Kant with Sade

Is Marquis de Sade, as the reputation that precedes him intimate, the sexually transgressive aristocrat par excellence? This element seems to be missing in the two short stories published by Hesperus Press in the thin volume Betrayal: “The Magistrate Mocked” and “Emilie de Tourville.”

As John Burnside observed in his foreword to the book, the popular notion that Sade “was all about sex, and that ‘sadism’ – the ritualization of an exquisite sexual cruelty – was something that the ‘Divine Marquis’ had invented” somehow misses the point.[1] Sade’s obsession is with power and humiliation, two themes that overshadow the stories.

Sa kabila ng (walang habas na) pandarahas ng estado, tuloy pa rin ang laban!

Patuloy pa rin sa paghahanap ang mga magulang nina Karen Empeño at Sherlyn Cadapan. / PW files

And no, I am not writing the body of this text in Filipino. I confess that I cannot write a decent sentence in the national language (patawarin niyo po ako, sa totoo ay sinasanay ko pa ang sarili ko na magsulat sa Filipino – bigo ata ang paghulma sakin ng sistemang pangedukasyon sa larangang ito). And though I’ve been compelling myself to read Filipino texts these past months, I still find reading them difficult.

So why the title? For one, it captures the message of what I thought I would briefly mention here before all of this unnecessary rationalizations came up. Secondly, I actually take a fetishistic pleasure (sa kabila ng aking paghihirap) in the articulation of militant tracts in Filipino (ang mga islogan at agit sa partikular – mangahas, mangahas, mangahas na makibaka) in the same way that I enjoy apparently pointless K-Pop choruses – gee, gee, gee, gee, baby, baby, baby (not to mention the Korean lyrics of which I understand not a word).

Now that explains the linguistic discontinuity between the title and the body of this blog entry. But that is not important.

Pandarahas

These days, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that not a day passes without one’s hearing a report of a human right violation – be it extrajudicial killings, abductions, illegal detentions, massacres, harassment, etc.

And this is not just a matter of statistics (the human rights alliance KARAPATAN has documented over a thousand extrajudicial killings and two hundred enforced disappearances since the present regime’s assumption of power).

Just this semestral break and this is the news that greeted my brief homecoming, Karlo Cabahug and Cai Alvarico (both of whom I got the honor of working with in a few student advocacies when I was still studying in Cebu) were illegally detained by elements of the Philippine Army while they were researching on the conditions of peasants in Zamboanguita, Negros Oriental.

Karlo and Cai are now free. The charge of rebellion filed against them was dismissed by the Prosecutor’s Office in Dumaguete City for lack of probable cause. They only spent more than two weeks in jail.

But not everyone is as lucky (swerte dahil hindi pinalabas ng militar na missing, atbp. – isa pang indikasyon sa perverted na kaayusan ng lipunan na umiiral sa kasalukuyan).

Last year, Rachelle Mae Palang, who I also got the honor of working with for a while when she was editor-in-chief of her college’s student paper and officer of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines, became a martyr for the cause of social transformation.

It is often said that every Filipino has a relative or a friend or at least someone close who is working abroad. With the way things are going, I’m sure the day is not far when the same can be said of victims of the State terrorism.

Dukot

It is therefore good to hear that the recent film Dukot is tackling the pervasive issue of human rights violations in the country. I was told that Dukot will be shown sometime this November or December.

Written by Bonifacio Ilagan and directed by Joel Lamangan, Dukot follows in the tradition of the great Filipino classic films, such as Orapronobis by Lino Brocka and Sister Stella L. by Mike de Leon, that portrays the country’s ugly realities.

I hope Dukot becomes a truly material force not only for raising awareness (and mapping the contours of the present crisis) but also moving people to emancipatory collective action. Will be waiting to see the film. For now, we can check out the trailer and the soundtrack music video:

A Void: Now How About That?

Looking for a book missing from an expensive bookstore’s shelves, I stumbled upon another title which immediately finds itself in my hands. The front cover, a violet expanse with a lower corner inhabited by an army of minuscule letter E’s in different pink shades, caught my attention. I turned to the blurbs in the back cover and read The New Yorker praise it as “A true tour de force: a full-length novel containing not a single ‘E.’ An entertaining post-modern detective story.”

Now how about that? Straight away, I returned Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Rolando Tolentino’s National/Transnational: Subject Formation in and on the Philippines (thinking it’s in the university library anyway), Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and Edward Said’s Orientalism, among others, back on the shelf – I not having the financial capability to acquire all of them – and bought Georges Perec’s A Void at the counter.

Thus having relegated Said for Christmas (or perhaps my next birthday), I began leafing through A Void and learned that the book was originally in French and that the author, perhaps to compensate for the lack of E’s in A Void, also wrote a shorter text using only E as a vowel. Meanwhile, the award-winning translator and novelist Gilbert Adair also made sure that the English translation made use of not a single E!

For the Love of Žižek: a Fan’s Confession

We believe that feelings are immutable, but every sentiment, particularly the noblest and most disinterested, has a history.

Michel Foucault,
‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’

I was not always a keen reader of theory, that anamorphic genre that blends literary, sociological, philosophical, political, and other conceptual apparatuses under one appellation. Adorno, Bahktin, Barthes, Judith Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Kristeva, Lacan, and Lyotard, were never my thing. I’ve read some Marx, some Lenin, and some Mao before. But that’s just it. It was only recently, particularly the beginning of this year that I began to develop a taste for what most readers would readily dismiss as dry and obscure texts. I have Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian guy, to thank for that.

Yes, I am a fan of Žižek in the same sense that my classmates are fans of the Korean pop boy band Super Junior, or in the way that my other friends are avid followers of J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter, or in the sense that my baby sister follows Spongebob Squarepants on television every weekend, or in the way that some of my acquaintances are obsessed with the Japanese porn star Maria Ozawa. I am a fan in the fullest sense of the word, like the Noranians of the past or the Pinoy Big Brother devotees of today.

To Whom It May Concern

Hello.

Bad habits die hard. I’ve been trying to stop myself from writing you. But then, it seems even in the middle of performing what I’m supposed to be “officially” doing, I’m still trying to write you! I guess there’s not much we can do about it, no?

But language never communicates in a straightforward manner (a friend said language doesn’t communicate at all while my other self is questioning this whole enterprise of communication).

To put things simply, let’s just say that we often say things we don’t mean and mean things that we don’t say, which goes to say that some things (like this one) are better left unsaid.

All this reminds me of a poem I recently read from the cover of a book I came across somewhere in the library:

            My love
            Is like the grasses
            Hidden in the deep mountain:
            Through its abundance increases,
            There is none that knows.

That would have been the best for all of us. Then again, I was watching the new on TV the other day and realized something: Typhoons, as we all know, have been battering the country these past weeks. They pour too much water on rivers that overflow and flood the towns and cities. Such an abundance does not fail to make its presence felt. ■

An Instrument of War

“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he’s a painter, or ears if he’s a musician, or a lyre at every level of his art if he’s a poet, or even, if he’s a boxer, just his muscles? On the contrary, he’s at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heartrending, fiery or happy events to which he responds in every way. How would it be possible to feel no interest in other people and by virtue of an ivory indifference to detach yourself from the life which they so copiously bring you? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.”

Pablo Picasso

Babae / Woman

I remember the second time I visited SM City Iloilo this year quite vividly for the simple reason that I heard a familiar tune playing over the mall’s intercom. I was with my two titas and their baby boy when we noticed Inang Laya’s song “Babae” reverberating across the mall interior.

I was way younger when I first listened to the song. I cannot recall the circumstances of those childhood moments anymore but I can recollect the song’s melody just fine anytime. I was older when I came across the song again and that was also the time when I learned the lyrics:

“Babae”

By Inang Laya

Kayo ba ang mga Maria Clara
Mga Hule at mga Sisa
Na di maruning na lumaban?
Kaapiha’y bakit iniluluha?
Mga babae, kayo ba’y sadyang mahina?

Kayo ba ang mga Cinderella
Na lalake, ang tanging pag-asa?
Kayo nga ba ang mga Nena
Na katawan ay ibinebenta?
Mga babae, kayo ba’y sadyang pang-kama?

Ang ating isip ay buksan
At lipuna’y pag-aralan,
Ang nahubog ninyong isipan
At tanggaping kayo’y mga libangan
Mga babae, ito nga ba’y kapalaran?

Bakit ba mayroong mga Gabriela
Mga Teresa at Tandang Sora
Na di umasa sa luha’t awa?
Sila’y nagsipaghawak ng sandata
Nakilaban, ang mithiin ay lumaya.

Bakit ba mayrong mga Lisa
Mga Liliosa at mga Lorena
Na di natakot makibaka
At ngayo’y marami nang kasama?
Mga babae, ang mithiin ay lumaya!

“Women hold half the sky,” Mao once said. But in a society like the Philippines, women are subjected to the double oppression, among others, of class and sex. “Babae,” a favorite during women’s month commemoration affairs during March and protest actions involving women’s issues, is a song that problematizes the gender role assigned by the social order to women since their childhood.

On This Reproductive System Where I’m Blissfully Stuck Now

Not only do we find in the uneasy transitions of organisms engaged in reproduction the same basic violence which in physical eroticism leaves us gasping, but we also catch the inner meaning of that violence.

Georges Bataille,
Death and Sensuality

The news of students and faculty in 10 University of California campuses coming out in huge protests cheered me up, coming as I am from a university that is victim to the same neoliberal policies of budget cuts and fee increases. These cuts, Judith Butler writes,

eliminated 2,000 positions, gutted programmes that train high school teachers in science education, closed courses in East Asian languages and advanced Arabic, overburdened classrooms, shut students out of their majors, let scores of lecturers go and closed the university library on Saturday. In addition, the administration demanded of students tuition and fee increases of nearly 40%, imperilling the very notion of an affordable public university and forcing many students to leave the university or scramble for full-time jobs.

Meanwhile: “Annually the state pays $49,000 per prison inmate and less than $14,000 per UC student. If the state can lock us up, it can invest in our education for one-third of the cost,” The Guardian quoted one of the protesting student’s leaflet.

University of California Berkeley students and faculty protest against fee increases and budget cuts. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty

Sounds familiar? In the Philippines, the government has been annually decreasing the budget for education services in favor of foreign debt servicing. Of course, why should the state provide quality and accessible education if what’s in demand by the global market is cheap and docile labor?

Perhaps this is one face of what Bourdieu describes as the “contribution that the educational system makes to the reproduction of the social structure”? Think of how certain competencies are restricted to the dominant groups in the social order. [1]

The University of the Philippines will be allotted only P5.3 billion pesos by the government next year. Not only is this figure way lower than the current year’s P7.06 billion budget, it is P13 billion less than the P18 billion originally proposed by the university.

This will certainly mean another round of increases in tuition and other fees as the university struggles to cope with the budgetary lack for its continued existence: a travesty that, in the Philippine context, runs in accordance with International Monetary Fund prescriptions that is restructuring the educational system to cater to the needs of the global market (the following of which is a precondition for further World Bank loans by the government).

Education for all!

It is precisely because of this adherence that the government implemented the Long-Term Higher Education Development Plan for 2001-2010, a plan which particularly reduces the number of state universities and colleges and transforms the remaining ones into semi-corporations that generate their own income.

Although I am skeptical of Althusser’s theory that the educational institution is still the principal apparatus for conveying the dominant ideology among the masses (so pervasive is the effect of popular culture and the media these days; and yes, my professors are my pets in facebook), it cannot be denied that education is still a powerful instrument for molding minds.

As the neocolonial and semi-feudal social formation in the country persists, the educational system will remain to be colonial (because it is geared to serving what Negri and Hardt call Empire), commercialized (because it is profit-oriented), and repressive (because it denies the youth access to education). The struggle for a nationalist, scientific, and mass-oriented education and culture, likewise, continues. ■

[1] Or how not all sperms are allowed to fertilize the egg in human reproduction? Whatever!

The Real Catastrophe behind Ondoy

The administration presidential candidate Gilbert Teodoro has been airing costly TV infomercials bragging about the Arroyo regime’s disaster preparations. The typhoon Ondoy proved his claims to be a big farce. The scale of human suffering that enveloped Metro Manila and other parts of the country in the aftermath of typhoon Ondoy’s onslaught is staggering. The landslides and flooding, said to be the worst in forty years, brought untold destruction on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

As we continue to extend aid to the victims of typhoon Ondoy, we should never overlook examining the convergence of various underlying factors that resulted in the disaster. The people were not merely victims of a natural catastrophe. The threat of strong tropical typhoons, considering the country’s geographic location of proximity to the Pacific Ocean, is always present. The more revealing detail is the Arroyo regime’s lack of adequate provisions for such emergencies.

Typhoon Ondoy did not only reveal problems of insufficient preparation for effective relief and rescue operations. More importantly, it exposed the government’s misaligned priorities that resulted in deficient preventive measures.

Lest we forget, even as the Arroyo regime continues to neglect urban planning, infrastructure, drainage, and flood control, the president was able to rechannel emergency funds amounting to P800 million for her foreign travels.

In a sense, typhoon Ondoy substantiates the people’s fears of an ecological breakdown that would destroy human civilization as we know it. It props up a form of thinking that can be summed up in the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s remark on how today “it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.”

But what is truly apocalyptic is not the specter of more environmental catastrophes but the reality of human actions that fail to prepare for such calamities. In the long run, we can only ready ourselves adequately for future Ondoys precisely by changing how our society is organized and the way our government is run.

Until Philippine society remains to be divided between an exploited majority of workers, peasants, and slum dwellers and an oppressive minority of big compradors and landlords who use the State for the protection of their interests, government funds intended for disaster prevention will continue to be squandered in corruption and skewed priorities.

“Cast away all illusions and prepare struggle,” Mao once said: let us turn the grief and suffering of the present into a thirst for justice. The moment this longing crystallizes will be the Day of Judgment for the callous ruling classes who have made the people suffer for the longest time. ■

DONATE RELIEF GOODS NOW for 20,000 families who badly need help after Ondoy fury

Help Tulong Kabataan reach 20,000 families ASAP. Donate relief goods now.

30 barangays in Metro Manila and nearby provinces badly hit by Ondoy cry for help.

You can help them NOW. Gather and bring relief goods to any Tulong Kabataan donation center:

• Rice
• Potable water
• Canned goods
• Cooking oil
• Cooking utensils
• Medicines
• Blankets, banigs
• School supplies

You can also help by donating money:

• Smart Money: 5299670778290
• GCash: +639266677163
• Bank Deposit
  Bank Account: Student Christian Movement of the Philippines
  Bank: BPI
  Branch: Kamias-Anonas, Quezon City Philippines
  US Dollar Account No: 3324-0048-06
  Peso Checking Account No: 3321-0176-64
• Paypal: donate or http://3.ly/tulong
• For Western Union: Carl Marc L. Ramota, B12 L27 San Pedro Subd Vill Nova QC

Tulong Kabataan donation drop-off points

TULONG KABATAAN CENTER

• 118-B Scout Rallos, Brgy. Sacred Heart, Quezon City (look for/contact Frances 09072536529, contact hotline number 394-4285 or email tulongkabataan@gmail.com)

QUEZON CITY

• Vinzons Hall Lobby/USC office, UP Diliman Quezon City (look for/contact Brandy 09062778145)

MANILA

• United Methodist Church Headquarters
  900 United Nations Avenue, Ermita, Manila (infront of Manila Police District, look for Ate Merly)

OTHER DROP-OFF POINTS
QC Area:

• Trinity University of Asia (Marga 09274313843)
• Southeast Asian College, Welcome Rtda (Val 09158156860)

U-Belt Area:

• College of Holy Spirit (Alpha 091642456955),
• San Beda College (Jacob 09156441311)

Intramuros:

• San Agustin Church

Taft Avenue:

• St. Scholastica’s College-Manila (Chikee 09277855372)
• St. Paul University-Manila (Kaycee 09272845150)
• UP Manila- CAS SC (Ces 09158185686)
• Emilio Aguinaldo College (Kath 09062537432)
• Adamson University (Dora 09069227804)

Sta. Mesa:

• Eulogio Amang Rodriguez Institute for Science and Technology (EARIST) (John Rey 09094389199)
• Polytechnic University of the Philippines

CAMANAVA:

• De La Salle Araneta University (Vincent 09228068473)

Metro South:

• PUP- Taguig (Jov 09107172398)

List of Community Beneficiaries

For more information contact the Tulong Kabataan hotline: (632)394-4285

The Lake by Yasunari Kawabata

Gimpei barely suppressed the urge to put his arm round the girl’s legs. But before he could do anything rash, the sudden realization that, every evening, she would walk here with her dog beneath the shade of the gingko tree and that he could watch her from a hiding place on top of the bank came to him like a ray of hope. It was like lying naked in the new grass, so cool and fresh was his sense of relief. Yes, he would watch her from the top of the bank, and she would come up the slope toward him forever… His happiness knew no bounds. (p. 86)

The Lake by Yasunari Kawabata begins with a fugitive entering a bath. He is Gimpei, a self-conscious old man with ugly feet who was suspended from teaching for seducing his teenage student. Gimpei recently took a bag dropped by a woman containing two hundred thousand yen and ran away from home, fearing the police will be after him.

Fragmented scenes and memories flashed in his head while he was bathed by the establishment’s pretty attendant. The voice and the body of the young girl stirred up his memory, haunted as he was by several ghosts from his past. So we begin to learn of the death of his father in the lake near his childhood home, the child he had with a prostitute who he abandons in the streets, and the faces of the young women in his life.

Throughout the novel, it is interesting to note that Gimpei’s voyeuristic episodes, sexual interactions, and perverse fantasies are narrated beautifully and with nostalgia as if they were the most natural thing in the world.

Meanwhile, a parallel narrative focuses on the life of Miyako, the young woman who lost her money. She gave her body to a decrepit old man in exchange for financial security. On one hand, the money she worked hard for and lost makes “the very thought of saving a bitter memory.” On the other hand, “she had felt a momentary thrill when she lost the money – a thrill of pleasure”:

It was as if some vague sensation, smoldering within her while she was being followed by the man had suddenly caught fire – almost as though her youth, lost in old Arita’s shadow, had suddenly been restored to life and had taken its revenge. If this were true, Miyako, at that precise moment, received compensation for all the shame she had endured through the long days and months it had taken to accumulate the two hundred thousand yen. And so the money was probably lost not in vain. (p. 50)

The Lake is essentially a disturbing yet poetically rendered short novel about the fantasies of a dirty old man and the twisted lives of those around him, all symbolized by the stagnant lake that fails to move forward. ■

I Love the System!

I love systems; corporations exploit systems and deform them to channel capital. I love habits; capital destroys habits so that implements must be replaced, which requires further raw materials to be drawn and further labor added, and fetishization and idealization to be the main quality of cathexis. I love cathexes; people murder and hurt one another because their drives have been pushed into distorted images or ideas, either by genetic predisposition or by a variety of family pathologies, psychological or physical abuses, that often stem from economic factors, but cross class lines and can express themselves in large-scale non-egalitarian modes of power, as well as in their more familiar manifestations within the living space, a determiner of roles among those sharing it.

Michael Scharf,
“I Love Systems”

Going Against the Current?

We all too often create our own conception of a thing that is removed from the reality of that object and dismiss the whole thing based on the wrong views that we have constructed.

An essay published online by John Ryan Recabar in the blog, Going Against the Current, last year questioned the continued validity of radical student activism as a means of effecting change.[1]

The disparity in the number of students participating in protest actions during the First Quarter Storm of the early 70s, and the height of the anti-dictatorship struggle in the mid 80s and the students mobilized in recent years seems to back up this view. A closer look at the topic, however, would reveal cracks in the arguments employed in the said essay to oppose what it labeled as “radical activism.”

Feels Like Insomnia

I left Miami last week after enjoying the university’s cheering contest, briefly passing by the town fiesta in Guam for dinner before flying over to Cebu early the next morning. It was a brief three-day stay with the family. I met some people and also visited the malls for, yes, window shopping.

There were yellow taxis (which are supposed to be less abusive than the ordinary white ones) in the airport already. My little sister has grown from a baby into a little girl who recited to me the poems she learned in preschool. I finally met my high school sister’s suitor, the same guy who ran away from the gate last Valentines’ Day when I went out to see who sent my sister a pink teddy bear.

And after more than half a decade of renting the house, the street that leads to our home was finally asphalted by the local government. The next local and national elections are just around the corner. An asphalt road’s supposed to be six inches thick but the one there was only two inches thin. Well, not much has changed. I’m expecting potholes and cracks the next time I visit home.

I also donated some books to Their Books, an event wherein the organizers collect books from writers, poets, editors and media practitioners, musicians, artists, book lovers, art lovers, and other prominent personalities in Cebu and put them on sale with the proceeds going to school children. There’s a list of the books they’re putting on sale at facebook. I’d like to get The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño for myself. Unfortunately, I’m not in Cebu for the event. So I guess I’d have to ask somebody to buy them for me.

Anyhow, I got myself a copy of Resil Mojares’s Origins and Rise of the Novel: A Generic Study of the Filipino Novel until 1940, a synchronic and diachronic investigation that seeks to chart the contours of the structures that underlie the Filipino novel while at the same time tracing the development of its various elements through history.

I have never been that much of an admirer of local literature, in part because my petty bourgeois habitus (the set of tastes characteristic of my class) is more inclined to consuming cultural artifacts coming from the west. Last year, this middle class colonial mentality was epitomized in a society columnist’s complaint over her daughter’s required high school class reading of Amado Hernandez’s Mga Ibong Mandaragit. Why not just let them read Hemingway, she asked?

But along with Soledad Reyes’s essays on the fictions of Filipino women writers, female characters in Filipino literary texts, and popular culture in Tellers of Tales, Singers of Songs: Selected Critical Essays, Mojares’s study has instilled in me a greater appreciation of the Philippine literary heritage. I’ve begun to see them in a new light.

I’m halfway through Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, a thick tome inhabited by a hilariously unreliable narrator. It is written in a most garish style, perhaps much too colorful for my taste but still very much worth the effort to read.

After discontinuing my previous attempt at Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject (which I was gravely unprepared for when I began reading it last December), I decided to start over and began reading the Slovenian cultural theorist’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (his first book in English) to gain an understanding his Lacanian-informed critique of ideology.

There are too many texts to read and too little time, especially when one has other things to do too – like attending classes, talking with and organizing people, daydreaming about running after a girl, losing sleep, and writing all sorts of silly stuff like this. ■

Arranging Your Books

D-mension, a system of modular racks created by Nicola Zanetti.

Something on “Bookshelf etiquette” from The Guardian Books Blog. Arranging them alphabetically is not the only way to go about it. ■