My trans. of Zlatomir Zlatanov, with a short note-commentary, is now out at Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism & Translation. — “The world has never had a message. Only this necrotic code of debility, exhumed by the lords of fraud.” — ZLATOMIR ZLATANOV (born 1953 in Slatina, Bulgaria) is a poet, writer, and critic who, shortly after the political changes of 1989, became—and still is—one of the mavericks of Bulgarian postmodernism. At the very cusp of the theoretico-political transition, he has already experimented with short stories and poetry, as in the poetic book Palinodies (1989), largely considered the first openly postmodernist poetry book in Bulgaria. He pre-emptively examined the coming neoliberal transition with his novelette Exitus (1985), which he adapted for the 1989 movie with the same title directed by Krassimir Kroumov (to this day considered one of the most representative Bulgarian films concerning the perestroika). Plundering the poetic canon, especially of national poetry, he has transformed and hijacked familiar meanings from the canon into workable socio-political material, with books such as, most (in)famously, On the Island of the Coprophiles (1997). In the late 1990s and early 2000s he began to develop an increasingly theoretical lexis (beginning with Protocols for the Other, 2000) and later engaged with the thought of Lacan and Badiou, publishing novels such as Lacanian Networks (2005) and the series of essays, Alain Badiou, Or, the Persistence of Illogical Worlds (2008).
Stanimir Panayotov

 

… at this point, the Deleuzian hero is the pervert. The pervert is the “structural” hero who escapes the undifferentiated depth of psychosis as well as the manic-depressive circles of neurosis. Through his art of surfaces and his mobility, the pervert circulates in the interval beyond neurosis and before psychosis. Ordinary neurosis remains at the level of lived experience and everyday triviality, enforcing the established significations, settled manifestations, and obvious denotations; psychosis drives into the depths of infra-sense, a world of instincts in which only bodies caught in relations of composition and destruction prevail. Only the pervert averts these twin dangers “at the end of an adventure which surely has passed through neurosis and brushed up against psychosis”. It is like a clinical version of the alternative between order and chaos. The pervert evades the undifferentiated in which  psychosis would plunge him as well as the preestablished differentiations in which neurosis is settled. “In a certain respect,” writes Deleuze, “it is our epoch which has discovered perversion.

There is of course a grandeur, a heroism, to the schizophrenic,
due to the unimaginable quantity of suffering with which his life is
permeated; but he remains a figure of collapse, unable to constitute
a metaphysical surface of thought. His effort to think is continually
driven back to its impossibility or powerlessness, the “schiz” itself.
What prevents the schizophrenic from attaining full positivity is his
incapacity to preserve and produce sense. Conversely, what accounts
for the positivity of the pervert is his unique aptitude for producing
sense, nothing but sense, be it in the most artificial way. If, despite
everything, the pervert prevails, it is because sense must be ‘saved. ”
Perversion, then, wins the day. While it is true that the powers of
thought are on the side of schizophrenia, it is no less true that the
metaphysical surface allowing those powers to be exercised is on the
side of perversion. Only perversion can deliver thought from the
powerlessness into which it otherwise continually slips. Perversion is
something like the ideal double of schizophrenia.

ABERRANT MOVEMENTS
THE PHILOSOPHY OF GILLES DELEUZE
David Lapoujade

Корупцията е гигантската хетеротопия, която поглъща публичния живот без да е в състояние да го изплюе обратно. А трябва. Абсолютната корупция е абсолютна липса на стил.
Това ни тормози, естетическата й неиздържаност, неестетиката на корупцията.
Това се получава, когато се надвишат 20 процента – какво? Спомняме си как започна, от мистър 10 процента.
Ескалацията не е изгодна на никого. Това е корумпиране на самата корупция.
От невнесените 700 милиона на хазартния бос се разбра, че 67 от тях са отишли където трябва. Това е 20 процента. Очевидно е било поискано още и инсталацията е гръмнала.
Двойно – да, но не и тройно, казваше Марангозов на тези, които му строяха къщата. Все пак той е западен човек.
В нормалната корупционна държава процентът не се надхвърля. Нито се премахва, защото би настъпил пълен ред, тоест ентропия.
Тук прекаляват. Дори подхвърлят гадни подмятания за обратната страна на тези проценти – 80 процента боклук, лош материал, мизерия и страдание, без да схванат пропорцията за спазване, която се знае още от първия кмет на Атина Анит до Ницше и Парето.
Можеха да седнат, които и да са те, и да се разберат за нещо като неписан закон, нали всичките им са такива – не повече от 20 процента.
А те се кълнат, че не са взели нищо и това е извънредното на наглостта.
Извънредното положение е точно това – хидрената корупция – но те я търсят на друго място.
Извънредното положение е етническият Доган, но те го търсят другаде.
Извънредното положение са всички тези интерпретации, които се състоят от интерпретации, оттам перспективизъм без перспектива.
Сега за тези милиарди европейска помощ, които пристигат като месианизъм без да са дошли. Вземете си точния процент, гадове, ако трябва извикайте Мария Габриел да го изчисли. Дайте шанс на корупцията да получи стил.
Казват, че ние сме били пасивни. Напротив, в това е нашата сила да издържим мръсотията на света, да не влезем в мръсните игри, за които няма изнамерен правилен алгоритъм.
Ако за една интерпретация се разбере как действа, тя вече не е интерпретация.
Ако бог бъде разбран, той вече не е бог.
Ако алгоритъмът на корупция се схване, тя вече не е корупция, а тривиална кражба, 20 процента извънредност.
Но като всички идиоти те гонят стоте процента аутизъм.

 

Lacan was without illusions as to the nature of the book. What
is the page for the writer but “‘the turd of his fantasy’? Publication Lacan referred to in an untranslatable pun as “‘poubellication” [poubelleis French for trash—trans.]. A contemporary of Samuel Beckett, Lacan understood the meaning of the trashcan.
The cradle of waste, the gathering-place of garbage, the trashcan,
sublimated, became something grandiose. But a book could also
become a piece of shit, something many books are judged to be.

THE LIVES AND LEGENDS OF JACQUES LACAN
Catherine Clément

“Only he who one day has abandoned everything and has been abandoned by everything, for whom everything has capsized and who sees himself alone with the infinite, has come to the very bottom of himself and recognized all the profundity of life. This is a great step which Plato compared to death.” (Schelling, cited by Heidegger.)

The Writing of the Disaster
Maurice Blanchot

In one of our last conversations, Borges did not lament in the face of the forgetting into which, as he foresaw, his work would disappear. Although this certainty did not weigh on him, he wished that, among the thousands of pages, one poem could be conserved: “The Golem.” But then, repentant at having staked too excessive a claim, he reduced his wish to one stanza, the first:

If (as the Greek affirmed in the Cratylus)
The name is the archetype of the thing,
In the letters of rose is the rose
And all of the Nile in the word Nile.

Why preserve only “The Golem”? Why only one part? Why the first stanza? Why not all of it? Why not only a name? Many years earlier, in the famous “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote,” already cited, the narrator, agreeing with the author, affirmed:
There is no intellectual exercise that is not infinitely futile. A philosophical doctrine is at first a verisimilar description of the universe; the years turn and it is a mere chapter—if not a paragraph or a name—of the history of philosophy. In literature this caducity is even more notorious.

It is not the first time that, anticipating by many years the alarming forecasts of a century split down the middle, Borges foretold the disappearance of literature, of poetry, of the word.

“All the Nile in the word Nile,” said Borges, and in these italics he finishes. But if the conjectures are resplendent, the final word Nile, the last or only that remains after the elimination that the poet prophesied with less resignation than joy, would be the only relic. Vernichtung, in German: a destruction that erases even the traces of that annihilation, in English, nil. Its French homonym, Nil, returns to the name of the river.

In “Le démon de l’analogie,” Mallarmé speculates about the painful enjoyment (pénible jouissance) that the words of sad nature produced in his mouth. He did not avoid that same analogical perversity taking over his words in order to suppress the reference at the same time that he invoked it. “The Penultimate is dead,” said Mallarmé, stressing the strange magic that torments the syllable nul, penultimate and nul, on the verge of disappearing in “that absurd sentence.”

It is not strange that an aesthetics of annihilation swaddles a century that has made of sheer annihilation its shadow, of silence and sounds, its danse macabre. In the first letter to the Corinthians, Paul said: “Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.” According to certain contemporary academic radicalisms, the prophecy has already been verified: if history disappeared again, if poetry was condemned and hermeneutics grew through the decline of theories— or the inverse, if the death of the author was announced more than once, confirming greater deaths that preceded it and those of them who announced it, if in this disappearance en masse, reality also fell, whom could it surprise that the work disappears and there only remains a word?
Like Cratylus, Borges believes in the truth of words, in the similarity they guard between themselves and with things, and this is why he would preserve a stanza, the first, and the final word, several times final: Nile, a variation of nil or of nihil, res nata, “nothing” is the contradictory redemption. In Genesis, golem designates the man created in the image and likeness, an embryo, a “larva,” mask and specter, a being who still is not or is no longer. Similar is strange. He who prohibits imitation, does he imitate himself? That is why, observing the contradiction more than the interdiction, the rabbi of Prague does something further: he gives life to his semblant by way of the word, inscribing emet, Hebrew for “truth,” in the same way as, in order to destroy it, he obliterates aleph, the first letter, leaving met, in Hebrew, and it remains transformed into a cadaver, or it does not remain at all.

BORGES The Passion of an Endless Quotation
Lisa Block de Behar

In his recent monumental book on Hegel, Zizek makes the point that the “Lacanian” split subject is driven, not just by the famous triad of how it imagines itself over and against the big Other of the social symbolic order and its Real material/animal existence, but also by its non-appearance of the self to itself. Here, as is typical, Zizek uses a joke: two men are at a theatre, knocking back a few drinks while in the audience. At some point, one of the men gets up to use the toilet, embarrassingly lurching around for the WC. Finally, desperate to relieve himself, he pops through a door and spots a potted plant. Frantic, he relieves himself right there. After some copious urination, he zips up and eventually finds his way back to his seat. “What a pity;’ his friend tells him as he sits down. “You missed the best part! Some man just came on stage and pissed in the potted plant!” Zizek provides the moral from here: “The subject necessarily misses its own act, it is never there to see its own appearance on the stage, its own intervention is the blind spot of its gaze:’ In the movie theatre, is this not the split between what Zizek calls the void of the subject, the pure cogito that has exited the room, and the subject as he appears to the Other in the social symbolic pissing on the plant?

SPECULATIVE REALISM
PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS
Peter Gratton

ГЕОРГИ АНДОНОВ
(1953-2020)

To be more unserviceable than a saint

Сбогом, приятелю!

НЕСПОСОБНИТЕ ДА СЛУГУВАТ ОСВЕЩАВАТ ДУХА

“There is no return to normal, the new ‘normal’ will have to be constructed on the ruins of our old lives, or we will find ourselves in a new barbarism whose signs are already clearly discernible.”
Thus writes the Slovenian philosophical “rock star” Slavoj Žižek in his quick and dirty little book, entitled PANdemIC!: Covid-19 Shakes the World and made available for readers within just weeks after the start of the spread of the Covid-19 virus beyond China. (12)
The economic shortfalls and social dislocations of the pandemic, Žižek writes, will “compel us to re-invent Communism based on trust in the people and in science.”(46-7) Communism with a New Yorker magazine face!

—

At the same time, Žižek seems to fear that instead of such a smily-faced “communism” might not turn out to prevail in a post-Covid world. Instead we are just as likely to experience “barbarism with a human face—ruthless survivalist measures enforced with regret and even sympathy, but legitimized by expert opinions”.(96) Further on in his meandering, little tractate, however, Žižek makes it clear that what he is calling “communism” is really nothing more or less “simply as a name for what is already going on (or at least perceived by many as a necessity), measures which are already being considered and even partially enforced” – in other words, city-wide lockdowns, closures of restaurants, demands for “social distancing,” and so forth.

—

With typical demurral Žižek admits: “It’s not a vision of a bright future but more one of ‘disaster Communism’ as an antidote to disaster capitalism. Not only should the state assume a much more active role, organizing the production of urgently needed things like masks, test kits and respirators, sequestering hotels and other resorts, guaranteeing the minimum of survival of all new unemployed, and so on, doing all of this by abandoning market mechanisms.”(116)

—

If the new “disaster communism” that Žižek sees as facing its own summons to manage the world after the presumed collapse of the neoliberal world order following the viral onslaught were to be worthy of its name, it would have had a distinctive plan for the dissolution of the asset-holding classes. Instead, the asset-holders have become even more entrenched, while what was left of the working class became truly (in Marx’s famous phrasing)“immiserated.”

Of course, we have already witnessed from the late twentieth century onward a unique kind of “zoonostic” transfer of the chromosomic material of” disaster capitalism” to the genomes of what was supposed to be the purest form of communism itself – Chinese Maoism.

The point is that at some point – which may be much sooner than one anticipates – a certain politico-theological pseudo-Trinitarian homoousiosis of “disaster capitalism,” “disaster communism”, and smiling neoliberal barbarism may become the preferred political strategy for the urban, cosmopolitan political elites who desperately want to hold on to their capital assets while the real workers starve but the planet cools down.

Via THE NEW POLIS

 

There is plenty here to keep fans of Story of the Eye happy, but Surya is more at pains to give Bataille his due as a philosopher and political thinker. Yes, this is the man who masturbated in front of his mother’s corpse while his pregnant wife slept in a neighbouring room, but he is also the author of “The Psychological Structure of Fascism”. Yes, this is the man who experienced a kind of ecstasy at London Zoo at the sight of a monkey’s arse (“a beautiful boil of red flesh”), but he also analysed the role of utility in social exchange in “The Notion of Expenditure”.
And yes, this is the man who was obsessed by some horrific photographs (reproduced in the book) of the Chinese torture of a hundred pieces, convinced that the young man being cut up alive was in a state of religious ecstasy (“hideous, crazed, lined with blood, as beautiful as a wasp”), but he also wrote “The Problem of the State”. It soon becomes clear that the morbid, obsessional erotic novels cannot be entirely divorced from the morbid, obsessional political philosophy.
Bataille’s literary works are not directly autobiographical, though they frequently borrow from his life. Unfortunately he only remembered the bad times, leaving us with the (probably) mistaken impression, says Surya, of “a black and completely accursed life”. Surya overcomes the lack of documentary evidence by focusing on Bataille’s intellectual development. However perverse Bataille seems, he argues, there is a systematic philosophy behind the work, although he was better at sudden insights than sustained argument. Nevertheless, through no fault of Surya’s, this remains a curiously bloodless portrait. The flesh-and-blood Bataille is missing – which is odd, for a man so obsessed by flesh and blood.
Surya traces Bataille’s pathological state of mind to his childhood. His syphilitic father was blind and paralysed and eventually went mad, and the family had to leave him behind when they were evacuated in September 1915. His tormented mother became delirious and attempted suicide. Two months later the family returned home to find “a fastened coffin in the bedroom”. Little wonder, then, that Bataille was fascinated by death.
Reacting against his irreligious father, Bataille found God and converted to Catholicism. He devoured medieval texts depicting the body as a bag of excrement, and studied the horrible tortures of the Christian martyrs. Looking back, he saw this devout period as an attempt to evade his “destiny”, which turned out to be Nietzsche. God was dead and “the tide of laughter sweeping over me had turned my faith into a game”.
Suddenly everything was permitted and he became devoted to the pleasures of the flesh (“My true church is a whorehouse”). He cared only for that which was “dirty”, and he wanted to make dirty anything sublime and pure. In the end only death was filthy enough for him, as is evident in Story of the Eye.
Bataille rarely mentions love except to degrade it. He was “systematically and copiously unfaithful”, says Surya, and his marriage in 1928 did not stop him from frequenting nightclubs, brothels, orgies (his wife left him in 1934), nor from having a mistress, Colette Peignot, the model for many of his heroines. It remains a mystery how Colette died (aged 35 in Bataille’s bed). Bataille said he would speak of it one day, but never did, and in truth women seem to pass through his life like figures in a dream.
It was a life of extreme solitude and, ultimately, disappointment. He never became the respected writer he dreamed of becoming. As Surya points out, Bataille was envious of André Breton’s celebrity and covetous of his position as leader of the Surrealists, yet he refused to join them, preferring to carp from the sidelines. Breton thought he went too far in embracing filth and corruption. “Mr Bataille loves flies,” he said. “Not we.” So Bataille remained on Surrealism’s fringes, a buzzing fly that would not go away.
Illness and age caught up with him in the end. On top of pulmonary tuberculosis he was diagnosed with cerebral arteriosclerosis aged 58. Dizzy spells and lapses of attention followed and he complained that his mind was “undoing itself “. In 1962, at the age of 65, he gladly succumbed to the “laughter of death”.
An important question hangs over this serious and respectful biography, and Surya returns to it several times: was Bataille mad? Surya does not think so, and neither did Bataille. “I was not insane,” he wrote, “but I undoubtedly made too much of the necessity of leaving, in one way or another, the limits of human experience.”

Ian Pindar, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/
Via Justin Murphy <justin@theotherlifenow.com>