Totally disturbing

[missweirdness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, i'm not dead =) the guillotine hasn't got me yet..anyhow..i was going on the internet and looked up the french revolution and came up to this disturbing picture which made me laugh xD

and i wanted to share it with you all because i have a sick sense of humor or whatever. and enjoy xD hahahahha

discuss xD

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Comments

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

Quite. -_-

It seems he has at least one useful idea (or at least a catchy title for it).

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

Actually, after being appalled by his analysis of jacobinism (Robespierre or the "Divine Violence of Terror" - which I find very un-historical) and by his appearance in the BBC docudrama, I have decided to give him a chance and hear more from him. Actually, I have found he makes quite a lot of interesting points on different subjects (limits of empathy, "tolerance" versus fraternité, social versus cultural analysis etc.). I have put the links on my LJ, as well as some of my comments on what I find relevant.
Now I understand what he meant by the reference to Gandhi in the docudrama, he was not allowed to explain it: he meant that Gandhi's resistence through organized mass negation to patricipate in the functionning of the colonial regime was a very "violent" and efficient way of disrupting the instituttions of British colonial rule.

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the key here: he's clearly using the word "violence" differently than most people, who tend to immediately think of physical violence when they hear him talking about it. Mind, I still think he's wrong about the Terror, even if he's speaking of a kind of Gandhian disruption rather than physical violence, since that's really not how anyone at the time thought of it. But there does seem to be some logic to his arguments when considered from that point of view.

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree with you. His analysis of the Terror is far too abstract and far too deprived of any historical context.

What I like about Žižek's remarks on Robespierre is the following:
"The popular image of Robespierre is that of a kind of Elephant Man inverted: while the latter had a terribly deformed body hiding a gentle and intelligent soul, Robespierre was a kind and polite person hiding ice-cold cruel determination signaled by his green eyes. As such, Robespierre serves perfectly today's anti-totalitarian liberals who no longer need to portray him as a cruel monster with a sneering evil smile, as it was the case by the 19th century reactionaries: everyone is ready to recognize his moral integrity and full devotion to the revolutionary Cause, since his very purity is the problem, the cause of all trouble, as is signalled by the title of the last biography of Robespierre, Ruth Scurr's Fatal Purity. [30] The titles of some of the reviews of the book are indicative: "Terror wears a sea-green coat," "The good terrorist," "Virtue's demon executioner," and, outdoing them all, Graham Robb's "Sea-green, mad as a fish" (in Telegraph, May 6 2006). And, so that no one misses the point, Antonia Fraser, in her review, draws "a chilling lesson for us today": Robespierre was personally honest and sincere, but "/t/he bloodlettings brought about by this 'sincere' man surely warn us that belief in your own righteousness to the exclusion of all else can be as dangerous as the more cynical motivation of a deliberate tyrant." [31] Happy us who live under cynical public-opinion manipulators, not under the sincere Muslim fundamentalists ready to fully engage themselves intheir projects... what better proof of the ethico-political misery of our epoch whose ultimate mobilizing motif is the mistrust of virtue! Should we not affirm against such opportunist realism the simple faith in the eternal Idea of freedom which persists through all defeats, without which, as it was clear to Robespierre, a revolution "is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime," the faith most poignantly expressed in Robespierre's very last speech on the 8 Thermidor 1994, the day before his arrest and execution:
But there do exist, I can assure you, souls that are feeling and pure; it exists, that tender, imperious and irresistible passion, the torment and delight of magnanimous hearts; that deep horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for the homeland, that even more sublime and holy love for humanity, without which a great revolution is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime; it does exist, that generous ambition to establish here on earth the world's first Republic.

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

I agree on both points. That particular passage, divorced from the rest of his theorizing, is brilliant. Well, aside from the translations. They could use a bit of work ("éclatant" rendered as "noisy", really?).