Thursday, April 25, 2019
University Discourse, Modern Dictatorships and Hysteric Discourse
Yaron Gilat
On April 9, 2019, the
elections to State of Israel’s 21st Knesset were held. Eventually, a large
right-wing party won the elections and is about to form coalition with ultra-orthodox
Jewish and extreme right-wing parties, in order to form the most right winged
government ever to exist in Israel.
On the agenda, new laws that
will damage the distinctive superior status of the Supreme Court, laws that
will impede the Separation of powers, annexation of large parts of the west
bank with or without full citizenship to the Palestinian population living
there and more. In the meantime, Israel's attorney general intends to indict
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on corruption charges, of bribery, fraud and
breach of trust in connection with three cases. According to media resources,
the upcoming government will legislate a law that will assure the Prime
Minister immunity in the face of justice as long as he serves in office.
Right winged populist parties
obtaining political power is a worldwide phenomenon, both in Europe (Poland,
Hungary, Russia, France), Asia (Turkey), south America (Brazil), north America
(USA) and now Israel. Voices of racism, segregation, anti-democracy and
nationalism are heard ever more laud.
In his seminar "the other side of psychoanalysis", Lacan introduced four discourses – the discourse of the master, the discourse of the analyst, the discourse of the university and the discourse of the hysteric. For Lacan, discourse is "social link". Geoff Boucher states that "the various discourses determine institutional frameworks that mediate social antagonism in distinctive ways".
In examining the structure of
these four discourses, one may notice that they include two inverse couples;
the inverse of the discourse of the analyst is the discourse of the master, and
the inverse of the discourse of the university is the discourse of the
hysteric.
Matthew Sharpe claims that
"in the contemporary world, 'university discourse' is increasingly
becoming the dominant form structure of social relations".
Boucher, mentioned above,
stresses that "Lacan's diagnosis of modernity involves the displacement of
the master by the bureaucrat. The decline of the master and the rise of the
bureaucrat – including the totalitarian leader […], the gradual displacement of
politics by bureaucracy, the mastery of persons by the administration of
thing". Boucher also states that "from the thirteenth century onward,
the discourse of mastery relied increasingly upon the university discourse […]
that actually served to legitimate the reigning master signifiers". He
mentions that Lacan aligns the discourse of science and technology with the
university discourse, and that he considers bureaucracy to be the perfect
realization of the university discourse.
I suggest that the
dictatorships of the 20th century, as well as the new ultra-right governments
of the 21st century, due to their leaning on science, pseudoscience and
technology and due to their bureaucratic excellence, are regimes that very much
operate in line with the university discourse. Therefore, in order to resist
them, one must operate according to the inverse of the discourse of the
university, which is the discourse of the hysteric. Let us not forget that
Lacan's interpretation of the movement of the radical students in 1968 was that
this movement represented a hysterical demand for a new master.
One cannot expect the master
to rebel. For that, he has a slave; the slave may transform the fantasy into a
demand in the form of a hysterical revolt. One cannot expect the university to
rebel against itself and the analyst is not a rebellious entity. In other
words, in order to combat semi-fascist phenomena that seem to spread around the
world, we must invoke hysterization of public discourse.
Only the hysteric, because of
her belief in the power of truth, is best suited for rebellion. The hysteric is
in a constant position of revolt against the sexual-non-rapport. Who else but
Dora could act out and slap Mr. K in the face?
1. Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Transl. R. Grigg, W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.
2. Boucher, G., "Bureaucratic Speech Acts and the University Discourse: Lacan's Theory of Modernity". In Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII. J. Clemens, R. Grigg (Editors), Duke University Press Books, 2006.
3. Sharpe, M., "The Revolution in Advertising and University Discourse". In Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII. J. Clemens, R. Grigg (Editors). Duke University Press Books, 2006.
It is time the world unites around an International Green New Deal
from The
Guardian
By Yanis Varoufakis and David
Adler:
In times of crisis and
catastrophe, children are often forced to grow up quickly. We are now
witnessing this premature call to action on a planetary scale. As the adults in
government accelerate their consumption of fossil fuels, children are leading
the campaign against our species’ looming extinction. Our survival now depends
on the prospects for a global movement to follow their lead and demand an
International Green New Deal.
Several countries have
proposed their own versions of a Green New Deal. Here in Europe, DiEM25 and our
European Spring coalition are campaigning under the banner of a detailed Green
New Deal agenda. In the UK, a new campaign is pushing similar legislation with
MPs such as Caroline Lucas and Clive Lewis. And in the US, dogged activists in
the Sunrise Movement are working with representatives such as Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez to push their proposal to the front of the political
agenda.
But these campaigns have
largely remained siloed. Their advisers may exchange notes and ideas, but no
strategy has emerged to coordinate these campaigns in a broader, global
framework.
Unfortunately, climate change
knows no borders. The US may be the second-largest polluter in the world, but
it makes up less than 15% of global greenhouse emissions. Leading by example is
simply not enough.
Instead, we need an
International Green New Deal: a pragmatic plan to raise $8tn – 5% of global GDP
– each year, coordinate its investment in the transition to renewable energy
and commit to providing climate protections on the basis of countries’ needs,
rather than their means.
Call it the Organization for
Emergency Environmental Cooperation – the namesake of the original OEEC 75
years ago. While many US activists find inspiration in a “second world
war-style mobilization”, the International Green New Deal is better modeled by
the Marshall plan that followed it. With financial assistance from the US
government, 16 countries formed the Organization for European Economic
Cooperation (OEEC), dedicated to rebuilding the infrastructure of a devastated
continent and coordinating its supply of energy.
But if the original OEEC
entrenched an extractive capitalism at Europe’s core –protecting the steel and
coal cartel – the new organization for an International Green New Deal can
empower communities around the world in a single transformational project.
The transnational scope of
this mobilization is crucial for three main reasons.
The first is production. Recent
studies show that, as long as countries cooperate, all continents have
the wind, solar and hydropower resources they need in a zero-emissions world.
Northern countries and mountainous regions have better access to wind power,
while southern lands are better suited to exploiting the sun. An International
Green New Deal could exploit these differences and ensure that renewable energy
is available to all of them year-round.
The second is innovation.
Confronting the climate crisis will require more than keeping fossil fuels in
the ground. We will also need major scientific breakthroughs to develop
renewable sources of energy, adapt existing infrastructure, detoxify our oceans
and decarbonize the atmosphere. No country alone can fund the research and
development necessary to meet these challenges. The OEEC would pool the
brainpower of the global scientific community: a Green Manhattan Project.
The third is reparation. For
centuries, countries such as the US and the UK have plundered natural resources
from around the world and polluted them back out. Less developed nations have
been doubly dispossessed: first, of their resource wealth, and second, of their
right to a sustainable life – and in the case of many small island developing
states, of their very right to exist. An International Green New Deal would
redistribute resources to rehabilitate overexploited regions, protect against
rising sea levels, and guarantee a decent standard of living to all climate
refugees.
The UN climate change
conferences will not save us from extinction – the demise of the Paris
agreement should be evidence enough. These frameworks lock us into prisoners’
dilemmas, in which every country has an incentive to defect on their climate
commitments, even if cooperation between them would yield a greater collective
good. As long as climate cooperation is framed around sacrifice, it is
vulnerable to strongmen like Donald Trump who vow to buck international rules
in the name of national interests.
The International Green New
Deal changes the frame. Rather than pleading for restraint, it sets out a
positive-sum vision of international investment, in which the gains from
joining in outweigh those to going it alone.
This is the strategy that won
Franklin D Roosevelt the original New Deal. His plan addressed people who had
given up hope and inspired in them the idea that there is an
alternative. That there are ways of pressing idle resources into
public service. It made sense to the disheartened and offered opportunity to
the entrepreneurial.
The same is true of the
International Green New Deal, which mobilizes public finance to crowd in
private investments that, together, fund the $8tn transition. Just like in the
original New Deal, public financing will involve a mix of taxes and bond
instruments. On the former, we can introduce a global minimum
corporate tax rate that is then redistributed on the basis of their
sales. On the latter, public investment banks – including the European
Investment Bank, the World Bank and the KfW, Germany’s state-owned development
bank – can coordinate the issue of green bonds that the major central banks
agree collectively to support in the secondary markets.
Suddenly, countries with large
trade surpluses will realize they are better able to invest their excess
capital if green investments in deficit countries are coordinated under the
auspices of an international plan. The positive-sum dynamic will prevail.
In this sense, the stakes of
the International Green New Deal are not merely environmental. By uniting
countries in the project of bottom-up economic transformation – and coercing
multinationals to fund their fair share of it – it will also stem the tide of
bigotry and xenophobia engulfing the world.
“Advanced” capitalist
countries today are literally falling apart. In the US, net public investment
has fallen below half of one per cent of GDP. Across the eurozone, net public
investment has remained below zero for nearly a decade. It is little wonder
that political monsters are rising again: just as in the 1930s, the grapes of
wrath are ripening and “growing heavy for the vintage”.
To revive the liberal
democratic project, some pundits have suggested making China into a bogeyman.
But the real bogeyman is of our creation: a climate crisis wrought by decades
of inaction and underinvestment. To address the true existential threat that we
face today, we must reverse the economic policies that brought us to this
brink. Austerity means extinction.
The promise of an
International Green New Deal to is to avoid the pitfalls of cold war politics
and unite humanity in the only project capable of preserving a habitable
planet. To do this, however, we need a powerful progressive international
movement to demand that our leaders begin to act beyond their own borders.
Let’s start building it. The children are watching.
War on Iran & Calling America’s Bluff
PEPE ESCOBAR
Vast swathes of the West seem
not to realize that if the Strait of Hormuz is shut down a global depression
will follow, writes Pepe Escobar.
The Trump administration once
again has graphically demonstrated that in the young, turbulent 21st century,
“international law” and “national sovereignty” already belong to the Realm of
the Walking Dead.
As if a deluge of sanctions
against a great deal of the planet was not enough, the latest “offer you can’t
refuse” conveyed by a gangster posing as diplomat, Consul Minimus Mike Pompeo,
now essentially orders the whole planet to submit to the one and only arbiter
of world trade: Washington.
First the Trump administration
unilaterally smashed a multinational, UN-endorsed agreement, the JCPOA, or Iran
nuclear deal. Now the waivers that magnanimously allowed eight nations to
import oil from Iran without incurring imperial wrath in the form of sanctions
will expire on May 2 and won’t be renewed.
President Trump’s decision to
withdraw from the Iran deal upheld his highest obligation: to protect the
safety and security of the American people.
Why Iran sanctions are necessary: http://45.wh.gov/SUUPiW
Why Iran sanctions are necessary: http://45.wh.gov/SUUPiW
The eight nations are a mix of
Eurasian powers: China, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Italy and
Greece.
Apart from the trademark toxic
cocktail of hubris, illegality, arrogance/ignorance and geopolitical/geo–economic
infantilism inbuilt in this foreign policy decision, the notion that Washington
can decide who’s allowed to be an energy provider to emerging superpower China
does not even qualify as laughable. Much more alarming is the fact that
imposing a total embargo of Iranian oil exports is no less than an act of war.
Ultimate Neocon Wet
Dream
Those subscribing to the
ultimate U.S, neocon and Zionist wet dream – regime change in Iran – may
rejoice at this declaration of war. But as Professor
Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran has elegantly
argued, “If the Trump regime miscalculates, the house can easily come
crashing down on its head.”
Reflecting the fact Tehran
seems to have no illusions regarding the utter folly ahead, the Iranian
leadership — if provoked to a point of no return, Marandi
additionally told me — can get as far as “destroying everything on
the other side of the Persian Gulf and chasing the U.S. out of Iraq and
Afghanistan. When the U.S. escalates, Iran escalates. Now it depends on
the U.S. how far things go.”
This red alert from a sensible
academic perfectly dovetails with what’s happening with the structure of the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — recently branded a “terrorist
organization” by the United States. In perfect symmetry, Iran’s Supreme
National Security Council also branded the U.S. Central Command — CENTCOM — and
“all the forces connected to it” as a terrorist group.
The new IRGC
commander-in-chief is Brigadier General Hossein Salami, 58. Since 2009 he was
the deputy of previous commander Mohamamd al-Jafari, a soft spoken but tough as
nails gentleman I met in Tehran two years ago. Salami, as well as Jafari, is a
veteran of the Iran-Iraq war; that is, he has actual combat experience. And
Tehran sources assure me that he can be even tougher than Jafari.
In tandem, IRGC Navy Commander
Rear Admiral Alireza
Tangsiri has evoked the unthinkable in terms of what might develop out
of the U.S. total embargo on Iran oil exports; Tehran could block the
Strait of Hormuz.
Western Oblivion
Vast swathes of the ruling
classes across the West seem to be oblivious to the reality that if Hormuz is
shut down, the result will be an absolutely cataclysmic global economic
depression.
Warren Buffett, among other
investors, has routinely qualified the 2.5 quadrillion derivatives market as a
weapon of financial mass destruction. As it stands, these derivatives are used
— illegally — to drain no less than a trillion U.S. dollars a year out of the
market in manipulated profits.
Considering historical
precedents, Washington may eventually be able to set up a Persian Gulf of
Tonkin false flag. But what next?
If Tehran were totally
cornered by Washington, with no way out, the de facto nuclear option of
shutting down the Strait of Hormuz would instantly cut off 25 percent of
the global oil supply. Oil prices could rise to over $500 a barrel, to
even $1000 a barrel. The 2.5 quadrillion of derivatives would start a chain
reaction of destruction.
Unlike the shortage of credit
during the 2008 financial crisis, the shortage of oil could not be made up by
fiat instruments. Simply because the oil is not there. Not even
Russia would be able to re-stabilize the market.
It’s an open secret in private
conversations at the Harvard Club – or at Pentagon war-games for that matter –
that in case of a war on Iran, the U.S. Navy would not be able to keep the
Strait of Hormuz open.
Russian SS-NX-26 Yakhont missiles — with
a top speed of Mach 2.9 — are lining up the Iranian northern shore of
the Strait of Hormuz. There’s no way U.S. aircraft carriers can defend a barrage
of Yakhont missiles.
Then there are the SS-N-22
Sunburn supersonic anti-ship missiles — already exported to
China and India — flying ultra-low at 1,500 miles an hour with
dodging capacity, and extremely mobile; they can be fired from a flatbed truck,
and were designed to defeat the U.S. Aegis radar defense system.
What Will China Do?
The full–frontal attack on
Iran reveals how the Trump administration bets on breaking Eurasia integration
via what would be its weakeast node; the three key nodes are China, Russia and
Iran. These three actors interconnect the whole spectrum; Belt and Road Initiative;
the Eurasia Economic Union; the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; the
International North-South Transportation Corridor; the expansion of BRICS Plus.
So there’s no question the
Russia-China strategic partnership will be watching Iran’s back. It’s no
accident that the trio is among the top existential “threats” to the U.S.,
according to the Pentagon. Beijing knows how the U.S. Navy is able to cut
it off from its energy sources. And that’s why Beijing is strategically
increasing imports of oil and natural gas from Russia; engineering the “escape
from Malacca” also must take into account a hypothetical U.S. takeover of
the Strait of Hormuz.
A plausible scenario involves
Moscow acting to defuse the extremely volatile U.S.-Iran confrontation, with
the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense trying to persuade President Donald
Trump and the Pentagon from any direct attack against the IRGC. The inevitable
counterpart is the rise of covert ops, the possible staging of false flags and
all manner of shady Hybrid War techniques deployed not only against the IRGC,
directly and indirectly, but against Iranian interests everywhere. For all
practical purposes, the U.S. and Iran are at war.
Within the framework of the
larger Eurasia break-up scenario, the Trump administration does profit from
Wahhabi and Zionist psychopathic hatred of Shi’ites. The “maximum pressure” on
Iran counts on Jared of Arabia Kushner’s close WhatsApp pal Mohammad bin Salman
(MbS) in Riyadh and MbS’s mentor in Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed, to replace the
shortfall of Iranian oil in the market. Bu that’s nonsense — as quite
a few wily Persian Gulf traders are adamant Riyadh won’t “absorb Iran’s market
share” because the extra oil is not there.
Much of what lies ahead in the
oil embargo saga depends on the reaction of assorted vassals and semi-vassals.
Japan won’t have the guts to go against Washington. Turkey will put up a fight.
Italy, via Salvini, will lobby for a waiver. India is very complicated; New
Delhi is investing in Iran’s Chabahar port as the key hub of its own Silk Road,
and closely cooperates with Tehran within the INSTC framework. Would a shameful
betrayal be in the cards?
China, it goes without saying,
will simply ignore Washington.
Iran will find ways to get the
oil flowing because the demand won’t simply vanish with a magic wave of an
American hand. It’s time for creative solutions. Why not, for instance, refuel
ships in international waters, accepting gold, all sorts of cash, debit cards,
bank transfers in rubles, yuan, rupees and rials— and everything bookable
on a website?
Now that’s a way Iran can use
its tanker fleet to make a killing. Some of the tankers could be parked in— you
got it — the Strait of Hormuz, with an eye on the price at Jebel Ali
in the UAE to make sure this is the real deal. Add to it a duty free for the
ships crews. What’s not to like? Ship owners will save fortunes on fuel bills,
and crews will get all sorts of stuff at 90 percent discount in the duty
free.
And let’s see whether the EU
has grown a spine — and really turbo-charge their Special
Purpose Vehicle (SPV) alternative payment network conceived after the
Trump administration ditched the JCPOA. Because more than breaking up Eurasia
integration and implementing neocon regime change, this is about the ultimate
anathema; Iran is being mercilessly punished because it has bypassed the U.S. dollar
on energy trade.
[Pepe Escobar, a veteran
Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is “2030.” Follow
him on Facebook.]
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