re Tom on Zizek and speech

[valis <valis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoth Tom:
> I do agree that Wojtek's translation _is_ more like everyday English. That
> is because everyday English is saturated with demonizing. This demonizing
> has a function in the formation of identity, as Zizek illustrates in the
> following quote,
>
>      To give a most elementary example: in the anti-Semitic vision,
>      the Jew is experienced as the embodiment of negativity, as the
>      force disrupting stable social identity--but the 'truth' of
>      anti-Semitism is, of course, that the very identity of our
>      position is structured through a negative relationship to this
>      traumatic figure of the Jew. Without the reference to the Jew who
>      is corroding the social fabric, the social fabric itself would be
>      dissolved. In other words, all my positive consistency is kind of
>      'reaction-formation' to a certain traumatic, antagonistic kernel:
>      if I lose this 'impossible' point of reference, my very identity
>      dissolves.

OK, but a plosively intoning Jesse Jackson would naturally render this as

       Without `the Jew,' there is no `you.'

and 10,000 proletarian heads would nod in perfect comprehension.
I would not harp on this speech issue were it not to become a literal
life-or-death matter shortly down the road.
As far as I know, only the Bad Subjects collective at Cal has even tried
to articulate it, much less practically deal with it.

> What would a "left" conceivably look like without IT'S negative referent,
> the "ruling elite?"

It would probably roost in PoliSci departments and write impenetrable
books on barely discernible subjects for incestuous pleasure.

An otherwise forgotten professor used to say, "If you can't tell it,
you never had it."
So what do we have to tell, and to whom?
If knowledge were oxygen, I think my gripe would seem less contrived.

                                                                    valis


  "I'm sorry, Mr Kipling, but you just don't know how to use
   the English language."
                           -- Editor of the San Francisco Examiner (1889)