intelligent badger, can entertain "mutual sympathies". The Christian paradigm of love, by contrast, is the love of strangers and enemies, not of those we find agreeable. Civilised notions such as mutual sympathy, more's the pity, won't deliver us the world we need.Secularisation is a lot harder than people tend to imagine. The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. The most successful candidate currently on offer is sport, which, short of providing funeral rites for its spectators, fulfils almost every religious function in the book.If Friedrich Nietzsche was the first sincere atheist, it is because he saw that the Almighty is exceedingly good at disguising Himself as something else, and that much so-called secularisation is accordingly bogus. Secular thinking, too, had to be demythified. "God had in fact gone into hiding," Robbins observes, "and now had to be smoked out of various secular terms, from morals and nature and history to man and even grammar." Even Nietzsche's will to power has a suspiciously metaphysical ring to it.Postmodernism is perhaps best seen as Nietzsche shorn of the metaphysical baggage. Whereas modernism is still haunted by a God-shaped absence, postmodern culture is too young to remember a time when men and women were anguished by the fading spectres of truth, reality, nature, value, meaning, foundations and the like. For postmodern theory, there never was any truth or meaning in the first place, and so mourning its disappearance would be like lamenting that a rabbit can't recite Paradise Lost.Postmodernism is properly secular, but it pays an immense price for this coming of age - if coming of age it is. It means shelving all the other big questions, too, as hopelessly passé. It also involves the grave error of imagining that all faith or passionate conviction is inci­piently dogmatic. It is not only religious belief to which postmodernism is allergic, but belief as such. Advanced capitalism sees no need for the stuff. It is both politically divisive and commercially unnecessary.And then arose the greatest irony of all. No sooner had the postmodernists and end-of-history merchants concluded that faith was as antiquated as the typewriter than it broke out in blind fury where it had been least expected - in the wrathful, humiliated world of radical Islam. The globe was now divided down the middle between those who believed too much and those who believed too little, as dark-skinned fundamentalists confronted lightly tanned CEOs. And if that were not irony enough, the fact is that these two camps are not simply antagonists. They are also sides of the same coin.

[Zero Tolerance]

The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to signal the advent of the single world of freedom and democracy. Twenty years later, it is clear that the world’s wall has simply shifted: instead of separating East and West it now divides the rich capitalist North from the poor and devastated South. New walls are being constructed all over the world: between Palestinians and Israelis, between Mexico and the United States, between Africa and the Spanish enclaves, between the pleasures of wealth and the desires of the poor, whether they be peasants in villages or urban dwellers in favelas, banlieues, estates, hostels, squats and shantytowns. The price of the supposedly unified world of capital is the brutal division of human existence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval patrols, barbed wire and expulsions. The ‘problem of immigration’ is, in reality, the fact that the conditions faced by workers from other countries provide living proof that—in human terms—the ‘unified world’ of globalization is a sham.

Alain Badiou, "The Communist Hypothesis", New Left Review, January/February 2008, p. 38

[Zero Tolerance]

There’s a weird Spice Girls structure to the Oxbridge “Blitcons” (a shortening of “British literary conservatives”) that Hitchens is a member of. Julian Barnes is ‘Froggy Blit,’ Ian McEwan is ‘Nerdy Blit,’ Salman Rushdie is ‘Curry Blit,’ Martin Amis is ‘Celebrity Blit,’ and Christopher Hitchens is ‘Gonzo Blit.’ The duties of Gonzo Blit include submitting to safe-word-protected waterboarding, bullying Arab youths, pretending to be a Bob Dylan fan, and, according to The Guardian, “courageously” asking people not to pray for him during cancer treatment (which shouldn’t matter to an atheist anyway). This is all pretty hardcore for Amis, though, when he claims that Hitchens is an all-round tough who ‘

likes the smell of cordite’ (probably unaware the stuff’s been obsolete for over 50 years).

[hazard]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/MH30Dj01.html

Why you won't find the meaning of lifeBy SpenglerMuch as I admire the late Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who turned his horrific experience at Auschwitz into clinical insights, the notion of "man's search for meaning" seems inadequate. Just what about man qualifies him to search for meaning, whatever that might be?The German playwright Bertolt Brecht warned us against the practice in The Threepenny Opera:Ja, renne nach dem GluckDoch renne nicht zu sehrDenn alle rennen nach dem GluckDas Gluck lauft hinterher.(Sure, run after happiness, but don't run too hard, because whileeverybody's running after happiness, it moseys along somewhere behind them).Brecht (1898-1956) was the kind of character who gave Nihilism a bad name, to be sure, but he had a point. There is something perverse in searching for the meaning of life. It implies that we don't like our lives and want to discover something different. If we don't like living to begin with, we are in deep trouble.Danish philosopher, theologian and religious author Soren Kierkegaard portrayed his Knight of Faith as the sort of fellow who enjoyed a pot roast on Sunday afternoon. If that sort of thing doesn't satisfy us (feel free to substitute something else than eating), just what is it that we had in mind?People have a good reason to look at life cross-eyed, because it contains a glaring flaw - that we are going to die, and we probably will become old and sick and frail before we do so. All the bric-a-brac we accumulate during our lifetimes will accrue to other people, if it doesn't go right into the trash, and all the little touches of self-improvement we added to our personality will disappear - the golf stance, the macrame skills, the ability to play the ukulele and the familiarity with the filmography of Sam Pekinpah.These examples trivialize the problem, of course. If we search in earnest for the meaning of life, then we might make heroic efforts to invent our own identity. That is the great pastime of the past century's intellectuals. Jean-Paul Sartre, the sage and eventual self-caricature of Existentialism, instructed us that man's existence precedes his essence, and therefore can invent his own essence more or less as he pleases. That was a silly argument, but enormously influential.Sartre reacted to the advice of Martin Heidegger (the German existentialist from whom Jean-Paul Sartre cribbed most of his metaphysics). Heidegger told us that our "being" really was being-unto-death, for our life would end, and therefore is shaped by how we deal with the certainty of death. (Franz Kafka put the same thing better: "The meaning of life is that it ends.") Heidegger (1889-1976) thought that to be "authentic" mean to submerge ourselves into the specific conditions of our time, which for him meant joining the Nazi party. That didn't work out too well, and after the war it became every existentialist for himself. Everyone had the chance to invent his own identity according to taste.Few of us actually read Sartre (and most of us who do regret it), and even fewer read the impenetrable Heidegger, whom I have tried to make more accessible by glossing his thought in Ebonics (The secret that Leo Strauss never revealed, Asia Times Online, May 13, 2003.) But most of us remain the intellectual slaves of 20th century existentialism notwithstanding. We want to invent our own identities, which implies doing something unique.This has had cataclysmic consequences in the arts. To be special, an artist must create a unique style, which means that there will be as many styles as artists. It used to be that artists were trained within a culture, so that thousands of artists and musicians painted church altar pieces and composed music for Sunday services for the edification of ordinary church-goers.Out of such cultures came one or two artists like Raphael or Bach. Today's serious artists write for a miniscule coterie of aficionados in order to validate their own self-invention, and get university jobs if they are lucky, inflicting the same sort of misery on their students. By the time they reach middle age, most artists of this ilk come to understand that they have not found the meaning of life. In fact, they don't even like what they are doing, but as they lack professional credentials to do anything else, they keep doing it.The high art of the Renaissance or Baroque, centered in the churches or the serious theater, has disappeared. Ordinary people can't be expected to learn a new style every time they encounter the work of a new artist (neither can critics, but they pretend to). The sort of art that appeals to a general audience has retreated into popular culture. That is not the worst sort of outcome. One of my teachers observes that the classical style of composition never will disappear, because the movies need it; it is the only sort of music that can tell a story.Most people who make heroic efforts at originality learn eventually that they are destined for no such thing. If they are lucky, they content themselves with Kierkegaard's pot roast on Sunday afternoon and other small joys, for example tenure at a university. But no destiny is more depressing than that of the artist who truly manages to invent a new style and achieve recognition for it.He recalls the rex Nemorensis, the priest of Diana at Nemi who according to Ovid won his office by murdering his predecessor, and will in turn be murdered by his eventual successor. The inventor of a truly new style has cut himself off from the past, and will in turn be cut off from the future by the next entrant who invents a unique and individual style.The only thing worse than searching in vain for the meaning of life within the terms of the 20th century is to find it, for it can only be a meaning understood by the searcher alone, who by virtue of the discovery is cut off from future as well as past. That is why our image of the artist is a young rebel rather than an elderly sage. If our rebel artists cannot manage to die young, they do the next best thing, namely disappear from public view, like J D Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. The aging rebel is in the position of Diana's priest who sleeps with sword in hand and one eye open, awaiting the challenger who will do to him what he did to the last fellow to hold the job.Most of us have no ambitions to become the next Jackson Pollack or Damien Hirst. Instead of Heidegger's being-unto-death, we acknowledge being-unto-cosmetic surgery, along with exercise, Botox and anti-oxidants. We attempt to stay young indefinitely. Michael Jackson, I argued in a July 2009 obituary, became a national hero because more than any other American he devoted his life to the goal of remaining an adolescent. His body lies moldering in the grave (in fact, it was moldering long before it reached the grave) but his spirit soars above an America that proposes to deal with the problem of mortality by fleeing from it. (See Blame Michael Jackson Asia Times Online, July 14, 2009.)A recent book by the sociologist Eric Kaufmann (Will the Religious Inherit the Earth?) makes the now-common observation that secular people have stopped having children. As a secular writer, he bewails this turn of events, but concedes that it has occurred for a reason: "The weakest link in the secular account of human nature is that it fails to account for people's powerful desire to seek immortality for themselves and their loved ones."Traditional society had to confront infant mortality as well as death by hunger, disease and war. That shouldn't be too troubling, however: "We may not be able to duck death completely, but it becomes so infrequent that we can easily forget about it."That is a Freudian slip for the record books. Contrary to what Professor Kaufmann seems to be saying, the mortality rate for human beings remains at 100%, where it always was. But that is not how we think about it. We understand the concept of death, just not as it might apply to us.If we set out to invent our own identities, then by definition we must abominate the identities of our parents and our teachers. Our children, should we trouble to bring any into the world, also will abominate ours. If self-invention is the path to the meaning of life, it makes the messy job of bearing and raising children a superfluous burden, for we can raise our children by no other means than to teach them contempt for us, both by instruction, and by the example of set in showing contempt to our own parents.That is why humanity has found no other way to perpetuate itself than by the continuity of tradition. A life that is worthwhile is one that is worthwhile in all its phases, from youth to old age. Of what use are the elderly? In a viable culture they are the transmitters of the accumulated wisdom of the generations. We will take the trouble to have children of our own only when we anticipate that they will respect us in our declining years, not merely because they tolerate us, but because we will have something yet to offer to the young.In that case, we do not discover the meaning of life. We accept it, rather, as it is handed down to us. Tradition by itself is no guarantee of cultural viability. Half of the world's 6,700 languages today are spoken by small tribes in New Guinea, whose rate of extinction is frightful. Traditions perfected over centuries of isolated existence in Neolithic society can disappear in a few years in the clash with modernity. But there are some traditions in the West that have survived for millennia and have every hope of enduring for millennia still.For those of you who still are searching for the meaning of life, the sooner you figure out that the search itself is the problem, the better off you will be. Since the Epic of Gilgamesh in the third millennium BC, our search has not been for meaning, but for immortality. And as the gods told Gilgamesh, you can't find immortality by looking for it. Better to find a recipe for pot roast.Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman.

[hazard]

http://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/opium-of-intellectuals-3786

The Opium of the Intellectualsby Roger KimballHow many people still remember The Opium of the Intellectuals, the French philosopher Raymond Aron’s masterpiece? First published in France in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, L’Opium des intellectuels was an immediate sensation. It caused something of a sensation in the United States, too, when an English translation was published in 1957. Writing in The New York Times, the historian Crane Brinton spoke for many when he said that the book was "a kind of running commentary on the Western world today."Unaccountably the book was out of print for many years. It was therefore welcome news indeed that Transaction Publishers brought out a new edition of Opium in 2001. The deformations that Aron analyzed are still very much with us, even if the figures that represent them have changed.Aron’s subject is the bewitchment--the moral and intellectual disordering--that comes with adherence to certain ideologies. Why is it, he wondered, that certain intellectuals are "merciless toward the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines"?Aron’s title is an inversion of Marx’s contemptuous remark that religion is "the opium of the people." He quotes the French writer Simone Weil’s sly reversal of Marx: "Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. . . . t has been continually used . . . as an opiate for the people."In fact Weil got it only partly right.Marxism and kindred forms of thought never really became the people’s narcotic. But they certainly became--and in essentials they still are--the drug of choice for the group that Aron anatomized: the intellectuals. The Opium of the Intellectuals is a seminal book of the twentieth century, an indispensable contribution to the literature of intellectual disabusement.Aron, who died in 1983 in his late seventies, is a half-forgotten colossus of twentieth-century intellectual life. Part philosopher, part sociologist, part journalist, he was above all a spokesman for that rarest form of idealism, the idealism of common sense. Aron was, Allan Bloom wrote shortly after the philosopher’s death, "the man who for fifty years . . . had been right about the political alternatives actually available to us. . . . [H]e was right about Hitler, right about Stalin, and right that our Western regimes, with all their flaws, are the best and only hope of mankind."From the 1950s through the early 1970s, Aron was regularly calumniated by the radical Left--by his erstwhile friends Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for starters, but also by their many epigoni and intellectual heirs. In 1963, for example, Susan Sontag dismissed Aron as "a man deranged by German philosophy belatedly converting to Anglo-Saxon empiricism and common sense under the name of `Mediterranean’ virtue."In fact, it would be difficult to find anyone at once more knowledgeable about and less "deranged" by German philosophy than Raymond Aron. His was a sober and penetrating intelligence, sufficiently curious to take on Hegel, sufficiently robust to escape uncorrupted by the encounter. The fact that Aron was hated by the Left does not mean that he was a partisan of the Right. On the contrary, he always to some extent considered himself a man of the Left, but (in later years anyway) it was the pre-Marxist Left of high liberalism.As the sociologist Edward Shils noted in an affectionate memoir of his friend, Aron moved from being a declared socialist in his youth to becoming "the most persistent, the most severe, and the most learned critic of Marxism and of the socialist--or more precisely Communist--order of society" in the twentieth century. Shils spoke of Aron’s "discriminating devotion to the ideals of the Enlightenment."The ideals in question prominently featured faith in the power of reason. Aron’s discrimination showed itself in his recognition that reason’s power is always limited. That is to say, if Aron was a faithful child of the Enlightenment--its secularism, its humanism, its opposition of reason to superstition--he also in many respects remained a faithful grandchild of the traditional society that many Enlightenment thinkers professed to despise.Enlightened thinking tends to be superficial thinking because its critical armory is deployed against every faith except its faith in the power of reason. Aron avoided the besetting liability of the Enlightenment by subjecting its ideals to the same scrutiny it reserved for its adversaries. "In defending the freedom of religious teaching," he wrote, "the unbeliever defends his own freedom."Aron’s generosity of spirit was a coefficient of his recognition that reality was complex, knowledge limited, and action essential. The leitmotif of Aron’s career was responsibility. He understood that political wisdom rests in the ability to choose the better course of action even when the best course is unavailable--which is always.The subject of politics, Aristotle noted, is "the good life for man." What constitutes the good life? Aron cannily reminds us that the more extravagant answers to this question are often the most malevolent. They promise everything. They tend to deliver misery and impoverishment.Hence Aron’s rejection of Communism: "Communism is a degraded version of the Western message. It retains its ambition to conquer nature, to improve the lot of the humble, but it sacrifices what was and must remain the heart and soul of the unending human adventure: freedom of enquiry, freedom of controversy, freedom of criticism, and the vote."Such freedoms may seem pedestrian in comparison with the prospect of a classless society in which liberty reigns and inequality has been vanquished once and for all. But such an idea, he noted, is "no more than an illustration in a children’s picture book."For Aron, the issue was "not radical choice, but ambiguous compromise." He continually came back to man as he is, not as he might be imagined: "At the risk of being accused of cynicism, I refuse to believe that any social order can be based on the virtue and disinterestedness of citizens."In his foreword to The Opium of the Intellectuals, Aron noted that he directed his argument "not so much against the Communists as against the communisants," against those fellow travelers for whom the West is always wrong and who believe that people can "be divided into two camps, one the incarnation of good and the other of evil."The primary target of Aron’s polemic was fanaticism. But he also recognized that the defeat of fanaticism often leads to a contrary spiritual sickness, indifference. Both are expressions of the ultimate enemy, nihilism. Skepticism, Aron wrote, is useful or harmful depending on which is more to be feared at the moment: fanaticism or apathy. The intervening faculty that orients us appropriately is practical wisdom, prudence, "the god" (Aron quotes Burke) "of this lower world."Aron’s indictment of intellectual intoxication is not the same thing as an indictment of intellectuals. He was not anti-intellectual or contemptuous of ideas. This was not simply because he was an intellectual himself. He clearly discerned the immense power, for good or ill, that ideas can have. "Intellectuals suffer from their inability to alter the course of events," he noted. "But they underestimate their influence. In a long term sense, politicians are the disciples of scholars or writers."

[Indy]

Valjda ovo pasuje ovde. Politika, 2. maja 1933, posle "ogromne majske svecanosti u Berlinu" na kojoj se nepreglednoj masi obratio g. Hitler, pronicljivi izvestac izmedju ostalog "kasandrovski" tacno predvidja:

Edited January 11, 2012 by Indy

[dare...]

Danilo Kiš: O NACIONALIZMUNacionalizam je, pre svega, paranoja. Kolektivna i pojedinačna paranoja. Kao kolektivna paranoja, ona je posledica zavisti i straha, a iznad svega posledica gubljenja individualne svesti; te, prema tome, kolektivna paranoja i nije ništa drugo do zbir individualnih paranoja doveden do paroksizma.Ako pojedinac, u okviru društvenog projekta, nije u stanju da se «izrazi», ili zato što mu taj društveni projekt ne ide na ruku, ne stimuliše ga kao individuu, ili ga sprečava kao individuu, što će reći ne daje mu da dođe do svog entiteta, on je primoran da svoj entitet traži izvan identiteta i izvan tzv. društvene strukture. Tako on postaje pripadnik jedne skupine koja postavlja sebi, bar na izgled, kao zadatak i cilj probleme od epohalne važnosti: opstanak i prestiž nacije, ili nacija, očuvanje tradicije i nacionalnih svetinja, folklornih, filozofskih, etičkih, književnih, itd. Sa teretom takve, tajne, polujavne ili javne misije, N.N. postaje čovek akcije, narodni tribun, privid individuuma. Kad smo ga već sveli na tu meru, na njegovu pravu meru, pošto smo ga izdvojili iz krda, u koje se on sam smestio – ili gde su ga drugi smestili, imamo pred sobom individuu bez individualnosti, nacionalistu, rođaka Žila (Jules).To je onaj Sartrov Žil, koji je porodična nula, čija je jedina osobina da ume da prebledi na pomen jedne jedine teme: Engleza. To bledilo, to drhtanje, ta njegova «tajna», da ume da prebledi na pomen Engleza, to je jedino njegovo društveno biće i to ga čini značajnim, postojećim: nemojte pred njim pominjati engleski čaj, jer će vam svi za stolom početi namigivati, davaće vam znake rukama i nogama, jer Žil je osetljiv na Engleze, zaboga, pa to svi znaju, Žil mrzi Engleze (a voli svoje, Francuze), jednom rečju, Žil je ličnost, on postaje ličnost zahvaljujući engleskom čaju.Ovaj i ovakav portret, primenjiv na sve nacionaliste, može se slobodno, a po ovoj shemi, razviti do kraja: nacionalista je, po pravilu, kao društveno biće, i kao pojedinac, podjednako ništavan. Izvan ovog opredeljenja, on je nula. On je zapostavio porodicu, posao (uglavnom činovnički), literaturu (ako je pisac), društvene funkcije, jer su one isuviše sitne u odnosu na njegov mesijanizam. Treba li reći da je on, po opredeljenju asketa, potencijalni borac koji čeka svoj čas. Nacionalizam je, da parafraziram Sartrov stav o antisemitizmu, «potpun i slobodan izbor, globalan stav koji čovek prihvata ne samo prema drugim nacijama nego i prema čoveku uopšte, prema istoriji i društvu, to je istovremeno strast i koncepcija sveta».Nacionalista je, po definiciji, ignorant. Nacionalizam je, dakle, linija manjeg otpora, komocija. Nacionalisti je lako, on zna, ili misli da zna, svoje vrednosti, svoje, što će reći nacionalne, što će reći vrednosti nacije kojoj pripada, etičke i političke, a za ostale se ne interesuje, ne interesuju ga, pakao to su drugi (druge nacije, drugo pleme). Njih ne treba ni proveravati. Nacionalista u drugima vidi isključivo sebe – nacionaliste. Pozicija, rekosmo li, komotna. Strah i zavist. Opredeljenje, angažovanje koje ne iziskuje truda. Ne samo «pakao to su drugi», u okviru nacionalnog ključa, naravno, nego i: sve što nije moje (srpsko, hrvatsko, francusko...) to mi je strano. Nacionalizam je ideologija banalnosti. Nacionalizam je, dakle, totalitarna ideologija.Nacionalizam je, uz to, ne samo po etimološkom značenju, još poslednja ideologija i demagogija koja se obraća narodu. Pisci to najbolje znaju. Stoga je pod sumnjom nacionalizma svaki pisac koji deklarativno izjavljuje da piše «iz naroda i za narod», koji svoj individualni glas tobože potčinjava višim, nacionalnim interesima. Nacionalizam je kič (a, da se podsetimo, Kič bi se mogao meriti stepenom banalnosti svojih asocijacija – A. Mol.), u srpsko – hrvatskoj varijanti, nacionalizam je borba za prevlast oko licitarskog srca.Nacionalista, u principu, ne zna ni jedan jezik, niti tzv. varijante, ne poznaje druge kulture – ne tiču ga se. Ali stvar nije tako prosta. Ako i zna neki jezik, što će reći da kao intelektualac ima uvid u kulturno nasleđe neke druge nacije, velike ili male, to mu znanje služi samo tome da uspostavlja analogije, na štetu onih drugih, naravno. Kič i folklor, folklorni kič, ako vam se tako više sviđa, nisu ništa drugo do kamuflirani nacionalizam, plodno polje nacionalističke ideologije. Zamah folklorizma, kod nas i u svetu, nije antropološke prirode, nego nacionalističke. Insistiranje na famoznom coleur locale-u takođe je, ako je izvan umetničkog konteksta, što će reći da nije u službi umetničke istine, jedan od vidova nacionalizma, prikrivenog.Nacionalizam je, dakle, prevashodno negativitet, nacionalizam je negativna kategorija duha, jer nacionalizam živi na poricanju i od poricanja. Mi nismo ono što su oni. Mi smo pozitivan pol, oni negativan. Naše vrednosti, nacionalne, nacionalističke, imaju funkciju tek u odnosu na nacionalizam onih drugih: mi jesmo nacionalisti, ali oni su to još i više, mi koljemo, kad se mora, ali oni još i više; mi smo pijanci, oni alkoholičari; naša istorija je ispravna samo u odnosu na njihovu, naš je jezik čist samo u odnosu na njihov. Nacionalizam živi od relativizma. Ne postoje opšte vrednosti, estetičke, etičke, itd. Postoje samo relativne. I u tom smislu, u prvom redu, nacionalizam jeste nazadnjaštvo. Treba biti bolji samo od svoga brata ili polubrata, ostalo me se i ne tiče. Skočiti malo više od njega, ostali me se ne tiču. To je ono što smo nazvali strah. Ostali čak imaju pravo da nas dostignu, da nas prestignu, to nas se ne tiče. Ciljevi nacionalizma uvek su dostižni ciljevi, dostižni jer su skromni, skromni jer su podli. Ne skače se, ne baca se kamena s ramena da bi se dostigao svoj sopstveni maksimum, nego da bi se nadigrali oni, jedini, slični a tako različni, zbog kojih je igra i započeta.Nacionalista se, rekosmo, ne boji nikog, osim svog brata. Ali od njega se boji strahom egzistencijalnim, patološkim: pobeda izabranog neprijatelja jeste njegov apsolutni poraz, ukidanje njegovog bića. Pošto je strašljivac i nikogović, nacionalista ne ističe sebi više ciljeve. Pobeda nad izabranim neprijateljem, onim drugim, jeste apsolutna pobeda. Stoga je nacionalizam ideja beznađa, ideologija mogućne pobede, zagarantovana pobeda, poraz nikad konačan. Nacionalista se ne boji nikoga, «nikoga do Boga», a njegov bog jeste bog po njegovoj meri, bledi rođak Žil, negde za nekim drugim stolom, njegov brat rođeni, isto toliko nemoćan kao i on sam, «ponos porodice», porodični entitet, svesni i organizovani deo porodice i nacije – bledi, blesavi rođak.Rekli smo, dakle, biti nacionalista znači biti individuum bez obaveze. «To je kukavica koja ne želi da prizna svoj kukavičluk; ubica koji potiskuje svoju naklonost ka ubistvu, nemoćan da je sasvim priguši a koji se, ipak, ne usuđuje da ubije, osim iz potaje ili anonimnosti gomile, ili u nekakvom pravednom ratu. Nezadovoljnik koji u mirnodopsko vreme ne usuđuje da se pobuni iz straha od konsekvenci svoje pobune» - slika i prilika citiranog Sartrovog antisemite. I odakle, pitamo se, taj kukavičluk, to opredeljenje, taj zamah nacionalizma u naše doba? Pritisnut ideologijama, na marginama društvenog kretanja, zbijen i izgubljen među konfrontiranim ideologijama, nedorastao individualnoj pobuni, jer mu je ona uskraćena, individuum se našao u procepu, u praznini, ne učestvuje u društvenom životu a društveno biće, individualista a individualnost mu uskraćena u ime ideologije, i šta mu preostaje drugo nego da svoje društveno biće traži drugde? Nacionalista je refulirani individualista, nacionalizam je refulirani (kolektivni) izraz tog i takvog individualizma, ideologija, i antiideologija... Edited January 29, 2012 by dare...

[Roger Sanchez]

“I’d rather my children red than dead,” ~ John F. Kennedy to Mimi Alford during the Cuban Missile Crisis

[Indy]

Secret documents lift lid on WWII mutiny by US troops in north Queensland

An Australian historian has uncovered hidden documents which reveal that African American troops used machine guns to attack their white officers in a siege on a US base in north Queensland in 1942.

[Indy]

Novotkrivene Hićine slike (Okej, možda su negde i viđene, ali su dosta retke).Ovo je kao neki koncept-art, skoro... uvezbavanje zapaljivih govora. Hića je bio 1 avangarda u tom pogledu, danas to svi rade.

[Prospero]

German soldiers preserved in World War I shelter discovered after nearly 100 years Edited February 15, 2012 by buffalo bill

[kim_philby]

za radagasta:A decade after his death, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu stands tall