[D-G] billet d'humeur on Brexit

[Mike Lansing]

'Perhaps the best way to encapsulate an epoch is to focus not on the
explicit features that define its social and ideological efices but on
the disavowed ghosts that haunt it, dwelling in a mysterious region of
nonexistent entities which none the less (persist [italics]), continue
to exert their efficacy.
....
Here, however, we encounter the first paradox of the Balkans: it seems
as if the Balkans themselves had, in the eyes of Europe, the peculiar
status of a ghost that haunts -- are not the post-Yugoslav Balkans,
this vortex of (self)destructive ethnic passions, the exact opposite,
almost a kind of photographic negative, of the tolerant coexistence of
ethnic communities, a kind of multiculturalist dream turned into a
nightmare? Does not the very indeterminate and shifting geographic
delimitation of the Balkans indicate their spectral status? Where do
the Balkans begin? -- the Balkans are always somewhere else, a little
bit more to the southeast....many arrogant Frenchmen associate Germany
itself with an Eastern Balkan brutality entirely foreign to French
finesse, and this brings us to the last link in this chain: to some
conservative British opponents of the European Union, for whom --
implicitly, at least -- the whole of continental Europe functions today
as a new version of the Balkans Turkish Empire, with Brussels as the
new Istanbul, a voracious despotic centre which threatens British
freedom and sovereignty....Is not this identification of continental
Europe itself with the Balkans, its barbarian Other, the secret truth
of the entire movement of the displaced delimitation between the two?

This enigmatic multiple displacement of the frontier clearly
demonstrates that in the case of the Balkans we are dealing not with
real geography but with an imaginary cartography which projects on the
real landscape its own shadowy, often disavowed, ideological
antagonisms, just as Freud claimed that the localization of the
hysteric's conversion symptoms project on to the physical body the (map
[it.]) of another, imaginary anatomy....the point to be made is that
precisely in so far as the Balkans' function as such a spectral entity,
reference to them enables us to discern, in a kind of spectral
analysis, the different modes of today's racism. First, there is the
old-fashioned unabashed rejection of the (despotic, barbarian,
orthodox, Muslim, corrupt, Oriental....) Balkan Other on behalf of
authentic (Western, civilized, democratic, christian....) values. Then
there is reflexive Politically Correct racism: the multiculturalist
perception of the Balkans as the terrain of ethnic horrors and
intolerance, of primitive irrational warring passions....The example of
Kusturica's films enables us to identify another feature of the Western
perception of the Balkans: the logic of displaced racism....when in an
interview about his film Underground, Kusturica dismissed the Slovenes
as a nation of Austrian grooms, nobody even reacted to the open racism
of this statement -- it was OK, since an 'authentic' exotic artist from
the less developed part of ex-Yugoslavia was attacking the most
developed part of it....(The Balkans constitute a place of exception
with regard to which the tolerant multiculturalist is allowed to act
out his-her repressed racism[it.]).

Therein lies the main ideological lesson of 'the Balkans' : when
theorists like Anthony Giddens or Ulrich Beck define contemporary
society as a 'risk society', the reference to 'the Balkans' allows us
to supplement their analysis by pointing out how, today, (racism itself
is becoming reflexive [it.]).'
(Zizek, The Fragile Absolute -- or why is the christian legacy worth
fighting for? pp. 3-6))

'Translators, such barbarians!'
(D&G list, circa 1990s)



Original Message-----> 
>From: Dewey Dell [dewey.dell5 at gmail.com]
>Sent: 3/12/2019 9:29:35 PM
>To: deleuze-guattari at lists.driftline.org
>Subject: Re: [D-G] billet d'humeur on Brexit
>
>today i have been by coincidence for fun visiting the european
parliament
>in a schizophrenic adventure with an old girl friend
>i enjoyed being offered lituanian spicy brown seed bread on market
place
>then to listen in irish after choosing between 12 other official
european
>language
>to a video tour undergound the european buildings in brussels.
(brussels
>which
>by right of being european city is also second city in the world in
terms
>of cosmopolitanism
>after Abu Dhabi.
>
>this choice should be offered to every one in brussels. the city should
>become
>an international city, a bit like vatican city, with the exception
that the
>same choice
>should be offered for every citizen in europe, someone in romania being
>able to
>listen in augmented reality in portuguese or norvegian to the bus
driver
>orders:
> it should be able for someone to switch the language in which one
receives
>the orders
>from the bus drivers.
>
>contrary wise it seems in europe the national tendency is overcoming
>politics,
>not only on the far right i mean.
>
>the "states" agree politically to conceive themselves above the
others, and
>besides to be superseded by "brussels"
>
>this is so wrong, the citizen of europe are self harm children and
should
>be treated as adults
>and let it be required of them to grow up. if politicians suddenly
stopped
>talking to children,
>the children would be so lost that they would obey to their inner
biologic
>tendency to become adults.
>
>the politicians should not give up should not be lenient.
>same with brussels, they should notice that the ukip feodal capitalist
>power has won the upper hand
>in Britain now. its the locomotive, the rest is Static Apparatus
crumbling.
>that UK shall not give a fuck about Ireland.
>Brussels should be aware and directly make the best Deal with USA and
>ignore London right away.
>Brussels should run to Washington in search for a deal.
>
>USA is already protecting London, and the interest of the anglo-saxon
world
>shall prevail that way,
>so let's speed up and break this with a no deal between Brussels and
>London, and let there be a Deal between Mainland Europe and
>USA, instead than vague discussions across the Channel. The Parliament
>Session of today said it all because you can feel
>the locomotive desiring machine noise of MPs roar and cheers clamour
as the
>Sea advancing in front of the New Hobbes Lion, and panties parting
letting
>visible
>the Atlantic Cables underneath the Ocean.
>_______________________________________________
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>