- disturbing fantasies, traumatic verses, definitely mongrel thoughts
who am i
activist, blogger, and legislator. email me at mongpalatino@gmail.com
mongster links
>bloglinks
>mong pictures
Bloggers Kapihan
Facebook profile
Friendster profile
Global Voices Online
Kabataan Partylist
plurk mongster
tinig
twitter mongster
UPI Asia
yehey news
archives
today
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
--- 2008 ---
--- 2006 ---
--- 2005 ---
--- 2004 ---
Categories
arts
books
congress
east asia
economy
education
elections
fatherhood
greens
health
media
nation
personal
places
rallies
reds
speeches
travel
workers
youth
recent comments
Anonymous on Landlords’ CARPER
Anonymous on Con-ass moments
Anonymous on Interpellation
Anonymous on dumaguete delights
Anonymous on Who’s afraid of ...
Counter
visited *loading* times
Ideal victims
Links: Regulation of online political content in Singapore. How to improve traffic in Brunei. Texting and the Cambodia-Thailand border tension. Khmer Rouge Tribunal.
It was former student leader and fellow activist Jpaul Manzanilla who encouraged me to read Slavoj Zizek two years ago. References for the article below include Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real, The Metastases of Enjoyment, The Fragile Absolute, and Tarrying with the Negative.
First of two parts.
Homo Sacer refers to an individual of Roman Law who may be killed but cannot be offered in a religious ceremony. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben defined it as someone who is alive as a human being but excluded from the political community. A Homo Sacer is not a full citizen. Another philosopher Slavoj Zizek pointed out that a Homo Sacer is “one who is deprived of his or her full humanity being taken care of in a very patronizing way.”
Examples of Homo Sacer figures in Philippine politics: guerilla fighters of the Communist Party, leftists in the military’s Order of Battle, calamity victims, street vendors, squatter colonies, MILF members and sympathizers.
Related to the concept of Homo Sacer is the universalized notion of the victim. Zizek explains:
“The customary image of the victim is that of an innocent-ignorant child or woman paying the price for political-ideological power struggles. Is there anything more non-ideological than this pain of the other in its naked, mute, palpable presence? This perplexed gaze of a starved or wounded child who just stares into the camera, lost and unaware of what is going on around them, is today the sublime image that cancels out all other images.”
A good victim is passive and helpless. Zizek adds:
“The ideal subject-victim is a political subject without a clear agenda, a subject of helpless suffering, sympathizing with all suffering sides in the conflict, caught up in a madness of a local clash that can be pacified only by the intervention of a benevolent power.”
But a victim who decides to fight back, one who is no longer ready to play the role of a good victim, is immediately described as terrorist, fanatical, fundamentalist, intolerant. Zizek discusses the “paradox of victimization”:
“The Other to be protected is good insofar as it remains a victim; the moment it no longer behaves like a victim, but wants to strike back on its own, it magically turns all of a sudden into a terrorist/fundamentalist/drug-trafficking Other.”
Displaced Moro communities in Mindanao are examples of good victims. They are worthy to receive humanitarian aid. But once they decided to fight back, they become cruel terrorists who need to be punished for their excess. Environmental refugees are also good victims. But if they complained of government neglect and when they begin to question the environmental policies of the state, they are suddenly depicted as brainwashed, communist-influenced, irrational refugees.
When Moro rebels resist military offensives, it is cited as proof that the enemies are terrorists. When communist guerrillas attack police/military posts, it is denounced as a terrorist act. Victims are not allowed to defend themselves against the armed component of the state.
“Theft of enjoyment”
A “reflexive politically correct racism” is visible today, in regards to the GRP-MILF debacle. According to Zizek, this “metaracism” refers to the “multicultural perception of (Mindanao) as the terrain of ethnic horrors and intolerance, of primitive irrational warring passions, to be opposed to the post-nation-state liberal-democratic process of solving conflicts through rational negotiation, compromise and mutual respect. Here racism is, as it were, elevated to the second power: it is attributed to the Other, while we occupy the convenient position of a neutral benevolent observer, righteously dismayed at the horrors going on ‘down there’.”
Notice how many Christian politicians and commentators articulated their respect for the culture of the Moro people but this did not stop them from advocating an all-out war policy. This respect is hypocritical. Again, using the words of Zizek, the real sentiment of these politically correct racists is this: “I know very well that the Other’s culture (Moro culture) is worthy of the same respect as my own: nevertheless…[I despise them passionately].”
This reflected racism is more dangerous than downright (or classical) racism.
The logic of the “theft of enjoyment’ can further explain the surprising hatred of many conservative Filipinos against the Moros. Zizek writes:
“We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment.”
Zizek states further that “what ‘bothers’ us in the ‘other’ is that he appears to enjoy a privileged relationship to the object – the other either possesses the object-treasure, having snatched it away from us (which is why we don’t have it), or poses a threat to our possession of the object.”
Zizek argues that what is concealed in this “blaming the other” process is the “traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us.”
Politicians have warned that the possible loss of many parts of Mindanao could threaten the national heritage. National heritage? Again, Zizek clarifies that national heritage is nothing but “a kind of ideological fossil created retroactively by the ruling ideology in order to blur its present antagonism.”
Capital is the enemy
The true enemy of the Moro people is not Manila imperialism but monopoly capitalism. The real violence in Mindanao and elsewhere is the “objective, systemic, anonymous violence” imposed by imperialist Capital on the people.
Zizek reminds us that “while capitalism does suspend the power of the old ghosts of tradition, it generates its own monstrous ghosts.” Capitalism and its “reduction of all heavenly chimeras to brutal economic reality generates a spectrality of its own.”
The ideological foundation behind the barbaric exploitation and incredible violence in Mindanao is sustained by capitalist hegemony. The ugly war between MILF-GRP should not distract us from recognizing that a possible solution to the Mindanao question is Socialism.
The ongoing conflict in the south renders visible the violent antagonism in a semi-feudal, semi-colonial society. It is this “open chance and undecidable” resistance of the Moro people which makes it possible to integrate and articulate the socialist project in the Mindanao issue.
Related entries:
Urban facelift
Walls
Excess and lack
Marcos-Arroyo
Marcos-Japan
Other radicals
It was former student leader and fellow activist Jpaul Manzanilla who encouraged me to read Slavoj Zizek two years ago. References for the article below include Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real, The Metastases of Enjoyment, The Fragile Absolute, and Tarrying with the Negative.
First of two parts.
Homo Sacer refers to an individual of Roman Law who may be killed but cannot be offered in a religious ceremony. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben defined it as someone who is alive as a human being but excluded from the political community. A Homo Sacer is not a full citizen. Another philosopher Slavoj Zizek pointed out that a Homo Sacer is “one who is deprived of his or her full humanity being taken care of in a very patronizing way.”
Examples of Homo Sacer figures in Philippine politics: guerilla fighters of the Communist Party, leftists in the military’s Order of Battle, calamity victims, street vendors, squatter colonies, MILF members and sympathizers.
Related to the concept of Homo Sacer is the universalized notion of the victim. Zizek explains:
“The customary image of the victim is that of an innocent-ignorant child or woman paying the price for political-ideological power struggles. Is there anything more non-ideological than this pain of the other in its naked, mute, palpable presence? This perplexed gaze of a starved or wounded child who just stares into the camera, lost and unaware of what is going on around them, is today the sublime image that cancels out all other images.”
A good victim is passive and helpless. Zizek adds:
“The ideal subject-victim is a political subject without a clear agenda, a subject of helpless suffering, sympathizing with all suffering sides in the conflict, caught up in a madness of a local clash that can be pacified only by the intervention of a benevolent power.”
But a victim who decides to fight back, one who is no longer ready to play the role of a good victim, is immediately described as terrorist, fanatical, fundamentalist, intolerant. Zizek discusses the “paradox of victimization”:
“The Other to be protected is good insofar as it remains a victim; the moment it no longer behaves like a victim, but wants to strike back on its own, it magically turns all of a sudden into a terrorist/fundamentalist/drug-trafficking Other.”
Displaced Moro communities in Mindanao are examples of good victims. They are worthy to receive humanitarian aid. But once they decided to fight back, they become cruel terrorists who need to be punished for their excess. Environmental refugees are also good victims. But if they complained of government neglect and when they begin to question the environmental policies of the state, they are suddenly depicted as brainwashed, communist-influenced, irrational refugees.
When Moro rebels resist military offensives, it is cited as proof that the enemies are terrorists. When communist guerrillas attack police/military posts, it is denounced as a terrorist act. Victims are not allowed to defend themselves against the armed component of the state.
“Theft of enjoyment”
A “reflexive politically correct racism” is visible today, in regards to the GRP-MILF debacle. According to Zizek, this “metaracism” refers to the “multicultural perception of (Mindanao) as the terrain of ethnic horrors and intolerance, of primitive irrational warring passions, to be opposed to the post-nation-state liberal-democratic process of solving conflicts through rational negotiation, compromise and mutual respect. Here racism is, as it were, elevated to the second power: it is attributed to the Other, while we occupy the convenient position of a neutral benevolent observer, righteously dismayed at the horrors going on ‘down there’.”
Notice how many Christian politicians and commentators articulated their respect for the culture of the Moro people but this did not stop them from advocating an all-out war policy. This respect is hypocritical. Again, using the words of Zizek, the real sentiment of these politically correct racists is this: “I know very well that the Other’s culture (Moro culture) is worthy of the same respect as my own: nevertheless…[I despise them passionately].”
This reflected racism is more dangerous than downright (or classical) racism.
The logic of the “theft of enjoyment’ can further explain the surprising hatred of many conservative Filipinos against the Moros. Zizek writes:
“We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment.”
Zizek states further that “what ‘bothers’ us in the ‘other’ is that he appears to enjoy a privileged relationship to the object – the other either possesses the object-treasure, having snatched it away from us (which is why we don’t have it), or poses a threat to our possession of the object.”
Zizek argues that what is concealed in this “blaming the other” process is the “traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us.”
Politicians have warned that the possible loss of many parts of Mindanao could threaten the national heritage. National heritage? Again, Zizek clarifies that national heritage is nothing but “a kind of ideological fossil created retroactively by the ruling ideology in order to blur its present antagonism.”
Capital is the enemy
The true enemy of the Moro people is not Manila imperialism but monopoly capitalism. The real violence in Mindanao and elsewhere is the “objective, systemic, anonymous violence” imposed by imperialist Capital on the people.
Zizek reminds us that “while capitalism does suspend the power of the old ghosts of tradition, it generates its own monstrous ghosts.” Capitalism and its “reduction of all heavenly chimeras to brutal economic reality generates a spectrality of its own.”
The ideological foundation behind the barbaric exploitation and incredible violence in Mindanao is sustained by capitalist hegemony. The ugly war between MILF-GRP should not distract us from recognizing that a possible solution to the Mindanao question is Socialism.
The ongoing conflict in the south renders visible the violent antagonism in a semi-feudal, semi-colonial society. It is this “open chance and undecidable” resistance of the Moro people which makes it possible to integrate and articulate the socialist project in the Mindanao issue.
Related entries:
Urban facelift
Walls
Excess and lack
Marcos-Arroyo
Marcos-Japan
Other radicals
posted by: mongpalatino at August 24, 2008 20:05 |
link | comments |
nation
Comments:
