The unacknowledged but pervasive tension and dishonest mingling of ultra-determinist historical materialism and hyperactive voluntarism/subjectivism has been shown to be a hallmark of the totalitarian turn in Leninism, Stalinism. According to Leo Kofler this particularly shows when things don’t go to plan ‚Das Hinüberschieben der Schuld für das Mißlingen der bürokratischen Pläne auf die Schulter ...
Slavoj Zizek on Newsnight – doubly mislabelled. He’s a jacobinist demagogue in search for “an authentic leader” – not one who tells people what to do but one who expresses what they really really want and tells them to do that. Very much what, at the time, a lot of people (and they themselves) thought ...
In my previous post on Basis/Überbau I casually mention Gramsci’s totalitarian tendencies. This needs some further explanation, especially since I will use some aspects of his reconceptionalisation (as struttura/superstrutture) when arguing for the retention of this much maligned metaphor. Gramsci tries to solve the old problem of dualism of base/superstructure (which he rejects as an ...
On the occasion of the death of Kim Jong-il I notice how the notion that he was popular and beloved by many in North Korea keeps popping up (together with some idea that this is the result of total control of the media and complete insulation from the outside world). The BBC has a series ...
The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep.’ (Orwell 1990) Totalitarianism is en vogue again, it seems, as the internationally acclaimed philosopher/psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek ...