Cantastoriedimorte - Cantastoriedimortie

biden removing cuba from the state sponsor of terrorism list NOW is so fucking stupid. trump last act as president put cuba on the terrorism list. biden last act as president take cuba off the list. cuban lives continue to be nothing more than western pawns. cuba has experienced crisis after crisis during the biden administration and he only moves to do this now because no part of him actually wants to see cuba free. it's been over 66 years and these old white men are still pissing themselves in fear of latin american leftism, their sick need for control leading them to arbitrarily point fingers and cry "terrorist." we all know who the real terrorists are.

Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own…

Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcis­sistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship. Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.

Badiou -  In Praise of Love.  Serpent’s Tail 2012.

Karim Aïnouz

- Mariner of the Mountains

2021

May 18, 1978

Like love, mourning affects the world—and the worldly—with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from its demands. The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation, etc. The world depresses me. Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes

Sacrifice

‘me’, I exist—suspended in a realized void—suspended from my own dread— different from all other being and such that the various events can reach all other beings and not 'me’ cruelly throw this 'me’ out of total existence. But, at the same time, I consider my coming into the world—which depended on the birth and on the conjunction of a given man and woman, then on the moment of their conjunction. There exists, in fact, a unique moment in relation to the possibility of me—and thus the infinite improbability of this coming into the world appears.

•Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess Selected Writings, 1927-1939

“In the early days of childhood, the child and the mother form a kind of libidinal symbiosis. The mother (primary caregiver) is always there. At first, she appears to be omnipotent (phallic, non-lacking, uncastrated). The baby’s body forms a perceived unity with the mother’s body, but time goes on and the baby isn’t tactilely unified with the mother as much and now finds unity with her through constantly being the object of her loving gaze, i.e., her desire. Even if the baby isn’t actually touching its mother, it maintains the feeling of unity by having the mother’s attention focused solely on it. But time goes on and the baby comes to realize that its mother’s gaze isn’t always directed towards it. The baby is now aware of the intentionality or directedness of the mother’s consciousness/desire. As Edmund Husserl put it, “In perception something is perceived, in imagination, something imagined, in a statement something stated, in love sorting loved, in hate hated, in desire desired etc.” (Logical Investigations: Volume 2, p. 95). The baby is not always the object of the mother’s desire. For the child, its experiences of the absent object of the mother’s desire (intentionality toward this “object”) are Sartrean négatités, i.e., concrete negations or experiences of nothingnesses. We can even term the mother’s intentional desire or directed attention her “misintentionality”, since her actual intentionality causes the child the misperceive its missing “object”. This phenomenon causes the baby to start wondering about what it is that the mother desires and its answer, its guess, will be the single object that has the power to completely satisfy mother’s desire. The child, then, decides that it must be this object for the mother so as to maintain the child-mother unity. As Lacan said, “If the mother’s desire is for the phallus, the child wants to be the phallus in order to satisfy her desire” (‘The Signification of the Phallus’, Écrits, p. 582). The baby starts “asking” itself about her absence: “Where does mommy go when she’s not here with me and why does she leave?” “What is it that mommy truly wants?” And, of course, the obvious answer in most cases is the father. This is the first answer the baby can grasp, since it cannot yet comprehend the concepts of “work”, “hobbies”, “duties”, “errands”, “interests”, “responsibilities”, etc. These concerns are not yet part of the child’s world, they’re still unintelligible to it, but the actual father, for the most part, is part of it, since the child can actually perceive the father or hears about him through what the mother says about him. This, in turn, is what makes the father the child’s first rival regardless of its sex. This is reinforced in the mother’s speech: “Mom and dad are going out to dinner tonight”, “Mommy and daddy are going to bed now”, etc. Thus, the child comes to associate the disappearance of the mother with the father. This leads the child to hypothesize the following: “Daddy must have the powerful object, the perfect thing, that I lack and has the power to satisfy the desire of my mother”. And this “object” of the mother’s desire is what Lacan called the “Imaginary phallus” (Lacan’s matheme or “mathematical” symbol for the Imaginary phallus is φ [lowercase phi]). This Imaginary phallus is what I’ve been referring to as the “substantial” phallus (a negative “substance” insofar as it does not really exist). Long story short, Symbolic castration occurs in two steps. The child realizes that the mother is not omnipotent insofar as she herself lacks/desires something outside of the dyadic relation between herself and the child (she is missing something). The child posits the Imaginary phallus (perfect-powerful object) that satisfies the mother’s desire, which, then, the child wants to be. The second and most important moment of the castration complex, what brings the Oedipus complex to an end, is when the child accepts its own lack, that is, gives up trying to be the Imaginary phallus for the mother and realizes that the father is the one who has it. This realization is brought on by the installation of the privileged phallic signifier, that is, the Symbolic phallus (Lacan’s matheme for the Symbolic phallus is Φ [uppercase Phi]). The Symbolic phallus (phallic signifier) indicates the Imaginary phallus (“substantial” power). We could actually say that the Symbolic phallus is the signifier (index, stand-in, representation) of the Imaginary phallus (the elusive x of the mother’s desire, i.e., what women want). The phallic signifier can be any number of things, e.g., a word, a look, a gesture, an object, etc. It’s some feature or thing associated with the father that indicates that he has the “substantial” phallus, that he has the power. I think it’s correct to say that this “power” indicated by the phallic signifier is precisely what gives the name-of-the-father its authority. It’s because the phallic figure “has” the phallus that his “No!” has authority. The “name-of-the-father” is what Lacan calls the prohibitory function of the father, that is, the “No!” of the father. The French term nom du père is what gets translated as the “name-of-the-father” but there’s more going on with it. Dylan Evans writes, “From the beginning Lacan plays on the homophony of le nom du père (the name of the father) and le ‘non’ du père (the ‘no’ of the father), to emphasise the legislative and prohibitive function of the symbolic father” (An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, p. 122). The pure function of the Symbolic father is to be a “No!”, that is, to embody the pure prohibition. Sartre, once again, is helpful here: “It is as a Not that the slave first apprehends the master, or that the prisoner who is trying to escape sees the guard who is watching him. There are even men (e.g., caretakers, overseers, gaolers) whose social reality is uniquely that of the Not, who will live and die, having forever been only a Not upon the earth. Others so as to make the Not a part of their very subjectivity, establish their human personality as a perpetual negation” (Being and Nothingness, p. 87). But Sartre’s authority figures are only able to embody the “No!”, exercise their Symbolic power, because they are bearers of the Symbolic phallus (badge, uniform, gun, etc.). The embodied “Not”, the incarnated “No!”, first occurs in the Symbolic castration of the child via the Symbolic father. The Symbolic phallus and the name/no-of-the father form the assemblage of the father’s power and authority. Once the child has accepted its lack, once it has repressed its desire for the mother’s desire and substituted it with the father’s mandate (what Lacan calls the “paternal metaphor”), he or she has entered into the Symbolic order (Law) and become a desiring (neurotic) subject proper. The Symbolic phallus may seem to be a flat-out oppressive mechanism, and it definitely creates problems when it comes to sexual difference, but it also has a liberatory dimension to it. Despite all the negative issues surrounding the phallic signifier, it still serves to free the child from the prison of the mother’s desire. We can also call the Symbolic phallus the signifier of freedom. Let’s have a look at two very important quotes from Lacan: Don’t you know that it’s not longing for the maternal breast that provokes anxiety, but its imminence? What provokes anxiety is everything that announces to us, that lets us glimpse, that we’re going to be taken back onto the lap. It is not, contrary, to what is said, the rhythm of the mother’s alternating presence and absence. The proof of this is that the infant revels in repeating this game of presence and absence. The security of presence is the possibility of absence. The most anguishing thing for the infant is precisely the moment when the relationship upon which he’s established himself, of the lack that turns him into desire, is disrupted, and this relationship is most disrupted when there’s no possibility of any lack, when the mother is on his back all the while, and especially when she’s wiping his backside. (Seminar X: Anxiety, pp. 53–4) The mother’s role is the mother’s desire. That’s fundamental. The mother’s desire is not something that is bearable just like that, that you are indifferent to. It will always wreak havoc. A huge crocodile in whose jaws you are — that’s the mother. One never knows what might suddenly come over her and make her shut her trap. That’s what the mother’s desire is. Thus, I have tried to explain that there was something that was reassuring. I am telling you simple things, I am improvising, I have to say. There is a roller, made out of stone of course, which is there, potentially, at the level of her trap, and it acts as a restraint, as a wedge. It’s what is called the phallus. It’s the roller that shelters you, if, all of a sudden, she closes it. (Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 112)”

— Lacan’s Concept of the Phallus by DangerousMaybe

Mark Fisher's interview with Burial, December 2012

The actual consideration of what fascism is is rather something of general import. A number of folks here have deferred to Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism, and while I wouldn't discourage it, it is a text from the perspective of semiotics; that is to say, from the perspective of what signifies fascism, not what it is per se. Hence also why Eco emphasizes that none of the fourteen ways he describes are strictly necessary or sufficient for fascism, just that fascism as it has emerges coalesces around such signifiers. The aesthetics and rhetoric of fascists is rather succinctly summed up in Ur-Fascism, but what fascism is in a more direct, structural sense is a somewhat different consideration.

The governing structure of fascist Italy, as an example, retained many of the facets of the liberal democratic system from which it emerged, with a legislature, a judiciary, and an executive. Mussolini was legally the prime minister- though he adopted the title of Duce, literally "leader"- and was appointed by a legislative council- though a new one created by the fascist party called the Grand Council of Fascism that by and large excluded the previous legislature- and the prime minister could legally be dismissed by the head of state, the king, after a sustained vote of no confidence similar to the UK's formulation. Fascist Italy also redoubled- rather than invented- Italian colonial policy, promoting the settlement of Italians into Libya and other African colonial projects and the genocide of local populations. The domestic economic policy of fascist Italy was also much more explicitly in the interests of private business: in 1939, the whole of Italy was explicitly proposed to be legally divided into 22 corporations which appointed members to parliament; labour organization outside of the appointed corporate structures and striking as a practice were banned. The interests of fascist Italy's ruling bodies was very overtly bourgeois, and their economic policy is often referred to as specifically corporatist.

Nazi Germany was similar in structure, though while the German parliament- called the Reichstag- was maintained, a series of laws were passed which enabled the Chancellor- Hitler, who was appointed such by President Hindenburg- and the cabinet to implement laws without parliamentary or presidential approval. The Hitler cabinet is generally considered to have been the defacto ruling body of Nazi Germany, though members of the Reichstag obviously still convened and drafted laws and ran elections and generally supported Nazi rule and the judiciary remained a distinct body. The Nazis also wanted to redouble their colonial policy in specifically Africa- a theatre in which they were snubbed compared to other European powers- but were by and large unable to secure resources there for continued expansion due to the British opposing them in protecting its own colonial projects. A rather infamous and demonstrative guiding principle of Nazi economic policy, Lebensraum- literally "living space"- sought specifically to appropriate land and other productive capital to give to Germans that they might be made petite bourgeois and small artisans; de-proletarianized and bourgeoisified, at the same time that the people such capital is expropriated from were made slaves to fuel further expansion or killed outright. This was imposed both within and, once the resources of social underclasses at home ran dry, without. The interests too of Germany's ruling bodies was very overtly bourgeois.

What all of this is to say is primarily that fascism as a governmental system is a legal permutation of liberal democracy, rather than a strict departure from it. The overriding interests of fascist states are also commensurately the interests of the bourgeoisie of those nations. It's an entirely logical progression of liberalism, to be frank, and a rather stark example of why liberal states should be opposed. The most violent fascist policy at home is often simply what liberal states have as their explicit foreign policy, for instance. As for whether this or the other politician in a liberal democracy is a fascist, I'd ask first and foremost that it be known that the Nazi policy of expansion was based first on the US policy of expansion; the cart isn't pulling the horse, as it were.