Tag: Politics

Slavoj Žižek – In the Grey Zone

Link to an article by Slavoj Žižek on the Charlie Hebdo incident:

“In the Grey Zone”

Bonus links: “Laughter in the Dark” (“And here we confront Charlie Hebdo’s greatest failing, not that its cartoonists mocked the Prophet or skewered the Mullahs, but that the magazine became a tool of the ruling order, aiming its most savage work at the most vulnerable citizens of France: the weak, the marginalized and the dispossessed. In the end, Charlie Hebdo, like much of the French intelligentsia, became an agent of orthodoxy, a persecutor of the poor and the powerless, deaf to their desperation.”) and “The Red Flag and the Tricolore”

Isaac William Martin – Rich People’s Movements

Rich People's Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent

Isaac William Martin – Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent (Oxford University Press 2013)

A sociological history of the co-option of progressive protest tactics (originally developed to advance the interests of the poor) in support of tax policies that favor the rich.  The title references the classic by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1977).  The premise sounds almost ridiculous, but Isaac Martin makes an interesting case.  His account seems fairly balanced, and for the most part seems reliably complete.  If there is a weak spot, it falls on the more recent efforts.  Martin doesn’t seem to provide enough context for why politicians suddenly capitulated to the same sorts of demands that had been made for decades, and he doesn’t necessarily treat all political parties equally.  It is a small quibble in an otherwise interesting and well-researched book.  This is a more thoroughly-researched and neutral academic treatment of a topic that has been addressed in other books like Thomas Frank‘s Pity the Billionaire (2012) and Paul Street and Anthony DiMaggio‘s Crashing the Tea Party (2011).

Miya Tokumitsu – In the Name of Love

Link to an article by Miya Tokumitsu:

“In the Name of Love”

This reminded me of Slavoj Žižek’s observation that it was an obscenity for the Nazis to place “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work makes you free”) on or above the gates to concentration camps like Dachau and Auschwitz.

See also The End of Dissatisfaction?: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment