The Five Percenters by Michael Mohammad Knight

Though building on a unique cosmology and legendary characters, Allah positioned himself as anti-religion. Known as a High Scientist during his time in the mosque, he later discouraged high science in favor of "city science". Many Gods take a practical look at their divinity; the word God to both Fard and the Father, in I Majestic's interpretation, "has no religious context here, it's not claiming to be an astral being" The Five Percenters would respond to anarchism's ethos of "no gods, no masters", with I God, I Master. For a black man to call himself God means that he will take responsibility, as the Father of Civilization , to lift himself up in the here and now- as opposed to waiting for a mystery to solve his problems or reward him in the afterlife...

I thought of Allah and the Desert Fathers that came before him: Father Divine, Noble Drew Ali, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. They were all born in the south and came north as young men in search of a better tomorrow, but found the American Dream to be a mystery god: an empty promise that took blind faith and gave only hard times.

There really is a devil, and like the Lost-Found Muslim Lesson No 1 says, he does keep you from his social equality. The bloodsucking Ten percenters, peddlers of the Mystery God, rule the Eighty-five Percent with priests, imams, ministers, mullahs and theologians, trained experts in phantoms, selling what cannot be seen. An old man who has only been an MTA bus driver all his life cannot stand up in a mosque and give khutbah on what he learned while struggling in the city and supporting a family. It's not enough, he has to go to Al-Azar, perfect his Arabiyya, master tajwid, eat up the medieval scholars, fill his head with fiqh and learn all the schools of thought. But in the new Mecca of Harlem, he can come to the front of the Harriet Tubman's auditorium in his MTA work jacket and he's God as is.'

Making information widely accessible should not be a bad thing; but as Muslims often complain that reading the Qur'an in a language other than the original Arabic will sacrifice its meaning, the 120 gives up its heart when translated to hypertext.

Shared on a playground or prison yard, the degrees become living things. I received my 120 on a hallway floor in the St. Nicholas House. The lightening was dim, the walls tagged with graffiti, my teacher stoned but still holding a lineage to his own teacher, who went back to his teacher and his teacher and so on through the unbroken trees of transmission drawn in the Sun of Man to the First Born, to the Father, To Malcolm and the mosque and the Muslims on back to Elijah Muhammad himself on Feb. 20,1934, answering questions as they were given to him by Master Fard.

The lines of the teachers and students all begin at that same original source and are cousins to one another. On the project floor with a document soft in a way that paper gets when it is old, the creases becoming tears, stained with coffee and scented with the same oils that Muslims put on their Qur'ans, I became a link in one chain. In contrast, a computer screen offers only dead words, an experience about as real as sitting on your couch to watch Muharram self-flagellations from Tehran on the Discovery Channel.

The Duel by Joseph Roth

Back then, before the Great War, when the incidents reported on these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a person lived or died. If a life was snuffed out from the host of the living, another life did not instantly replace it and make people forget the deceased. Instead, a gap remained where he had been and both the near and distant witnesses of his demise fell silent whenever they saw this gap. If a fire devoured a house in a row of houses in a street, the charred site remained empty for a long time. For the bricklayers worked slowly and leisurely, and when the closest neighbors as well as casual passerby looked at the empty lot, they remembered the shape and the walls of the vanished house. That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.

For a long time, the deaths of the regimental surgeon and Count Tattenbach stirred the emotions of the officers and troops of the lancer regiment and also the civilian population. The deceased were buried according to the prescribed military and religious rites. Beyond their own ranks none of the officers had breathed a word about the manner of deaths, but somehow the news had traveled through the small garrison that both men had fallen victim to their strict code of honor. And it was as if the forehead of every surviving officer now bore the mark of a close, violent death, and for the shopkeepers and craftsmen in the small town the foreign gentlemen had become even more foreign. The officers went about like incomprehensible worshipers of some remote and pitiless deity, but also like its gaudily clad and splendidly adorned sacrificial animals. People stared after them, shaking their heads. Thy even felt sorry for them. They had lots of privileges, the people told one another. They can strut around with sabers and attract women, and the Kaiser takes care of them personally as if they were his own sons. And yet before you can even bat an eyelash, one of them insults another, and the offense has to be washed away with blood!

So the men they were talking about were not truly to be envied. Even Captain Taittinger, who was rumored to have participated in several fatal duels in other regiments, altered his normal behavior. While the loud-mouthed and flippant were now silent and subdued,  strange uneasiness to hold of the usually soft-spoken, sweet-toothed, and haggard rittmaster. He could no longer spend hours siting alone behind the glass door of the little pastry shop, devouring pastries or else wordlessly playing chess or dominoes with himself or with the colonel. Taittinger was now afraid of solitude. He literally clung to the other men. If no fellow officer was nearby, he would enter a shop to buy something he did not need. He would stand there for a long time, chatting with the storekeeper about useless and silly things, unable to make up his mind to leave – unless  he spotted some casual acquaintance passing by outside, whereupon Taittinger would instantly pounce on him. That was how greatly the world had changed. The officers’ club remained empty. They stopped their convivial outings to Frau Resi’s establishment. The orderlies had little to do, If an officer ordered a drink, he would look at the glass and muse that it was the very one from which Tattenbach had drunk just a couple of days ago. They still told the old jokes, but they no longer guffawed loudly; at most, they smiled. Lieutenant Trotta was seen only on duty.

It was as if a swift magical hand had washed the twinge of youth from Carl Joseph’s face. No similar lieutenant could have been found entire Imperial and Royal Army. He felt he had to do something extraordinary now, but nothing extraordinary could be found far and wide. Needless to say, he was to leave the regiment and join another. But he looked about for some difficult task. He was realty looking for some self-imposed penance. He could never have put into words, but we may say that he was unspeakably afflicted by the thought of having been a tool in the hands of misfortune.

It was in this state of mind that he informed his father about the outcome of the duel and announced his unavoidable transfer to a different regiment. Although he was entitled to a brief furlough on this occasion, he concealed this from his father, for he was afraid to face him. But as it turned out, he underestimated the old man. For the district captain, that model of a civil servant, was well aware of military customs. And strangely enough, as could be read between the lines, he also seemed to know how to deal with his son’s sorrow and confusion. For the district captain’s answer went as follows:

Dear Son,

     Thank you for your precise account and your confidence. The fate  your comrades met touches me deeply. They died a death that befits men of honor.

In my day, duels were more frequent and honor far more precious than life. In my day, officers, it seems to me, were also made of sterner stuff. You are an officer, my son, and the grandson of the Hero of Solferino. You will know how to cope with your innocent and involuntary involvement in this tragic affair. Naturally you are sorry to leave the regiment, but you will still be serving our Kaiser in any regiment, anywhere in the army.

                                                              Your father,

                                                              Franz von Trotta

P.S. As for your two-week furlough, to which you are entitled with your transfer, you may spend it as you wish, either in my home or, even better, in your new garrison town, so that you may more easily familiarize yourself with your new situation.

                                                                           F.v.T.

Lieutenant Trotta read the letter not without a sense of shame. His father had guessed everything. I the lieutenant’s eyes, the district captain’s image grew to almost fearful magnitude. Indeed, it soon equaled his grandfather’s. And if the lieutenant had previously been afraid of facing the old man, it was now impossible to spend his furlough at home. Later, later, when I get my regular furlough, thought the lieutenant, who was made of less stern stuff than the lieutenants of the district captain’s youth. . .

                              *                             *                            *  

.  .  . The third day brought orders to retreat, and the battalion formed to march off. Both officers and men were disappointed. It was rumored that an entire dragoon regiment had been wiped out nine miles east. Supposedly Cossacks had invaded the country. Silent and grumpy, the Austrians marched west. They soon realized that no one had prepared for there the retreat, for they came upon a confused donnybrook of the most disparate military branches at highway crossings and in villages and small towns. Innumerable and conflicting directives poured from army headquarters.

Most of these orders pertained t the evacuation of villages and towns and the treatment of pro-Russian Ukrainians, clerics and spies. Hast court martials in villages passed hasty sentences.  Secret informers delivered unverifiable reports on peasants, Orthodox priests, teachers, photographers, officials. There was no time. The army had to retreat quickly but also punish the traders swiftly. And while ambulances, baggage, columns, field artillery, dragoons, riflemen, and infantrists formed abrupt and helpless clusters on sodden roads, while courier galloped to a fro, while inhabitants of small towns fled westward in endless throngs, surrounded by white terror, loaded down with red-and-while featherbeds, gray sacks, brown furniture, and blue kerosene lamps, the shots of hasty executioners carrying out hasty sentence rang from the church squares of hamlets and villagers, and the somber rolls of drums accompanied the monotonous decisions of the judges, and the wives of the victims lay shrieking for mercy before the mud-caked boots of the officers, and red and silver flames burst from huts and barns, stables and hayricks. The Austrian army’s war had begun with court-martials. For days on end genuine and supposed traitors hung from trees on church squats to terrify the living.

The  living, however, had fled far and wide.  Fires surrounded the corpses dangling in the trees, and the leaves were already cracking, and the fire was more powerful than the steady gray drizzle heralding bloody autumn. The old bark of ancient trees slowly charred, tiny, silvery, swelling parks crept up along the fissures like fiery worms, reaching the foliage, and the green leaves curled, turned red, then black, then gray; the ropes broke, and the corpses plunged to the ground, their faces black, their bodies unscathed.

One day the soldiers stopped at the village of Krutyny. They arrived in the afternoon, they were supposed to continue west-ward in the morning, before sunrise. By now the steady wide-spread rain  had paused and the late-September sun had wove a benevolent silvery light across the vast fields, which were still filled with grain, the living bread that would never be eaten. Gossamer drifted very slowly through the air. Even the crows and ravens kept still, inveigled by the fleeting peace of this day and with no hope of finding the expected carrion.

The officers hadn’t taken off their clothes for a week. Their boots were waterlogged, their feet swollen, their knees stiff, their calves sore, their backs couldn’t bend. They were billeted in huts. They  tried  to fish dry clothes out of the trunks and wash at meager wells. In the clear, still night, with the abandoned and forgotten dogs in scattered farmyards howling in fear and hunger, the  lieutenant couldn’t sleep and he left the hut where he was quartered. He walked down the long street towards the church spire, which loomed against the stars with its twofold Greek cross. The church with its shingle roof stood in the middle of the small churchyard, surrounded by slanting wooden crosses that seemed to caper in the nocturnal light,.  Outside the huge gray wide-open gates of the graveyard three corpses were dangling, a bearded priest flanked by two young peasants in sandy-yellow smocks, with coarse plaited raffia shoes on their unstirring feet. The black cassock of the priest hung down to his shoes so that they struck the circles of his priestly garment like dumb clappers in a deaf-and-dumb bell; they seemed to be tolling without evoking a sound . .  . he thought he recognized some of his own soldiers in these three victims. These were the faces of the peasants he drilled every day. The priest’s black, fanning beard reminded him of Onufrij . . . .

Reflections on this Blog

I can't work under the restraints of the rules against plagiarism,under the needs and necessities of an academic performance, the reflective 'stops' and awkward attributive designs which for me that involves. Not that I don't deploy them on occasions because after all I wouldn't want anyone to think that everything I say or write is 'original' , that I owe nothing to anybody else when, in fact, I owe everything to them, even that which is most intimate and personal, seemingly drawn from the deepest recesses of my own experience. I just have a extremely difficult time disentangling the threads of what I know and feel, why I know and feel what I do as it is without burdening myself with the huge and complex project of identifying the sources of those thoughts and feelings in a formal structure that finally discounts the concept and ideas I'm juggling except as they might 'be possessed' like any other material commodity in life.

This attitude is reflected in my blog, the site of my primary intellectual effort, which paradoxically tries above all to restrain the expression my 'personal opinions' and simply present the 'findings' of the authors of book I read in their own words, albeit condensed, rearranged and focused on certain points which are of interest to me more or less in a random fashion, that is, without any fully formed intent to make an argument that encompasses a concept of the totality of the life- past and present- we live today, as might be the case in a novel or an essay in the fullest possible sense of that literary form. I'm just not up to it. I have to content myself with presenting multiplicities and in popular forums like Facebook and twitter, moments of reaction to what others say in the negative mode of perception, which I recognize can be over-bearing and selfish but there is no help for it but to withdraw and remain silent.
I do make an effort to turn my blog into something more than it is. For instance, I have undertaken a project to index its contents to a more detailed degree than the search mechanism of Blogspot makes available, I have been pushing aspects of The Critical Tradition. This would be for for a constructive purpose but the job is interminable and I doubt there is enough time nor do I possess the capacity to develop these resources where I could use them to establish myself as an 'original author', an existential impossibility as I see it currently.Every attempt I have made in the past has turned to ashes. I look back on those efforts with contempt and shame. I have no desire to reproduce the like. I'd just be wasting my time in self-flagellation. I am satisfied to live and work with my own obvious limitations.

I am where the North Sea touches Alabama

Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem

[Although Scholem’s writings cover a whole range of Jewish mysticism from the Merkavah texts of the early centuries C.E. through Hasidism, he was most concerned with the recovery of the Kabbalah, the secret traditions about the meaning of Jewish life and practice that first emerged in twelfth-century France and Spain and spread throughout the Jewish world.]

In the esoteric tradition of the Kabbalah, the highly ramified mystical tendencies in Judaism developed and left their historical record. The Kabbalah was not, as is still sometimes supposed, a unified system of mystical and specifically theosophical thinking. There is no such thing as ‘the doctrine of the Kabbalists.” Actually, we encounter widely diversified systems and quasi-systems. Fed by subterranean currents probably emanating from the East Kabbalism first came to light in those parts of southern France, where among non-Jews the Catharist, or neo-Manichaean,the movement was at its height.* In thirteenth century Spain it quickly obtained its fullest development, culminating in the pseudo-epigraphic Zohar of Rabbi Moses de Leon, which became a kind of Bible to the Kabbalists and for centuries enjoyed an unquestioned position as a sacred an authoritative text. In sixteenth century Palestine, Kabbalism knew a second flowering, in the course of which it became a central historical and spiritual current in Judaism; for it supplied an answer to the question of the meaning of exile, a question which had taken on a new urgency with the catastrophe of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Fired with explosive fervor in the great Messianic movement centering around Sabbatai Zevi, which even in its collapse provoked a mystical heresy, a heretical Kabbalah, whose impulses and developments, paradoxically enough, played a significant part- long overlooked and becoming clear to us only today – in the rise of modern Judaism.

From the start this resurgence of mythical conceptions in the thinking of Jewish mystics provided a bond with certain impulses in the popular faith, fundamental impulses springing from the simple man’s fear of life and death, to which Jewish philosophy had no satisfactory response. Jewish philosophy paid a heavy price for its disdain of the primitive levels of human life. It ignored the terrors from which myths are made, as though denying the very existence of the problem. Nothing so sharply distinguishes philosophers and Kabbalists as their attitude toward the problem of evil and the demonic. By and large, the Jewish philosophers dismissed it as a pseudo-problem, while to the Kabbalists it became one of the chief motives of their thinking. Their feeling for the reality of evil and the horror of the demonic, which they did not evade like the philosophers but tried to confront, related to their endeavors in a central point with the popular faith and with all those aspects of Jewish life in which these fears found their expression.

Unlike the philosophical allegorists who looked for metaphysical ideas in ritual, the Kabbalists, indeed, in their interpretations of the old rites often reconstituted their original meaning, or at least the meaning they had in the minds of the common people. The demonization of life was assuredly one of the most effective and at the same time most dangerous factors in the development of the Kabbalah, but this again demonstrates its kinship with the religious preoccupation of the Jewish masses. Thus it is less paradoxical than it may seem at first sight that a largely aristocratic group of mystics should have enjoyed so enormous and influence among the common people. It would be hard to find many religious customs and rituals that owed their existence or development to philosophical ideas. But the number of rites owing their origins, or at least the concrete forms in which they impose themselves, to the Kabbalistic consideration is legion. In this descent from the heights of theosophical speculation to the depths of popular thought and action, the ideas of the Kabbalists undoubtedly lost much of their radiance. In their concrete embodiment, they often became crude. The dangers with which myth and magic threaten the religious mind are exemplified in the history of Judaism by the development of the Kabbalah, and anyone who concerns himself seriously with the thinking of the Kabbalists will be torn between feelings of admiration and revulsion.

It was the very boldness of the gnostic paradox in  Kabbalistic cosmology- exile as an element in God Himself- that accounted in large part for the enormous influence of their ideas on the Jews. . .

[God has removed from himself that which we know as the world; that is, evil and the demonic have been purged from original creation- variously conceived- and this is the world. Never-the less, emanations of Creation remain in the world, largely veiled or secret subject to the ‘decoding’ of mystical knowing. This involves various aspects of creation distributed at many levels- sometimes as many as there are verses or letters in the Torah- including a separation of the original unity of the masculine and feminine.  The job of men is the restoration (tikkun)  of the scattered,  occluded emanations of divine ‘light’ from the world to the broken unity of Creation by means of their religious acts, rites and ritual. The homology is not only with Jewish exile but human language itself: the bar that stands between the signifier and the signified, the broken link between what we say about the world and the world as it is ‘out there.’- my inadequate summary of the Kabbalistic situation]


It lies in the very nature of mysticism as a specific phenomena within historical systems of religion that two conflicting tendencies should converge in it. Since historical mysticism does not hover in space, but is mystical view of a specific reality, since it subjects the positive contents of a concrete phenomena such as Judaism, Christianity, or Islam to a new mystical interpretation without wishing to come into conflict with the living reality and traditions of these religions, mystical movements face a characteristic contradiction. On the one hand, the new view of God and often enough of the world, cloaked in the  deliberately conservative  attitude of men who are far from wishing to infringe on, let alone, overthrow tradition, but wish rather to strengthen it with the help of a new vision. Yet, on the other hand, despite this attitude of piety towards tradition, the element of novelty in the impulses that are here at work is often enough  reflected in a bold, if not sacrilegious, transformation of the traditional religious contents. This tension between the conservative and the innovationist or even revolutionary runs through the whole history of mysticism. Where it becomes conscious, it colors the personal behavior of the great mystics. But even when in full lucidity they choose to take the conservative attitude toward their tradition, they always walk the steep and narrow path bordering on heresy.

. . .we have seen how the Jews built their historical situation into their cosmology. Kabbalistic myth had ‘meaning’ because it sprang from a fully conscious relation to a reality which, experienced symbolically even in its horror, was  able to project mighty symbols of Jewish life as an extreme case of human life pure and simple. We can no longer fully perceive, I might say, ‘live’;, the symbols of the Kabbalah without considerable effort, if at all. We confront the old questions in a new way. But if symbols spring from a reality that is pregnant with feeling and illuminated by the colorless light of intuition, and if, as has been said, all fulfilled time is mythical, then surely we may say this: what greater opportunity has the Jewish people ever had than in the horror of defeat, in the struggle and victory of these last years, in its utopian withdrawal into its own history, to fullfil its encounter with its own genius, its true and ‘perfect’ nature?

* see http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2013/02/preface-to-montaillou-langue-doc.html

Durcharbeiten by Samo Tomsic

This is  a discussion of the equivalencies and differences in the epistemology and politics  of Marx and Freud as mediated by Jacques Lacan; the analytic ‘working out’ of what  it is about Capitalism that’s unconscious, or how capitalism has colonized our mental apparatus. The author detects homology in the works of these three ‘giants’ in the critical tradition.  I cannot elaborate the full intricacies  of Tomsic’s arguments here, but will proceed with those matters which I have most easily been able to grasp.

Although Tomsic makes no mention of Adorno or the Frankfurt School of criticism, his main assertion is that Marx, Freud and Lacan practiced negative dialectics, in a surprisingly well- developed way.

“ The entire work of Marx and Lacan,” Tomsic remarks, “ could be considered an immense footnote and precision on Hegel’s statement that ‘Speech and work are outer expressions in which the individual no longer keeps or possesses himself within himself, but lets the inner get completely outside of him, leaving it to the mercy of something other than himself (Phenomenology of Spirit, 1977 Oxford edition page 187).” To the general reader the position of ‘The Other” in these discussions might seem ambiguous, both existing or not-existing depending on the context in which the term is deployed. We may say ‘The Other’ exists in  reality but it is not real. “In reality,” Tomsic writes. ‘the process of montage or construction is at stake ( the creation of a world view or ideology), while the real demands decomposition and dissolution of appearances.”

Perhaps it would be best  to clarify this complex matter by quoting Tomsic’s  more or less summary explanation of the Feud/Marx method near the end of his book. First, however, it is necessary to pin down what  the terms ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ in the passage refer to, beside the influence Saussure. The world (the signified) is out there, but descriptions of the world (signifiers) are not.  Truth cannot be out the- cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there.

The intertwining of the epistemological and the political problem becomes evident here. The symptom ( class conflict, the fetish, the commodity) is the return of the truth as such in the gap of certain knowledge, pointing beyond the field of positive science which supports, for instance the medical notion of symptom. The truth of cognition remains factual but comes in pair with error. Speaking truth, by contrast, disrupts the regime of knowledge by introducing an enunciation that goes beyond the enunciated and uncovers the detachment of the signifier from its seemingly adequate relation to the signified. Consequently, the autonomy of the signifiers implies another regime of truth, and this is what Lacan describes as the ‘truth as such’ – the conflictual rather than the factual  truth. This conflictual truth (detached from the ‘out there’ by its very autonomy) corrupts a specific type of knowledge, which strives to constitute the ‘beautiful order’, an ordering knowledge of science, but also certain philosophies, religion and political economy. This regime of knowledge necessarily excludes the conflictual dimension of the truth and affirms the doctrine of truth-value, adequacy, facticity or convention. In this epistemological conflict, we could envision a particular expression of what Althusser called “class struggle theory,” which manifests here through the struggle for a doctrine of truth and knowledge that does not subscribe to the positivistic ideal of scientificity . Herein lies the epistemological and political novelty of psychoanalysis ( and Marx’s dialectical materialism): ‘ Analysis came to announce to us that there is a knowledge  that does not know itself, supported by the signifier as such. . . .rooted in the signifier’s pure  and autonomous difference (labor-power in Marx’s formulation).

There is no cultural metaposition from which to analyze  the structural features of individual psyche, social relations or political economy. Structure (which is always discursive) itself only provides a minimum of consistency by constituting the subjective ( grounding social relations in biological differences, for example) and social reality ( on the abstraction of ‘The Economy” with its autonomous, hidden providences) while simultaneously introducing into this reality a maximum of instability that manifests through the formation of symptoms, crisis or revolution. Herein lies the hope for transformation and progress though we can hardly say  a priori of what that transformation and progress will consist.

Tomsic’s argument is theoretically dense though with many flashes of insight into the ‘concrete” of everyday struggle. Towards the end he gets to the main polemical intent of the whole book which is an attack of “Identity Politics’ so called:

. . .identitarian politics pursued the proliferation of minoritarian identities and moved towards the problematic of representation (e.g. gender quota) which successfully neutralized the language of revolutionary politics. The subject of identitarian politics no less rejects the actual subject of revolutionary politics, which is constitutively pre-identitarian, non-individual and non-psychological, hence irreducible to particular identities or identifications. In the end, identity politics proposes its own version of the (capitalist) narcissistic subject.

For the non-identical subject of the unconscious, Freud and Lacan argued that it could be discovered only under the conditions and within the horizon of the modern scientific revolution (with its provisional hypothesis rather than ‘command’ performances). This means that the subject of modern politics is the subject of modern science, and while politics grounded on the economic and legal abstractions repeats the capitalist rejection of this negative subjectivity, communist politics would have to start from the practical mobilization and organization that Marx isolated in his science of value (the autonomy of labor power, now a commodity defined by its exchange value). Lacan’s reading of Marx insists that his critique comes down to a theoretical isolation, a materialist theory of the subject, which provides a new orientation of political practice. While capitalism considers the subject to be nothing more than a narcissistic animal. Marxism and psychoanalysis reveal that the subject of revolutionary politics is an alienated animal, which, in its most intimate interior, includes its other. His inclusion is the main feature of a non-narcissistic love and consequently of a social link that is not rooted in self-love.

…………………………………………………………………………..

Marx argues in Grundisse that greed itself is the product of a definite social development, not natural, as opposed to historical. Desire is not the producer – it is itself produced, while the producer is situated elsewhere.  How Freud exactly approaches the relation between desire and productive unconscious labor will be examined below; what matters now is that for Freud no reality is consistently objective and every worldview, every ideological construction, contains ‘wish-fulfillment’ . . . The task of psychoanalysis is thus in clear opposition to world views, It does not interpret reality by feeding it with more meaning – it creates (or attempts to create) the conditions under which the subject will be able to produce a transformative act (homologous to Marxian praxis).

An opposition exists in these writings between need and demand, pleasure (the object of desire) and jouissance, (the insatiable productions of the drive), between the useful and the useless. So, as the joke goes, capitalism commands :  “Enjoy yourselves, be miserable.” tethered to a political economy where incessant production is an end in itself and the intensification of work is virtually infinite, only the effects of war and global warming holding it back, and the colonizing of bodies by the sovereign discourse of abstractions like “the Economy” knows no limit. The only thing Americans own collectively is the national debt whose creditors are the banks and the ‘wizards of finance’, a fetish-figure analogous, or should I say homologous, to the ‘princes, nobles and prelates’ of medieval  times.