For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade its public that their commitment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. As Rancière says, ‘[e]thics has become the way to think this infinite or absolute evil, which has created an irremediable break in history’. Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. So here we have it. If you have any question you can ask below or enter what you are looking for! People who we don't know massacred people who we do. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Is it the tragic loss of almost 7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet of office space in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock Exchange? Only infinite justice can be truly universal, and in the same way human rights have to be the rights of the infinite. In the universe of the epic these two domains, that of human beings and that of the gods, are linked together in an external way, as a ‘mixture’ (, With tragedy Hegel moves forward in his attempt to conceptualize this constitutive division of the Greek world. In tragedy ‘the essence ultimately exists only as the universal moment, separated by the mask from the concrete and actual self, and as such this essence is still not actual.’24 The supposed union of the actor and the character, the concrete individual and the universal essence, remains thus external, and, in fact, hypocritical: ‘the hero who appears before the onlookers splits up into his mask and the actor, into the person in the play and the actual self’.25 For the tragic mode of representation this split between actor and character is unbridgeable, and in the end the actor, who is there to represent the essence, tries in vain to make us forget his actual self, and to see through his mask only the sublime character as the universal essence. There are two divergent lines which I try to follow: Hegel, comedy and politics, and Kant, tragedy and ethics. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) The fireball and the ice pick. In the universe of the epic these two domains, that of human beings and that of the gods, are linked together in an external way, as a ‘mixture’ (Vermischung) of the universal and the individual. Copyright © 2013. And they did so with contemptuous glee." What is Osama bin Laden? As Zupančič remarks, this kind of conception of comedy is both simplistic and ideologically problematic. American people ought to know that it is not them but their government's policies that are so hated. For example, from this perspective the comic characters are often opposed to tragic heroes and heroines, who are then considered as ‘extremists’ seeking to transcend the human limitations and realize the impossible at any costs, which cannot but end up in (political or ethical) catastrophe.35 There is indeed the same sort of politics or ethics of human finitude, whose corollary is, as Žižek points out, ‘that the ultimate source of totalitarian and other catastrophes is man’s presumption that he can overcome this condition of finitude, lack and displacement, and “act like God”, in a total transparency, surpassing his constitutive division’.36, Although one could argue that Hegel goes rather a long way in this same direction in his analysis of comedy, he however makes an essential qualification. In America there has been rough talk of "bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age". For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom for whom? They left no suicide notes, no political messages; no organisation has claimed credit for the attacks. When it began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam. As supplies run out - food and aid agencies have been asked to leave - the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Had it been drawn in, it's more than likely that our democracy, such as it is, would not have survived. America's grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public. He's America's family secret. Each refers to the other as "the head of the snake". infinite synonyms, infinite pronunciation, infinite translation, English dictionary definition of infinite. (The irony is that America was equally unaware that it was financing a future war against itself.). Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know, because they don't appear much on TV. As Rancière says, ‘[e]thics has become the way to think this infinite or absolute evil, which has created an irremediable break in history’.7. But then the actor is no longer himself, he only brings to life the (universal) essence he represents. And second, to assume that The Enemy's motives are what the US government says they are, and there's nothing to support that either. The tragic performance displays to the audience ‘conscious human beings who, In this way we come to a new mode of representation, in which the actors put on their masks and thus represent the essence with the help of the mask. Afghanistan's economy is in a shambles. Will my love come home tonight? Usually in tragedy its hero or heroine is longing for some supersensible, universal essence – this is his hubris – but is violently thrown against his own limits, his ineradicable human finitude, and is in this process himself destroyed. In other words, in comedy absolute powers lose their form of representation by appearing themselves as subjects or as concrete beings. Witness the infinite justice … It will spawn more anger and more terror across the world. And if it's any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way. People who we don't know massacred people who we do. The problem with the Infinite Justice is then, as Jacques Rancière has pointed out,2 that it means justice without limits. It slips through customs unnoticed. The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium as a "revolutionary tax". The central question is how the spiritual work of art is representing the absolute. More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. This is, of course, only partial truth, but it is instructive to see how the same kinds of arguments which Hegel marshals against Kant can be directly applied when we want to attack or go against our contemporary ethical ideology, whose dominant trait is, as Rancière said, ‘the excess of ethics over law and politics’. Who is America fighting? The actual framework of this discussion is that of self-representation of Absolute Spirit through art and religion. It turned out to be much more than that. It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. Surely it is; it only needs firm (axiomatic and universal) political decision and courage to make this decision actual through meticulous transformation of the current situation point by point. For Zupančič, ‘comedy is the universal at work’.43. Pakistan too has suffered enormously. Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government's record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things - to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? As we watch mesmerised, Operation Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the world. How, then, does Hegel conceive of art in the. Albright never lost her job for saying this. The heroin used by America's drug addicts comes from Afghanistan. The universal powers (gods) have in epic the form of individuality, and their actions are identical to those of men; they simply act like humans, but at the same time they actually withdraw from the connection with the concrete and remain unrestricted in their own specific characters.19 ‘As such,’ Zupančič writes, ‘this universal and its powers remain a “void of necessity” that floats above the heroes and everything else. Why the new name? abstract universal – J.P.] as something that is, in the end, utterly empty and contingent.42, And consequently comedy is not the undermining of the universal, but its own reversal into the concrete, the labour or work of the universal itself. The world will probably never know what motivated those particular hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings. The US government has not been shy of supporting military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in the country. To what purpose? Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But on the other hand Hegel does not, either, simply apply his pre-established concepts to different forms of art, he introduces the latter as cases of concretely existing moments of the concept, and this indirect approach allows him to propose some surprising insights about the nature of comedy. In my chapter there is a kind of parallax view which is focused on two kinds of thinking of ethics and politics. We have collated the necessary evidence. The Taliban, which the Pakistan government has sup ported, funded and propped up for years, has material and strategic alliances with Pakistan's own political parties. ‘The mask as such has no content, it is more like the pure surface … that separates the self of the actor from his stage character as (represented) essence.’23 But, for Hegel, in this gap between the actor and the character lies also the flaw in the tragic mode of representation. And as Zupančič says, ‘tragedy is the pain of this difference’.29 Through the relation between the objective circumstances (chance or fate) and the subjective singularity (which is constitutive to hero or heroine) tragedy explores the domain of this dialectics of desire. The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. Through reading what Hegel and Lacanian psychoanalysis has to say about comedy and its paradoxical relation to the human finitude I try to argue that perhaps the answer to the impasses of international politics is not to refer our constitutive finitude as in tragedy but our paradoxical finitude that is revealed by the fundamental structure of the comedy to be actually infinite. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease. The principle behind this is revealed by the figure of the absolute victim, a victim of infinite evil. Will there be nerve gas in the subway? Perhaps Infinite Justice happens at the end of time, if God will, in some sort of messianic time, but at least one thing is certain: the Last Judgement is not the business of any earthly courtroom, not even that of the US Supreme Court, and George W Bush was surely not directly expressing God’s will.
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