Tuesday, September 19, 2006
(12:00 AM) | Anonymous:
Tuesday Hatred: Penis Envy Edition
Hate? Don't talk to me about hate...I hate how much of Lacan's Écrits seems to be taken up with him waving his cock in the faces of other psychoanalysts. It's not even an especially big cock, although it's very elaborately tattooed. Generally, I felt the book could do with rather more anecdotes about Ridley Scott movies, and rather fewer references to classical literature - who bothers with that stuff nowadays?
(I hate that Cynthia Plaster-Caster and her friends never did a tour of French academia in the early 70s, and that there now remains no material record of how big Lacan's cock actually was. Who out of Lacan, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida do you suppose was the biggest? My bet's on Deleuze.
Also: what effect would it have on the theoretical status of Irigaray's writings if it were to be discovered that she was in fact a man - and, moreover, hung like a horse? This Sex Which Is Not One? One-and-a-half, more like...)
I hate how much of Zizek's How to Read Lacan is made up of selected highlights of his other books and articles - approximately all of it, as far as I can make out; although it may be that I'm mistaking original material that he's plagiarised elsewhere for a plagiarism of the plagiarism. I also hate how little that book tells you about how to actually, y'know, read Lacan. I suspect the reason is that the actual Lacan is literally unreadable: Zizek's Lacan is just some imaginary wonder-theorist that Zizek's effectively made up by interpolating juicy bits of Hitchcock and Hegel between the lines of Lacan's vaporous prose. Not that this wouldn't be a perfectly legitimate operation, of course...
Enough of dead Frenchmen, and their long-since atrophied appendages! This week I have surrendered to the diseased charms of liberal piety, and started hating on the Muslims. What kind of a world religion is it that, when it believes itself to have been obliquely slandered by the leader of another world religion, can find nothing better to say than, "ooh! ooh! You big meanie, you dissed my deeply-held beliefs!"? Come on - there are, like, a million and one better comebacks than that! Where are all the Muslim intellectuals patiently explaining that Ratzinger's got his head up his pontifical arse, and by the way has he heard of Ibn Rushd (note: he probably has)? Failing that, you'd think at least someone would manage a spirited crack about not being in any hurry to listen to lectures on the mysteries of the divine logos from a bunch of Jew-burning, Nazi-sympathising kiddy-fiddlers in dresses. (Note to self: check Ahmadinejad's blog for updates). Muslims! Get your act together! These are the instigators of the Spanish Inquisition you're dealing with here - it should be like shooting fish in a barrel.
I hate all of the Robbie Williams fans who have been travelling from London to see his show at the Milton Keynes Bowl on the very same train I go home from work on each day, even though in actual fact there weren't that many of them and they didn't overcrowd the train nearly as much as we were warned they might. I think the sheer fact of their being Robbie Williams fans is sufficient cause for hatred; but if you disagree, I would ask you to take into consideration the inordinate number of references to MySpace that peppered the conversation with which the two teenage girls in my carriage so enlivened the journey.
I hate that my MySpace page gets fewer page visits than my sister's.
My dear brethren, I would leave you with this excellent quotation from an early letter of accomplished hater Philip Larkin to his grate chum Jim Sutton: "Please believe me when I say that half my days are spent in black, surging, twitching, boiling HATE!!!". Words to live by; and so, I say to you: hate on, and damned be he that first cries "hold, enough!"
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Tuesday Love is also available.]
