World Outside Simulacra

People with a taste for periodization, tell us that modernism is over, and we are now in the epoch of postmodernism. What do you think of that?

I suppose it’s true to people who think exclusively in terms of America and advertising culture and the media, pastiche, and that sort of thing. But if you are aware of other worlds than, say, Madison Avenue and high-tech architecture, you will realize that the battle for modern, and therefore modern as in “modernity,” is… a very important one. It is, indeed the battle.

Edward W. Said,
“People’s Rights and Literature,” Interview with Jonathan Ree, Alif: Journal of Comparative Ethics, The American University in Cairo, 1993

Men Make Their Own History

One would have to pretty much scuttle all the jaw-shattering jargonistic postmodernism that now dot the landscape. They are worse than useless. They are neither capable of understanding and analyzing the power structure of this country, nor are they capable of understanding the particular aesthetic merit of an individual work of art. Whether you call it deconstruction or postmodernism or post-structuralism or post-anything, they all represent a sort of spectacle of giving back tickets at the entrance and saying, we’re really out of it. We want to check into our private resort and be left alone.

Re-engagement with intellectual process means a return to an old-fashioned historical, literary and, above all, intellectual scholarship based upon the premise that human beings, men and women, make their own history. And just as thing are made, they can be unmade and remade… There’s only one way to anchor oneself, and that is by affiliation with a cause, with a political movement. There has to be identification not with the secretary of state or the leading philosopher of the time but with matters involving justice, principle, truth, conviction. Those don’t occur in a laboratory or a library.

Edward W. Said,
“The Intellectual and the War,” Interview with Barbra Harlow, Middle East Report, Washington, D.C., 1991

Pagtatagpo sa Kabilang Dulo: Panitikang Testimonial ng Desaparecidos

Desaparecidos, the national organization of the families of the disappeared, and Pagbutlak, the official student publication of the University of the Philippines Visayas College of Arts and Sciences, will be book launching  Pagtatagpo sa Kabilang Dulo: Panitikang Testimonial ng Desaparecidos in Panay this January 8 at the Training Room 1 of the Graduate and Continuing Education Building in the UP Iloilo City Campus.

As the present Editor in Chief of Pagbutlak, I am honored to be part of this momentous event. Not only does the book contribute to the promotion of Philippine literature and culture, it also raises awareness on human rights violations, which sad to say remains part of Philippine realities more than two decades after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship.

If 3,257 extrajudicial killings were committed in a span of two decades under the US-sponsored Marcos regime, 1,118 cases of extrajudicial killings were perpetrated  under the Arroyo regime in a span of eight years.

Like political killings, making critical voices disappear has always been one way for a regime to silence opposition and perpetuate itself in power.  Since 2001, more than 200 cases of enforced disappearances has been documented by the human rights alliance KARAPATAN. Pagtatagpo sa Kabilang Dulo: Panitikang Testimonial ng Desaparecidos is a collection of testimonials from the loved ones of those who disappeared under the Arroyo regime Marcos, Aquino, and Arroyo regimes.

Unlike in cases of extrajudicial killings where the victims or martyrs are clearly dead, those left by the disappeared find it harder to deal with the lost of their loved ones. Since the fate of the desaparecido is ambiguous, there is always a hope that maybe he or she would surface again. There is no real closure and this is what makes it harder to bear psychologically.

Filipino cultural critic Rolando B. Tolentino notes that the process of coming up with the book was more difficult than the usual title because the contributors’ writing for the book was also a process of confronting their demons, a farewell to the desaparecidos, a confession of sadness, a commitment to make the powers responsible for such inhumanities pay, and a promise that those who disappeared did not just vanish into oblivion.

But the work is not only written in memory of the disappeared. It is not only the remembrances of those left behind by the disappeared. For Tolentino, the book does not have a narcissistic bent. Rather, it is a writing that more importantly interrogates an unjust system that made their loved ones disappear. It is a writing that looks forward to a just and more humane society that respects human rights. ■

An Updated New Year Book Wishlist

In 2009, I read 91 books in contrast to my 127 in 2008. The simplest explanation for this is I’ve been more busy this year. And besides, what have I really been doing in 2008 anyway? During the Summer of that year I fulfilled my management practicum by spending zombie afternoons in a certain government-owned and controlled corporation: buying the managers pizza, routing paperwork, enhancing my typing skills, and of course, stealing time to read novels, among others. Moreover, the latter part of 2008 was the time when the only thing I did was read novels and think about writing my own stories (which was a huge failure, but anyway).

Last year, I’ve returned to the campus, but albeit taking a different program, literature. That’s one explanation. Another would be the fact that I’ve been reading only certain parts of lots of books lately. Only half of this one, only certain essays or chapters of that, or I skip subsections in this other one… So there. In the first place, why am I trying to explain what seems to be a very superficial point anyway? So I proceed to other things.

I noticed that there is a more conscious effort to engage with Filipino texts, particularly criticism and theorizing, last year. I finished Jose Dalisay’s Killing Time in a Warm Place, which in all honesty didn’t like that much except for the essay introduction.

Then there was Soledad S. Reyes’ Tellers of Tales, Singers of Songs: Selected Critical Essays, Kris Montanez’s New Mass Art and Other Related Essays (1974-1987), Jose Duke Bagulaya’s Writing Literary History: Mode of Economic Production and Twentieth Century Waray Poetry, Gelacio Guillermo’s Ang Panitikan ng Pambansang Demokrasya, and Rolando B. Tolentino’s Sipat Kultura: Tungo sa Mapagpalayang Pagbabasa, Pag-aaral at Pagtuturo ng Panitikan.

I also went over significant parts of Tolentino’s Sa Loob At Labas Ng Mall Kong Sawi Kaliluha’y Siyang Nangyayaring Hari: Ang Pagkatuto At Pagtatanghal Ng Kulturang Popular, Alice Guillermo’s Protest/Revolutionary Art in the Philippines, 1970-1990, Reyes’ Pagbasa Ng Panitikan At Kulturang Popular (Piling Sanaysay, 1976-1996), Isagani A. Cruz’s Bukod na Bukod: Mga Piling Sanaysay, and Edel Garcellano’s Knife’s Edge (Selected Essays).

Apart from the long titles, one thing what attracted me into reading them is their political commitment or at the very least their reading of the literary text as a process that is firmly connected to the social condition. It’s a bit funny though that my exploration of Filipino criticism and theorizing came as an outgrowth of an earlier interest in studies produced in the West (for the lack of a better term). In a previous entry I already mentioned Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian cultural theorist.

Aside from all those Žižek texts, I remember reading Illuminations: Reflections and Essays (1931-1940) by Walter Benjamin, The Meaning of Sarkozy by Alain Badiou, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays by Althusser, Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism (which is quite thin), and Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (some sort of crash course).

I also went over the second edition of Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (at last after many failed attempts in the past), Adorno and Horkeimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (which was quite a chore), Antony Easthope’s British Post-Structuralism Since 1968, and Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction.

But then I’ve strayed far too long from the main topic and would thus stop myself from exerting effort to make a more thorough accounting of my reading habits here like the litbloggers Smithereens and Bibilographing (who makes all those cool graphs analyzing the lengths, publishers, and themes of the books she read). Let me proceed to what one commenter called “an updated wish list for 2010.”

Since he asked for titles that are not readily available here in the Philippines, here are some of them: I’d like my own hard copy of volume one of Marx’s Capital. There’s Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, François Cusset’s French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, and the paperback of Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes.

But those are the more critical texts. For the more creative ones, some titles that are also not widely available here that I like include Juan Goytisolo’s The Marx Family Saga, Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author, Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge, Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau, and Roberto Bolano’s Nazi Literature of Americas.

As for the ones that are just in the bookstores in Cebu, there’s Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, and Bolano’s 2666. I’d still like to get copies of titles I’ve mentioned in this blog previously like Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (which I have to read for a class next year) and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

Meanwhile, I would love to have all those new repackaged versions of Foucault titles (but only because of the lovely covers: I’m sure I can’t read any of them completely any time soon even if I suddenly get copies).

Since there are so many books in the World and I lack the time to go over most of them, I think I am urgently in need of advice from Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Then again, it would seem that I really don’t need to since as F. Sionil Jose points out in the context of last year’s “avalanche of excellent titles” from the Philippine publishing houses:

Unfortunately for all of us, this cultural bonanza will not be appreciated because Filipinos don’t read and, worse, those who do are often shackled by colonized minds and they snub our writers, even the very best. They will certainly miss this good harvest for the year.

But so much for that. This year, unlike the last, I won’t specify a quota as to what titles to read for the entire year. Let’s just say I’m inspired and would like to be more spontaneous in terms of my readings this year. ■

In the Laundry Bag with the Dirty Linen

Not starting to write what I should really be writing already, I contribute a few more insignificant lines here…

1. Heading back for my parents’ house in Cebu from Iloilo earlier this month, I brought with me all my personal books that I’ve done reading since June, five titles from the library, and few others that I planned to work on over the Christmas break, not knowing that all those books would lead me to overload my plane baggage by 8 kilos. So to avoid paying an extra P800, I had to hand carry a good bunch with me.

Fortunately, I brought along a laundry bag along with the laptop bag and the big travel bag. A good number of those books had to travel with dirty linen!

Four recently acquired books.

2. Instead of Baudrillard’s System of Objects, my friend Dada gave me Edward Said’s Orientalism for Christmas because the bookstore ran out of stock and it would take a few more months before they can deliver one. Too bad I won’t be able to read Baudrillard’s critique of the ideology behind commodities and interior design. On the good side, I won’t have to destroy my eyes with my .pdf file of Said’s work while working on my thesis.

A book store gift certificate from the mother/father also allowed me to acquire Power, Politics, And Culture: Interviews With Edward W. Said. Anyhow, to quell the notion that I am just a collecting books or coercing friends to give them to me, I have to add that I also give books away. This Christmas, for instance, I gave Dada (among others) a new copy of Pevear and Volokhonsky’s new translation of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

3. Recently talked with a friend who asked me what classic works of literature should he read for the New Year. First, of course, I cannot help myself but give a brief discussion interrogating the continuing relevance of the term “Classics,” a category which in our predominantly colonial consciousness has come to be equated with the Western Canon.

Then after asking him what he really wanted to read, I gave him some of my favorite titles from the very same Western Canon I just lambasted. So, okay… His background in the hard sciences (he is studying Biology), he told me, gave him a bias for works with lucid language (no James Joyce there) and straightforward narrative (no Umberto Eco there too).

Asked about Jane Eyre, I promptly commented about how the work was complicit in the reinforcement of imperialism by constituting the female subject as individualist (Spivak) – as if the ones I suggested weren’t, but anyhow… I eventually recommended Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, and any short story by Chekhov as well as the more surreal ones by Kafka.

4. I recently stumbled upon the cool designs found in We Love Typography. I love typography too and can’t stop going over the site’s archives.

5. It’s amazing how just over a year ago, I  almost totally succumbed to a pessimistic and cynical world view that saw no hope for the nation. Well, with the things happening to the country and the World, anyone with a superficial appreciation of things would easily fall into “despondence and indifference.” That’s what happens if you divorce yourself from a “concrete analysis of concrete conditions.”

A friend, the one who I gave the Le Guin novel days ago, remarked how a series of calamities – both man-made and natural, symbolic and real – battered the country this year. First, there was Hayden Kho scandal, then the AH1N1 epidemic, the never ending instances human rights abuses, the Ondoy typhoon and massive flooding, then the Maguindanao Massacre, and now we have the Mayon Volcano explosion… Add a regime and a socio-economic system that exacerbates such disasters… Watching all that in the evening news feels quite surreal.

But one realization that I’ve really begun to internalize is that life wouldn’t be life without challenges (contradiction). We all should strive to actively overcome these challenges collectively. In a way, it is this realization that made the second half of this year one of the best times of my life. ■

Some Notes On What I Was Reading

a. Lee Gandhi’s critical introduction to postcolonial theory is a good overview of the subject.

b. I think Jose Duke Bagulaya’s Writing Literary History: Mode of Economic Production and Twentieth Century Waray Poetry reads too much like a cross between academic writing and a pamphlet. My former marketing professors would call its style one of the “hard sell.” But regardless of that I do agree with the book’s conclusion though (how the Philippine semi-feudal mode of production, as dominated by foreign monopoly capital, prevents the flowering of Waray Poetry and how the cultural project of the National Democratic Revolutionary Movement goes around this) and found Bagulaya’s theorizing on the appropriation of postmodern intellectual trends for a totalizing Marxist framework quite useful.

c. Finally read Bulgakov’s A Dead Man’s Memoir (A Theatrical Novel) and was a bit disappointed to find it not as interesting as I thought it would be. The novel was humorous and interesting in certain parts but dull in others. The narrative style is reminiscent of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, one of my favorite novels, but this one comes out as somewhat too melodramatic. Perhaps it’s because the book is a slightly disguised autobiographical account of the publishing fate of Bulgakov’s other book, The White Guard. In one passage, a character described the protagonist as having “a touch of Dostoevsky” about him. And indeed, there is always a touch of Dostoevskian obsession with shame in the the Memoir’s pages.

I don’t know if this has to do with the rise of the Futurist movement during the early Soviet period but it’s interesting to read an account of what seems to me like an early deployment of the concept of the hologram:

And then in the evenings I began getting the impression that there was something colored projecting up out of the white pages. On looking more closely and screwing up my eyes, I became convinced that it was a picture. And even more, that it was not a flat picture but a three-dimensional one, like a little box, and in it, through the lines of words, I could see a light burning and the same little figures that were described in the novel moving about (40).

And yes, the novel suddenly stops when it was about to reach the climax. The Memoir is, unfortunately, left unfinished. Bulgakov leaves those writing fiction some good advise: “One has to love one’s characters: if you don’t have that, I advise anyone not to take up the pen – you will only suffer great distress, and it will serve you right.” ■

Voters Registration Extended

• End speculation, focus on registration, Comelec told
• KABATAAN Partylist to first-time voters: ‘Seize the holidays, register!’
• Extension of voter reg best Christmas gift for youth – KABATAAN Partylist

Thank you KABATAAN Partylist for successfully petitioning the Supreme Court to compel the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) to extend the voters registration period! ■

In the Time of Cholera

Red and green are invading houses, malls, streets, churches, and stores. Along with the proliferation of Santa Claus outfits on TV ads, Christmas lights and decors adorning the campus, holiday greetings, and the chilly mornings, all these announce the start of the Yuletide season.

Perhaps most of us are already busy making Christmas wishlists. For sure, some of us are thinking what presents to give our friends and families as we return to our hometowns.

But not all are as blessed. For the past eight years, it would not be an exaggeration to say that not a day or week passes without one’s hearing or reading a news report of human rights abuses.

Be it for political killings, forced disappearances, illegal detentions, torture, massacres, harassment, abductions, and so on, the Arroyo regime has become notorious as the worst human rights violator after the Marcos dictatorship.

How lucky of them not to have been summarily executed or made to disappear by the military was the immediate response of some people when hearing the news of last semestral break’s illegal detention of three Cebu-based student leaders.

And indeed, lest we forget, UP Diliman students Karen Empeño and Sherlyn Cadapan, like the three, were also working with peasants when they were abducted four years ago. The two remain missing.

The impunity with which human rights are desecrated is reflective of the kind of society we live in. It is symptomatic of the desperation of the Arroyo regime, which had to resort to physical violence against its political enemies to perpetuate itself in power.

Through Oplan Bantay Laya I and II, the armed forces, police, and other repressive state apparatuses have been mobilized in the anti-insurgency campaigns to thwart the resistance to the regime’s scandalous schemes and anti-people policies.

The human rights alliance KARAPATAN has documented at least 1000 cases of political killings and more than 200 cases of enforced disappearances. The Maguindanao Massacre added 34 journalist killings to this list.

But this is not just a matter of statistics. Some of us students, after all, are not new to infringement of rights even in the campus. The adoption of the repressive Diliman Code of Student Conduct here in UPV is like a sword that hangs over our heads.

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, it seems that the day is not far when the same can be said of victims of state terrorism.

Luisa Posa-Dominado, for instance, who was abducted along with fellow activist Nilo Arado by alleged military elements in April 12, 2007, is the mother of one UPV student. The two remain missing until now.

Wheras iskolars ng bayan demand genuine student consultations and respect for students rights in the campus, the loved ones left behind by victims of human rights violations are wishing for justice and genuine democracy this Christmas. ■

Note: Published as the editorial of the December 2009 issue of Pagbutlak, the Official Student Publication of the University of the Philippines Visayas College of Arts and Sciences.

The Big Sleep

Following the suggestion of Pechorin’s Journal, I read Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep on my way home from Miami to Cebu. In this mystery novel, private detective novel Philip Marlowe is hired by a dying millionaire in a case of blackmail involving his two daughters. But as these kinds of yarn go, Marlowe inevitably gets caught up in complications that include pornography, murder and all that usual stuff.

My initial impression of the book is the thought that it must be the source of all those detective story clichés abounding in pocketbooks, films, and TV series: the protagonist is a world-weary sleuth who postures as a tough guy but really has a goody-goody heart, the women are either silly victims or seductive femme fatales, and the dialogue are all crisp and witty as if the characters all consciously agreed with each other to talk in soundbytes, etc.

Another initial impression would be to categorize it as a good example of a work of fiction that unhurriedly builds suspense (withholding details from the reader for later satisfaction) while at the same time not forgetting to foreground the narrative (providing enough details so as to not make the ending so much of a surprise but a belated realization). The conclusion comes as something you seem to intuitively know but can only recognize when it’s already revealed by the narrator to you. I like the way the title insinuates the solution to the problem presented at the beginning of the novel. The ending does not come as a complete surprise:

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. (216)

A scene from the 1946 film adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.

I therefore didn’t find The Big Sleep that interesting. Perhaps my attention was too taken by my homecoming (or the fact that I’m departing a place I’d rather not leave)? Or maybe the cynical theme (yes, the system is rotten but we cannot do anything about it but go along) as epitomized by the following passage has become too passé for me:

As for the cover-up, I’ve been in police business myself, as you know. They come a dime a dozen in any big city. Cops get very large and emphatic when an outsider tries to hide anything, but they do the same thing themselves every other day, to oblige their friends or anybody with a little pull. (106)

I don’t have to add that this world-weariness is precisely the predominant ideological mode in the present era of late capitalism. But still I have to hand it to Chandler for churning out some charming lines. The Big Sleep is still, after all, a classic in the mystery genre. Alluding to the cynical disposition of his profession, Marlowe comments, “Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.” The detective protagonist goes on to describe someone tailing him as “a fellow trying to pick up a girl and lacking the last inch of nerve…”

My favourite bit is Marlowe’s take on a long tradition of detective fiction that endures up to the present in TV series like CSI: “I’m not Sherlock Homes or Philo Vance. I don’t expect to go over ground the police have covered and pick up a broken point and build a case from it.” ■

Nobody but You

Does UP education lead to selfless service to the Filipino people?

On the one hand, the University of the Philippines has been regarded by the people as a bastion of academic excellence, critical thinking, and social awareness.

This reputation is the legacy of generations of iskolars ng bayans who excelled in their particular fields of study and forwarded the people’s rights in the streets, the impoverished communities, and the countryside.

On the other hand, the university conditions its students to accept modes of thinking that conform to the dominant beliefs and values in Philippine society. The university, after all, can never be separated from the greater community in which it is situated. The problems that affect the people in general, likewise, find themselves reflected within the university.

The government, for instance, being beholden to foreign powers, must acquiesce to unequal economic prescriptions by the International Monetary Fund as a precondition for further World Bank loans.

The budget allotted for education is thus decreased in favor of foreign debt servicing. Education is likewise restructured to meet the demands of the foreign market.

The privatization of public education, as carried out in the Long-Term Higher Education Development Plan of 2001-2010 effectively reduces the number of state universities and colleges and transforms the remaining ones into semi-corporations that generate their own income.

The university is thus deprived of much-needed budget annually. Next year, the university will be given only P5.3 billion pesos by the government. 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.

In the end, the responsibility of subsidizing UP education is passed on the students through tuition and other fee increases.

Is education given in the university then still for the people considering these circumstances? Or does it simply aid in the reproduction of values that instill in the students a silent acceptance of the unjust social realities?

We iskolars ng bayan are essentially being molded to become subservient automatons that uncritically follow the norms and dictates of an unjust social order.

The closing of democratic access to education restricts certain “know-hows,” and therefore the means to succeed later on in life, to the more well-off – in short, the dominant groups of society.

Repressive measures like the tagging of progressive organizations as communist fronts, the closing of student publications, and the harassment of student leaders are designed to preserve such a commercialized and elitist orientation.

The proposal to implement the 2009 Code of Student Conduct and other measures that will limit our rights to organize, freedoms of speech, and other democratic liberties in the whole UP system is part of this dynamic.

What is truly decisive, however, is our response to such a condition. Will we iskolars ng bayan allow the university to go on its present course? Or will we forward an alternative paradigm, a more people-oriented direction, for the university?

To serve the people in this light is to uphold the people’s democratic right to quality and accessible education. The Filipino people wants nobody, nobody but you. ■

Note: Published as the editorial of the November 2009 issue of Pagbutlak, the Official Student Publication of the University of the Philippines Visayas College of Arts and Sciences.

Man’s Fate?

I read Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate, one of those novels I’ve really wanted to read for the longest time, some time ago. It’s supposed to be one of the best fictional accounts of the Chinese revolution, the blurbs read, with a focus on the failed Shanghai Insurrection of 1927, which was brutally crushed by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops. But now I feel shortchanged. For some reason, I felt that the novel was a bit overrated.

Yes, there were not a few highlights, particularly in the first part leading to the General Strike. The novel captured the optimism of the revolutionary workers and their party preparing for the insurrection and the the maneuvering of the forces of reaction.

The interspersing of radio broadcasts and newspaper headlines in the narrative intensifies the feeling that what one is reading actually took place in reality. This reminded me of Tolstoy’s sweeping historical flare in War and Peace. However, these are weighed down by dragging portions and overly existentialist themes.

There is always a sense of foreboding. Those familiar with their history all know beforehand that the alliance between the striking communist workers and the Kuomintang will be betrayed by the latter as Chiang Kai-shek orders the brutal killings of the communards. There is also the matter of the Comintern and worker’s leadership’s miscalculations.

A striking Shanghai worker executed by Chiang Kai-shek's troops.

You wait for that moment. But after the suspense, it’s as if something’s still lacking. I just cannot put precise words into it now. But perhaps it’s the impulse to strive for a sort of complete closure in the narrative that leaves no space in the readers’ imaginations for the construction of alternative scenarios for the ill-fated uprising. It could not have happened any other way, the narrative seems to say.

Man’s fate in Malraux’s novel is ultimately absurd and tragic. The collective action of the workers is crushed and the defeated workers are depicted being finished off individually by the forces of reaction.

Nevertheless, such a pessimistic stance will be proven wrong by the march of history more than a decade after the novel’s first publication in 1933. The deaths of the Shanghai communards were never in vain, their failure redeemed by the 1949 victory of the new democratic revolution led by Mao. ■

Some Sort of Summing Up

Earlier this year, I promised myself to read or at least get myself copies of certain books before the year ends. I’ve read some of them. But shifting interests made me change the prioritization of the reading of some titles. Not a single title in the original plan, for example, were by a Filipino writer whereas I am presently slowly going over Resil Mojares’ Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel Until 1940 and Jose Duke Bagulaya’s Writing Literary History: Mode of Economic Production and Twentieth Century Waray Poetry.

Just this week, I also started reading a newly published collection of short stories in Hiligaynon, Sa Taguangkan sang Duta (roughly translated to In the Womb of the Land or something like that), by Alice Tan Gonzales, one of my professors in class. I assigned the literary editor of our college’s student publication to write a book review of ma’am Gonzales’ book so perhaps I can repost it here if the review is nice enough.

But anyhow, allow me to proceed to some sort of summing up of this year’s reading based on that original plan. For one, I still have to read Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. I’ve already read Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Dickens’s Great Expectations, Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Malraux’s Man’s Fate and Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad. I don’t think I have the time to read Hasek’s Good Soldier Svjek, Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Tolstoy’s The Cossacks anymore.

As for the books I planned to purchase, I’ve bought Moby-Dick by Melville and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy but only read the latter. I still have to get myself copies of The Seducer’s Diary by Soren Kierkegaard and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Moreover, I got myself a copy and read Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations: Reflections and Essays (instead of Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing as earlier set).

I downloaded good PDF versions of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, Turgenev’s Virgin Soil, and Žižek’s In Defense of Lost Causes. About Žižek, who remains one of my major reading projects this year, I’ve had unsuccessful attempts at The Ticklish Subject. So far I’ve gone over Violence: A Six Sideway Reflection, How to Read Lacan, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, and First As Tragedy, Then As Farce.

However, I am still slowly going over Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology at the present. One of my problems with the Žižek books is that all my copies, apart from Violence, are in PDF. I’m still not that used to reading entire books on the computer screen. I still love the paper book after all: I can crease its pages, make dog ears, write notes on the margins, underline passages with a pen, and so on. The physical book is also handy. I can carry it anywhere without worrying about batteries or sockets.

Moving on, I still have to acquire personal copies of Hugo’s Les Miserables, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Roberto Bolano’s Nazi Literature of Americas, and Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years. I think I will read Les Miserables this coming Summer in preparation for next Academic year’s class on Romanticism. The other three titles will have to wait.

For this Christmas, I am expecting my friend Dada to give me a copy of Jean Baudrillard’s System of Objects. So I will be reading that along with Achebe, Bagulaya, Gonzales, Mojares, and Žižek this vacation. But then again, I think I will be getting myself Bulgakov’s A Dead Man’s Memoir since it’s on sale for half its original prize in one of the bookstores back in Cebu. And Kingsley Amis’ Jake’s Thing too (which is also discounted) for more variety.

I’m also planning to give Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed to some girl I have a non-passing fancy on. I hope she appreciates it.

Some friends and acquaintances have long commented about my preoccupation with the reading of books. I should get a life, they say. But then again, if we look at things more closely it becomes clear that everything around us are texts that we read since everything – from the words in the newspaper, the color of her dress, the body language of the persons around us, etc. – are engaged in the creation of meaning. “Il n’y a pas de hors texte,” Derrida used to say. What is wrong with privileging one sort of text over other texts? ■

Alice Tan Gonzales

The Narcissism of Love Letters

[A] subject who writes love-letters actually does not address the beloved but writes letters to none other than himself. No matter how much a lover tries to capture in the letter the essence of his beloved, he is primarily addressing himself, i.e. he is dealing with his own desires, fantasies, narcissism—all that constitutes his in-love feeling. At the same time, the writer of the love-letter is also in a particular way dealing with anxiety…

On Anxiety,
Renata Salecl

On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme

Jose Ortega y Gasset’s On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme is a collection of essays on love. Since it was published in the first half of the last century, the book is dated. Reading it made me realize the speed in which the World has changed. But then again, the text’s anachronism is precisely the quality that makes it an amusing read. You cannot but laugh while going over the old-fashioned stances spewed out from the text. To substantiate my claim and to, so to speak, let the text speak for itself (although I cannot help myself from adding my own inane remarks), the next “few” lines in this virtual space will consist primarily of long passages from the book.

The first essay in the book, “Features of Love,” begins by differentiating the object of investigation, love, and “love affairs.”

“Love affairs” are more or less accidental episodes that happen between men and women. Innumerable factors enter into them which complicate and entangle their development to such an extent that, by and large, in most “love affairs” there is a little of everything except that which strictly speaking deserves to be called love. A psychological analysis of “love affairs” and their picturesque casuistry is of great interest; but we would not progress far unless we first determined what genuine love itself is. Moreover, reducing the study of love to what men and women feel for one another would be narrowing the subject; indeed, Dante believed that love moves the sun and the other planets. (7)

A Brief Reply to a Long Comment On Žižek

This is a reply to comment by Mr. Alex Reynolds in a previous blog entry explaining my position as a fan of the Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. The introduction to the said blog entry was, of course, something of a joke, a play on the postmodernist commonplace of how no narrative can be privileged to explain the complexity of life and history anymore. Thus the juxtaposition of Žižek’s cultural theory and Maria Ozawa’s pornographic videography. Consequently, an excess meaning can be traced in the demonstration of how in this era of late capitalism what has been described as the condition of postmodernity inaugurates a multiplicity of (and often contradictory) identities.

Coming from a university with a culture of student activism, I join immersions in impoverished communities, protest actions on various issues, and espouse a “nationalist, scientific and mass-oriented culture” in the Maoist mold. But then as a student of Literature in the Humanities Department, I study The Illiad, Oedipus Rex and other artifacts of Western “high culture” in the classroom. But then I also keep myself updated on the latest Korean pop songs from my classmates and friends and listen to these songs while reading on Said or the latest by Žižek in the dormitory. And in facebook, I got hit for watching the latest Harry Potter without reading the book version first.

Seriously though, I don’t think it would be fruitful to dismiss Derrida, Lacan, Žižek, and much of Post-Saussurean theory on the premise that the language these theorists use in expounding their texts lack clarity. The aim of their theoretical projects is precisely to demonstrate that what we perceive as “natural,” “obvious,” and “commonsensical” are ideologically constructed. Common sense, as Catherine Belsey notes in her book Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), is “rooted in a specific historical situation and operating in conjunction with a particular social formation”[1] and is thus “produced in a specific society by ways in which that society talks and thinks about itself and its experience.”[2] And since “Common sense appears obvious because it is inscribed in the language we speak,”[3] a critique of ideology necessitates a reappraisal of the concept of language as “merely the medium in which autonomous individuals transmit messages to each other about an independently constituted world of things… transparency of language is an illusion.”[4] Belsey explains:

Partly as a consequence of this theory, the language used by its practitioners is usually far from transparent. The effect of this is to alert the reader to the opacity of language, and to avoid the “tyranny of lucidity,” the impression that what is being said must be true because it is obvious, clear and familiar… New concepts, new theories, necessitate new, unfamiliar and therefore intially difficult discourses. [5]

As Adorno and Horkheimer already pointed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947): “False clarity is only another name for myth; and myth has always been obscure and enlightening at one and the same time: always using the devices of familiarity and straightforward dismissal to avoid the labor of conceptualization.” [6] Of course, there is a proper place for everything. I don’t use Lacanese when writing for the student paper or speak in Derridean aporias to my classmates. Anyhow, my position vis-a-vis Žižek is perhaps better captured by Filipino literary critic and poet Edel E. Garcellano:

It is not surprising that Žižek would find resonance in the heart of young scholars: The Elvis Presley of philo is a veritable compendium of film, music, philo & lit giants that are intertwined in a new light: this bestiary that would dazzle the Socratic flaneurs in MTV mix. At this point of historical flux when Marxism is a god that failed & the future isn’t even privy to Benjamin’s angel, anyone who emerges from the ruins of despair would find Žižek a comforting figure that survived the first wave of socialism but wouldn’t denounce it, assaying also as unacceptable the triumphalistic chest beating of capitalism. Which exactly fills the bill for a generation of Filipino activists who devours Žižek as a feast of texts: he represents a positive despair in view of the promise yet unfulfilled by the revolutionists of the ’70s, its deflection in the ’80s, & the subsequent rectification in the past decades to keep their hopes alive.[7]

As I’ve pointed out before, I do have reservations about Žižek. But it has nothing to do with his lack of clarity or his compulsion to be original, which as Mr. Alex Reynolds points out, leads him to cling to the most unoriginal and orthodox Leninist positions (which for me is one of the good things about Žižek!). My primary reservation would be, apart from those I already pointed out in my previous blog entry, Filipino Marxist scholar E. San Juan Jr.’s observation that Žižek does not go beyond questioning the coordinates of the present order:

Armed with Žižek’s apercus disseminated in numerous books and articles circulated all over the world, are we any wiser or more fully informed of the total picture of the world today after his brilliant disclosure? Are we more adequately mobilized to confront Obama’s imperial mission in Afghanistan and all over the world, including the Philippines, via the subservient neocolonial Arroyo regime? Can the Lacanian-Freudian theoretical framework clarify the root and solution to the unprecedented global economic crisis started by the financial collapse of 2008? Is US hegemony still standing after the powerful Žižek diagnosis of self-deception, seduction, and traumatic cathexes?[8] ■