• 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! ■

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.

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.” ■

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.

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. ■

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? ■

[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

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)

Against this reduction, Gasset points out the many facets of love. “Not only does man love woman and woman man, but we love art or science, the mother loves her child, and the religious man loves God.” From there, Gasset moves on to a survey of a few more misconceptions of the idea of love which he takes pleasure in debunking.

The idea of love that St. Thomas gives us, in summing up Greek tradition, is, obviously erroneous. For him, love and hate are two forms of desire, appetite, or lust. Love is the desire for something good in so far as it is good – concupiscibile circa bonum; hate, a negative desire, a rejection of evil as such – conscupiscible circa malum. This reveals the confusion between appetites or desires and sentiments from which all psychology up to the eighteenth century suffered… (8-9)

For Gasset, love, contrary to the definition given by St. Thomas, is not simply desire.

…desire automatically dies when it is fulfilled; it ends with satisfaction. Love, on the other hand, is eternally unsatisfied. Desire has a passive character; when I desire something, what I actually desire is that the object come to me. Being the center of gravity, I await things to fall down before me. Love, as we shall see, is the exact reverse of desire, for Love is all activity… It does not gravitate toward me, but I toward it.  (10)

Gasset then proceeds to an attack on the notion of love by Spinoza who (according to Gasset) said that “love must be happiness combined with knowledge of its cause; hate, on the other hand, sadness combined with knowledge of its sources.”

Spinoza did not observe carefully: loving is not happiness. He who loves his country may die for it, and the martyr may perish out of love. And conversely, there is a kind of hatred that derives pleasure from itself, that is transported with joy by the harm that befalls the hated person. (12)

So having set love apart from a mere “love affairs,” desire, a particular knowledge, and “falling in love,” Gasset, following St. Agustine (“My love is my weight; where it goes I go”), defines love as a gravitation toward that which is loved.” But then this “…is not simply a question of physically moving toward the beloved, of gaining closeness and external intimacy… [but] in its psychic inwardness as a process of the soul.” (13) Quite abstract, but this metaphysical abstraction is soon concretized in later pages:

It is possible for a person in love to succeed in preventing, by virtue of reflective considerations, – social decorum, difficulties of any nature – the surrender of his will to the one he loves. What is essential is that he feels himself, regardless of the decision of his will, surrendered to the other. (174)

Because as the cliché rearticulated by Gasset goes,

Romantic love…is characterized by… a feeling of being “enchanted” by another being who produces complete “illusion” in us, and a feeling of being absorbed by him to the core of our being, as if he had torn us from our own vital depths and we were living transplanted our vital roots within him… a person in love feels himself totally surrendered to the one he loves… (174)

This is the supreme sign of true love: being close to what is loved, in a more profound contact and proximity than that of space. It means being with the other vitally. The most exact, but too technical phrase would be this: an ontological state of being with the beloved, faithful to its destiny, no matter what it is. (31)

“Love in Stendhal,” the next essay, moves on to a debate against Stendhal’s conception of love as “Crystallization”:

…in sum, this theory defines love as an essential fiction. It is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. We fall in love when our imagination projects non-existent perfections onto another person. One day the phantasmagoria vanishes, and with it love dies. This is worse than declaring, as of yesteryear, that love is blind. For Stendhal it is less than blind: it is imaginary. Not only does it not see what is real, but it supplants the real. (22)

Gasset, to demolish Stendhal’s account of love, harps on the greatness of man. He reiterates this point in his next essay, “On the Role of Choice in Love”:

First, it is unlikely that any normal activity of man is based upon an essential error. Love sometimes errs, as the eyes and ears may err. But, like these, its abnormality is based upon general accuracy. Second, imaginary or not, love is excited by certain real charms and qualities. It always has an object. Although the real person may not coincide with this imaginary object, some grounds of affinity must exist between the two which leads us to fancy one woman, and not another, as the foundation and subject of those charms. (105)

In the same vein, Gasset goes against the commonplace that equates love and sexuality:

If it is an absurdity to say that a man’s or woman’s true love for one another has nothing sexual about it, it is another absurdity to believe that love can be equated with sexuality. (89)

In a quirky twist, he proves this by asserting that “…nothing immunizes a male against other sexual attractions so well as amorous enthusiasm for a certain woman.” (89) Gasset then states, and I agree with him on this point, that “…sexual instinct, strictly speaking, practically does not exist in man, but is almost always found to be indissolubly united, at least, with fantasy.” (102) But love is also accorded the same constitutive characteristic. Love for Gasset, like the sexual instinct, “is not an instinct but rather a creation, and, in man, no primitive creation at that.” Love, then, far from being something natural, is a human construct. As Gasset emphasizes:

…if one wishes to see clearly into the phenomenon of love, it is necessary, above all, to free oneself from the common idea which sees it as a universal sentiment, within the reach of almost everyone’s experience, occurring at every minute everywhere, regardless of the society, race, nationality or period in which we live. (181)

And crowning this insight, which I see as the ultimate achievement of the book, is the realization that

…things and peoples are what they are not merely because of sheer and spontaneous generation. No! Everything that is, everything in the world that has form, whatever it may be, is a product of some force, a vestige of some energy and a symptom of some activity. In this sense, everything has been made, and it is always possible to inquire into the power that has forged each thing and in so doing, left its everlasting mark upon it. (116)T

This realization, however, instead of leading to the radical notion that the concept of love is itself a site of struggle for different and often conflicting ideas of love (bourgeois love vs. class love, for example), regresses to an Orientalist privileging of Western superiority. Only Western culture has developed the notion of love (“The savage has no inkling of it, the Chinese and the Indian are unfamiliar with it, the Greeks of the time of Pericles barely recognized it”) and the bearer of love is more fully human than the rest of the crowd since it “is a vital luxury which only organisms with a high level of vitality can possess.” (184)

What is funnier is that after assigning upon love and sexual instinct the status of constructs, Gasset reverts to an essentialism which assigns to women the nature of a poverty of imagination.

…the notorious disproportion between the sexuality of man and woman, which makes the normally spontaneous woman so conservative in “love,” probably coincides with the fact that the human female usually enjoys less imaginative power than the male. Nature, cautiously and foresightedly, wanted it that way, because if the opposite had occurred and the woman were endowed with as much fantasy as the man, licentiousness would have flooded the planet and the human species would have disappeared, volatilized in sensuousness. (103)

This sort of thinking of course leads to the next:

…the essence of femininity exists in the fact that an individual feels her destiny totally fulfilled when she surrenders herself to another individual… In opposition to this marvelous phenomenon, masculinity presents the deep-rooted instinct which impels it to take possession of another person. There exists, therefore, a pre-established- harmony between woman and man; for the former, living means surrender; for the latter, living means taking possession; and both destinies, precisely because they are opposites, come to a perfect agreement. (160)

And the next:

From the spectator and public the man passes, by means of the flirtation, to an individual relationship with the woman. Starting a flirtation is an invitation to a tête-á-tête, a furtive spiritual communication. It begins, therefore, with a gesture, a word which disregards and as it were removes the conventional mask, the woman’s surface personality, and knocks at the door of that more intimate personality. Then, like the moon which emerges from among the clouds, the concealed woman begins to radiate her hidden vitality and relinquish her fictitious countenance before the man. This moment of spiritual denudification, that brief period in which the superficial, impersonal woman is transformed into the real, individual woman (a phenomenon which can be compared to the exposure of a photographic plate) produces in the man the greatest spiritual delight. (136-137)

And the next:

Extraordinary beauty acts as an obstacle to men of fine sensibilities feeling attracted by a woman. The excessive perfection of a face encourages us to objectify its possessor and to keep at a distance from her in order to admire her as aesthetic object. The only ones who fall in love with “official beauties” are fools and drugstore clerks. They are public monuments, curiosities which one views momentarily and from a distance. In their presence one feels like a tourist and not a lover. (148)

It perpetuates all sorts of silly stereotypes that creates the phenomenon they describe:

The woman in love usually despairs because she never seems to have the man she loves before her in his totality. She always finds him somewhat distracted, as if on the way to their meeting he had left sections of his mind scattered about the world. For this reason, the man always seems to be clumsy in love and incapable of reaching the perfection which the woman succeeds in giving to this sentiment. (75)

And perhaps funniest of all, he makes use of this image of the essential woman as a point for a clever refutation of Darwin’s theory of evolution:

Let us say it, in all crudity, that women have never been interested in geniuses, unless it were per accidens; that is to say, when in addition to the genius of a man there were overshadowing qualities which were scarcely compatible with his genius. One thing is certain: the qualities which are generally most esteemed in a male, for the good of progress and human greatness, do not at all interest the woman erotically. (124)

From the point of view of human selection, this fact means that the woman in her sentimental preferences does not collaborate, in the same way as does man, in the perfection of the species. She tends rather to eliminate the best individuals, speaking from a masculine viewpoint – those who innovate and undertake lofty enterprises – and she manifests a decided enthusiasm for mediocrity. (127)

All silly, I must say. But then again a decent dose of good old-fashioned machismo is never a bad thing in this supposed politically correct era. (I’ve always had this lingering suspicion that the prevailing critical discourses that impose this compulsion to be prim and proper hides an underlying complicity with the larger social structures they supposedly seek to address by limiting their sights to the minutae.)

Besides, the book presents you with a jumble (since the treatment of the subject matter by Gasset is quite diffused) of lines that can be of good use when wooing someone.

The combination of these two elements, enchantment and surrender, is, then, essential to the love which we are discussing. This combination is no accident. Both do not merely chance to co-exist, but rather one is born out of and takes nourishment from the other. What exists in love is surrender due to enchantment. (175)

Falling in love even once is an insistence that the beloved exists; a refusal to accept (since everything depends on that one thing) the possibility of a universe without it. (18)

It also gives a few good observations on the practice of love:

Love is the most highly eulogized activity. Poets have always embellished and refined it with their cosmetic instruments, endowing it with a strange abstract reality, to such a point that before experiencing it we know all about it, place high value on it, and are resolved to practice it, like an art or profession. (24)

Falling in love automatically tends toward madness. Left to itself, it goes to utter extremes. This is well known by the “conquistadores” of both sexes. Once a woman’s attention is fixed upon a man, it is very easy for him to dominate her thoughts completely. A simple game of blowing hot and cold, of solicitousness and disdain, of presence and absence is all that is required. The rhythm of that technique acts upon an woman’s attention like a pneumatic machine and ends by emptying her of all the rest of the world. How well our people put it: “to suck one’s senses”! In fact: one is absorbed – absorbed by an object! Most “love affairs are reduced to this mechanical play of the beloved upon the lover’s attention. (53)

And finally, it offers some sensible advice:

…falling in love is a state of mental misery which has a restricting, impoverishing, and paralyzing effect upon the development of our consciousness. (40)

Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that “falling in love” …is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility. Without a paralysis of consciousness and a reduction of our habitual world, we could never fall in love. (51)

Let us tear down the romantic trappings that have adorned passion. Let us cease believing that the measure of a man’s love lies in how stupid he has become or is willing to be. (178) ■

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] ■

1. As cited in Isagani R. Cruz, “Ang Wika bilang Ideolohiya o ang Wika ng Teorya bilang Teorya ng Wika” in Bukod na Bukod: Mga Piling Sanaysay, edited by David Jonathan Y. Bayot (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2003), 133.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., 134.

5. Ibid.

6. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), xiv.

7. Edel E. Garcellano, “Theory, Theory, Theory,” Edel Garcellano: Poems Old and New, 9 May 2008, http://theworksofedelgarcellano.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/theory-theory-theory

8. E. San Juan Jr., “On Zizek’s Popularity in Diliman, Philippines, and the Problem of Freudian and Lacanian Speculations for Social Change in the Philippines and Elsewhere: A Brief Comment,” The E. San Juan Jr. Archive, 5 April 2009, http://rizalarchive.blogspot.com/2009/04/who-is-afraid-of-zizek.html

Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman’s Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath is described by the Publishers Weekly as “a gripping narrative of the 1942 battle for the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines,” by Kirkus Reviews as an “[a]ssiduous account of the Japanese conquest of the Philippines in World War II and the fate of the American garrison there,” and finally by Richard Pyle of the Associated Press as

A new account of the Bataan Death March, in which more than 70,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war were victims of appalling barbarism, a particularly grim episode of World War II following Japan’s invasion of the Philippines.

Tears in the Darkness is marketed as “an altogether new look at World War II that exposes the myths of war and shows the extent of suffering and loss on both sides.” Bryce Christensen writes in an advanced review:

Unlike historians who have spotlighted the titans—MacArthur and Wainwright, Yamashita and Homma—who matched strategies in the Philippines in 1942, the Normans focus on the ordinary soldiers who bore the brunt of the wartime savagery.

Tears in the Darkness, a The New York Times book review enthuses:

is authoritative history. Ten years in the making, it is based on hundreds of interviews with American, Filipino and Japanese combatants. But it is also a narrative achievement. The book seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of many individual participants.

But while there is no question to the integrity, “extremely detailed and thoroughly chilling treatment” of the historical facts presented in the rigorously researched book, there is also no reason for us to promptly accept the efforts to privilege the book as “popular history’s final say on the subject.”

In the new book, the Normans’ gaze is basically focused on the ordeals faced by the Americans involved in the Death March, particularly on the figure of Ben Steele. The Christian Science Monitor comments:

The book seamlessly blends the history of the war with the stories of people like Steele who lived through it. It could just as easily and appropriately have been titled “Ben Steele’s Story.”

Striving to give the other side of the conflict, the couple also presents previously untold accounts of some Japanese soldiers “who struggle to maintain their humanity while carrying out their superiors’ inhuman commands.”

But where are the Filipinos, the “collateral damages” of conflicting American and Japanese imperialist interests?

Victorious American colonizers stand over the bodies of fallen Filipinos. More than 1.4 million Filipinos died during the Philippine-American War.

The Great Depression that struck the advanced capitalist nations in the 1930s directly led to the Second World War of the next decade as these very same nations scrambled to redivide the world among them to escape the economic crisis. The fascist powers Germany, Italy, and Japan fought against the Allied imperialist nations (US, France, UK, etc.) for the acquisition of colonies and semi-colonies that will serve as new sources of cheap labor and natural resources and new dumping grounds for their surplus products.

The Philippines was thus dragged into the war by virtue of its being a US colony.

This deafening absence is no reason to dismiss the book outright, however. While it may not be “popular history’s final say on the subject,” the book still presents one more vantage point from which insights can be taken.

A Japanese force of 43,000 seasoned troops began the invasion of the Philippine islands eight hours after the Japanese fleet attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The US preparations against the looming Japanese invasion of the Philippines, however, were at best haphazard. Falling back skirmish after skirmish, the American command finally gathered the remaining US troops and Filipino volunteers in Bataan and Corregidor in January 1942. Ninety nine days later, the Normans write, “more than 76,000 Americans and Filipinos under American command laid down their arms.”

The sick, starving, and bedraggled prisoners of war were rounded up by their Japanese captors and made to walk sixty-six miles to a railhead for the trip to prison camp, a baneful walk under a broiling sun that turned into one of most notorious treks in the annals of war, the Bataan Death March. […]

As the events of 1941‒1942 passed into the hands of historians, both the battle for Bataan and the death march became symbols, the former as a modern Thermopylae, a stirring last stand, and the latter as a crucible of courage, the courage to continue on a walk to the grave.

…but when the dross of propaganda and myth is skimmed from the surface of history, what’s left, in this case, is an example of the miscarried morality and Punic politics that underlie every appeal to arms—the bad leadership, the empty promises, the kind of cruelty that crushes men’s souls. (4-5)

"KILL EVERYONE OVER TEN," American Gen. Jacob Smith ordered his troops during the Philippine-American War.

And indeed, American and Filipino troops battling side by side (but with the latter as the leading man’s sidekick of course) and sharing the experience of brutality under the Fascist Japanese military occupiers sealed the image of America as the colonized people’s benevolent big brother.

The vicious violence of subjugation (half a million Filipinos killed during the Philippine-American War and so on) was erased from the Filipino people’s collective memory primarily by way of the US colonial administration’s introduction of a public educational apparatus that molded the Filipino people into docile and passive colonial subjects.

The bond formed between the American and Filipino troops during the Second World War only furthered this erasure. This amnesia and attendant “colonial mentality” survives up to the contemporary period of neocolonialism (the indirect control of foreign imperial powers over the Filipino people’s political, economic, and cultural life). ■

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.

I haven’t read any of the Marquis’ other more popular works like Justine, One Hundred Days of Sodom, or Philosophy in the Boudoir to actually verify it with my own eyes, but if we are to believe Burnside “sex in his [Sade’s] writings is usually rather unceremonious, devoid of sensuality, tenderness or erotic charge.”[2] Burnside adds:

Set any of his books beside Venus in Furs, or L’Histoire d’O, and it soon becomes obvious that Sade cares not a whit for the ceremonies of sex, or for the nuances of power play between dominant and submissive partners. Sade is all about force… play hardly ever come[s] into it.[3]

“The Magistrate Mocked” begins with the following epigraph: “For you can take my word: these people I will so / Depict that they will never more their faces show.”[4] And indeed, the whole story is simply about such a humiliation. An aristocrat’s younger daughter is arranged to be married to a corrupt magistrate. Her lover, older sister, and brother-in-law conspire to humiliate and ultimately drive away the unfortunate visitor.

The denigration of blacks in the text aside, what I found distasteful in the story is the underlying condescension against the non-aristocratic classes. The figure of the magistrate, who is representative of the rising provincial bourgeois, is conveniently defined as corrupt, ugly, stiff, and so on. The villain’s provincial accent, for instance, is made fun of, etc. The aristocratic protagonists, meanwhile, are projected as upright, beautiful, playful, etc. Behind the hilarious presentation is an aristocratic bitchiness set against the ascendant bourgeois, provincials, and hapless prostitutes.

“Emilie de Tourville,” on the other hand, is also about a younger daughter, this time victim of the cruel punishment of her elder, lawyer brothers who detest her compromising of their family’s honor. The question posed by de Sade at the onset of the story pretty much sums up this tale of “Brotherly Cruelty” – “who is guiltier in the eyes of reason: a weak and deceived girl, or some relative or other who, by setting up as a family’s avenger, becomes the tormentor of the hapless creature?”[5]

But for all of de Sade’s supposed moral bravado or mania with perverse sexual practices, this story’s the conclusion is quite within the confines of the polite order. A girl gets abused by some sort of dandy. She is punished by her cruel brothers. But at the end all she can do is accept the apologies and of her abuser. Marriage is presented as the only option.

At the end of the day, all this reminds me of Žižek’s expounding of Lacan’s point in “Kant with Sade”:

Today, in our post-idealist era of the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” doesn’t everybody know what the point of the “with” is – the truth of Kant’s ethical rigorism is the sadism of the law, i.e., the Kantian law is a superego agency that sadistically enjoys the subject’s deadlock, his inability to meet its inexorable demands, like the proverbial teacher who tortures pupils with impossible tasks and secretly savors their failings? Lacan’s point, however, is the exact opposite of this first association: it is not Kant who was a closet sadist, it is Sade who was a closet Kantian.[6] ■

[1] John Burnside, foreword to Betrayal by Marquis de Sade (London: Hesperus Classics, 2006), vii.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid. Perhaps this is one more reason why I think Sade would come late in my reading lists.

[4] Marquis de Sade, Betrayal, translated by Andrew Brown (London: Hesperus Classics, 2006), 4.

[5] Ibid, 83.

[6] Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 194-195.

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:

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!

Now how about that? Ruminating on such an oddity, the first thing that entered my mind is an old vulgar joke which came to me first from – of all people – one of my old professors in the university. A rakish American cowboy, the joke goes, came across an Indian village. To test the Indian chief’s virility, the arrogant cowboy asked the chief how many wives he had.

“I’ve tried all the women in the village including the little girls,” said the chief coolly.

“Oh boy,” the visitor exclaimed after this revelation.

“That includes the boys,” answered the chief.

“Holy cow!” The cowboy couldn’t resist from crying.

“Yes, I also did the cows.”

Again shocked, the white man yelled, “Oh dear!”

Yes, the Indian chief calmly added, even the deers but only when I can catch them. And the deer, of course, swift as it is, is never caught (it is always out there!). Such is the case in this novel of Perec’s, which has as its formal premise quite a ludicrous constraint.

In the novel’s postscript, Perec claims to have drawn inspiration from “a (modish) linguistic dogma claiming primacy for what Saussurian structuralists call a significant…” which he claims was “not a handicap, not a constriction, but, all in all, a spur to my imagination.” He likewise professes to have had a lot of fun writing it principally “by locating and disclosing that contradiction in which all syntactic, structural or symbolic signification is bound up.”

Suffice to say, certain lovers of “meaningful Literature,” bred on the privileging of a literary text’s organic unity, clarity, and polish, would readily dismiss the rawness and systematic chaos of A Void as superficial and pretentious.

On the other hand, Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson (before his structuralist turn), and the rest of the Russian School of Formalism should find in Perec’s novel a posterboy for their tenets of “defamiliarization,” that curious literary doxa that assigns the “literariness” of a text to its deviation from the ordinary use of language or what Jakobson calls an “organized violence committed on ordinary speech.”

A Void begins with the unveiling of an affliction that’s been gnawing Anton Vowl’s mind, an affliction that took shape (or the lack thereof) from the lost of the letter E from the world around him:

His mind runs riot. Lost in thought, scrutinizing his rug, Vowl starts imagining 5, 6, 26 distinct visual combinations, absorbing but also insubstantial, as though an artist’s rough drafts but of what? – that, possibly, which a psychiatrist would call Jungian slips, an infinity of dark, mythic, anonymous portraits flitting through his brain, as it burrows for a solitary, global signal that might satisfy his natural human lust for signification both instant and lasting, a signal that might commandingly stand out from this chain of discontinuous links, this miasma of shadowy tracings, all of which, or so you would think, ought to knit up to form a kind of paradigmatic configuration, of which such partial motifs can furnish only anagrams and insipid approximations… (5)

Fast-forward a few pages and Vowl suddenly disappears. His friends look for any hint as to his whereabouts by digging through his diary, notes, and manuscripts – texts which Vowl’s companions have described in the following revealing way:

“I said just an instant ago that only Champollion would know how to crack such a conundrum,” says Augustus sadly. “But now I doubt if Champollion could pull it off. A Chomsky might in a pinch, though.”

“Or possibly a Roman Jakobson, who could submit a structuralist’s opinion of Ozymandias!” (110)

A Void is marked by self-reflexive parts, which some of my classmates would readily assign the label postmodern, that remind us readers that what we are reading is a fiction, a constructed world that is a step away from our own:

“From which point it’s but a hop, skip and a jump to grasping why so much was built on so rigorous a constraint, so tyrannical a curb. It was born out of a mad and morbid whim: that of wholly satisfying a fascination with linguistic gratuity, with proscription and subtraction, that of avoiding any word striking its author as too obvious, too arrogant or too common, of according its significant just a gap, a slit, a loop, so narrow, so slim and so sharp, that you instantly grasp its justification.” (177)

Racing through a tight succession of roundabout subplots, literary pastiches (E-less versions of Moby Dick, Shakespeare’s To Be Or Not To Be soliloquoy, among others), a random mention of Donald Duck, segues on the craft of literary production, namedroppings of Foucault and Lacan, absurd anecdotes, and other playful devices we finally end up with a “Maldiction,” “a Zahir,” the void that ties it all together.

And this specter that casts a long shadow over the novel, as in all texts of this mischievous type (the supposed historical artifact that creates a ruckus in Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, to cite another example, turns out to be a laundry list – not to mention the bulk of Borges’ ficciones) turns out to be something very incredulous. The text itself comments near the end:

“Voila,” says Squaw, in a sort of monosyllabic singsong, “all kaput. All kaput. Who would think of it? And, you know, I find this conclusion just a tiny but anticlimactic, a tiny but Much Ado About Nothing, a bit irritating, a bit discouraging, don’t you think?” (276)

But then sometimes, as the cliché goes, it’s not the end in sight that truly matters but the process that leads to that end. In the novel’s beginning, we are faced

“…with a haunting strand of plot working its way through a mosaic of motifs so confusing that you and I can’t possibly summon up a vision of its totality from A to Z, its organic unity, so confusing that our wish to find a significant sign in it is simply an illusion.

“But gradually, with our starting to grasp that a law is structuring its composition, this initial confusion of ours will turn to admiration – admiration at how, with such a niggardly grammatical, syntactical and punctuational construction, with a vocabulary cut down to a minimum by so many constraints of scission, omission and approximation, such an inscription can still contain so much information.” (177)

Ultimately, Perec, if we are to believe the following passage as his aim in writing A Void (and if we are to accord such authorial declarations significance), appears to have succeeded:

My ambition, as Author, my point, I would go so far as to say my fixation, my constant fixation, was primarily to concoct an artifact as original as it was illuminating, an artifact that would or just possibly might, act as a stimulant on notions of construction, of narration, of plotting, of action, a stimulant, in a word, on fiction-writing today. (281)

But as José Ortega Y Gasset writes in his treatise on love: “Falling in love automatically tends towards madness. Left to itself, it goes to utter extremes.” ■

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.

What made me a fan of Žižek, first and foremost, is his acerbic humor, his engagement with popular culture, and of course, his reworking of Marxist ideology critique from a Lacanian lens to include the economy of enjoyment as a political factor. But what I like most about Žižek, in contrast to much of his Western postmodern liberal leftist contemporaries, is Žižek’s no nonsense endorsement of the supposed “Lost Cause” of revolutionary upheavals that aim for egalitarian emancipation as the only means of radically transforming the exploitative and oppressive order of the present.

In Michel Foucault’s theorization of power, resistance is inevitably co-opted by power in advance. Žižek, writing in his The Ticklish Subject, goes beyond Foucault by questioning this certainty. That

resistance to power is inherent and immanent to the power edifice (in the sense that it is generated by the inherent dynamic of the power edifice) in no way obliges us to draw the conclusion that every resistance is co-opted in advance, included in the eternal game Power plays with itself.[1]

For Žižek,

the key point is that through the effect of proliferation, of producing an excess of resistance, the very inherent antagonism of a system may well set in motion a process which leads to its own ultimate downfall.[2]

Žižek thus attacks the two main strands of postmodern leftism in the west: the liberal, multiculturalist, pluralist Left that aims for “capitalism with a human face” for reinforcing the rule of capital and the self-proclaimed radical anti-capitalist Left for refraining from engaging in a revolutionary project that does not eschew the excesses of such interventions: “the pious desire to deprive the revolution of this excess is simply the desire to have a revolution without revolution.”[3]

Of course, this line, in the Philippine context, does not depart much from the standard national democratic criticism of reformist and pseudo-leftist groups that mislead the people into believing that participation in the parliamentary arena and legal struggles can by themselves effect meaningful social transformation.

Perhaps this uncompromising oppositional stance can account for a bomb threat that cut short Žižek’s talk on his new book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, to an audience of 800 in New York City last week? Žižek’s new book, after all, calls on the disparate Lefts of the west “to discard the narratives of the crisis that blame the meltdown on contingent deviations, and expose the mortal flaws of the global capitalist system as such.”

Being a fan of someone doesn’t mean eating him hook, line and sinker though. I, as a fan, also have many hesitations about Žižek. For one, I still can’t follow much of his elaborate discussion of Lacanian Psychoanalysis and German Idealism. Secondly, there’s the matter of some of the notions advanced in his vast body of texts. I don’t agree with Žižek, for example, on his line that the only alternative to U.S. imperialism and China’s emergence as an authoritarian-capitalist power is Europe. Recent developments, such as the Maoist victories in Nepal, the Naxalite upsurge in India, and the unwavering march of the national democratic movement here in the Philippines contradicts Žižek’s comment that “The Third World cannot generate a strong enough resistance to the ideology of the American Dream.”[4] I am also suspicious of Žižek’s opposition of theory and action and the privileging of the former as too easy a way out:

You know, Marx thesis eleven: philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is, we have now to change it. Maybe, as good Marxists, we should turn it around. Maybe we are trying to change it too much. It’s time to redraw and to interpret it again, because do we really know what is going on today?

We need theory more than ever. Don’t be—don’t feel guilty for withdrawing from immediate engagement and for trying to understand what’s going on.[5]

Shouldn’t the two go side by side instead? ■

[1] Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 2000), 256.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin, the 1917 Writings (London: Verso, 2002), 261.

[4] Slavoj Žižek, “Thanks, But We’ll Do It Ourselves against Enlightened Administration,” In These Times, 19 June 2005, http://www.lacan.com/zizekamish.htm.

[5] Slavoj Žižek, interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, 12 May 2008, http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/12/world_renowned_philosopher_slavoj_zizek_on

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. ■