The Republic of Dissent

Ending the year with a bang

I'm in Paradise, which explains why I'm not blogging. It is hot, but unfortunately for me, I think I have caught something. I hope that it isn't something too exotic. In any case, I can't complain because the end of 2008 has been amazing. I moved to New York. I had an excellent time in Paris even though it rained a lot. Right now, I'm enjoying the highest luxury imaginable according to Baudelaire, which is to spend my days on a bed staring at gorgeous ceilings.In spite of the fact that it is hard to blog in Paradise, I wanted to take the time to wish a happy new year to my readers especially Craig (I'm still reading Frantz Fanon) who have helped not to lose my mind this year, which was incredibly difficult until its end. I know that 2009 is going to be exceptional and the Bordeaux will be heavenly and hopeful affordable. Happy new year!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Revoir Paris

I'm flying to Paris tomorrow to spend a few days in what remains for to me la capitale de l'allégresse before going to a warmer and more tropical Eden. This song by Jacques Dutronc describes perfectly my current state of mind and my mood. Things are going so fast around me that I have to stop and to remind myself to enjoy the good times. Anyway,  since I feel like around everything around me " n'est qu'ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté," I'm going to remain in semi-exile from this blog for a while. Happy Holidays to all of you and since I'm too obsessive not to write, I will post from time to time.

It's just another day, well no, it's my birthday!

It's my birthday and I'm still on a cloud. I'm probably going to keep flying bot figuratively and literally for a while because my life has unexpectedly taken an incredibly bright and exciting turn, which requires me to make a lot of changes and to adjust to different things such as positive thinking and fierce perfection. In any case, I'm enjoying this birthday more than I usually enjoy my birthdays because I feel like I'm moving forward at the right pace. I will continue to post as much as I can, but I'm asking you to be patient because everything around me is in flux and because I'm going to be going places where I've never been in a conquering mood so in the next few weeks, things are going to slow down and I will be less available.

La vita è bella

Life is sweet ! Although the weather is colder than last year in New York, I can't help enjoying Manhattan and its crowd, which may be less joyous than usual given the financial crisis, but which still find ways to have fun during the holidays.The most amazing thing to me is that how great and content I feel. I am not even anguished by the fact that my birthday is tomorrow and that I will be a year older. I'm looking forward to it and  I'm just enjoying life as one enjoys a glass of rare, but fabulous wine.

Light reading

While waiting for my new apartment to be ready, I'm staying in a hotel in Manhattan, which makes me realize how liberating and confining it can be to live in an expensive room where everything is accessible to you for a price. In any case, I only have two books with me, The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy and Paul Eluard's La Vie Immédiate. I love reading Pat Conroy in hotel rooms because his writing style enables me to forget the instability and relative foreignness of my surroundings. As for Eluard, I take him or rather his poems, everywhere with me because I can't live without him them. The main difference between reading Baudelaire and Eluard is that the first never lets you forgets that poetry although it can create flowers, they are flowers of evil. Eluard is more generous because he can, for a moment, transport you not to nirvana, but to a place where all transformations are possible as he would put it.

Getting to Happiness

As a true believer in America and its promises, naturally, I cherish  the fact that it doesn't characterize the pursuit of happiness as selfish and that in fact, it encourages it even though I have the strong suspicion that it has something to do with the fact that America is a religious country , which assumes that God wouldn't have created people without a purpose and without making possible for them to achieve happiness. Since I don't't believe in God and since I'm convinced that existence precedes essence, to me, happiness isn't something upon which you stumble upon or that you find because someone or something wants you to find it. So when I write today that I am happy what I'm saying that as Sisyphus surely did, I'm in a period when I'm enjoying pushing the rock up the mountain because this morning, I have finally achieved something. So, as I'm near the top of the mountain doing the apparent purposeless task of pushing a rock to the top so that it will fall back to the bottom, I feel joyful and fulfilled as a being for itself, I have done something, which makes me like the queen of the world. As I said yesterday, I write less frequently for a while because not only am I moving to a new apartment, but I'm also taking a trip of the country. Anyway, since this year seems to be the one of magical thinking, I hope that all you have the chance to see your wildest dreams come true

Everything is in flux

Since I'm moving to a new apartment and since I don't know when I will have my Internet connection set up, it is possible that I won't be able to write as much as I want to. In any case, I'm having a wonderful month of December in spite of my cold, which seems to love me because it forces  me not to calm down, to focus on the positive, and to see la vie en rose.

A stubborn believer in revolutions

Adam Kirsch has a profile of Slavoj Žižek in the New Republic, which has the merit of being thorough even though it still lacks depth and sufficient distance to uncover its subjects to people who have never heard of him :

Whether or not it would be always a mistake to take Slavoj Zizek seriously, surely it would not be a mistake to take him seriously just once. He is, after all, a famous and influential thinker. So it might be worthwhile to consider Zizek's work as if he means it--to ask what his ideas really are, and what sort of effects they are likely to have.

Zizek is a believer in the Revolution at a time when almost nobody, not even on the left, thinks that such a cataclysm is any longer possible or even desirable. This is his big problem, and also his big opportunity. While "socialism" remains a favorite hate-word for the Republican right, the prospect of communism overthrowing capitalism is now so remote, so fantastic, that nobody feels strongly moved to oppose it, as conservatives and liberal anticommunists opposed it in the 1930s, the 1950s, and even the 1980s. When Zizek turns up speaking the classical language of Marxism-Leninism, he profits from the assumption that the return of ideas that were once the cause of tragedy can now occur only in the form of farce. In the visual arts, the denaturing of what were once passionate and dangerous icons has become commonplace, so that emblems of evil are transformed into perverse fun, harmless but very profitable statements of post-ideological camp; and there is a kind of intellectual equivalent of this development in Zizek's work. The cover of his book The Parallax View reproduces a Socialist Realist portrait of "Lenin at the Smolny Institute," in the ironically unironic fashion made familiar by the pseudo-iconoclastic work of Komar and Melamid, Cai Guo-Jiang, and other post-Soviet, post-Mao artists. He, too, expects you to be in on the joke. But there is a difference between Zizek and the other jokesters. It is that he is not really joking.

The question of whether to take Zizek seriously is the wrong one because it is unnecessarily condescending and because it avoids accepting Zizek for what he is: a priest, a true believer in “Socialism.” Zizek has so much in common with zealot priests who are so persuaded that they have seen the light and are obsessed with spreading it even when they aimed isn’t to convince and convert, but to preach. In other words, I read Zizek just as I used to read William Buckley not to know about the state of the world or to discover unknown realities, but simply to find some peculiar and thought provoking insights. Reading and taking Zizek “seriously” is like eating crickets, you don’t do it to fill yourself up, but for the simple experience of the act, to reassure yourself that they will never in spite of their high protein contents take the place of steaks or lobsters.  

Pause musicale

The thing called news

Informative points from Christiane Amanpour on Cable News, objectivity, and reality:

I stay away from commentary and I stay away from ideology. All this stuff that we have seen marching into the space of fact-based news over the last several years, the highly opinionated, highly ideological [demagoguery] that exists and masquerades as journalism. I draw a line and I stay in the fact-based reality. […] Objectivity is not treating each side equally, not drawing a false moral equivalence […] It's covering all sides, giving all sides a hearing but not necessarily drawing false conclusions because if you do that in these kinds of situations, in my view, you're an accomplice.

Becoming Obama's piñata

By accepting to become Obama's Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has become his administration's piñata. She will be blame for all of his foreign policy's failures and ignored for her role in all of its successes. In my opinion, the last efficient Secretary of State was James Baker under George Bush Senior administration. He was successful because he could make Bush listen to him since he was never suspected of having his own agenda and grand political ambitions. The problem for Hillary Clinton is that she comes to the job handicapped by the strong suspicions that she doesn't want Obama to succeed unless it is on her terms. Every time she will express privately or semi-publicly opinions which are different from the one of the President or of the other members of his national security team, she will seen as the evil bitch of the democratic primaries who dared to believe that she could make a better president than an eloquent, inspiring, and brilliant "black" male. In other words, I think Hillary Clinton just got "Powellize" meaning that at the end of Obama's term, she will realize just as Colin Powell did that she lent all of her political capital to a president who needed her at the time and that all she got was a lousy job as a the figurehead of policies she had no great role in manufacturing. I hope that I'm wrong, but I believe that Susan Rice, the new Ambassador of the US to the United Nations will have more power than Hillary Clinton in the sense that she will have all of the president's trust and confidence and will therefore be listened to more and probably used to make sure that Hillary is acting in the best interest of Obama.