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在不知不覺中，竟然一口氣寫完了25000字左右，湊一湊也有兩章之多，順手也把這陣子的靈感來源整理整理吧～以免以後又找不到了。
1. Karl Marx
People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852)
Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself (On the Jewish Question, 1843)
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2. Can We Criticize Foucault? (Daniel Zamora, 12/10/14)
One can, of course, lament the statist form in which social security is managed, or say, for example, that it ought to be run by collectives — though I don’t really buy that — but criticizing the tool and its ideological basis as such, that’s very different. When Foucault goes so far as to say it’s “clear that there is hardly any sense in speaking of a ‘right to health,’” and asks, “should a society seek to satisfy individuals’ need for health? And can those individuals legitimately demand the satisfaction of those needs?” we are no longer really within the anarchist register.
For me, and contrary to Foucault, what we should do is deepen the social rights that we have already, we should “build on what already exists,” as Bernard Friot says. And social security is an excellent tool that we should both defend and deepen.
Along the same lines, when I read the philosopher Beatriz Preciado, who writes in Libération that “we’re not going to cry over the end of the welfare state, because the welfare state is also the psychiatric hospital, the disability office, the prison, the patriarchal-colonial-heteronormative school,” it makes me think that neoliberalism has done much more than transform our economy; it has profoundly reconfigured the social imagination of a certain “libertarian” left.
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3. 傅柯是新自由主義始作俑者嗎？評《批判傅柯：80年代與新自由主義的誘惑》（睫狀肌譯，02/02/2016）
原文：Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins & Alexander Arnold, Critiquer Foucault: Les Années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale, 18/03/2015
Zamora說，傅柯否認有「健康權」這種東西的想法，跟新自由主義者不謀而合。可是，傅柯固然不同意有這樣的權利存在，但他並不像新自由主義者那樣，認為國家提供醫療照護，將會與個人自由扞格，或者無益於個人自由。傅柯認定，健康無法量化，它是一種主體性特質，而非事實，因而無法透過法律來強制乃至於「保證」。（Take for example Foucault’s rejection of the idea that there exists a right to health, a position that neoliberals, Zamora points out, share with him. Foucault did agree that no such right existed, but he did not think, like neoliberals, that it was because state provision of healthcare was inherently contrary to personal freedom, or was inefficient. Instead Foucault believed that health was an unquantifiable, subjective quality rather than a fact, and therefore he thought it could not be “guaranteed” or enforced by law.）
傅柯並不像Zamora所說的，「再生產」了新自由主義俗見，他採取的是一條不一樣的思路，他並沒有論稱個人應該在公開市場購買健康照護，傅柯談的是，一個政治共同體，應該採取必要措施，來保障個人有生活在益於其健康的環境的權利，並且集體決定最佳方式的權利。（Instead of reproducing the “neoliberal doxa” as Zamora says he does, Foucault takes a rather different tack. He does not argue that people should be forced to purchase healthcare on an open market. Rather Foucault says that a political community should take the necessary steps to preserve an individual right to live in conditions that are conducive to health, and to collectively decide the best way to do so.）
傅柯對法國70年代健康照護體系的批評並沒有疑問，但沒有「無條件支持健康照護體系」，並不代表傅柯對新自由主義誘惑退讓，像是Zamora要我們所相信的那樣。傅柯的批判旨促使人們創意性地重新思考這個體系，並同時維持它對健康照護的基本許諾。（Undoubtedly Foucault was critical of the system of health that existed in France in the 1970s. Yet his lack of “unconditional support for the system” is not an indication that he ceded to a neoliberal temptation, as Zamora would have us believe. Rather, Foucault’s criticisms were aimed at pushing people to creatively rethink that system while preserving its basic commitment to healthcare.）
在這些Zamora錯誤地指稱是傅柯屈服於新自由主義觀點鐵證的訪談中，傅柯對於公衛的關注，以及他對公衛體系能否透過市場實現的懷疑，其實都歷歷可見。傅柯這麼說，「不用說，我並不是主張一種野蠻的自由主義：有辦法的人得享健保覆蓋，沒本事的人就自己想辦法。」（His commitment to public health, and his skepticism that it could be assured through the market, is blatantly clear in the very same interview to which Zamora erroneously points as evidence that Foucault succumbed to the neoliberal view. In it, Foucault says, “I do not adhere to¬ — it goes without saying — a savage liberalism that would provide individual coverage for those with means, and an absence of coverage for those without them.”）
那什麼是「後期傅柯」的政治效應呢？據Zamora所說，傅柯引導左翼放棄了勞動階級，放棄了對抗剝削的戰爭，並對新自由主義的「反國家論」給予重要的支持，還加持了新自由主義的重要政策，像是負所得稅與瓦解全民健康照護體制。（So what were the political effects of this “late Foucault?” According to Zamora they are the following: Foucault led the left to abandon the working class and the fight against exploitation, gave critical support to neoliberal anti-statism, and helped garner backing for major aspects of neoliberal policy, namely the negative tax and the dismantling of a universal healthcare system.）
我們已經證明，Zamora所引述的，傅柯對於這些政策的討論，並不等於贊同它們。我們也已經看到，基於傅柯並沒有主張要用市場來取代國家，成為社會的根本組織機制，傅柯的反國家論也根本不同於新自由主義。即便傅柯相信捍衛勞動階級，對抗剝削並非70年代左翼最重要議題，這也不是什麼新東西。（We have already shown that Foucault’s critical discussion of the neoliberal policies Zamora cites did not constitute an endorsement thereof. We have also seen that Foucault’s anti-statism was of a fundamentally different variety than that of neoliberalism, due to the fact that he did not propose that the market should replace the state as the fundamental organizing mechanism of society. And while it is true that Foucault believed that the defense of the working class and the fight against exploitation were not the left’s most important issues in the 1970s, these beliefs were not new. ）
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4. Michel Foucault (1988). Power and sex. In: Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984 (London: Routledge), pp. 114-115
[T]he movements labeled “sexual liberation” ought to be understood as movements of affirmation “starting with” sexuality. Which means two things: they are movements that s tart with sexuality, with the apparatus of sexuality in the midst of which we’re caught, and which make it function to the limit; but, at the same time, they are in motion relative to it, disengaging themselves and surmounting it.
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5. Jean Baudrillard (2002). The Violence of the Global. Initially published as “La Violence du Mondial,” in Jean Baudrillard, Power Inferno (Paris: Galilée, 2002), pp. 63-83.
The analogy between the terms “global” and “universal” is misleading. Universalization has to do with human rights, liberty, culture, and democracy. By contrast, globalization is about technology, the market, tourism, and information. Globalization appears to be irreversible whereas universalization is likely to be on its way out. At least, it appears to be retreating as a value system which developed in the context of Western modernity and was unmatched by any other culture.
Any culture that becomes universal loses its singularity and dies. That’s what happened to all those cultures we destroyed by forcefully assimilating them. But it is also true of our own culture, despite its claim of being universally valid. The only difference is that other cultures died because of their singularity, which is a beautiful death. We are dying because we are losing our own singularity and exterminating all our values. And this is a much more ugly death.
In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the most minimally common value. This is precisely the fate of human rights, democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest expression…Universalization is vanishing because of globalization. The globalization of exchanges puts an end to the universalization of values. This marks the triumph of a uniform thought over a universal one.
In fact, the presence of globalization makes us wonder whether universalization has not already been destroyed by its own critical mass. It also makes us wonder whether universality and modernity ever existed outside of some official discourses or some popular moral sentiments. For us today, the mirror of our modern universalization has been broken. But this may actually be an opportunity. In the fragments of this broken mirror, all sorts of singularities reappear. Those singularities we thought were endangered are surviving, and those we thought were lost are revived.
History gave universalization its chance. Today though, faced with a global order without any alternative on the one hand and with drifting insurrectionary singularities on the other, the concepts of liberty, democracy, and human rights look awful. They remain as the ghosts of universalization past. Universalization used to promote a culture characterized by the concepts of transcendence, subjectivity, conceptualization, reality, and representation. By contrast, today’s virtual global culture has replaced universal concepts with screens, networks, immanence, numbers, and a space-time continuum without any depth.
There was a sort of dialectical tension or critical movement that found its materiality in historical and revolutionary violence. But the expulsion of this critical negativity opened the door to another form of violence, the violence of the global. This new violence is characterized by the supremacy of technical efficiency and positivity, total organization, integral circulation, and the equivalence of all exchanges. Additionally, the violence of the global puts an end to the social role of the intellectual (an idea tied to the Enlightenment and universalization), but also to the role of the activist whose fate used to be tied to the ideas of critical opposition and historical violence.
It is the violence of a society where conflict is forbidden, where death is not allowed. It is a violence that, in a sense, puts an end to violence itself, and strives to establish a world where anything related to the natural must disappear (whether it is in the body, sex, birth, or death). Better than a global violence, we should call it a global virulence. This form of violence is indeed viral. It moves by contagion, proceeds by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist.
Who can defeat the global system? Certainly not the anti-globalization movement whose sole objective is to slow down global deregulation. This movement’s political impact may well be important. But its symbolic impact is worthless. This movement’s opposition is nothing more than an internal matter that the dominant system can easily keep under control. Positive alternatives cannot defeat the dominant system, but singularities that are neither positive nor negative can. Singularities are not alternatives. They represent a different symbolic order. They do not abide by value judgments or political realities.
Not all singularities are violent. Some linguistic, artistic, corporeal, or cultural singularities are quite subtle. But others, like terrorism, can be violent. The singularity of terrorism avenges the singularities of those cultures that paid the price of the imposition of a unique global power with their own extinction. We are really not talking about a “clash of civilizations” here, but instead about an almost anthropological confrontation between an undifferentiated universal culture and everything else that, in whatever domain, retains a quality of irreducible alterity.
Once a culture [of the West] has lost its values, it can only seek revenge by attacking those of others. Beyond their political or economic objectives, wars…aim at normalizing savagery and aligning all the territories. The goal is to get rid of any reactive zone, and to colonize and domesticate any wild and resisting territory both geographically and mentally…In an intensely integrated system like ours, everything can have a similar effect of destabilization. Everything drives toward the failure of a system that claims to be infallible.
The universal dimension of modernity cannot be refused. From the perspective of the West, of its consensual model, and of its unique way of thinking, it is a crime not to perceive modernity as the obvious source of the Good or as the natural ideal of humankind. It is also a crime when the universality of our values and our practices are found suspect by some individuals who, when they reveal their doubts, are immediately pegged as fanatics.
The hatred of non-Western people is not based on the fact that the West stole everything from them and never gave anything back. Rather, it is based on the fact that they received everything, but were never allowed to give anything back. This hatred is not caused by dispossession or exploitation, but rather by humiliation.
God used to allow some space for sacrifice. In the traditional order, it was always possible to give back to God, or to nature, or to any superior entity by means of sacrifice. That’s what ensured a symbolic equilibrium between beings and things. But today we no longer have anybody to give back to, to return the symbolic debt to. This is the curse of our culture. It is not that the gift is impossible, but rather that the counter-gift is. All sacrificial forms have been neutralized and removed (what’s left instead is a parody of sacrifice, which is visible in all the contemporary instances of victimization).
What we hate in ourselves -- the obscure object of our resentment -- is our excess of reality, power, and comfort, our universal availability, our definite accomplishment, this kind of destiny that Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor had in store for the domesticated masses. And this is exactly the part of our culture that the terrorists find repulsive (which also explains the support they receive and the fascination they are able to exert).
Terrorism’s support is not only based on the despair of those who have been humiliated and offended. It is also based on the invisible despair of those whom globalization has privileged, on our own submission to an omnipotent technology, to a crushing virtual reality, to an empire of networks and programs that are probably in the process of redrawing the regressive contours of the entire human species, of a humanity that has gone “global.”
Thus, if terrorism is derived from this excess of reality and from this reality’s impossible exchange, if it is the product of a profusion without any possible counterpart or return, and if it emerges from a forced resolution of conflicts, the illusion of getting rid of it as if it were an objective evil is complete. For, in its absurdity and non-sense, terrorism is our society’s own judgment and penalty.
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6. Daniel Little, Assemblage theory as heuristic (11/02/2016). Published in ‘Understanding Society: Innovative thinking about a global world’
This is interesting that I somehow found Deleuze’s theory (or metaphor) of assemblage can be better captured in and applied to international relations, so maybe this explains why all competing interpretations (due to different ontological view) of certain situations (or, let’s say, regimes and conventions) can make sense at the same time, because they are contingent and not organic as they are presupposed.
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7. Andrew Gurza (09/02/2016), Price of Intimacy: The Time I Hired a Sex Worker. OUT MAGZINE
“Though I’d been learning to embrace my life in a wheelchair—a result of cerebral palsy—going without touch, or even access to my own body, was taking a toll.”Beautiful writing and nice sharing! This just reminds me so much of the “Hand-Angel” [手天使] project run in Taiwan today; What’s more, it’s even a voluntary service. “I started to sense even more as I neared climax. I felt my two identities collided: queer and crippled came together in a surge of pure, uncomplicated pleasure.”
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8. Leland de la Durantaye棄置，才能完成作品：阿岡本《牲人》最終章(睫狀肌譯，10/02/2016)
《肉身的踐行》所投射出來的影子顯然長很多，這個本體論、神學、哲學與詩學共同探索出來的投影，其邊界被阿岡本說是『人類起源學』，或者，我們是如何變成現在這樣的？阿岡本所有別具一格書寫，至關重要的，就是這個東西。
核心論題是：什麼是你的？而你會如何使用它？比如說：你的身體是你的，而你運用這副肉身過著你的生活，而在什麼情況下，它會受制於種種限制？又限制到什麼程度。
總之，肉身是如何被生命是什麼又為何存在，承擔什麼義務，又被賦予哪些使命的概念，所制約與安身？
後記：
太有趣了，明明因為趕論文死線在即的關係，讓我在前陣子淚寫一封分手信給那些讓自己「意亂情迷」的思想家們（套句指導教授的話，「回歸正軌」）。
結果真的浪子回頭投身international law和global health的領域時，反而一直在許多著作裡「巧遇」他們；不過也可以理解，畢竟任誰也想跟他們對上幾句話吧（但我老闆都不懂得欣賞他們的美）！
可是我的腦海裡一直浮出E神《好久不見》的旋律：「我多麼想和你見一面，看看你最近改變...」自以為是失聯已久的朋友。我好瘋喔！哈哈哈哈～果然走火入魔了。
1. Karl Marx
People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852)
Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself (On the Jewish Question, 1843)
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2. Can We Criticize Foucault? (Daniel Zamora, 12/10/14)
One can, of course, lament the statist form in which social security is managed, or say, for example, that it ought to be run by collectives — though I don’t really buy that — but criticizing the tool and its ideological basis as such, that’s very different. When Foucault goes so far as to say it’s “clear that there is hardly any sense in speaking of a ‘right to health,’” and asks, “should a society seek to satisfy individuals’ need for health? And can those individuals legitimately demand the satisfaction of those needs?” we are no longer really within the anarchist register.
For me, and contrary to Foucault, what we should do is deepen the social rights that we have already, we should “build on what already exists,” as Bernard Friot says. And social security is an excellent tool that we should both defend and deepen.
Along the same lines, when I read the philosopher Beatriz Preciado, who writes in Libération that “we’re not going to cry over the end of the welfare state, because the welfare state is also the psychiatric hospital, the disability office, the prison, the patriarchal-colonial-heteronormative school,” it makes me think that neoliberalism has done much more than transform our economy; it has profoundly reconfigured the social imagination of a certain “libertarian” left.
．
3. 傅柯是新自由主義始作俑者嗎？評《批判傅柯：80年代與新自由主義的誘惑》（睫狀肌譯，02/02/2016）
原文：Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins & Alexander Arnold, Critiquer Foucault: Les Années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale, 18/03/2015
Zamora說，傅柯否認有「健康權」這種東西的想法，跟新自由主義者不謀而合。可是，傅柯固然不同意有這樣的權利存在，但他並不像新自由主義者那樣，認為國家提供醫療照護，將會與個人自由扞格，或者無益於個人自由。傅柯認定，健康無法量化，它是一種主體性特質，而非事實，因而無法透過法律來強制乃至於「保證」。（Take for example Foucault’s rejection of the idea that there exists a right to health, a position that neoliberals, Zamora points out, share with him. Foucault did agree that no such right existed, but he did not think, like neoliberals, that it was because state provision of healthcare was inherently contrary to personal freedom, or was inefficient. Instead Foucault believed that health was an unquantifiable, subjective quality rather than a fact, and therefore he thought it could not be “guaranteed” or enforced by law.）
傅柯並不像Zamora所說的，「再生產」了新自由主義俗見，他採取的是一條不一樣的思路，他並沒有論稱個人應該在公開市場購買健康照護，傅柯談的是，一個政治共同體，應該採取必要措施，來保障個人有生活在益於其健康的環境的權利，並且集體決定最佳方式的權利。（Instead of reproducing the “neoliberal doxa” as Zamora says he does, Foucault takes a rather different tack. He does not argue that people should be forced to purchase healthcare on an open market. Rather Foucault says that a political community should take the necessary steps to preserve an individual right to live in conditions that are conducive to health, and to collectively decide the best way to do so.）
傅柯對法國70年代健康照護體系的批評並沒有疑問，但沒有「無條件支持健康照護體系」，並不代表傅柯對新自由主義誘惑退讓，像是Zamora要我們所相信的那樣。傅柯的批判旨促使人們創意性地重新思考這個體系，並同時維持它對健康照護的基本許諾。（Undoubtedly Foucault was critical of the system of health that existed in France in the 1970s. Yet his lack of “unconditional support for the system” is not an indication that he ceded to a neoliberal temptation, as Zamora would have us believe. Rather, Foucault’s criticisms were aimed at pushing people to creatively rethink that system while preserving its basic commitment to healthcare.）
在這些Zamora錯誤地指稱是傅柯屈服於新自由主義觀點鐵證的訪談中，傅柯對於公衛的關注，以及他對公衛體系能否透過市場實現的懷疑，其實都歷歷可見。傅柯這麼說，「不用說，我並不是主張一種野蠻的自由主義：有辦法的人得享健保覆蓋，沒本事的人就自己想辦法。」（His commitment to public health, and his skepticism that it could be assured through the market, is blatantly clear in the very same interview to which Zamora erroneously points as evidence that Foucault succumbed to the neoliberal view. In it, Foucault says, “I do not adhere to¬ — it goes without saying — a savage liberalism that would provide individual coverage for those with means, and an absence of coverage for those without them.”）
那什麼是「後期傅柯」的政治效應呢？據Zamora所說，傅柯引導左翼放棄了勞動階級，放棄了對抗剝削的戰爭，並對新自由主義的「反國家論」給予重要的支持，還加持了新自由主義的重要政策，像是負所得稅與瓦解全民健康照護體制。（So what were the political effects of this “late Foucault?” According to Zamora they are the following: Foucault led the left to abandon the working class and the fight against exploitation, gave critical support to neoliberal anti-statism, and helped garner backing for major aspects of neoliberal policy, namely the negative tax and the dismantling of a universal healthcare system.）
我們已經證明，Zamora所引述的，傅柯對於這些政策的討論，並不等於贊同它們。我們也已經看到，基於傅柯並沒有主張要用市場來取代國家，成為社會的根本組織機制，傅柯的反國家論也根本不同於新自由主義。即便傅柯相信捍衛勞動階級，對抗剝削並非70年代左翼最重要議題，這也不是什麼新東西。（We have already shown that Foucault’s critical discussion of the neoliberal policies Zamora cites did not constitute an endorsement thereof. We have also seen that Foucault’s anti-statism was of a fundamentally different variety than that of neoliberalism, due to the fact that he did not propose that the market should replace the state as the fundamental organizing mechanism of society. And while it is true that Foucault believed that the defense of the working class and the fight against exploitation were not the left’s most important issues in the 1970s, these beliefs were not new. ）
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4. Michel Foucault (1988). Power and sex. In: Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984 (London: Routledge), pp. 114-115
[T]he movements labeled “sexual liberation” ought to be understood as movements of affirmation “starting with” sexuality. Which means two things: they are movements that s tart with sexuality, with the apparatus of sexuality in the midst of which we’re caught, and which make it function to the limit; but, at the same time, they are in motion relative to it, disengaging themselves and surmounting it.
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5. Jean Baudrillard (2002). The Violence of the Global. Initially published as “La Violence du Mondial,” in Jean Baudrillard, Power Inferno (Paris: Galilée, 2002), pp. 63-83.
The analogy between the terms “global” and “universal” is misleading. Universalization has to do with human rights, liberty, culture, and democracy. By contrast, globalization is about technology, the market, tourism, and information. Globalization appears to be irreversible whereas universalization is likely to be on its way out. At least, it appears to be retreating as a value system which developed in the context of Western modernity and was unmatched by any other culture.
Any culture that becomes universal loses its singularity and dies. That’s what happened to all those cultures we destroyed by forcefully assimilating them. But it is also true of our own culture, despite its claim of being universally valid. The only difference is that other cultures died because of their singularity, which is a beautiful death. We are dying because we are losing our own singularity and exterminating all our values. And this is a much more ugly death.
In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the most minimally common value. This is precisely the fate of human rights, democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest expression…Universalization is vanishing because of globalization. The globalization of exchanges puts an end to the universalization of values. This marks the triumph of a uniform thought over a universal one.
In fact, the presence of globalization makes us wonder whether universalization has not already been destroyed by its own critical mass. It also makes us wonder whether universality and modernity ever existed outside of some official discourses or some popular moral sentiments. For us today, the mirror of our modern universalization has been broken. But this may actually be an opportunity. In the fragments of this broken mirror, all sorts of singularities reappear. Those singularities we thought were endangered are surviving, and those we thought were lost are revived.
History gave universalization its chance. Today though, faced with a global order without any alternative on the one hand and with drifting insurrectionary singularities on the other, the concepts of liberty, democracy, and human rights look awful. They remain as the ghosts of universalization past. Universalization used to promote a culture characterized by the concepts of transcendence, subjectivity, conceptualization, reality, and representation. By contrast, today’s virtual global culture has replaced universal concepts with screens, networks, immanence, numbers, and a space-time continuum without any depth.
There was a sort of dialectical tension or critical movement that found its materiality in historical and revolutionary violence. But the expulsion of this critical negativity opened the door to another form of violence, the violence of the global. This new violence is characterized by the supremacy of technical efficiency and positivity, total organization, integral circulation, and the equivalence of all exchanges. Additionally, the violence of the global puts an end to the social role of the intellectual (an idea tied to the Enlightenment and universalization), but also to the role of the activist whose fate used to be tied to the ideas of critical opposition and historical violence.
It is the violence of a society where conflict is forbidden, where death is not allowed. It is a violence that, in a sense, puts an end to violence itself, and strives to establish a world where anything related to the natural must disappear (whether it is in the body, sex, birth, or death). Better than a global violence, we should call it a global virulence. This form of violence is indeed viral. It moves by contagion, proceeds by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist.
Who can defeat the global system? Certainly not the anti-globalization movement whose sole objective is to slow down global deregulation. This movement’s political impact may well be important. But its symbolic impact is worthless. This movement’s opposition is nothing more than an internal matter that the dominant system can easily keep under control. Positive alternatives cannot defeat the dominant system, but singularities that are neither positive nor negative can. Singularities are not alternatives. They represent a different symbolic order. They do not abide by value judgments or political realities.
Not all singularities are violent. Some linguistic, artistic, corporeal, or cultural singularities are quite subtle. But others, like terrorism, can be violent. The singularity of terrorism avenges the singularities of those cultures that paid the price of the imposition of a unique global power with their own extinction. We are really not talking about a “clash of civilizations” here, but instead about an almost anthropological confrontation between an undifferentiated universal culture and everything else that, in whatever domain, retains a quality of irreducible alterity.
Once a culture [of the West] has lost its values, it can only seek revenge by attacking those of others. Beyond their political or economic objectives, wars…aim at normalizing savagery and aligning all the territories. The goal is to get rid of any reactive zone, and to colonize and domesticate any wild and resisting territory both geographically and mentally…In an intensely integrated system like ours, everything can have a similar effect of destabilization. Everything drives toward the failure of a system that claims to be infallible.
The universal dimension of modernity cannot be refused. From the perspective of the West, of its consensual model, and of its unique way of thinking, it is a crime not to perceive modernity as the obvious source of the Good or as the natural ideal of humankind. It is also a crime when the universality of our values and our practices are found suspect by some individuals who, when they reveal their doubts, are immediately pegged as fanatics.
The hatred of non-Western people is not based on the fact that the West stole everything from them and never gave anything back. Rather, it is based on the fact that they received everything, but were never allowed to give anything back. This hatred is not caused by dispossession or exploitation, but rather by humiliation.
God used to allow some space for sacrifice. In the traditional order, it was always possible to give back to God, or to nature, or to any superior entity by means of sacrifice. That’s what ensured a symbolic equilibrium between beings and things. But today we no longer have anybody to give back to, to return the symbolic debt to. This is the curse of our culture. It is not that the gift is impossible, but rather that the counter-gift is. All sacrificial forms have been neutralized and removed (what’s left instead is a parody of sacrifice, which is visible in all the contemporary instances of victimization).
What we hate in ourselves -- the obscure object of our resentment -- is our excess of reality, power, and comfort, our universal availability, our definite accomplishment, this kind of destiny that Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor had in store for the domesticated masses. And this is exactly the part of our culture that the terrorists find repulsive (which also explains the support they receive and the fascination they are able to exert).
Terrorism’s support is not only based on the despair of those who have been humiliated and offended. It is also based on the invisible despair of those whom globalization has privileged, on our own submission to an omnipotent technology, to a crushing virtual reality, to an empire of networks and programs that are probably in the process of redrawing the regressive contours of the entire human species, of a humanity that has gone “global.”
Thus, if terrorism is derived from this excess of reality and from this reality’s impossible exchange, if it is the product of a profusion without any possible counterpart or return, and if it emerges from a forced resolution of conflicts, the illusion of getting rid of it as if it were an objective evil is complete. For, in its absurdity and non-sense, terrorism is our society’s own judgment and penalty.
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6. Daniel Little, Assemblage theory as heuristic (11/02/2016). Published in ‘Understanding Society: Innovative thinking about a global world’
This is interesting that I somehow found Deleuze’s theory (or metaphor) of assemblage can be better captured in and applied to international relations, so maybe this explains why all competing interpretations (due to different ontological view) of certain situations (or, let’s say, regimes and conventions) can make sense at the same time, because they are contingent and not organic as they are presupposed.
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7. Andrew Gurza (09/02/2016), Price of Intimacy: The Time I Hired a Sex Worker. OUT MAGZINE
“Though I’d been learning to embrace my life in a wheelchair—a result of cerebral palsy—going without touch, or even access to my own body, was taking a toll.”Beautiful writing and nice sharing! This just reminds me so much of the “Hand-Angel” [手天使] project run in Taiwan today; What’s more, it’s even a voluntary service. “I started to sense even more as I neared climax. I felt my two identities collided: queer and crippled came together in a surge of pure, uncomplicated pleasure.”
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8. Leland de la Durantaye棄置，才能完成作品：阿岡本《牲人》最終章(睫狀肌譯，10/02/2016)
《肉身的踐行》所投射出來的影子顯然長很多，這個本體論、神學、哲學與詩學共同探索出來的投影，其邊界被阿岡本說是『人類起源學』，或者，我們是如何變成現在這樣的？阿岡本所有別具一格書寫，至關重要的，就是這個東西。
核心論題是：什麼是你的？而你會如何使用它？比如說：你的身體是你的，而你運用這副肉身過著你的生活，而在什麼情況下，它會受制於種種限制？又限制到什麼程度。
總之，肉身是如何被生命是什麼又為何存在，承擔什麼義務，又被賦予哪些使命的概念，所制約與安身？
後記：
太有趣了，明明因為趕論文死線在即的關係，讓我在前陣子淚寫一封分手信給那些讓自己「意亂情迷」的思想家們（套句指導教授的話，「回歸正軌」）。
結果真的浪子回頭投身international law和global health的領域時，反而一直在許多著作裡「巧遇」他們；不過也可以理解，畢竟任誰也想跟他們對上幾句話吧（但我老闆都不懂得欣賞他們的美）！
可是我的腦海裡一直浮出E神《好久不見》的旋律：「我多麼想和你見一面，看看你最近改變...」自以為是失聯已久的朋友。我好瘋喔！哈哈哈哈～果然走火入魔了。
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