Somebody used the search string “canadian people are overweight” in order to find my blog today. That must have ranked on, at best, the 30th page of search results. Who ever goes past 3 or 4 pages of results anyways?
the dream started with hammond (from jurassic park 1) pretending to sleep on his bed with his maids looking on. the funny thing is he had the skull of a woolly mammoth beside him for comfort. he also wore a head dress made of fur. i had the distinct feeling that hammond had acquired the mammoth skull by illicit means.
that’s insane, ahahahha
whenever his maids looked away he’d open his eyes and when they looked back he’d promptly close them again and pretend to snore.
hahaha, like a ghost in mario bros
haha, yah
after his maids left he got up
this is the point in the dream when i became hammond
oh man
haha
i stood up. walked over to the mirror and looked at my old features.
Zizek on love. Seems to be an overplayed theme but I’ve recently experienced some of my own turmoil that has confirmed certain aspects of Zizek’s brief love monologues for me, but has also lead me to disagree with a particular concept of love that Zizek puts forward.
Zizek’s ideal definition of love in that first video is a love that does not idealize the beloved; rather, love is characterized by Zizek as the acceptance of a “person with all of its failures, stupidities, ugly points.” With this concept of love in mind the beloved becomes “absolute for you” and as a result you are able to
“see perfection in imperfection itself…”
This seeing of “perfection in imperfection” seems to follow the logic of the negation of negation. Zizek succinctly defines “negation of negation” as the shift of perspective which turns failure into true success. In the Parallax View, Zizek uses the example of Muhammad Ali’s 1996 Olympic Games torch lighting as an example of the negation of negation. The frail Muhammad Ali, suffering from the trademark symptoms of Parkinson’s disease during the lighting, became truly great not through smashing his opponents in the ring but through the “dignified endurance of his debilitating illness” in the public eye.
Negation of negation is a primary characteristic of the gaze of love, but I must argue against Zizek and say that love is impossible without the idealization of the beloved.
Love is impossible without idealization because the gaze of love imbues the beloved with an idealized phantasmic second body. This second body is precisely what Zizek describes as seeing “perfection in imperfection.” What we see is not the actual person with all his/her “failures, stupidities, ugly points” but rather we see our own projection of that second body which sees these imperfections but ignores them. It is only when we fall out of love that we realize the idealization of the beloved that takes place. When we fall out of love we see the imperfections as imperfections, the love falls from our eyes and what we see often turns out to be something quite unexpected. The negation of negation is negated (haha, maybe) and we are left with a NOT. With raw imperfection (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing).
In part 2 i’ll turn to a second zizek video.
Depressive realism is a theory which states that people who are depressed are able to more accurately gauge their reputation, locus of control, abilities, and the way the world actually is. It’s argued that depressed people are able to see without the rose-colored glasses that non-depressed people wear. On initial reflection I was inclined to agree, but the nature of the concept of the objet petit a, put forward by Jacques Lacan, speaks against Depressive Realism, or at least suggests that ‘realism’ may be an inappropriate term for the way that depressed people see the world.
The objet petit a in Lacanian psychoanalysis is the object that is created by desire. Zizek puts it nicely in “Looking Awry”: “The objet petit a is an object that can be perceived only by a gaze distorted by desire, an object that does not exist for an “objective gaze.”" The objet petit a does not exist in-itself because it is nothing but the enfleshment of the distorted gaze; a mapping of desire onto the contours of objective reality.
For depressive realism to be an accurate theory it would have to posit that depressed individuals lack an interested gaze; a gaze permeated by desire. It would also have to posit that depressed people occupy a gaze that is objective. This would only make sense since an objective gaze would be able to “see” reality more accurately. The below illustration is my attempt to represent the way depressed and non-depressed people see objects differently according to depressive realism. Keep reading →
Shu, the god of the air, upholds Nut, the sky-goddess, while Geb, the earth-god, reclines under Nut. The website where I found this argues that this structure is similar to Israelite cosmology, although I must argue that it is similar only in so far as Shu is a YHWH equivalent, along with Ba’al and Marduk in the Caananite and Babylonian pantheons respectively. Note the description in Psalm 24 of YHWH’s victory over chaos, and the nature of YHWH’s kingship.
1Psalm of David. The earth is the LORD’S, and all it contains, The world, and those who dwell in it.
2 For He has founded it upon the seas And established it upon the rivers.
8 Who is the King of glory? The LORD strong and mighty, The LORD mighty in battle.
9 Lift up your heads, O gates, And lift them up, O ancient doors, That the King of glory may come in!
10 Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, He is the King of glory. Selah.
The occasion of this psalm is YHWH’s victory procession entering his temple-palace. It invokes Ancient Near Eastern imagery from the Caananite creation myth in which Ba’al conquers the chaos serpent Yam-Nahar (Sea-River). Some Psalms commentators have suggested that this Psalm, specifically vs. 8, argues for YHWH’s dynamic kingship as opposed to a static one. If that is the case, then YHWH’s struggle with Yam-Nahar is an ongoing battle. YHWH the warrior, the LORD of hosts must continually extert his heroic strength to maintain the order of the world. In the above picture Neither Geb nor Nut represent hostile forces, which is why it is structurally different than Israelite Cosmology. However, as I already mentioned, YHWH can be understood as a Shu equivalent. Both Shu and Yhwh were considered gods of the sky [in the case of YHWH this was only a true assumption in normative Judaism (the ideal Judaism of scripture)]. I envision a picture of YHWH standing where Shu stands in the above picture on top of a serpent while holding up the firmament, and standing upon the earth’s pillars. Quite like the image below.
If the below image of God is the one that Psalms describes, the mighty YHWH holding up the skies and keeping back the sea serpent then we have a problem. If YHWH the warrior battles to maintain order, what happens if the world experiences an ecological collapse, as so many environmentalist prophets predict? The logical result seems to be that YHWH becomes the vanquished warrior assuming the conquered place of the serpent.
The perspicuity of scripture has been a main tenet of Protestant biblical hermeneutics since the Reformation era, and can be seen particularly in Martin Luther’s well known Sola Scriptura doctrinal/hermeneutical principle. Luther was appealing to the unique nature of the Bible’s intrinsic authority, while rejecting any extra-biblical traditions tacked on by the Catholic church. Luther, highlighting this doctrinal position, famously said that “a simple layman armed with Scripture is greater than the mightiest pope without it.”
I empathize with Luther because of his appeal to the liberating kernel he saw in the Bible (and certainly the Catholic church during his time was veering off course), but I think the principle of Sola Scriptura, as it is appropriated today, attempts to lay a prohibition upon the creative way that Scripture has always been used.
In my experience within the Western Evangelical Christian tradition I have noticed that Sola Scriptura is silently assumed but not actually practiced. In this tradition, scripture is the only source of authority and everything must be tested against it but, at the same time, it is taken for granted that the reader who is testing doctrine against scripture is an interpreter. The act of reading, therefore, is the moment when Sola Scriptura becomes an impediment rather a benefit. Most Western Evangelicals assume that the text is plain in its meaning, and that this meaning is the meaning it has always taken since it was first authored many thousands of years ago. The plain sense according to the particular Western Evangelical reader then becomes the universalized meaning of the text. Particularity masked as universality is a simple summation of the Western Evangelical reading technique.
Keep reading →
The following article was published in Mars’ Hill, the student newspaper for Trinity Western University. I wanted to talk about something that lurks on the underbelly of our school. This piece attempts to put forward a mimetic theory of pornography. In some following posts I will discuss why I don’t think that theory covers everything.
The Idealized Fantasy of Love and Sex
Ideal conceptions of love, romance and sex are shaped by popular cultural forms of media and their content: movies, books, newspaper, television and others. Think of a movie such as The Notebook and the way it influences our image of the ideal romance: an assortment of passion and intense but playful love in an idyllic setting punctuated by a tasteful scene of love-making.
This montage of love teaches the viewer how to desire and what to desire. The goal of a romantic relationship becomes the successful reproduction or reenactment of the idealized scene. The technical term for such a reenactment is called mimesis. Mimesis can also be seen in the popular fantasy of the perfect marriage: the woman is a beautiful princess marrying her Prince Charming and life ends happily ever after (think Cinderella).
If you’ve ever watched any of the wedding shows currently running on any number of TV networks, you’ll realize just how much the Cinderella fantasy dominates modern weddings.
Keep reading →
Premier of Alberta, Ed Stelmach, recently promised a $12 million injection into Alberta’s arts and culture scene. Stelmach, commented on the function of culture saying,
“(c)ulture contributes greatly to our quality of life and is the lens through which the rest of the world views our province.
My immediate reaction to this is that the function of culture is exactly the opposite of this. Rather than providing outsiders with a lens through which to understand a province, culture provides those living within the province a lens for understanding the outside. Developing a strong cultural identity along provincial lines allows us to understand our unique place within the sphere of not only Canadian culture, but within the sphere of world culture.
a large study that found that underweight Americans are more likely to die than those who are moderately overweight.
-http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/health/22fblogs.html, “In the Fatosphere, Big Is in, or at Least Accepted”
Underweight people are more likely to die than the moderately overweight? Sounds like some sketchy science to me. Everyone knows that Duncan McLeod is the only man who is the least likely to die:
THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE
Reality is the field of symbolically structured representations, the outcome of symbolic ‘gentrification’ of the Real: yet a surplus of the Real always eludes the symbolic grasp and persists as a non-symbolized stain, a hole in reality which designates the ultimate limit where the word fails.
