Highway 61 Revisited

The ritual re-enacts Abraham's (Ibrāhīm) pilgrimage to Mecca as explained by the Muslim historian al-Azraqi:

When he [Abraham] left Mina and was brought down to (the defile called) al-Aqaba, the Devil appeared to him at Stone-Heap of the Defile. Gabriel said to him: "Pelt him!" so Abraham threw seven stones at him so that he disappeared from him. Then he appeared to him at the Middle Stone-Heap. Gabriel said to him: "Pelt him!" so he pelted him with seven stones so that he disappeared from him. Then he appeared to him at the Little Stone-Heap. Gabriel said to him: "Pelt him!" so he pelted him with seven stones like the little stones for throwing with a sling. So the Devil withdrew from him.[2]

All three jamarāt represent the devil: the first and largest represents his temptation of Abraham against sacrificing Ishmael (Ismāʿīl); the second represents the temptation of Abraham's wife Hājar to induce her to stop him; the third represents his temptation of Ishmael to avoid being sacrificed. He was rebuked each time, and the throwing of the stones symbolizes those rebukes.

The stoning of the jamarāt also represents the repudiation of man's self (literally the "internal despot," an-nafs al-'amāra) and the act of casting aside one's low desires and wishes. As one Islamic theologian puts it,

If one is able to crush al‑nafs al‑'amāra during the stoning of Jamrat al‑ʿAqaba (the Jamrah of Aqaba), then one has taken the next step in attaining closeness to Allah, and since between the servant and Allah there is no more than the distance of one step, if one has been able to take this step and make it past one's own low desires and wishes, then that which follows is the level of closeness to Allah.

During those two or three days after the Eid that one is in Mina, one must stone the three jamarāt, meaning that one must trample upon his internal despot (an-nafs al-'amāra), the external despot of the Shaitan from the Jinn (Iblīs and those like him), and the Shayṭān from among the Humans (the enemies of religion and of humanity).

The stoning of the three jamarāt is, in essence, the trampling upon the despots and waging war against all of them. When one focuses on them and the hatred for them, then one automatically focuses with complete attention upon one's self – and rightfully so – while stoning the jamarāt, one must focus entirely upon one's self.

- Wikipedia, "on the sybolic significance of stoning the devil"

Spite

All nature is but art unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, "Whatever IS, is RIGHT."''

- Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Man,"

Keyhole Voyeurism

Are we Happy, Yet?

In psychoanalysis, the betrayal of desire has a precise name: happiness. When, exactly, can people be said to be happy? In a country like Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s and 1980s, people actually were in a way happy: three fundamental conditions of happiness were fullfilled there.

1. Their material needs were basically satisfied - not too well satisfied, since the excess of consumption can in itself generate unhappiness. It is good to experience a brief shortage of some goods on the market from time to time (no coffee for a couple of days, then no beef, then no TV sets): these brief periods of shortage functioned as exceptions which reminded the people that they should be glad that such goods were generally available - if everything is available all the time, people take this availability as an evident fact of life, and no longer appreciate their luck. This life went on in a regular and predictable way, without any great efforts or shocks; one was allowed to withdraw into one's own private world.

2. A Second - extremely important - feature: there was the Other (the Party) to be blamed for everything that went wrong, so that one did not feel truly responsible - if there was a temporary shortage of some goods, even if a storm caused great damage, it was 'their' fault.

3. And - last, but not least - there was an Other Place (the Consumerist West) which one was allowed to dream about, and even visit sometimes - this place was just at the right distance: not too far away, not too near.

This fragile balance was disturbed - by what? By desire, precisely. Desire was the force which compelled the people to go further - and end up in a system in which the vast majority are definitely less happy.

Happiness is thus - to put it in Alain Badiou's terms - not a category of truth, but a category of mere Being, and, as such, confused, indeterminate, inconsistent (take the proverbial answer of a German Immigrant to the USA who, asked: 'Are you happy?', answered: 'Yes, yes I am very happy, aber glucklich bin ich nicht...). It is a pagan concept: for pagans, the goal of life is to be happy (the idea of living 'happily ever after' is a Christianized version of paganism), and religious experience and political activity are considered the highest forms of happiness (see Aristotle) - no wonder the Dalai Lama has had such success recently preaching the gospel of happiness around the world, and no wonder he is finding the greatest response precisely in the USA, the ultimate empire of the (pursuit of) happiness... In short, 'happiness' belongs to the pleasure principle, and what undermines it is the insistence of a Beyond of the pleasure principle.

- Slavok Zizek, "Welcome to the Desert of the Real"

Monster Chiller Horror Theatre

...hosted by Count Floyd

On the Political Party Supposed to Obstruct and Impede

Of course, the sense of menace had been ignited by genuine disorder and violence (New Orleans/Katrina aftermath): Looting, ranging from base thievery to foraging for the necessities of life, did occur after the storm passed over New Orleans. However, the (limited) reality of crimes in no way exonerates "reports" on the total breakdown of law and order-not because these reports were "exaggerated," but for a much more radical reason. Jacques Lacan claimed that, even if the patient's wife is really sleeping around with other men, the patient 's jealousy is still to be treated as a pathological condition. In a homologous way, even if rich Jews in early 1930s Germany "really" had exploited German workers, seduced their daughters and dominated the popular press, the Nazis ' anti-Semitism would still have been an emphatically "untrue," pathological ideological condition. Why? Because the causes of all social antagonisms were projected onto the "Jew" - an object of perverted love-hatred, a spectral figure of mixed fascination and disgust.

- Slavoj Zizek, "The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape"

So, how many Republican sponsored House bills has the 2013 Democratically lead Senate taken up or passed after having changed Senate rules?

Rethinking Utopia

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