Bye Eartha

Eartha Kitt, one of the most amazing voices of all-time, died on Christmas day today. She was so much more than just Catwoman, but she did do evil awfully well...

Academic Love

Perhaps I can connect my current departmental troubles and its impending demise and all the rest of the small but troubling and time consuming academic politics I find myself constantly immersed in with that interestingly perverse reading of evil as emerging out of love. It is that notion of love as itself an imbalance that unjustly selects one particular thing in the world to be its object out of all the other possible objects in the world. This is the riff on the evil and violence of love used by Zizek, and the one I've written about before in connection with technology and the war.

In this case, the love at stake is the love of truth, standards, and academic rigor. I don't despise these things. However, I'm always wary of their champions. The most generous reading of the damage being done to myself, my colleagues, and our students is that it is not the result of any specific malicious intent by upper level administrators directed against our small, non-traditional academic unit of interdisciplinary teachers and scholars. Rather, it is their love of the ideals of the academy itself that motivate them to love its most traditional and disciplinary parts above all others. In moving to express that love, then, an injustice is done to those programs that live in the cracks and crevices of mainstream, disciplinary academic life and thus fail to bask in the full light of their budgetary beneficence. The evil and injustice of destroying a program is done out of love.

Of course, my own particular academic loves are no less unjust or violent. They ardently embrace some things and passionately exclude many, many others. There is no help for this. It is the nature of love. Hence, the irreducible need for politics. Noticing the production of inequities and injustices and addressing them directly and meaningfully is what political struggle is about. I'm pretty good at this most days. But it is always easiest to engage in this struggle when the fact that it IS a struggle is kept clearly in sight by all parties involved. Then the contest can move more or less along the lines of "fight hard, but fight fair." It is those terrains which try to define themselves as outside of politics in one way or another that always become the most difficult places to address the politics still lurking there. The academy, home of truth, is one of the very worst offenders on this front. "Truth is never political." That is an axiom vexed at every level of its formulation. Like Nietzsche's "'All truth is simple.' Is that not a compound lie?" the view that "Truth is never political" is actually an example of the most spectacularly political lie ever told. Sadly, the dismantling of my department has politely taken place on a terrain where the intrusion of politics is viewed as simply bad manners. This has been depressing all on its own. The opportunity to fight hard, but fight fair was never really possible, and so even the dignity of losing a battle well fought is also not possible.

Perhaps I'm being too subtle, though. Even the links between love and aggression don't require much effort to uncover. After all, it's really not all that hard to tell the difference between being loved and getting screwed.

Love in Iraq

Continuing the speculations on Zizek, Freud, and the evils of love, this photo was taken Mardi Gras day in Iraq.

The most benign formulation I can give for the current horrors in Iraq is that they emerged out of love. Love of country, love of family, love of god, love of freedom, love of peace. If it is true that love is always unjust and does evil by excluding others from the focus of our care and concern, then certainly the outpouring of love by the citizens of the United States in the wake of 9/11 finds no more spectacular expression than in the injustice and evil of the carnage in Iraq. Iraq is the place where love goes to die.

Love of country, love of freedom, love of the troops, and love for the victims of 9/11 becomes transformed into the injustice and evil of shock and awe, of Abu Ghraib, and of the hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq. This seems to fit well with both the experience and rhetoric of the war to date where noble sentiments and endless shit have marched hand in hand.

Evil as the result of a good heart is, of course, what makes for truly magnificent evil. It is much easier to avoid evil when it confronts us naked and undisguised. Evil expressed as love is much harder to resist, and much harder to stop. This is because resistance to expressions of such love may be portrayed as folks who do not love their country, their troops, their commander-in-chief, or their freedom.

Loving Evil

The post below on Zizek and the evils of love reminded me of a wonderful post from Limited, Inc. on the world's most dangerous man:

"The most dangerous man the world has ever known was not Attila the Hun or Mao Zedong. He was not Adolf Hitler. In fact, the most dangerous man the world has ever known died without having an inkling that he was the most dangerous man the world has ever known. He wasn’t a politician, or a general, or a bandit, and the most publicity he ever received was when he was elected president of the American Chemical Association in 1944. His name was Tom Midgley."

Thomas Midgley was the inventor of both tetraethyl lead and freon. Tetraethyl lead is the additive used to make leaded gasoline. In addition to helping engines run smoothly, it also caused the most wide spread and dramatic increase in environmental lead pollution and lead poisoning in history. (The EPA has a bizarrely defensive history of lead poisoning on its website which is almost nostalgic for the good old days of smooth burning leaded gas and laments the advent of automobile emission standards which required catalytic converters that inadvertently prevented cars from being able to burn leaded gasoline.) Midgley also pioneered the use of freon and chlorofluorocarbons in refrigeration systems and air conditioners. These same chlorofluorocarbons have depleted the ozone layer and helped usher in global warming. (In a strange twist of fate, Midgley contracted polio and died from being strangled by the system of wires and pulleys he used to raise himself out of bed -- another device of his own invention.) It is the first two inventions, though, that put Midgley in the running for the title of world's most dangerous man. However, we were speaking of love.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud writes that the injunction to love thine enemy does an injustice to those we have more reason to love. If our love is universal and extends to everybody and everything, then those who give us special cause to be loved are short changed and cheated. In Zizek's gloss, the evil that love does is to discriminate against all those others we withhold our love from; for to invest love in one special object is also to deprive the rest of the world of our love. These two formulations of who gets cheated by love describe exactly the same situations, so I see no need to quibble over whom love does an injustice to. Love is unjust. This is why Zizek can describe love as a "cosmic imbalance" and say that "in this quite formal sense, love is evil."

Perhaps Tom Midgley's inventions are simply another face of the injustice of love. To love engines that don't knock and beer that is cold does an injustice. It does an injustice to all those other engines that ping and all that other beer that is warm. It also does an injustice to all those who wish to live without environmental holocaust and to the rest of the planet which is deprived of this particular love. Midgley's evil is not one of premeditation and malice aforethought. His aim was not cataclysm. His aim was quiet motors and cold drinks. Loving these simple things, though, does an injustice to the rest of the world. This love is also evil. It may be that love always brings with it this risk of loving "not wisely, but too well."

Love Is Evil

Zizek arguing that "Love is evil." I love this guy. Srsly. I'll need to write more about him soon.