Oh beloved! Tonight there came news that you will come

…وہ

وہ آتے ہیں

وہ آئیں گے

اور وہ آنے کو ہیں

وہ آئے

 

Alain Badiou: a life in writing

”So many people now don’t know the joy of love. They know sexual pleasure, but we all know what Lacan said about sexual pleasure’

Excerpts

 ”While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist[ic] manner, on particular objects, like breasts, buttocks and cock,” writes Badiou, “love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life that is consequently disrupted and re-fashioned.” 

But, he argues, avoiding love’s problems is just what we do in our risk-averse, commitment-phobic society. Badiou was struck by publicity slogans for French online dating site Méetic such as “Get perfect love without suffering” or “Be in love without falling in love”. “For me these posters destroy the poetry of existence. They try to suppress the adventure of love. Their idea is you calculate who has the same tastes, the same fantasies, the same holidays, wants the same number of children. Méetic try to go back to organised marriages – not by parents but by the lovers themselves.” Aren’t they meeting a demand? “Sure. Everybody wants a contract that guarantees them against risk. Love isn’t like that. You can’t buy a lover. Sex, yes, but not a lover.”

For Badiou, love is becoming a consumer product like everything else. The French anti-globalisation campaigner José Bové once wrote a book entitled Le Monde n’est pas une Marchandise (The World Isn’t a Commodity). Badiou’s book is, in a sense, its sequel and could have been entitled L’Amour n’est pas une Marchandise non plus (Love Isn’t a Commodity Either).

Surely that makes him an old romantic? “I think that romanticism is a reaction against classicism. Romanticism exalted love against classical arranged marriages – hence l’amour fou, antisocial love. In that sense I’m neither romantic nor classic. My approach is that love is both an encounter and a construction. You have to resolve the problems in love – live together or not, to have a child or not, what one does in the evening.”

How does truth come into all this? “You discover truth in your response to the event. Truth is a construction after the event. The example of love is the clearest. It starts with an encounter that’s not calculable but afterwards you realise what it was. The same with science: you discover something unexpected – mountains on the moon, say – and afterwards there is mathematical work to give it sense. That is a process of truth because in that subjective experience there is a certain universal value. It is a truth procedure because it leads from subjective experience and chance to universal value.”

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Modern employment tactics

Slavoj Žižek argues that modern employment tactics create the illusion that our employer is our friend. This fabrication empowers the employer while denying the employed the right to vocalize and protest dissatisfaction of their working conditions. “You’re not going to stick around and help out? I thought we were a team? I thought we were friends?”

Žižek suggests that the environment of the workplace has been twisted, using architectural devices, to manipulate employees. Kitchens, ‘break-out spaces’, lounges, free food, free coffee – he postulates that this is a postmodern sleight of hand designed to manipulate and disarm staff. By fabricating the illusion of employer as friend, the employed is denied the opportunity to protest, argue, fight, be adversarial and demand more of their working conditions. These informal spaces are political spaces of control, surveillance and manipulation.

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بایئں بازو کی سوچ

منٹو صاحب ، آج کل بایئں بازو والے سینکڑوں مضامین لکھ رہے ہیں …کیونکہ میں آپ سے براہراست پوچھ  سکتا ہوں، اس واسطے یہ وضاحت کر دیں کہ آپ کی نظر میں بایئں بازو والے ہوتے کون ہیں ؟

   منٹو  : ہم ….ہم ….آج کے حساب سے تھوڑا ٹھہراؤ آ گیا ہے اس واسطے جواب اتنے دھیمے انداز میں شروع کر رہا ہوں …. ورنہ، میری نظر میں آج کل کے ”بایئں بازو” کا حال ایک پاکستانی نوجوان کے ”بایئں بازو” جیسا ہے – بس،  فرق صرف اتنا ہے کہ بیشتر کا استمعال جسمانی ہے جبکہ کچھ کا استمعال  ذہنی – اس سے  زیادہ  کی ہمت اور لگن نا تو دونوں کے پٹھوں میں  ہے اور نا ہی سوچ میں    

Manto is a depowering experience – The News on Sunday – Manto Special

Manto is a depowering experience – The News on Sunday – Manto Special.

Zizek on authenticity

”….Man wants to be loved for what he truly is; which is why the archetypal male scenario of the trial of woman’s love is that of the prince from a fairy tale who first approaches his beloved under the guise of a poor servant, in order to insure that the woman will fall in love with him for himself, not for his princely title. This, however, is precisely what a woman doesn’t want-and is this not yet another confirmation of the fact that woman is more subject than man? A man stupidly believes that, beyond his symbolic title, there is deep in himself some substantial content, some hidden treasure which makes him worthy of love, whereas a woman knows that there is nothing beneath the mask-her strategy is precisely to preserve this ‘nothing’ of her freedom, out of reach of man’s possessive love…”

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Super Moon (بھرپور چاند )

اس دفعہ بھرپور چاند کو دیکھ کر وحشت سی ہوئی – ہر کسی کو خوشی مناتا پایا – پر مجھے بس اتنا بتاؤ، کہ، کیا تم کو نہیں معلوم کہ اس چاند کی چاندنی کے پیچھے ہزاروں دھماکے ، ، سینکڑوں زلزلے اور جانے کتنی ڈراریں پنہا ہیں ؟ ہیں ناں؟ تو پھر میں کیسے اس بظاہر ہنستے مسکراتے چاند کی اذیت کو بھول کر اپنی خوشی کا سامان پیدا کروں ؟؟؟؟

Get busy living or get busy dying

Get busy living or get busy dying. That’s goddamn right. For the second time in my life, I’m guilty of committing a crime. Parole violation. Course, I doubt they’re going to throw up any road blocks for that. Not for an old crook like me. I find I’m so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel. A free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I HOPE…

Letting your enemy outpower himself

The best way to destroy an enemy is to leave the field free for him to deploy his potential, so that his success will be his failure, since the lack of any obstacle will confront him with the inconsistency of his own position. Cunning of Reason involves a trust in the power of “unreason”: “If reason is as cunning as Hegel said it was, it will do its job without your help.” Un-Reason is the certainty that, no matter how well-planned things are, somehow they will go wrong. … Lacan aims at the heroic stance of “Take care of the truth, and the healing will take care of itself”: confront the Truth, risk everything and health will come, … confront the Real, and reality will take care of itself. Do not compromise your desire, and your needs and demands will be provided for. … It is counter-productive to make health a direct goal – one should work on other things and count on health emerging as a by-product. To invert the motto accordingly: take care of the pathological reality, and the Real will take care of itself? Be modest, try to help the patient by easing his suffering, and the Truth will emerge by itself? … Does Lacan not rely here on some kind of Cunning of Reason which will help the patient achieve health without directly looking for it?

Slavoj Zizek

Hegel on Marriage – Slavoj Zizek

Excerpts from the article 

……we humans no longer just make love for procreation, we get involved in a complex process of seduction and marriage by means of which sexuality becomes an expression of the spiritual bond between a man and a woman, and so forth. However, what Hegel misses is how, once we are within the human condition, sexuality is not only transformed/civilized, but, much more radically, changed in its very substance. It is no longer the instinctual drive to reproduce, but a drive that gets thwarted as to its natural goal (reproduction) and thereby explodes into an infinite, properly meta-physical passion. The becoming-cultural of sexuality is thus not the becoming-cultural of nature, but the attempt to domesticate a properly un-natural excess of the meta-physical sexual passion. This is the properly dialectical reversal of substance: the moment when the immediate substantial (“natural”) starting point is not only acted upon, trans-formed, mediated/cultivated, but changed in its very substance. We not only work upon and thus transform nature; in a gesture of retroactive reversal, nature itself radically changes its “nature.” (In a homologous way, once we enter the domain of legal civil society, the previous tribal order of honor and revenge is deprived of its nobility and appears as common criminality.) This is why Catholics who insist that only sex for procreation is human while coupling for lust is animal totally miss the point and end up celebrating the animality of humans…..

……What Hegel does here is bring forward the “performative” function of the marriage ceremony. Even if this ceremony appears to the love partners as a mere bureaucratic formalism, it enacts the inscription of the sexual link into the big Other, the inscription which radically changes the subjective position of the concerned parties. This explains the well-known fact that married people are more attached to their spouses than it may appear (to themselves also). A man may have secret affairs, may be dreaming about leaving his wife, but anxiety prevents him from doing this when a chance presents itself—in short, we are ready to cheat on our spouses on condition that the big Other doesn’t know it (register it). The last quoted sentence is very precise here: “The knot is tied and made ethical only after this ceremony, whereby through the use of signs, i.e. of language (the most mental embodiment of mind), the substantial thing in the marriage is brought completely into being.” The passage from a natural link to spiritual self-consciousness has nothing to do with “inner awareness” and all with the external “bureaucratic” registration, a ritual whose true scope can be unknown to its participants, who may think they are just performing an external formality.

The key feature of marriage is not sexual attachment, but “the free consent of the persons … to make themselves one person, to renounce their natural and individual personality to this unity of one with the other. From this point of view, their union is a self-restriction, but in fact it is their liberation, because in it they attain their substantive self-consciousness.” In short, true freedom is liberation from pathological attachments to particular objects determined by caprice and contingency. But Hegel goes all the way to the end here, i.e., to the dialectical reversal of necessity into contingency. To overcome contingency does not mean to arrange marriage based on careful examination of the future partner’s mental and physical qualities (like in Plato); it is rather that, in marriage, the partner is contingent, and this contingency should be assumed as necessary. So when Hegel deals with the two extremes of prearranged marriages and marriages out of attraction and love, he ethically prefers the first one. At one extreme,

the marriage is arranged by the contrivance of benevolent parents; the appointed end of the parties is a union of mutual love, their inclination to marry arises from the fact that each grows acquainted with the other from the first as a destined partner. At the other extreme, it is the inclination of the parties which comes first, appearing in them as thesetwo infinitely particularized individuals. The more ethical way to matrimony may be taken to be the former extreme or any way at all whereby the decision to marry comes first and the inclination to do so follows, so that in the actual wedding both decision and inclination coalesce.

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