Wilhelm Reich

[canardos]

convidado, je n'ai pas dit que j'étais d'accord avec le psychanalyste que je cite, mais seulement que lui au au moins defendait les enfants et critiquait les théories freudiennes qui en font des coupables et exonèrent leurs bourreaux

[Louis]

Bon je sort de mon silence (sur ce sujet tout du moins) pour remonter le moral de CP qui m'a tout l'air d'en avoir besoin (tu m'as l'air d'être au bord de la crise de nerf)

Il me faudrait faire encore une tranche, cette fois ci avec un Lacanien teinté lutte de classes...Ca existe?

Prend donc une goutte de Slavoj Zizek

Repeating Lenin
Slavoj Zizek
Lenin’s Choice

Source: lacan.com;
Mark-up: Styled and linked to Zizek's sources by Andy Blunden.

The first public reaction to the idea of reactualizing Lenin is, of course, an outburst of sarcastic laughter: Marx is OK, even on Wall Street, there are people who love him today — Marx the poet of commodities, who provided perfect descriptions of the capitalist dynamics, Marx of the Cultural Studies, who portrayed the alienation and reification of our daily lives -, but Lenin, no, you can’t be serious! The working class movement, revolutionary Party, and similar zombie-concepts? Doesn’t Lenin stand precisely for the FAILURE to put Marxism into practice, for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire XXth century world politics, for the Real Socialist experiment which culminated in an economically inefficient dictatorship? So, in the contemporary academic politics, the idea to deal with Lenin is accompanied by two qualifications: yes, why not, we live in a liberal democracy, there is freedom of thought... however, one should treat Lenin in an “objective critical and scientific way,” not in an attitude of nostalgic idolatry, and, furthermore, from the perspective firmly rooted in the democratic political order, within the horizon of human rights — therein resides the lesson painfully learned through the experience of the XXth century totalitarianisms.

What are we to say to this? Again, the problem resides in the implicit qualifications which can be easily discerned by the “concrete analysis of the concrete situation,” as Lenin himself would have put it. “Fidelity to the democratic consensus” means the acceptance of the present liberal-parliamentary consensus, which precludes any serious questioning of how this liberal-democratic order is complicit in the phenomena it officially condemns, and, of course, any serious attempt to imagine a society whose socio-political order would be different. In short, it means: say and write whatever you want — on condition that what you do, does not effectively question or disturb the predominant political consensus. So everything is allowed, solicited even, as a critical topic: the prospects of a global ecological catastrophe, violations of human rights, sexism, homophobia, antifeminism, the growing violence not only in the far-away countries, but also in our megalopolises, the gap between the First and the Third World, between the rich and the poor, the shattering impact of the digitalization of our daily lives... there is nothing easier today than to get international, state or corporate funds for a multidisciplinary research into how to fight the new forms of ethnic, religious or sexist violence. The problem is that all this occurs against the background of a fundamental Denkverbot, the prohibition to think. Today’s liberal-democratic hegemony is sustained by a kind of unwritten Denkverbot similar to the infamous Berufsverbot in Germany of the late 60s — the moment one shows a minimal sign of engaging in political projects that aim to seriously challenge the existing order, the answer is immediately: “Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!” The ideological function of the constant reference to the holocaust, gulag and the more recent Third World catastrophes is thus to serve as the support of this Denkverbot by constantly reminding us how things may have been much worse: “Just look around and see for yourself what will happen if we follow your radical notions!” And it is exactly the same thing that the demand for “scientific objectivity” means: the moment one seriously questions the existing liberal consensus, one is accused of abandoning scientific objectivity for the outdated ideological positions. This is the point on which one cannot and should not concede: today, the actual freedom of thought means the freedom to question the predominant liberal-democratic “post-ideological” consensus — or it means nothing.

Habermas designated the present era as that of the neue Undurchsichtlichkeit — the new opacity.1 More than ever, our daily experience is mystifying: modernization generates new obscurantisms, the reduction of freedom is presented to us as the arrival of new freedoms. In these circumstances, one should be especially careful not to confuse the ruling ideology with ideology which SEEMS to dominate. More then ever, one should bear in mind Walter Benjamin’s reminder that it is not enough to ask how a certain theory (or art) declares itself to stay with regard to social struggles — one should also ask how it effectively functions IN these very struggles. In sex, the effectively hegemonic attitude is not patriarchal repression, but free promiscuity; in art, provocations in the style of the notorious “Sensation” exhibitions ARE the norm, the example of the art fully integrated into the establishment.

One is therefore tempted to turn around Marx’s thesis 11: the first task today is precisely NOT to succumb to the temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul de sac of debilitating impossibility: “what can one do against the global capital?”), but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space — it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who “really want to do something to help people” get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) — they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity2: of doing things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something really happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian, politically correct, etc., activity fits the formula of “Let’s go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!”

Let us take two predominant topics of today’s American radical academia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism is undoubtedly crucial; however, “postcolonial studies” tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic of the colonized minorities’ “right to narrate” their victimizing experience, of the power mechanisms which repress “otherness,” so that, at the end of the day, we learn that the root of the postcolonial exploitation is our intolerance towards the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself is rooted in our intolerance towards the “Stranger in Ourselves,” in our inability to confront what we repressed in and of ourselves — the politico-economic struggle is thus imperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the subject unable to confront its inner traumas... The true corruption of the American academia is not primarily financial, it is not only that they are able to buy many European critical intellectuals (myself included — up to a point), but conceptual: notions of the “European” critical theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of the Cultural Studies chic.

My personal experience is that practically all of the “radical” academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on the stock market). If there is a thing they are genuinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life environment of the “symbolic classes” in the developed Western societies. Their excessive Politically Correct zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against their own innermost identification, a kind of compulsive ritual whose hidden logic is: “Let’s talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change to make it sure that nothing will really change!” Symptomatic is here the journal October: when you ask one of the editors to what the title refers, they will half-confidentially signal that it is, of course, THAT October — in this way, one can indulge in the jargonistic analyses of the modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the link with the radical revolutionary past... With regard to this radical chic, the first gesture towards the Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game in a straight way, and are honest in their acceptance of the global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to the pseudo-radical academic Leftists who adopt towards the Third Way the attitude of utter disdain, while their own radicality ultimately amounts to an empty gesture which obliges no one to anything determinate.

It is true that, today, it is the radical populist Right which is usually breaking the (still) predominant liberal-democratic consensus, gradually rendering acceptable the hitherto excluded topics (the partial justification of Fascism, the need to constrain abstract citizenship on behalf of ethnic identity, etc.). However, the hegemonic liberal democracy is using this fact to blackmail the Left radicals: “we shouldn’t play with fire: against the new Rightist onslaught, one should more than ever insist on the democratic consensus — any criticism of it willingly or unwillingly helps the new Right!” This is the key line of separation: one should reject this blackmail, taking the risk of disturbing the liberal consensus, up to questioning the very notion of democracy.

So how are we to respond to the eternal dilemma of the radical Left: should one strategical support center-Left figures like Bill Clinton against the conservatives, or should one adopt the stance of “it doesn’t matter, we shouldn’t get involved in these fights — in a way, it is even better if the Right is directly in power, since, in this way, it will be easier for the people to see the truth of the situation"? The answer is the variation of old Stalin’s answer to the question “Which deviation is worse, the Rightist or the Leftist one?": THEY ARE BOTH WORSE. What one should do is to adopt the stance of the proper dialectical paradox: in principle, of course, one should be indifferent towards the struggle between the liberal and conservative pole of today’s official politics — however, one can only afford to be indifferent if the liberal option is in power. Otherwise, the price to be paid may appear much too high — recall the catastrophic consequences of the decision of the German Communist Party in the early 30s NOT to focus on the struggle against the Nazis, with the justification that the Nazi dictatorship is the last desperate stage of the capitalist domination, which will open eyes to the working class, shattering their belief in the “bourgeois” democratic institutions. Along these lines, Claude Lefort himself, whom no one can accuse of communist sympathies, recently made a crucial point in his answer to Francois Furet: today’s liberal consensus is the result of 150 years of the Leftist workers’ struggle and pressure upon the State, it incorporated demands which were 100 or even less years ago dismissed by liberals as horror.3 As a proof, one should just look at the list of the demands at the end of the Communist Manifesto: apart from 2 or 3 of them (which, of course, are the key one), all others are today part of the consensus (at least the disintegrating Welfare State one): the universal vote, the right to free education, universal healthcare and care for the retired, limitation of child labor...

Il me semble que tu piges l'anglais (sinon, je ferais une traduction, mais les glissements de sens seront de ma responsabilité)

Sinon, tu peut aussi consulter l'ensemble des textes de zizek sur Lénine

Tout ce que vous auriez voulu demander a Lénine sans avoir à le demander a Hitchcock

[Gaby]

"Car le divan n'est pas qu'une "affaire de cul", c'est aussi le moyen de gagner de l'argent." !
Tu ne sais vraiment pas citer :ermm: Je parlais de l'endettement des malades comme des moins malades. Quelque chose de suffisament grave pour ne pas faire l'autruche.

Quant à l'argument que tu utilises, "on n'apprend rien", il y a eu de nombreux liens proposés et des textes copiés.

Loin de l'opposition des contraires, du mouvement (Ca / Moi / surmoi, appelle ca comme tu veux, mais tu ne la voie pas là la dialectique ?)

:ermm:

[Sterd]

On ne peux parler de la théorie de la gravité universelle si on nie la chute des pierres, ni non plus en allant chercher des citations à n'en plus finir de Newton sur son comportement avec ses disciples, avec ses amis, etc  dans le but de discréditer sa théorie !
Sans parler d'aller chercher les erreurs de calculs de Képler et ses falsifications.. ( car il y en a..)
Ou de me dire que la théorie des supers cordes est une ânerie idéaliste parce qu'on en a jamais vu une !

Il n'y a rien de commun entre Newton et Freud. Freud a tout falsifié de bout en bout de façon consciente. Il a triché sur ses résultats. Ses conclusions sont profondément erronées, il ne c'est servi de sa "science" dans le seul but de s'enrichir.
On a pas effectivement besoin d'aller chercher en plus des citations. Les citations prouvent seulement qu'en plus d'être un charlatan, un faussaire et un fraudeur, il est en plus mysogine et homophobe.

Quand à Reich. On peut toujours ne s'intéresser à lui que comme rédacteur de quelques opus sur la sexualité, mais il n'en reste pas moins que ces brochures sont infiniment minoritaires et marginales dans son "oeuvre". La plus grande partie de ses travaux a constitué en la "découverte" de l'orgone (energie sexuelle qui baignerai tout l'univers) et de différents mécanismes qui permettent de la capter et de la concentrer. Comme le concentrateur d'orgone qu'a posté Gaby, ou différentes machines a faire pleuvoir dont on trouve plein de plans sur le net. Selon Reich, l'orgone était aussi probablement le carburant des OVNIs. Il a aussi "découvert" la végetothérapie et les différentes cuirasses corporelles (faites des recherches sur google, j'arrive pas a résumer en quoi ça consiste).
Trouver Reich interessant pour trois bricoles sur la sexualité, c'est comme trouver interessant un bouquin d'Elisabeth Tessier ou des Frères Bogdanov. C'est profondément absurde.

[Gaby]

Je ne sais pas si j'ai le droit de poster cette photo ?



Reich et le brise-nuages.

Plus stoïquement, à partir de quel date faut-il s'arrêter pour Reich d'après ses défenseurs ? à ses 35 ans, donc 1932 ?