Re: [Marxism] The "turn to industry" of the 70s and 80s

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sam B wrote:
> On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 6:42 PM, Joaquin Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> But what is the alternative? A proletarian socialist movement is not
>> POSSIBLE because there is no actual class movement for this to be the most
>> advanced expression of.
> 
> The Marxist Wager
> 
> by Slavoj Zizek
> 
> <http://www.lacan.com/zizou.htm>
> 

I thought this passage from Zizek's article was particularly pithy:

In philosophical terms, this inhuman dimension can be defined as that of 
a subject subtracted from all form of human individuality or personality 
(which is why, in today's popular culture, one of the exemplary figures 
of pure subject is a non-human - alien, cyborg - who displays more 
fidelity to the task, dignity and freedom than its human counterparts, 
from the Schwarzenegger-figure in Terminator to the Rutger-Hauer-android 
in Blade Runner). Recall Husserl's dark dream, from his Cartesian 
Meditations, of how the transcendental cogito would remain unaffected by 
a plague that would annihilate entire humanity: it is easy, apropos this 
example, to score cheap points about the self-destructive background of 
the transcendental subjectivity, and about how Husserl misses the 
paradox of what Foucault, in his Les mots et les choses, called the 
transcendental-empirical doublet, of the link that forever attaches the 
transcendental ego to the empirical ego, so that the annihilation of the 
latter by definition leads to the disparition of the first. However, 
what if, fully recognizing this dependence as a fact (and nothing more 
than this - a stupid fact of being), one nonetheless insists on the 
truth of its negation, the truth of the assertion of the independence of 
the subject with regard to the empirical individuas qua living being? Is 
this independence not demonstrated in the ultimate gesture of risking 
one's life, on being ready to forsake one's being?

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