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Emotional exhibitionism, intellectual masturbation and the vanity of grief

Slavoj Zizeck, in a rhetorical splurge in 2004 quotes: "Step on the throat of your muse." Because, as I understand him, the personal and the expressive is now the reactionary, it is what isolates us in consumerism. Get out there engage and if necessary use ethical violence to change an ethical stasis, an exploitable stagnation. So this blog is reactionary - according to Zizeck.

There was an article in a philosophy magazine about the vanity of grief. Apparently the reason why people get taken up in grief is because they are actually confused about their own identity when they lose someone. So this blog is a manifestation of vanity.

Blogging about things that you are not an expert in where you may not be read and may not get a response and blogging as if you had something of any significance to say has been called intellectual masterbation. So I suppose that this blog is an exercise, sometimes, in intellectual masturbation.


Well what should I respond to that?
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  1. Paul22:56

    I think you just did. There was a kind of movement to take all the personal and expressive notes out of poetry which not coincidentally coincided with the rise of neo-conservatism and the making of humans into machines for creating capitalist excess. If grief is vanity, then we are all vain. And the last one is the typical sillyness of 'experts' panicking now that everyone has a voice and their hypocrisy, ignorance and jargon has been revealed for what it is.

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  2. Philip Hall23:29

    Exactly Paul.


    Good point. Slavoj Ziseck like one of those awful Trotskyist / Labour political leaders who didn't understand their own psychology. Their desire for power and dominance hidden by spurious political agendas.

    Philosophers who say that prolonged grief is vanity, because they themselves have small low capacity souls. The philosopher defined in opposition to the artist - an awful plodder, mechanised in thought, a little glass bead flicker in a little room somewhere.

    They are threatened by the anarchy of blogging: Zizeck who talks about the imposition of the dacalogue as a progressive social act.

    What would Bakunin have to say about that? In fact what DID Bakunin say about that?

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