typical London bathroom

Franz Rosenzweig suffered from the muscular degenerative disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease) and towards the end of his life had to write with the help of his wife Edith, who would recite letters of the alphabet until he indicated for her to stop, continuing until she could guess the word or phrase he intended (or, at other times, Rosenzweig would point to the letter on the plate of his typewriter). They also developed a system based on him blinking his eyes.

Rosenzweig's final attempt to communicate his thought, via the laborious typewriter-alphabet method, consisted in the partial sentence: "And now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep, the point of all points for which there—". The writing was interrupted by his doctor, with whom he had a short discussion using the same method. When the doctor left, Rosenzweig did not wish to continue with the writing, and he died in the night of December 10, 1929, in Frankfurt, the sentence left unfinished.

For the last eight years, this was the governor of my state. What does this mean?

the other side of something, articulately bombs through roads, twisting its nonsense beak, against the noon rise

Tonight I listened to a recording of a Malek class circa 2008. The best part might have been the 5-minute pizza break:

Nathan Schradle: Maybe a cow died in a way that was inhumane to make this pizza, but it's delicious pizza.

Alex Wolf: It's very tasty Bestand.

The example is first of all for others, and beyond the self. Sometimes, perhaps always, whoever gives the example is not equal to the example he gives, even if he does everything to follow it in advance, "to learn how to live," as we were saying, imperfect example of the example he gives--which he gives by giving then what he has not and even what he is not. For this reason, the example thus disjoined separates enough from itself or from whoever gives it so as to be no longer or not yet example for itself. We do not have to solicit the agreement of Marx--who died to this even before being dead--in order to inherit it: to inherit this or that, this rather than that which comes to us nevertheless by him, through him if not from him. And we do not have to suppose that Marx was in agreement with himself. ("What is certain is that I am not a Marxist," he is supposed to have confided to Engels. Must we still cite Marx as an authority to say likewise?) For Blanchot does not hesitate to suggest that Marx had difficulty living with this disjunction of the injunctions within him and with the fact that they were untranslatable into each other. How is one to receive, how is one to understand a speech, how is one to inherit it when it does not let itself be translated from itself to itself? This may appear impossible. And, we have to acknowledge, it is probably impossible. But since this sums up perhaps the strange subject of this lecture devoted to the specters of Marx, as well as to the avowed distortion of its axiom, permit me then to turn the objection around. Guaranteed translatability, given homogeneity, systematic coherence in their absolute forms, this is surely (certainly, a priori and not probably) what renders the injunction, the inheritance, and the future--in a word, the other--impossible. There must be disjunction, interruption, the heterogeneous if at least there must be, if there must be a chance given to any "there must be" whatsoever, be it beyond duty.

- Derrida, Specters of Marx

Edward Said mentions at least 'three remarkable witnesses of Gaza':

Amira Hass, Sara Roy, and Gloria Emerson.

Play that funky music, Jewish boy

Leonard Cohen sings, or rather recites, his sexual past as if he were an art historian talking about his favorite painters of the baroque. Cohen does not sing, or he sings in a near-monotone, a murmur so slow that it is profane, as if to actively communicate the fact that he is a novelist and a poet, a failed novelist turned musician. He deflates a traditional mode of the love song with a kind of dismissive spiritual detachedness, the detachedness of a Buddhist, a Jewish Buddhist, or, as my aunt says, a 'Jew-Bu' (he is one of the few musicians to devote his life entirely to Buddhism at one point).

Whereas the white Africanist male singer would croon for the woman, his words the evidence of the irrational sacrifices he makes for the object of his desires, the Jewish balladeer, epitomized by Cohen and Bob Dylan, approaches the situation differently. Jews are still not white, try as we might, or, as Hannah Arendt put it, 'there is no escaping Jewishness' (and Jewishness is not, Judith Butler points out, the same as Judaism). Both Cohen and Dylan have not tried to escape their Jewishness, and this has been part of the key to their enormous success. There is a poetic moment to their sonic fictions, a theoretical aspect to their sonorous mobility, which can be traced back to the exegetical and the Talmud.

This is not to say that a Jew, someone like Neil Diamond, perhaps, is incapable of writing, and presenting him or herself, in a thoroughly non-Jewish mode, or that a non-Jew is incapable of displaying an intense Jewish influence. The description of an aesthetic, or, as Susan Sontag would say, of a sensibility, must allow for an articulation of the ways in which the sensibility, the movement, has moved, itself, through cultures, rubbing against others.

Bugsy (1991)

Bugsy Siegel is a fascinating character, and Warren Beatty did an incredible job of portraying him, especially for a gentile. Annette Bening is amazing as his love interest, and she is even more cruel and insane than he is.

What a bizarre episode in American history. Jewish gangsters, exiled to LA by anti-semitism, build Las Vegas. I think the reason Jews finally made it out of the ghetto is because they are brilliant at understanding the secret desires of white people. Secret, often shameful desires: money, sex, power, fame...just look at Al Goldstein or Howard Stern. Like Siegel, they realize that people will do anything to satisfy their guilty pleasures. And the creation of institutions or monuments to filth and excess creates, in turn, demand for such things.

Here's a beautiful, hilarious snippet from Wikipedia:

Siegel lost patience with the rising costs [of building the Flamingo Hotel], and his notorious outbursts unnerved his construction foreman. Reputedly, Siegel told him, "Don't worry — we only kill each other."

Remnants of Auschwitz

"...the specific ethical aporia of Auschwitz: it is the site in which it is not decent to remain decent, in which those who believed themselves to preserve their dignity and self-respect experience shame with respect to those who did not"

"perhaps never before Auschwitz was the shipwreck of dignity in the face of an extreme figure of the human and the uselessness of self-respect before absolute degradation so effectively described"

"...Auschwitz marks the end and ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm. The bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor conforms to anything. It is itself is the only norm; it is absolutely immanent"

"...what defines the camp is not simply the negation of life... neither death nor the number of victims in any way exhausts the camp's horror...the dignity offended in the camp is not that of life but rather of death"

"In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced. Corpses without death, non-humans whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production"

"...the decisive function of the camps in the system of Nazi biopolitics. They are not merely the place of death and extermination; they are also, and above all, the site of the production of the Muselmann, the final biopolitical subtance to be idolated in the biological continuum. Beyond the Muselmann lies only the gas chamber"

"I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write" - Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge

James Baldwin wrote that the idea of happiness, in the American experience, is a post-war, tragic illusion. The pursuit of happiness, a small phrase which has been turned into a hegemonic ideal, is, for him, the pursuit of a life without pain, without discord, distinguished only by the steady accumulation of wealth.

Joy, however, is a very real thing, an effervescent eruption that can occur in the most apocalyptic of circumstances. The young men in the video come from one of the most violent parts of the United States. Dancing on the corner where their friend was shot to death, one is wearing the suit he wore to the funeral. They've just witnessed, once more, one of the most glaring contradictions of the American dream, one of the greatest failures of capitalism. But the most sinister question on their minds, the question which they try to ignore, is does capitalism rely, for its smooth operation, on the murder of their friends?

Privatization, globalization, neoliberalism, late capitalism: all of these processes operate by means of what Bataille called the restricted economy. The restricted economy restricts flows of capital even as it persistently expands flows of people and resources. It agglomerates by mobilizing mechanisms of deprivation: there is no privation without deprivation. These images were taken in one of the most deprived places in the First World, because East Oakland has suffered not only from a paranoid white flight but also from a recent black flight, so that those left behind are only those who are forced to stay.

There is no happiness in East Oakland. It would be stupid to call its inhabits 'happy,' on the whole. But there is a joy which bubbles and boils over in moments of art such as these and in its vibrant musical sensibility.

Nietzsche wants a therapeutic thinking. A truly alien idea to our world of Ritalin and self-medication. A developed country with developed illnesses. Nietzsche says that thought itself is therapy, and an irreplaceable one, because one of the most insidious illnesses is the illness of ressentiment. The illness of the sheep who decides that the bird of prey is evil, that the bird of prey eats the sheep out of malice, and begins to say it is unjust that the bird of prey eats the sheep.

Ressentiment - the re-sentiment, the apparation of a sentiment when it is no longer needed. The compulsion to repeat, and a simultaneous inability to cope with repetition. The shock at the return of the sentiment, a shock which repeats itself.

Bataille, in the next century, thought that the thinking of waste might be the most therapeutic thinking. But therapeutic might not be the right word any longer, embroiled as it is in the politics of risk-management (Cf. the films of Adam Curtis). The thinking of waste brings life about, allows for life and virility to bloom in the way Nietzsche argued for. It is the ressentiment of this blooming that, in Altizer, makes the Christian church Satanic: the church has turned in on itself, or turned against the teachings of Jesus, in trying to prevent life from flowering, in trying to shut down effervescence through self-punishment. The church does this for profit.

So the thinking of waste is at once against the church and against the state, although it is not necessarily atheistic. It asks what it could mean to believe after the death of God. To be religious without the church.

The thinking of waste can release us from ressentiment. In a state of peace, there is no more common crime than spousal abuse. A man feels as if his attention, and his affection, toward his beloved has been a waste. She, let's say she's a woman, does not merit his affections, because these affections do not appreciate into currency. This currency is whatever the man has been seeking, and the woman may be unable to give it, or the man may be unable to accept it. It could be that she gives it freely, and he does not recognize its worth, or it could be that she cannot give it. If he does not recognize its worth he does not recognize her, nor does he recognize the relational character of their relationship.

The relational lives in the excessive. That is to say, there is no relationship--between peoples, between nations, between organisms--without the unnecessary or accidental exchange. This encompasses the gift and the tragedy at once. You hear about the natives, the 'savages,' giving gifts to the Europeans, and you hear about the Europeans trading with the natives to receive more. This is the difference between a relationship and a conquest: giving and trading. Relation and extraction, exuberance and privation.

Men are told that women are to be conquered. But part of us knows that if we approach them in this way that it will end up like colonialism ends up. We must reject the logic of equal exchange, even as we accept the logic of equal rights with women. If women are our equals, that still does not mean that a relationship will consist of even, rational transactions. It cannot. If I give a woman something: a compliment, a favor, a gift, and my intention is, directly, to get something from her, to acquire her sex, I'm sabotaging myself, because the sex is deprived of its value. It is deprived of value as it is assigned a value: the price of a bouquet of flowers, the price of a thoughtful compliment. For if this banality is its value it is inadequate: rationally, I ought to find another woman who will not sleep with me until I buy her a Prada bag. And then she, again, is inferior to the woman who will not sleep with me until I buy her a Rolls Royce. And so on...

This logic of banal escalation is a motor of capitalism. The reduction of men to objects of money is just as integral to its functioning as the reduction of women to body parts on billboards, although it reduces them to utility just as easily.

I'm not ENTIRELY Comfortable with being human

First Violence: July 30th 1987--I didn't ask to be born.
Second Violence: Happy Birthday--was I born in a year, on a day, at a moment?
Third Violence(s): "Celebrating Birthdays is trite." ('Happy Birthday!')--"you're welcome"!

The night began with some of the most ambiguous words in the language: "I'll text you."

And I think it ended with the words "don't go liking me or anything."

This is where machines intervene. Robots have no feelings, but they carry and distribute intimacy. Identity lives in databases and your heart moves there when you don't think about it.



Love becomes an automatic piloting mechanism, like the mind that actually keeps an airplane upright, a computer. You enter a connection and recognize its flaws, its weak points, its liabilities and greatest assets, and then you power it without working. One disturbance here affects something across the world. One change of lighting, one word, changes the entire arrangement. Love is a matter of balancing pressures, finding media, finding that one is medial, mediating between and without.

A medicated generation

More The Green Hornet Videos

Can you (begin to) explain these statistics?

Many ignored causes...

Oakland, CA: population 399,000
London, England: population 7.5 million

In 2009, London had 15 murders.
Oakland had more than 100 (the SF Chronicle website on the topic is no longer updated...)