Softest shout

At the club
the loud music… noise and chatter
We belong to the noisiest places
'He listens to her every shout with the attention he would give to the softest whisper'

What is a crowd?
No PDA?
We would be behind the layered curtain of people when our lips are supposed to meet

- part of our body would spiral like the steps that led us here to sin,

perhaps.

Bureaucrat

What a bureaucrat of Love

'we will write to each other like sms and email do not exist.'

He fed us all the unwillingness of female virgins

Castrate him

I am compiling a list of guy friends who would make a good eunuch

2 centuries before

Wrong Tool

It's wrong
it's the wrong tool.
To reach for the magnifying glass to look for
something that resembles truth.

Circus Magic

The roadshow music they are blasting made you felt like a clown walking down the street, with balloons and at times, both feet above ground.

While you are listing out what to perform, you are also thinking how circus magic won’t bring her back, how circus magic won’t remove the impact - the impact of his actions.

The noises from trumpets and tin drums are nothing compared to a rustling plastic bag in the middle of the night.

Circus magic won’t absolve his sins. Circus magic won’t bring her back.

He looked again at his only audiences, the children. On the street, how they behaved like the insane. They have shrill sound for laughter, she is pulling up her skirt and he is pulling down his trouser for no reason. They can’t stand still, they need to jump and run, cry and shout, ask questions, suck and lick fingers.
Now he can’t remember how they are related, related to what he wanted to say when he has a nose so huge and red.

Woundows

Meaning too precise is sure
To void your dreamy literature.

- Mallarmé (Translated by A. S. Kline)

I could have had this rewritten with a pen
Four years ago but then

Made a note of these words:

Wind, the breeze
Wind, the crank I am winding
Wound, what have I turned, and a cut
Window, a cut on the wall

Woundow

To remember I owe you an explanation
of the window on the flesh of her wall
The view is coloured how
Wrong impressions were painted

Excerpt from 'Hegel, Zizek & Substance as Subject by Davie Maclean

Australia prides itself on the tolerance we practice towards difference within our multicultural society. Any cultural position is allowed, it is purely a personal matter, and no one should have to suffer for their ethnic, religious, sexual or cultural identity. But does this tolerance not have a blind spot ? Is there not one cultural position that simply will not be tolerated within our tolerant society?

What about the person whose cultural identity involves telling racist jokes? Or sexist jokes for that matter, or homophobic, or... or... We will tolerate anything — except intolerance. That we will not tolerate.

So to what extent are we really a tolerant society?

For the Left, of course, the question is not about the right to tell racist jokes. The real issue, however, becomes clearer once we begin to explore further what is excluded from our ‘tolerant’ society, from our democratic political process.

Let us begin with the obvious — Islamic fundamentalism, clearly not acceptable, One Nation populism, likewise. But just why are these political options beyond the pale? Is it because they seek to impose a social project on society as a whole? That they stand for a social order that would apply to all?

And as such are they not condemned as fascist? Fascist they may well be — but the problem for the Left does not lie with them, it lies with us. What about our social project, what about socialism, or communism, or more loosely a commitment to social justice, to the environment? Are these not caught in the same net? Are they not fascist too?

In other words, is any social project whatsoever not excluded in this way? Is it not defined in advance as fascist, or totalitarian, and unacceptable as such?

It is here we find the hole in the centre of Western democracy — anyone can hold any political position they like so long as the existing social order is left untouched.

Where does this leave the Left? Clearly it can not accept these limitations for its goal is precisely to transform the social order. Somehow a breach must be found, some way of changing what is politically possible and what is not. For Zizek the resistance of the excluded to their exclusion offers one such possibility. We can see how this works in the approach Zizek would adopt towards the refugee crisis. For Zizek, it is the soft liberal humanitarian approach to the boat people that the Left must reject above all, the position that argues as a tolerant, humane society we can not turn our backs on these poor people. To Zizek this is pure ideology.

Instead it is the right wing response to the refugee problem that should be the point of entry for the Left. For when the Right argue that the boat people represent the tip of the iceberg, that accepting them will open the floodgates and lead ultimately to the complete destruction of our way of life, Zizek’s response would be, ‘Yes, that’s exactly why we should accept them’.

Necessity and Contingency

This reversal is homologous to the one that characterizes the Hegelian dialectics of necessity and contingency. In a first approach, it appears that their encompassing unity is necessity, i.e., that necessity itself posits and mediates contingency as the external field in which it expresses – actualizes itself – contingency itself is necessary, the result of the self-externalization and self-mediation of the notional necessity. However, it is crucial to supplement this unity with the opposite one, with contingency as the encompassing unity of itself and necessity: the very elevation of a necessity into the structuring principle of the contingent field of multiplicity is a contingent act, one can almost say: the outcome of a contingent (“open”) struggle for hegemony. This shift corresponds to the shift from S to S, from Substance to Subject. The starting point is a contingent multitude; through its self-mediation (“spontaneous self-organization”), contingency engenders – posits its immanent necessity, in the same way that Essence is the result of the self-mediation of Being. Once Essence emerges, it retroactively “posits its own presupposition,” i.e., it sublates its presuppositions into subordinated moments of its self-reproduction (Being is transubstantiated into Appearance); this positing, however, is retroactive.

Slavoj Žižek