The attitude of the General Council in regard to the “Religious Idea” is clearly shown by the following incident: — One of the Swiss branches of the Alliance, founded by Michael Bakunin, and calling itself Section des athées Socialistes, requested its admission to the International from the General Council, but got the reply: “Already in the case of the Young Men’s Christian Association the Council has declared that it recognizes no theological sections” (Mr. George Howell’s History of the International Working-Men’s Association).
Which is interesting a) because I never realized the YMCA tried to join the First International (presumably we can now claim the Village People song as a communist anthem) and b) because the First International rejected a group for being explicitly atheist, which sheds some interesting light on debates about whether Marx was a secularist. Also:
We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable (“Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung”).
Which is presumably the source of Negri’s celebrated line “No pity for our enemies.”
The strange love affair of journalists and generals
Now I’m not going to deny that Kyra Phillips looks super cute in her faux-military olive fatigues. But isn’t there something just plain weird about the willingness of journalists to, still, after five years of clear and documented bullshit, identify with the military? If it was just the stylish caps, I wouldn’t mind, but it leads to horribly fawning interviews like this one (skip forward to 18 minutes or so in to see how bad it can get):
Leanne Battersby’s recent storyline in Coronation Street has been excellent. It’s done a very good job of criticizing the material conditions of prostitution without basing that on a stigmatization of prostitutes. The economic criticism of prostitution is too often expressed as horror that economic conditions force women so low; but it’s hard to disentangle that from the marginalization of prostitutes which, as Coronation Street has been pointing out, is precisely part of the economic problem of prostitution. Read more »
Nietzsche, as ever, has just the right words to describe Tracy Barlow:
Mischief-makers overtaken by punishments have for thousands of years felt in respect of their “transgressions” just as Spinoza did: “here something has unexpectedly gone wrong,” not: “I ought not to have done that.”
One shouldn’t go around believing in them, of course, but I think there’s something to be said for the construction of conspiracy theories as a mode of political analysis; trying to come up with an entertaining conspiralogical explanation for events is a nice way of exploring the various interests and affects caught up in them. My current research focuses on who is really responsible for the Celebrity Big Brother racism row. My money is on the BNP and Ken Livingstone, hand-in-glove; doubtless one of the housemates was their cat’s-paw (Jo O’Meara, perhaps? Or Ian “H” Watkins, his lovable camp persona just a front).
Jade Goody’s apparent support for Fatah on Celebrity Big Brother.
The This Life special nostalgically reviving lazy mid-90s reflexive “irony” (Egg has written a book! Little does he know he is just a character himself!).
The current state of British dance music, as filtered through ads for compilations. A surprisingly high concentration of Happy Hardcore (is this just a north of England thing?), and a remix of “Another Brick in the Wall.” Genius.
I’m not so keen on the fact that ITV and the producers of Dead Clever seem to think it’s OK to structure your plot around classic 1950s cliche, “Lesbian, driven mad by her disordered, unnatural lusts, turns to murder.”
Talking to a friend a while ago, he expressed surprise when I said that I found, in sad music, not tears and catharsis, but an odd sort of strength, or even cheer. “But listen to Miles Davis playing Concierto de Aranjuez,” he said; “how can you not feel the bleakness, the absolute despair in that record?” But what stops it short of being absolute despair is precisely the fact that it is a record. It’s not simply the bleak fact of despair, but a representation of despair; hence proof that something can be done with sadness. This kind of sublimation is not a theodicy, at least not in the traditional sense. The brute fact of suffering is not justified by the brute fact of redemption, rather, redemption, or the closest we can get to it, comes through the fact that suffering can be interpreted, that the fact that we suffer never determines what we then do with that suffering.
If there’s one thing I don’t want from House, it’s learning and growth, which completely misunderstands what is so compelling about House as a character. House of course is very unhappy, but it would be quite wrong to take the pop-Platonist-therapy route of saying that this is because of ignorance on his part. On the contrary, House knows exactly why he is unhappy, and continues to do it anyway, precisely because if he ceased to do that, he would no longer be him. There is no “real” house separate from his depression and pain. I’m reminded of Deleuze’s gloss of Nietzsche: “The eternal return says: whatever you will, will it in such a manner that you also will its eternal return.” It’s hard to think of a more consistent, a more terrible, or a more cheering, self-knowledge.
In other House news, it appears (from the faith-healer episode repeated last night) that Dr Cameron is a Spinozist. How splendid.
In times gone by, there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and above all, frugal élite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living.
Leanne Battersby’s recent storyline in Coronation Street has been excellent. It’s done a very good job of criticizing the material conditions of prostitution without basing that on a stigmatization of prostitutes. The economic criticism of prostitution is too often expressed as horror that economic conditions force women so low; but it’s hard to disentangle that from the marginalization of prostitutes which, as Coronation Street has been pointing out, is precisely part of the economic problem of prostitution. 
Jade Goody’s apparent support for Fatah on Celebrity Big Brother.
